Tempting The Dark. Michele Hauf

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       Chapter 1

      Savin Thorne stood before the weird, wavery, silver-blue vibrations that undulated in the midnight sky twenty feet above the lavender field. He waited. Twenty minutes had passed since he arrived in the beat-up pickup truck he barely kept alive with oil changes and the occasional battery jump. He’d gotten a call from Edamite Thrash regarding a disturbance in this countryside location, north of Paris.

      He knew this area. It was too familiar. His family once lived not half a kilometer away. Yet when driving past the old neighborhood, he’d noted his childhood home had been torn down. Construction on a golf course was under way. Just as well. The bad memory from his childhood still clung to his bones.

      To his right, Edamite Thrash, a corax demon, stood with his eyes closed, his senses focused to whatever the hell was going on.

      Savin could feel the undulations in the air and earth prickle through his veins. A heebie-jeebies sensation. The demon within him stirred. Savin tended to think of the nameless, incorporeal demon inside him as “the Other,” for no other reason than it had been a childhood decision. She was upset by whatever was irritating the air. And when she stirred, Savin grew anxious.

      Ed had been getting instinctual warnings about this disturbance for days, and tonight those dire feelings had alerted him enough to call Savin.

      Savin reckoned demons back to Daemonia. The bad ones who had no reason or right to tread the mortal realm. The evil ones who had harmed mortals in this realm. Sometimes even the good ones who pushed the boundaries of secrecy and might have been seen by humans or who were trying to tell the truth about their species.

      Savin wasn’t demon. He wasn’t even paranormal. He was one hundred percent human. Except for the part about him hosting an incorporeal demon for the past twenty years. That tended to screw with a man’s mental place in this world. But most days he felt he was winning the part about just trying to stay sane.

      A sudden whining trill vibrated the air. Pushing up the sleeves of his thermal shirt to expose the protective sigils on the undersides of his forearms, Savin planted his combat boots and faced the sky that flickered in silver and red.

      Ed hissed, “Savin, did you hear that?”

      “I did. I’m ready.”

      Behind them, hefting a fifty-pound sack of sea salt out from the back of a white hearse, Certainly Jones, a dark witch, prepped for his role in whatever might come charging at them.

      “Hurry up, Jones!” Ed called. “It’s happening!”

      With that announcement, the sky cracked before them. A black seam opened from ground to clouds. From within, a brilliant amber flame burst and roiled. A whoosh of darkness exploded out from the seam.

      Savin cursed. That could be nothing but demons. An invasion? He felt the dark and malevolent beings, incorporeal and corporeal, as they flooded into this realm. Cool, hissing brushes across his skin. Wicked alien vocals. The gnashing of fangs and rows of deadly teeth. Tails scything the air. Claws clattering for flesh. And the ones he could not see vibrated a distinctive hum in his veins.

      The protection sigils he wore tattooed on his body kept those invisible incorporeal demons from entering his system. As did the bitch demon he’d been serving as shelter to for twenty years. But that didn’t mean he was impervious to an external attack by a corporeal demon. He was strong but did not hold a weapon.

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