“This is quite the act of magic. While you were suffering, perhaps your former lover considered that punishment enough. But if you have recently started to enjoy your life, say by having discovered the merits of our little town...”
Brax looked at Penny as Minegold trailed off, leaving the conclusion to him. “She might have decided to up the ante. I was thinking about that tonight when it started to get bitterly cold inside my apartment. Thought to myself that Marietta wouldn’t like it if she found out I wasn’t starving to death or considering a nice sunny stroll just yet.”
“And she might be asking for more favors from the demon she’s bound to to speed things along?”
“Cold won’t kill us, but fire won’t save us. I have this thing for women who are bad for me,” Brax sighed.
“Hey!”
“Not you, darling.” Brax grabbed Penny and felt her sigh in relief when his cold body touched hers. “You’re the only good thing that’s ever happened to me, lady-wise.”
“I am?” Penny looked up at him, starry-eyed, a strange little smile on her face. “That’s... weird. But good.”
“That’s us. Weird, but good.” He said it again—and he liked it better when it was paired with Penny.
“I hate to interrupt, but if your former lover is calling up demons from the underworld, there are two theories of how such a thing is accomplished. One presumes she can’t summon him, having no soul to trade—so she must open a gate.”
“That’s not my department. I got bit, but I never bothered with the rules,” Brax admitted.
“Unfortunately, when you’ve lived with great evil, as I have, one bothers with all the rules. There is a legend that says ‘Should the fires of Hell be pooled into her chalice, she shall burn the gates and doors, she shall open the 9th Gate and see her wayclear. What shall be left is winter’s desolation, consuming all with the ice that burns as sharp as fire.”
Penny tilted her head. “We don’t have a gate. We don’t even have a doorman, and if there are monsters and devils roaming around, maybe we should?”
“The 9th Gate is a reference to the gates of Hell. Someone wants them open. Someone doesn’t just want you to die, Mr. Leon. Someone wants you to suffer.”
Penny leaned against his bicep, shaking. “That’s not okay.”
“No, my dear, it isn’t. Especially because if we don’t stop her, Pine Ridge is going to suffer along with him.”
Chapter Six
“All right. This is a whole new level of ‘you screwed me over’, or even ‘you cheated’. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. I didn’t even scorn her, I just had a snack,” Brax muttered as he paced, towing Penny with him, the little blonde wrapped around his back like a sloth on its mother. It was... Well, annoying and adorable, and odd how much he liked it.
It was beyond sex. It was need. Intimacy.
He would be damned if he finally found this peculiar, delightful feeling only to lose it in eternal torment a few hours later.
“If she’s sold her soul and she practices ‘vodoun,’ your former paramour may not even be the one calling the shots. Demons love to enter the mortal realm. They’ll use any combination of ways to get here, hence we have vampires, succubi, and the like, existing among humans. I hate to minimize your role in all of this—”
“Please do. I’d feel better.” Guilt. He had guilt.
It was a long-forgotten emotion, like right and wrong, and he didn’t like it.
Penny placed a sleepy kiss on his neck, her burning cheek against his shoulder.
