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Wayward Daughter

Logan Ledoux, Monster Hunter extraordinaire at your service.

Did your eccentric aunt leave you a bad-ass mansion that happens to be haunted by the malevolent spirit of a Victorian child?

Did you rescue a werewolf who was hit by a car because you thought it was a German Shepherd and now they think you’re their mate?

Did you happen to donate blood to a vampire posing as a phlebotomist And now they’ve gotten a taste for you?

If someone in Kansas bought another haunted doll at the antique road show, I’m going to need hazard pay to deal with it because the Governor has banned me from Kansas, and the state police would love to arrest me.

If you’ve pissed off a witch, you’ve probably got it coming.

It all started thirty years ago when my mother shoved an ornate knife in my hands and stashed me in a trapdoor under the floor. The sounds I heard in that hole will forever haunt me. When my uncle came to let me out, there was blood all over the walls, and my mom was missing. My uncle trained me to hunt monsters so nothing like that would ever happen to me and I could eventually figure out what happened to Mom.

I’m getting close. I have to be.

Istepped out of the confessional and mopped my hand down my face. Two more priests were being tempted into leaving their vocation. The LeDoux girl was a menace. I didn’t condone this at all, but there was once a time the Church would have burnt her as a witch.

These priests weren’t easily replaced. It was always unfortunate when a priest left their calling, but as much as the Vatican denied secret orders of the church, we did have them. Not every priest knew about them either. Like every secret society, you had to be tapped for it.

I was called to the Venatio Daemonum twenty years ago. We hunted demons and dealt with the occult. I should have still been out there fighting the good fight, but things went wrong on a job, and I had a hex on me. I was benched while I researched how to remove it. I was a confessor and mentor now. I could still go on jobs, but I couldn’t participate. I was there for safety.

Which led me to the LeDoux girl. I’d butted heads with The Flame ever since I started out in this vocation. It was the uncouth, civilian side of demon hunting. We didn’t like them, and they thought we didn’t know what we were doing. The Venatio Daemonum used the true God to banish evil, and the Flame used pagan methods. The Flame also thought not all supernaturals were evil. It was an affront to God.

It was a nightmare when we ended up on the same job. It was usually foul-mouthed men in flannel and beer guts, but there were a few random women. There were a lot more women lately.

The first time I met the LeDoux girl was when we both showed up to a possession. It was just her and us four priests. We had completely different methods for getting a demon out of someone.

She took offense when we took over and wouldn’t leave. She called me Daddy, paddled my bottom, and sang that infernal Hozier song the entire time we were trying to exorcize the demon out of that man. Then, when we finally succeeded, her mutant dog lifted his leg and pissed all over my trousers. She couldn’t be walking that thing enough because he couldn’t be more than thirty pounds, and I didn’t think he would ever stop.

She seemed to be at every job we showed up to, and that dog always tried to piss on one of us. They were both menaces, but the dog didn’t show up to fight demons in tight leather pants showing cleavage. The dog didn’t shamelessly flirt with celibate men. I was old enough to be her father, and she flirted with me.

We’d had four priests defect since she started showing up. I knew she was the reason because I heard their confessions up until they left. They were having impure thoughts and weren’t sure if they could resist fleshly temptations. Two left the Church altogether, and two asked to just be regular priests and teach.

Which said a lot. We regularly fought demons. We put down werewolves and shapeshifters. Our order had taken down vampire nests and entire covens. People died. I got hexed. All it took was a pretty girl with a filthy mouth to send several priests running.

And we’d just gotten a call about an uptick of demonic possessions in New Orleans. There were certain places where the ley lines converged that supernaturals liked to gather and get into trouble. New Orleans was one of them.

The problem was that a lot of the Flame congregated in those places. New Orleans was Logan LeDoux’s stomping grounds. We ran into her outside of New Orleans all the time, but we were at a disadvantage when we were on her turf.

I could send another team, but I was familiar with her feminine wiles by now and was best prepared to handle it. Saul and Solomon were the last of my team. One was killed by a werewolf, and several left over a woman.

I called them in.

“We’ve got reports of demonic activity in New Orleans.”

“New Orleans is a den of sin and good food,” Saul moaned.

Saul was…Saul. He wasn’t the brightest tool in the shed, but he was six foot five and built like an ox. He followed instructions, so there was that. He applied with letters of recommendation from his parish priest and his rugby coach. He got through seminary and was book smart, but he had the common sense of a burnt candle. I once had to explain to him that marijuana didn’t make him closer to God. It would just lead him into sin.

I didn’t think it quite sunk in. He was always hungry.

“What do we know?” Solomon asked.

Solomon had this way of hyperfocusing on whatever he needed to and getting things done. He was probably the smartest of all of us. Solomon was probably wasted here, but I knew why he was tapped. He was brilliant with languages. We had all these ancient texts. Most had been translated, but some of the translations were bad.

A bad translation was partly what got me hexed.