Keep Me Close

  Dominic Salem is many things: professional ghost hunter, curse breaker, and demon slayer to name a few. If there’s one thing he’s learned, it’s never pick up hitchhikers. Something about this one made him stop, though. Maybe he hasn't learned his lesson yet.

  Lavinia “Vinny” Wake doesn’t exactly trust her smoking hot ride. Her music is her sanctuary, the only thing she really believes in. But now, Vinny’s dreams have her all messed up, and the last one seemed too...real.

  Dom can tell Vinny’s nightmares aren’t just dreams—they’re way worse. Something or someone is drawing her into a trap, and Dom has to stop it. Turns out Vinny’s life isn’t the only thing at stake. Her soul is on the line, too. No pressure.

  Copyright © 2017

  Cover design by James T. Egan, www.bookflydesign.com.

  Edited by Amanda Valentine, ayvalentine.com.

  Also by Elizabeth Cole

  Secrets of the Zodiac Novels

  A Heartless Design

  A Reckless Soul

  A Shameless Angel

  The Lady Dauntless

  Beneath Sleepless Stars

  A Mad and Mindless Night

  Swordcross Knights Novels

  Honor & Roses

  Choose the Sky

  Raven’s Rise

  The Brothers Salem Series

  One Touch of Silver (Prequel)

  Keep Me Close

  Chapter 1

  “Get your paws the hell off me!” Dom shouted as the demon grabbed for him.

  He rolled away from the thing’s gigantic claws with millimeters to spare. As he regained his footing, he felt a draft and looked at the brand new rips in his t-shirt. Nope. Make that one millimeter to spare.

  “Get over here,” the demon hissed. Its voice penetrated Dom’s skull, going through not just his ears but the ether itself, slipping into his brain and setting off a thousand whispers that echoed the demon’s command.

  The worst memories of his life, the ones he tried to bury deepest, suddenly surfaced as if they’d all happened yesterday. When he broke his leg. When he thought he’d hurt his little brother Mal. When his parents left for the last time. When Rachel found him. Everything combined in a swirl of emotion—guilt and pain and misery.

  Dom winced, trying to shake off the attack. Unlike most humans, he’d suffered this type of assault before. He knew how to deflect the worst feelings, how to shove the memories away to be dealt with later. He really wished demons would learn to fight fair.

  The demon approached Dom, confident the mortal was paralyzed by the psychic pain hurled into his brain. Hot breath, which stank like week-old garbage, blasted Dom’s face. Just as the demon reached out for him, Dom moved. Gripping his favorite demon-fighting knife, he slashed sideways, aiming to sever the sinewy, oversized forearm.

  The blade hit the flesh with a sizzle. The demon roared and pulled back. Dom could see the wound briefly drip dark blood. Then the flesh sealed up again, healing within moments.

  The demon roared with laughter, a huge, dark sound that reverberated through the humid air. With narrowed eyes, it looked at Dom and the knife he held, then growled.

  “You’re a supernasty I don’t need to run into again,” Dom muttered, pulling something from his pocket.

  He hurled a little, paper-wrapped object at the demon. It detonated at the thing’s ugly feet, causing smoke to furl up.

  Expecting something more than a smoke bomb, the demon sprang away and waved its arms to diffuse the grey cloud.

  Using the few seconds of distraction, Dom reached into his pocket again and pulled out a vial of salt—a simple but very useful tool against many creatures from the otherworlds. He bit off the cap and spilled the salt into his palm.

  He dragged the blade of his knife through the salt, coating the silver surface with tiny white crystals.

  Just in time. The demon hurtled out of the smoke, its arms held out wide, claws splayed for maximum slashing—a pose that left its torso completely exposed.

  Instead of running away, Dom lunged forward, knife held steady. The blade connected, creating a deep slash in the middle of the thing’s scaly hide. The blessed salt worked with the enchantments on the blade to form a bond that cut through even a creature from the roughest neighborhood in the otherworlds. The demon’s shriek pierced Dom’s skull. He knew the sound was mostly echoing in the otherworlds. Most folks in the real world wouldn’t hear it at all, and if they did, they’d mistake it for a police siren.

  But Dom couldn’t ignore it, and he winced at the instant headache the unholy scream brought pulsing between his ears.

  The monster regarded him in disbelief. These creatures assumed that all humans were easy prey. Dom was happy to prove them wrong, one by one.

  “You are bound,” Dom managed to gasp out past the pain in his head. “Bound by blood and salt. Flesh and earth.” As he recovered his breath, his voice strengthened. Dom held up the bloody knife blade. He took a moment, picturing the spell he wanted to work in his mind. He needed to keep the demon from slipping away into the otherworlds. The binding of blood and salt would hold only so long. He needed a more permanent solution.

  Solution.

  He dumped the remaining salt into a water bottle and muttered in Latin, “Let the sea that gives life take life back. Let this be the sea inside.”

  The water in the bottle didn’t change appearance, but a wave of intense force rolled over Dom, as if the power of a strong tide invaded the space they’d been fighting in.

  The demon snarled, straining against the quick spell contained in Dom’s knife cut. It writhed, the vicious claws flexing instinctively as it prepared to wrest itself free and pound on Dom.

  “I’ll cut your skin into slivers and make you watch while I eat them,” it hissed. Flames dripped from its mouth as it spoke.

  “Sure you will,” said Dom.

  “Watch me! I can—”

  Perfect. A big mouth. Timing it right, Dom flung the contents of the water bottle directly into the demon’s open gullet. The salt water hissed and steamed when it hit the hot flesh of the demon.

  “Let the tide rise,” Dom said in Latin.

  The creature looked surprised, then sick. It started spitting a mixture of oily goo and salty water onto the ground, but something was happening inside of it, something it couldn’t stop.

  It clawed at its stomach, forming deep gouges. Pink, brackish water leaked out, and the monster began to gasp like a fish drowning in the air.

  Dom kept his knife tight in his right hand, but he knew the final spell worked. The creature was drowning, trapped in an environment that was particularly nasty to its kind. The salt of the earth prevented it from escaping to its home in the infernal otherworlds, and the magically summoned water was the element opposite its own fire.

  Dom watched as the demon kept fighting to breathe, to escape the ocean inside it. It wasn’t strong enough, though, and finally succumbed to the lethal combination of salt and water. It seemed to crumple, looking like a piece of trash floating in a shifting mass of water.

  “Carry the remains to the sea,” Dom murmured, once again in Latin. “And then be free.”

  The elemental force he’d summoned immediately seeped lower, below the surface, into the earth itself.

  Dom should have guessed that here in Florida, more of a swamp than a state, the fastest way to the ocean was just to sink into the lawn.

  Finally, Dom stood up, his skin slick with sweat, demon ichor, and the salty water from the spell. His hands were covered in blood. Not his blood, but that didn’t make him feel any better. He was dead tired. Fighting a demon tended to do that.

  He muttered a prayer in Spanish, one his mother taught him years ago. “Santa Muerte, keep me close to you and on the side of the l
iving so I can keep sending you the dead.” The words helped center him, and after fighting a demon, Dom needed centering.

  He pulled off his now destroyed t-shirt and used it to wipe away the blood. That’s how his clients found him. Standing there in the sopping wet backyard, shirtless and bloody.

  The husband, a big, tall white dude in a muscle tee, came up first, his expression awed.

  The Cuban wife tried to hide a phone behind her back. She’d obviously filmed the whole thing. Dom didn’t worry about it. Beings from the otherworlds had some innate ability to prevent their existence from being recorded. No one knew exactly why, but it had always been that way. Audio played back as static or garbled nonsense. Video either went black, blurry, or simply seemed to be from another scene altogether.

  Dom’s youngest brother, Lex, who was terrifyingly smart, theorized that demons warped space-time when they entered the real world, causing blips and strange effects. The woman could put anything she wanted up on social. No one would see the truth. And that was fine with the demon-hunters of the world. Mass panic was not a good situation.

  The husband was saying, “We were watching through the window, but I’m still not sure what happened.”

  “I exterminated the demon that was harassing your family,” Dom said. “Nasty bugger, too. Just say a sinkhole opened up in your backyard. Which is sort of what happened in the end.”

  The man looked fearfully out at the yard. “Where’s the…”

  “No body. The demon is gone,” Dom reassured him. “Dead. Destroyed. You don’t have to worry about it coming back.”

  “Are you all right?” the wife asked, gazing at Dom. He was very conscious of his sweatiness, his exposed upper body, his tattoos, and the fact that the wife didn’t seem to mind at all.

  “Yup. If you have some fresh water, I’ll take it,” he said. “Used mine up and I’m pretty thirsty.”

  “Sure thing,” she said, apparently recovered from the demon in her home.

  “Get him a shirt while you’re in there,” the man said pointedly.

  She went off with a scowl.

  “Thanks,” Dom said. “If you have the money, I’ll take that too.”

  A little while later, Dom was wearing a loose white t-shirt and had just polished off a bottle of water when his client handed over the payment in cash.

  Dom counted it carefully. It looked like a lot, but he was already mentally deducting the many expenses he’d have to cover, from gas to sacred herbs harvested only when the full moon was in Scorpio. Demon hunting wasn’t cheap.

  The client said, “Um…how will this look to the IRS?”

  “Mark the payment to Salem Associates. If anyone asks, the fee was for home improvement work.”

  “Home improvement?”

  “Well, your home isn’t inhabited by a demon now. That’s an improvement, isn’t it?”

  “Good point.”

  “Thank you for your business,” Dom said, sliding the folded money into his pocket.

  “This won’t happen again, will it?” the client asked nervously.

  “Your home being plagued by a demon? Not unless you do something else that’s either really unlucky or stupid. But you still live in Florida, so I can’t guarantee something else bizarre won’t happen to you.”

  “Yeah, well. Florida.” The client shrugged. “Bizarre is fine. It was the way the demon kept leaving claw marks in the mirrors and walls that bothered me. That, and how it kept trying to kill us.”

  Dom picked up his backpack. “I’ll get out of your way now.”

  His client trailed him to the front door. “So with a last name like Salem… Does that mean your family was around during…you know?”

  “I don’t really like to talk about that,” Dom said with a smile. The standard line.

  Her tone serious, the wife said in Spanish, “You’ve seen Santa Muerte’s face.”

  “I don’t really like to talk about that either,” Dom said to her. He kept to English, having seen the husband’s confusion when his wife spoke Spanish.

  He reached for the door handle. “If you meet anybody with any other problems of a supernatural type, you’ve got the number. Take care.”

  Dom returned to the crappy motel he was staying in during the job. The window unit air conditioner pinged loudly, protesting the humid air outside. The Salems always traveled cheap. Less overhead meant more money. They needed money to make their home actually habitable.

  He called his brother Malachy. “All done,” he said. “And paid.”

  Mal said, “I knew you’d get that one taken care of fast.”

  “How’s our house?” Dom could picture the old Victorian on the outskirts of the small midwestern town they made their home base. The brothers hadn’t lived there long, and it was a dump, but Dom missed it more than he expected.

  “Slowly collapsing,” said Mal. “I think the roof over the back bedroom is being attacked by pigeons.”

  “Lily’s room?”

  “No, the other one with the green walls. Greenish,” Mal amended.

  “Oh, right. Well, lock Behemoth in there. That should sort it out.” Behemoth preferred to hunt supernasties small enough to get his claws into, but he wouldn’t pass up a pigeon.

  “If I can lift him.” His brother sighed. “How’s Pie?”

  Dom looked at Piewicket, the little calico cat sleeping on the motel bed. “She’s fine.”

  “She made a big stink about going along with you. Did she help?”

  “With killing the demon? No, she didn’t even wake up for the appointment.” Dom wasn’t sure why Piewicket had been so insistent on joining him for the job. He was happy she was there. Piewicket was undeniably the sweeter cat in the Salem house. But she’d done nothing more than keep him company, just as she’d done for his whole life.

  Piewicket and Behemoth were family pets…sort of. They were more family than pets. And though both cats seemed to be normal felines in every respect, they had been in the Salem family a very long time. Far longer than any self-respecting veterinarian would believe.

  Behemoth had been a big, savage black cat when Dom was a little boy, and he was a big savage black cat now. Behemoth had been a big, savage black cat when his grandmother was a young girl. He just stuck around the Salems, occasionally killing, but mostly sleeping. Piewicket was more adventurous and frequently accompanied the brothers when they had to do a job, though not usually one this far from home.

  “I miss Pie,” Mal said. “Tell her that.”

  “Why? I’ll be home in two days.”

  “Actually you won’t,” Mal said. “There’s a new job, and it’s time sensitive. A ghost is haunting a rich guy. So we need you to be a ghostbuster.”

  “It better not be in Florida.”

  “West coast, bro. You’ll like it.”

  “I should come home anyway to resupply.”

  “Buy what you need out there. The client’s loaded, Dom. He’ll cover the costs, but he’s serious about the timeline.”

  “Maybe he should have called earlier instead of waiting till the ghosts got out of hand.”

  “You know how some people need to work up the nerve to call. It takes a huge event for some to even admit this stuff is real.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” Some people never seemed to get that until it was way too late. “Speaking of huge events, has anything happened across the street?”

  The house they were now living in had previously been inhabited by an elderly relative, another Salem who fought the supernasties that plagued the world. Aunt Jo had been keeping watch on the neighboring property, because signs suggested the place was a hellhole—a magnet for demonic activity. But after her health declined last year, the brothers got the house for free when they agreed to take over watching duties. Aunt Jo had packed up for an assisted living facility, still grumbling about leaving such an important job to “the boys.”

  Mal snorted. “Not a thing. I don’t know what the family was so worried about. This is the most
boring surveillance job ever. No one goes in and no one goes out.”

  “You’re sure?”

  He could hear Mal’s sigh of frustration as a crackle over the spotty connection. “Dom, I’m sure. I’ve been watching the place. When I’m not watching it, Lex is watching it. When neither of us can watch it, the cat watches it. We’re all bored. Trust me, you can take this next job without peeking in on us. And we really need this paycheck.”

  “Okay,” Dom said, still with some misgivings. Ever since their parents had died, Dom felt responsible for his younger brothers. But Mal was right. They did need the money. “Send me the details. I’ll hit the road tomorrow.”

  “We have a new job,” he told Piewicket after he hung up.

  The little cat blinked slowly. Yes, I know.

  Dom felt the cat’s response form in his mind. The Salems always had a telepathic bond with their two family cats, and Dom had grown up thinking such conversations were totally normal. He asked, out loud, “Is this the job you really wanted to come along for? What’s going to happen?”

  We go to hunt, for love and justice and fresh meat.

  “You mean I’m going to take out another supernasty and you’re going to get a treat after I get paid for all my hard work.” As he said that, Dom sat on the bed next to Pie, his shoulders slumped after a day of demon-smashing.

  Such is the order of things.

  “You weren’t a lot of help today, you know.” He scratched behind her ears, and Pie’s eyes closed as she leaned into him. “Did you just want to get out of the house?”

  The cat’s tail twitched. True, this demon was no match for your power.

  “It was just a quick spell.”

  Stop that. False modesty is an ugly human trait. Few others have the gift of a quick spell, as you put it. Glory in the power you have.

  “It doesn’t feel glorious.” It was rare, though. Piewicket had him there. Most spells required extensive research and a lot of preparation to cast, and could only be done in alignment with the proper stars and seasons. But Dom had been born with the ability to sidestep some of the usual restrictions. He could reach into the well of magic he always felt close by, and speak a spell without more than a moment’s notice.