Demon Hunts. C.E. Murphy

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Demon Hunts - C.E.  Murphy


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      Praise for

       C.E. MURPHY

       and her books

      THE WALKER PAPERS

      Urban Shaman

      “A swift pace, a good mystery, a likeable protagonist, magic, danger—Urban Shaman has them in spades.”

      —Jim Butcher, bestselling author of The Dresden Files series

      Thunderbird Falls

      “Fans of Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels and the works of urban fantasists Charles de Lint and Tanya Huff should enjoy this fantasy/mystery’s cosmic elements. A good choice.”

      —Library Journal

      Coyote Dreams

      “Tightly written and paced, [Coyote Dreams] has a compelling, interesting protagonist, whose struggles and successes will captivate new and old readers alike.”

      —RT Book Reviews

      Walking Dead

      “Murphy’s fourth Walker Papers offering is another gripping, well-written tale of what must be the world’s most reluctant—and stubborn—shaman.”

      —RT Book Reviews

      THE NEGOTIATOR

      Heart of Stone

      “An exciting series opener…Margrit makes for a deeply compelling heroine as she struggles to sort out the sudden upheaval in her professional and romantic lives.”

      —Publishers Weekly

      House of Cards

      “Violent confrontations add action on top of tense intrigue in this involving, even thrilling, middle book in a divertingly different contemporary fantasy romance series.”

      —LOCUS

      Hands of Flame

      “Fast-paced action and a twisty-turny plot make for a good read…. Fans of the series will be sad to leave Margrit’s world behind, at least for the time being.”

      —RT Book Reviews

      Demon Hunts

      C.E. Murphy

       www.mirabooks.co.uk

      Author Note

      By the time Demon Hunts comes out in June 2010, you’ll have just missed the Brenda Novak Diabetes Research auction, which she runs every May. In 2009 I offered a “Tuckerization”—an opportunity to have a character named after a reader—in the auction, and will very likely do the same in future auctions. Please keep an eye on my Web site, cemurphy.net, for information about such opportunities in the upcoming years!

      —Catie

      This one’s for Tara.

       (I think that’s enough apologizing now, don’t you? :))

      CONTENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      CHAPTER ELEVEN

      CHAPTER TWELVE

      CHAPTER THIRTEEN

      CHAPTER FOURTEEN

      CHAPTER FIFTEEN

      CHAPTER SIXTEEN

      CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

      CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

      CHAPTER NINETEEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY

      CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

      CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

      CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

      CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

      CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

      CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

      CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

      CHAPTER THIRTY

      CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

      CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

      CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

      CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

      ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      CHAPTER ONE

      Tuesday, December 20, 4:34 A.M.

      Someone had been chewing on the body.

      Not something. Something, in the grand scheme of life, seemed like it would be okay. Things—cats, dogs, raccoons: choose your omnivore, I wasn’t picky—were expected to chew on dead flesh. I was no forensics expert, but I’d learned a few basics at police academy. For example, a bear stripped of its skin and missing its skull can so easily be mistaken for a skinned human that the exposed meat has to be tested in order to ascertain what kind of animal it had been. For another example, humans have a very round, even cusp to their bite that most mammals don’t share. So I was pretty confident it was a someone, and not a something, who had eaten part of Charlie Groleski’s left arm.

      This was really not how I wanted to start the holiday season.

      My partner, a holiday himself—Billy Holliday—swung down beside me. The Christmas carol he was whistling turned into a low long warble of dismay. “Looks like somebody ate him.”

      “I’d noticed.” I rocked back on my heels—a dangerous endeavor, since I was halfway up a low cliff, standing on a semi-sheer rock face. I was roped into a harness that was secured at the top of the cliff, but leaning back still felt like asking for trouble. “Tell me something, Billy. How come we get all the exciting cases?”

      “We don’t.” Billy crouched beside the body, his own harness squeaking and rattling with the motion. I edged several inches to the side and squinted nervously at the drop immediately to my left. Harsh white searchlights stared back at me, the generators powering them shaking all quietude from the morning. The lights made sharp shadows of our narrow ledge, enhancing my awareness that there wasn’t really enough room for two people on the ledge, much less two people and a corpse. “Daniels, he gets exciting cases,” Billy said. “Drug murders, Mafia turncoats, revenge killings. We never get that stuff.”

      “You don’t think half-eaten dead guys stuffed into crevasses are exciting?”

      He shook his head. “No. I think they’re weird. We get the weird cases, not the exciting ones.” He pushed up and wrapped a hand around his rappelling line for balance. “Groleski must’ve been dead from the time they called in a missing persons report, maybe before. Too many days. I can’t get anything from him.”

      I muttered, “Crap,” and let the Sight wash over me.

      Billy was right, if you wanted to get technical about it. He and I constituted Seattle’s only paranormal detective team, a truth which slightly less than a year earlier I would have pulled my tongue out before believing, much less uttering. We got the weird cases, the ones that could potentially have a supernatural element to them.

      He saw dead people. Murdered people, more specifically. Their ghosts tended to linger, and he was the man they could turn to, if he got there within two days of their brutal deaths. Unfortunately for Charlie Groleski, that was too short a window to allow him an opportunity to offer insight as to who’d chewed


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