Page 19 of Wayward Daughter

“Hellhounds are super intelligent. Pan can read and should he so choose, he can talk to you telepathically. He was the one who saved my life the night my mother went missing. There’s a lot we don’t know about Hellhounds because Pan was sold to assholes when he was a puppy. If your people know how to hurt one, I’d prefer you let everyone think he’s just a dog.”

“Logan, we don’t. They are the one reason we can abandon a job. They are immune to holy water, relics, and everything in our arsenal. Every time the Church has tried to trap one to study it, it was a slaughter. I’m guessing the only reason the people who bought him were able to keep him contained was that they got him so young. I’m not going to tell, but they aren’t bad men. They’ve been around you and Pan on several jobs and Pan saved us from those werewolves. If you really want them to see that not all supernaturals are evil, Pan could do that.”

Ugh. He wasn’t wrong. I also wasn’t doing it or asking Pan if he wanted to do it until I trusted these guys better and we weren’t there yet.

“Ooh, sandwiches,” Saul said when we got inside.

“We’ve got chicken salad, cucumber, and pimento because it’s Saint Dolly’s favorite sandwich and I didn’t know if anyone was vegetarian. There’s beer in the fridge, but we also got water and Coke.”

Saul already had a plate full of sandwiches and wanted a beer like I suspected. We’d made boudin cream cheese dip because it was quick and easy. Solomon was already digging into that and also wanted beer. Caleb was all business. He elegantly arranged himself on the couch and ignored the food.

“I actually wouldn’t mind a beer either,” he said.

Rainer and I grabbed the drinks and finally, we were all sitting and just staring at each other.

“I’ll go first,” Caleb said. “Bishop Henry was furious about what happened at the house. He’s also never been in the field before and doesn’t realize how dangerous it can get. He thinks because we are God’s warriors, we have divine protection, but people have died. Either on the job or because their death was ordered after they were turned. If your dog hadn’t handled it, we either would have been torn apart or killed because we turned.”

“Start with this one,” Rainer said, digging a book out and setting it on the table.

I could tell which book it was from the spine and why Rainer chose it. The Flame got turned all the time. We didn’t murder them for it unless they gave us a reason. A bunch of them kept diaries that were now lore books. It helped us understand how the virus worked its way through their bodies and how the change affected them. We knew what kind of new urges and instincts they had.

“We have several more like it. They are diaries from our people who turned. We think once you read it, you’ll understand it doesn’t have to be a death sentence. Most people adjust to their new reality just fine and some take it too far and get addicted to killing. It just depends on what they were like before they turned,” I said.

“Find out if more of them are coming,” Pan asked.

Good call. These guys were always a pain in my ass, but they weren’t the biggest pains in my ass from their group. So, I asked.

“Pretty sure he’s sending Father William.”

Saul and Solomon both groaned, which wasn’t a good sign. I didn’t know how many of them there were. I’d run into about five different teams on jobs across the country. They were all irritating, but there was one team that was way worse than the guys sitting in the living room.

“If that’s the guy with the scar in his eyebrow who perpetually looks like he’s got a log up his ass, can anyone veto that? We got into a fistfight once because he kicked my dog. He’s a hair puller, and he threatened to burn me as a witch.”

“I hope you whooped his ass like I taught you,” Rainer said.

“Why do you think he threatened to burn me as a witch?”

“That’s Father William. He’s ambitious, narrow minded, and a complete zealot. I’ve also known him since we were children and he’s a bully. I’ve got information on him that could get him in trouble, so he’s going to stay away from me, but if he can find his own blackmail material, he will.”

Awesome. Were priests allowed to have drama? Weren’t they supposed to be above all that? I already had my own drama with that dude. Maybe I could tell him being a drama llama would send you straight to Hell if we got into a fist fight again.

“Let us worry about William,” Caleb said.

“Can’t we just tell him the demons and witches who escaped fled to some remote area of Nebraska where the moose outnumber the people and they are deep in the forest?” Saul asked.

I knew I liked him. I didn’t want anyone from Venatio Daemonum in my city, but especially not those guys. New Orleans leaned into the whole supernatural thing for tourists, but there were a lot of supernaturals living here. Most of them minded their own business and weren’t causing any trouble and a good bit of them were my friends.

William and I got into a brawl because he finished a job and then went after some shifter kids. The virus completely rewrote genetics. Vampires were technically dead and couldn’t procreate, but shifters were either bitten or scratched by a shifter or born to one. Those kids went to school with other shifters since this was New Orleans, so there was no chance of them exposing other kids.

There were similar schools in most places and kids were homeschooled if there weren’t. Most shifters liked being around other shifters, so it was rare to find them on their own.

You couldn’t tell most supernaturals from looking at them if you were human unless you were a human with a pet Hellhound who could scent them. You had to catch them in the act. I didn’t know how William caught those three kids, but I knew him from jobs and I saw him trying to convince them to get into his car. I was already planning on inserting myself when Pan told me they were fox shifters.

“It’s not a bad idea, but it would cause problems later. The Bishop is going to want to know why we didn’t go with them if we had that intel and I made such a big deal about the threat. I’ll have to come up with something else,” Caleb said.

Huh. I didn’t take him for a rule breaker, but maybe I needed to explain the gravity of why I didn’t want this guy in my city. And I needed to start from the beginning and explain some people were shifters because the virus could be inherited. I was going to have some big opinions about working with these guys if they didn’t see anything wrong with going after kids.

“To answer the look on your face, there is nothing in our Esoteric texts about shifters being born. Our books say shifters made a deal with demons for power and the taint spreads by bites or scratches. The three of us would never harm children. We’d send them to their parents and dive back into the text to see if there was a cure,” Solomon said.