CHAPTER THREE

      WITHIN FIFTEEN MINUTES David reached the address. Shutting off the ignition and setting the kickstand, he parked his bike on the street several houses away. He quickly jogged toward the house, ignoring the shooting pain coursing through his leg.

      As he crept up the porch steps, the hairs on his arms and the back of his neck stood on end. His senses heightened, he listened for the sound of screams or yelling from behind the door. Nothing.

      He breathed deep, preparing himself, then froze. The smell of rotten eggs hit his nose, and he swore under his breath. David knew that smell.

      Sulfur.

      Without hesitation, he slammed into the front door with his full weight. It caved in after two hits from his two-hundred-plus-pound frame. Thank God for flimsy locks and no dead bolts. When his leg still functioned well, one kick would’ve done the trick. He frowned at that thought. As he stepped through the broken doorway, he pulled his gun and cocked the hammer, preparing to shoot. He was so ready to try out those new bullets. Holy-water-filled bullets wouldn’t kill a demon, but they would definitely slow it down for a few moments, and that was all he needed.

      He listened intently, trying to get a sense of where the demon was.

      After a quick scan of the ground floor, he called out, “Is anyone home?”

      An eerie silence answered. The quiet was too absolute. No sounds of talking or movement. His stomach dropped, and something inside told him he wasn’t searching for a demon anymore. He was searching for its victims. Its dead victims.

      He charged up the stairs. Agony seared through his leg as he climbed the steps faster than his pain-in-the-ass physical therapist would have approved of, but he wouldn’t allow that to hold him back. Not again. Three bedrooms to scan. Slowly he pushed open the door to the first and stepped inside. From the size and décor, definitely the master bedroom, probably where the wife, who’d called Father O’Reilly, and her husband slept. Unlike the rest of the pristinely organized room, the comforter and bedsheets lay in a twisted bundle, as if someone had shoved them off in a rush to jump out of bed. Otherwise, no signs of anything out of the ordinary. But there was no way he had the wrong house, not with the sulfur he smelled. Even old rotting Easter eggs that the kids hadn’t found for months didn’t smell that potent.

      He moved to the next bedroom, gun still drawn. He peeked inside: the room of a teenage boy. Sports memorabilia and a game system, but nothing unusual, just another messy bed. Turning toward the last room at the end of the hall, David stared at the open doorway. A shiver ran down his spine. Most people would have run in the other direction. It didn’t matter what dumbasses movies made the average citizen look like; in the real world, when people felt threatened, they ran, which honestly was the smartest thing to do. Instincts served a good purpose. But it was David’s job not to run.

      With a deep breath, he stepped inside. Immediately he lowered his gun. He was standing inside a baby’s nursery. He turned on the light and blinked rapidly as his eyes adjusted to the sudden brightness. From the pale pink molding on the white-painted walls and the small onesies lying in a neatly folded pile on a changing table near the crib, he could tell the room was meant for a baby girl. His stomach twisted into knots.

      Not again. Dear God, not another baby.

      Adrenaline coursed through him, and he fought back panic. He needed to find her, find the whole family, but to do so he needed to stay calm, collected, no matter how much the situation primed him to leap into action.

      Where was this family? No signs of a struggle, yet they weren’t here, and the disarray of their beds in comparison to the rest of the immaculately clean house suggested they hadn’t planned on leaving. No, David could tell something had woken them and forced them out of their beds.

      Tucking his gun back into its holster at his hip, he limped over to the baby’s crib and peered inside. A single bloodied thumbprint dirtied the white-painted wood. Shit.

      As quickly as he could manage, he jogged down the stairs. There had to be something he’d missed. He stopped as he reached the bottom of the staircase. Light shone faintly underneath the door of what he’d initially thought was a closet. He wrenched the door open.

      Carpeted stairs descended down into a basement. Several drops of blood stained the tan carpeting. One painful step at a time, David negotiated the stairway. His heart thumped against his chest. The sound rang in his ears in the silence.

      Though he’d known as soon as he reached the porch steps that something was wrong, nothing could have prepared him for the sight before him. A large lump crawled into his throat as he surveyed the gore-covered scene. The basement looked as if someone had taken the contents of an entire blood bank and used them to set off an explosion with a messy homemade bomb. Blood soaked the walls, ceiling and floor, seeping into the carpeting.

      The whole family...slaughtered.

      David stood for several long moments, surveying the scene. There was something not right about this on so many levels. Demons were assholes, and they loved to use humans and leave them for dead, but this? The carnage in front of him made the victims Robert had left in his wake look as if they’d died in their sleep. But the lingering smell of sulfur mixed with the overpowering odor of freshly spilled blood told David he wasn’t imagining things. This was demons’ work.

      If someone had told him that a demon had murdered an entire family in cold blood, he wouldn’t have believed it. He scanned each of the family members. The mother lay slumped against the corner of the far wall, her throat slit. Blood covered the front of her nightgown. Her mouth remained open, and her lifeless eyes stared upward to where her attacker would have stood. The cell phone she must have used to call Father O’Reilly sat a foot away from her outreached hand, the screen covered in cracks like spiderwebs.

      Across from the wife, her husband lay facedown on the floor, the murder weapon still clutched in his hand after he’d slit his own throat. The wife had been right. From the looks of the scene, the demon had possessed her husband, who’d murdered her and their children before he’d turned the knife on himself.

      A sharp pang of sadness hit David in the heart at the sight of the couple’s teenage son. A gaping hole in the middle of his chest showed the brutality of what the demon had done to him. The sulfur-sucking monster had slung the kid’s intestines around his corpse as if they were nothing more than sausage links. This had to be the most sickening scene he had ever laid eyes on, and he had seen some seriously messed-up shit during the year he’d served in the Brooklyn division.

      The next thought that came to his mind made him cringe. Where was the baby?

      Cautiously, David rounded the staircase to another section of the basement. His stomach flipped. Bile rose in his throat and burned his esophagus. He ran to the nearest trash bin and hurled the contents of his stomach into the small plastic bag. He didn’t have a weak stomach by any stretch of the imagination, but even he couldn’t handle the sight of what had been done to the once beautiful infant girl. He blinked back tears on the family’s behalf.

      A dangerous mixture of sadness and pure unadulterated rage rushed through him. He would find the demonic piece of shit that did this. He would find the bastard and painfully torture it for days, weeks, until it was begging to be put out of its misery. Then he would do more than send it back to hell, where it had the potential to crawl its way out again decades later. He would find some sort of spell, some ritual, something to ensure it was tortured in the most painful way possible for the rest of eternity.

      David stood in the middle of the basement amidst the dead bodies and the lingering smell of sulfur mixed with the metallic scent of the family’s blood. With robotic movements, he removed his phone and