Page 5 of Wayward Daughter

It had been different with demons until Delilah let us in on a secret. Before, all I could do was threaten to send them back to Hell after yapping their ears off. If Pan dropped the glamour and let them know they were dealing with a Hellhound, I could have some bite to my warnings. Once I got the demon out of the human, Pan could kill them for good.

“Yeah, and I’m going to threaten them a bit, so if you want to play, go ahead.”

“Can I chase them even if they cooperate?”

“You don’t need my permission to play. I don’t know if demons have butts when they are just smoke, but if you want to bite one, go ahead.”

“What about Julius?”

Pan hated Julius. Julius wasn’t a bad person; he just really wanted to bite me and kept pestering me. Pan hated every guy who showed any interest in me, really. It was hard bringing men home when my secret Hellhound would just unload his bladder all over them. And a lot of them thought I should beat my dog because of it. The ones that didn’t think I should yell, and I wasn’t going to traumatize him again.

I also wasn’t putting him outside because he lived here and some random man did not. Hellhounds before bros. Pan saved my life once. He also had senses I didn’t. If he hated someone, there was probably a reason. I had a fucked up childhood. I probably didn’t have the best taste in men.

“Julius is harmless,, and he’s in therapy now.”

“He smells like lust every time he’s around you, even if he’s stopped bothering you about biting.”

“You hate everyone who smells horny around me. You’ve chased a few up the block.”

Pan never bit a human because we didn’t need human authorities looking twice at him. He would chase them. I knew I should be mad about it, but there was something funny about watching a grown man running from a thirty-pound dog with the body of a sausage. Everyone was scared of the business end.

“Yeah, but I didn’t bite them.”

“You could only reach their ass if you dropped the glamour.”

“You can hobble anyone by mauling their Achilles. They are more fun to chew on than those beef tracheas you get me. A helpful tip from me to you.”

“Noted. Based on the social media posts I found, it was eight tourists in the friend group, but we don’t know how many demons got out. They could have possessed other people and grouped back up once they had bodies.”

A lot of the training between Delilah and Pan was just the two of them. Some of it was magic he should have, and sometimes, they just talked. Hell was an entirely different realm with its own culture. That was taken from Pan when he was just a pup. She told him stuff about demons the Flame, and I was pretty sure my priest nemesis didn’t know.

He told me some of it, but the rest of that intel just trickled out as he thought I needed it .

“Delilah said it’s hard to get out if you don’t have permission. They only give it to people who are out to make deals or who have been vetted. The King of Hell likes mayhem as much as the next demon, but it makes him look bad when they are utter dumbasses. She said his rules are similar to the Flame. They aren’t supposed to jump into anyone who didn’t summon a demon and ask to be possessed. They aren’t supposed to jump into any bodies where someone is going to be forced into the back of their mind while a demon rides them.”

Good to know. I also had no idea who the current King of Hell was, and I wasn’t going to ask because he was probably a scary Motherfucker and I didn’t want his attention on me.

“So, we could be dealing with tourists who got drunk and thought they were taking the piss by summoning a demon because they were in New Orleans.”

“We need to go back and talk to Delilah. If someone summons a demon, not just any demon gets to respond. There’s an entire system. It should be impossible for that many demons to get out at once. Not the kind of demons who are going to make a scene like this.”

We could do that. Delilah was like a second mother to me before and after she got possessed. Rainer would probably have some information too, and I needed to check in with my uncle.

I had the layout of the house they were squatting in and a general idea of how many demons I was dealing with.

But I always listened to advice from experts. If Pan said this was weird, I wasn’t going near that house until I had more information.

Iwalked across the front porch and let myself into Rainer’s duplex. Old bastard was already awake and making breakfast. One of these days, I was going to beat him awake and cook this man grits and eggs. He knew it too because he was smirking at me as he made me a plate and slid it over. He plated one up for Pan and set it on the floor, then made his own and joined me at the table.

“Last job. Report.”

It was a thing. I always walked over for breakfast after I got back from a job. We were both trying to figure out what happened to my mother and his sister. He’d deny it under torture, but he liked hanging out with me.

“It was a standard haunting. It would have been easy, but Venatio Daemonum showed up again. They are crashing more and more of my jobs.”

“The house get wrecked again?”

“Yeah. And you know they didn’t stay to help clean it.”