whiskey witches 01 - whisky witches by s m blooding Read Free Book Online Page B

room filled with silence.
    What could he do to help her? She needed to get up. She needed to fight.
    “It’s like I woke up, you know? From a really bad dream. One of those ones you can’t wake up from where evil things are chasing you and you can’t get away no matter where you go.”
    “I can’t—” He rubbed his ear uncomfortable. Women didn’t confide in him, generally. When he was in a room with a woman, he was either having sex or working a case, not listening while she unburied her heart. “I don’t know what to say.”
    “It’s like I just lost her. Like it was yesterday.” She took a step toward the window. “I don’t know what to do.”
    “You have an investigation.” He had nothing more to offer. Well, he could offer to have sex with her. Sex fixed everything, but the mood was too somber and it didn’t feel right. So, maybe it didn’t solve everything. “There’s some dumb freak out there killing people.”
    She was so still. “I don’t care.”
    “Hey, look.” Dexx walked up to her in three quick strides and gripped her shoulders. “I know what it’s like to lose someone you love, really I do. You just—” He stopped. You just what? What wonderful advice could he offer?
    She didn’t even look up at him.
    “You just—you live each day, you know, moment to moment. And it kinda gets better.” He let his hands slip off her shoulders. “Kind of. I mean, you get numb after a while and it becomes easier to do the job.”
    She stared at him with vacant eyes. “How do you live like this?” Her eyes closed and her head fell back slightly as tears studded her eyelashes. “There’s nothing. I feel . . . nothing.”
    “You’re lying, Pea. You’re feeling more than you can handle right.” He’d lost a brother. She’d had her daughter ripped away from her and years erased from her life. How could he compare the two? “It gets . . . better.”
    “Just do the job.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “You just do the job.”
    She opened her flooded, chocolate eyes.
    He tipped his head at her apologetically. “I know there isn’t much I can do, but if you need to talk . . .” He shrugged with his hands deep enough in his pockets to keep himself from grabbing hold of her again.
    An almost visible wall slammed across her features as she brushed past him. “We’re dealing with a killer trying to raise a demon.”
    He almost wished she’d go back to the weepy Paige. A thread of fear wormed through him. Whiskey women were crazy scary when they put those walls over their emotions. “Mostly, I think they’re after you.”
    “To raise a demon.”
    He followed her to the table and pulled out the wooden chair. “Your gift, you know, talking to demons and stuff, do you know how to use it?”
    She gave him a deadly serious look.
    He raised his hands in surrender. “Then maybe you know which demon they’re trying to raise now that you remember and all.”
    “I’ve got a pretty good idea, but we all thought he was dead.”
    “How dead? Like bounced back to Hell kind of dead, or dead like you’re never going to return kind of dead?”
    “Even demons have souls, Dexx,” Paige knelt beside her bag lying on the floor and dug through it. “I’m pretty sure his soul came back somehow. Reborn somewhere.”
    “Rebirth,” he said, blinking at her in disbelief. “A demon. You’re serious.”
    She walked to the dresser with a black candle and an incense burner. “I can’t be positive, but it would make sense. If we’re reborn, why can’t demons be?”
    “What would that look like exactly?” Unease burned through Dexx’s gut as the black candle stared at him from across the room. He knew black candles could be used to bring about good magick, but it could also bring about the bad. He wasn’t a complete fool. “Would he come back as a serial killer? Are we looking at this all wrong?”
    “No. We’re not. Demons aren’t what you think. They’re not what the Bible and the Koran tells us