Demon Night by Meljean Brook

a man’s weaknesses.
    Charlie wasn’t his. He liked her well enough, but he’d be a damned fool to let a woman like that depend on him or get under his skin.
    Apparently oblivious to the smirk that tilted Lilith’s lips, Jake leaned forward and tapped his finger against a line item. “A lot of it was this payment—she made it a year after she got out of Mission Creek.”
    â€œA five-thousand-dollar fine?” Lilith’s brows arched. “And a year at a state correction facility? Was the DUI her first offense?”
    Jake nodded. “No other DUIs, but she’d checked herself in and out of alcohol rehab for a couple of years, so the judge took that as a sign that she wasn’t capable of rehabilitating herself. And she totaled her rental car, driving into the side of that restaurant, so there were a few other charges thrown on top of it. She was lucky no one else was injured, or she might not have gotten off as easy as she did.”
    Ethan didn’t know it had been all that easy, but he didn’t respond. He was hardly one to determine suitable punishments.
    â€œDid you check out the inmates who were in with her? Any hits with Legion?” Lilith asked.
    â€œWe ran the names,” Ethan said. “There were none.”
    â€œHer financials are clean now, though she doesn’t have anything extra,” she noted as she hit the end of the file. “Certainly nothing to tempt a demon. Who gave her the money?”
    Jake slid his toothpick between his lips again, leaned back. “Her sister, a little over two years ago. The loan got her out of the hole. That’s also when Charlie stopped the careless spending and finally got a steady job.”
    â€œAt…Cole’s? Hold on.” Lilith glanced back at a page. “She’s drunk and drives her car through the window of his restaurant, and six years later he offers her a position as bartender ?”
    Another folder appeared in Jake’s hand. “Old Matthew Cole. Sentenced thirty-seven years ago for rape and double murder, then had his conviction overturned a quarter century later when DNA evidence showed he was innocent. Legally changed his name to ‘Old Matthew’ because he said that’s what he was when he got out—what the courts did to him, he just wanted to make official. Most of his staff has served time for minor offenses.”
    â€œAn ex-con turned Mother Hen, with a grudge against the law,” Lilith murmured, shaking her head in amusement, then turned back to the first page in Charlie’s file and studied her picture.
    â€œWe looked at all of Cole’s and the staff’s associates as well,” Ethan said.
    â€œShe’s attractive, I suppose, if one goes for those blond, sloe-eyed, rock-and-roll, just-fell-out-of-bed types. Don’t you think so, puppy?”
    â€œI’d do her,” Jake said.
    â€œYou’d screw a goat if it looked at you crosswise.” Ethan ignored Jake’s rueful grin of agreement and stared down at Lilith. Was she trying to rile him again, suggesting such a thing? Demons didn’t have a sexual drive; they could perform the act, but couldn’t feel physical desire. “A demon ain’t likely to lust after her, and it wouldn’t make no difference if she looked as she does now or if she were the bearded lady in a traveling wagon.”
    â€œNo, but they recognize and enjoy beauty. It doesn’t take much for appreciation to become envy, which might explain the change. I don’t know that her face is so remarkable it’d inspire that much envy, though. She’s an odd kind of pretty.”
    Only the knowledge that Lilith might shoot him kept Ethan from shaking his head in disbelief and observing that women were far more critical of each other than a man ever would be. Even upside-down and flattened by the photo, Charlie’s wide-spaced, heavy-lidded brown eyes, her translucent skin, her