Demon Crossings by Eleri Stone Page A

car approaching. A moment later, a silver SUV pulled up and a black-haired man hopped out, barely glancing at the headless thing bleeding into the dead grass. He paid a lot more attention to her, looking her over from head to toe and back again before turning to Aiden and pointing at the decapitated monster lying between them.
    “This the last one?”
    “Yes.”
    Grace took another step back, away from the woods. “There are more of these…these things out there?”
    The man gave her another longer, harder look but spoke to Aiden. “Was this your complication from last night?”
    Apparently, Aiden didn’t like his friend’s tone of voice, because he moved to stand next to her. “This is Grace. Grace—Fen. She can see past the glamour.”
    “Bull.”
    “Carl just left. Get rid of this before anyone else comes through. Carl saw a wolf.”
    “A wolf, eh?”
    “Grace killed it with her car but the car apparently didn’t fare so well. He saw the damage first. We’ll need to have Chris tow it in.”
    Fen eyed her with new respect. “ You killed a fire demon.”
    “With a Focus,” Aiden said.
    “I would have liked to have seen that.” Fen grinned at her, a wicked toothy grin that made her feel hunted. “What clan are you from?”
    She looked at him blankly and Aiden tossed the head on the tarp. “She thinks she’s human.”
    Fen’s smile disappeared, replaced by open suspicion. “What’s she doing here then? You said—”
    “She tracked Maia.”
    Fen swore. “That’s impossible.”
    Aiden pointedly avoided her gaze. “I know. Let’s get this done first.”

Chapter Seven
     
    Fen played his music loud, some song she didn’t recognize with a throbbing bass and garbled words she wasn’t sure were English. Aiden, gentleman that he was, had taken the backseat, so Grace wasn’t close enough to the tarp-wrapped corpse of the monster to even take a peek if tempted. Part of her wanted to see it one last time just to prove to herself that she wasn’t going crazy. Although, there would be a measure of comfort in crazy.
    She stared out the window and Aiden, she knew, stared at her. Even if he’d run a search on her, what could he have found out? She’d been careful to keep a low profile and had never once mentioned the word psychic. She’d learned that lesson the hard way long before reaching adulthood. She kept her gift to herself. Mike, who didn’t let on if he suspected anything strange, never talked to the papers and she was careful about covering her tracks with her clientele.
    There was that one newspaper article from when she was fifteen. Her four-year-old foster sister had wandered off into the woods and Grace had been the one who found her. It had to be moldering away on microfiche somewhere, didn’t it? But Aiden, when he’d called her a psychic, had sounded dead sure about it, and she had been able to see that monster. She still had no explanation for that. What the hell had she gotten herself into?
    Lost in thought, she barely noticed when the truck rocked to a stop. Fen waved a hand in front of her face, whistling to catch her attention. “Your girl’s not looking so hot, Aiden. Mind getting her out of my truck before she pukes again?”
    She glared at him. “I’m fine. And I’m not his girl.”
    He gave her that toothy grin again. “If you say so. I’m not going to argue with anyone who can track a portal jump and do that—” he nodded toward the back, “—to a fire demon.”
    Her stomach lurched just thinking about it and she stumbled out the door, nearly falling into Aiden’s arms. He steadied her and said to Fen, “Collect Christian and the twins when you’re done and meet us back here.”
    Fen took off and she stood staring at Aiden’s shirt. The cotton clung to his broad chest and the worn leather strap securing his scabbard slashed through the tractor logo. His hands circled her arms above the elbow, warm, firm, steady. He made no move to pull her closer and she made