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“Pretty sure they jumped into a group of tourists who were there for Jazz Fest. Which means the Flame shouldn’t fight us while we’re there.”

We banished all demons. They were demons, and they belonged in Hell. The Flame thought there was a difference between them possessing someone against their will or hopping into someone who was brain dead, and it was just a matter of their family deciding to pull the plug. They also thought their behavior should matter.

As if a demon could behave.

“Is Jazz Fest still happening?” Saul asked.

Bringing Saul to New Orleans was always a problem. He loved the food and the culture. While Solomon and I were doing research, he’d wander off, and we usually either found him cutting up with drag queens or drunk on hurricanes singing karaoke in the Quarter.

I could give him penance when he confessed, but he generally came back with intel much better than I could find online, so we weren’t locking him up at night.

Thankfully, Jazz Fest was over. I looked that up as soon as I took the job and knew I’d be bringing Saul to New Orleans again. He was the last person I would have expected to feel the call and see it out this far, but he put in the work, and I didn’t want him corrupted.

“The last weekend of Jazz Fest wrapped up two weeks ago. A group of six friends from another state got tickets. They were planning to stay for both weekends and attend as many performances as they could. They were scheduled to fly back home the next Monday. They have not. They rented an Airbnb and refused to leave when their reservation was up. The owner asked for more money, and they refused to pay. When law enforcement showed up to remove them, they fought. We know it’s demons because bullets didn’t stop them.”

“It’s New Orleans,” Solomon said. “Not all law enforcement know what it means when they shoot someone and they don’t die, but enough of them do to contact one of the Flame. If the demons possessed tourists, refused to pay a bill, and assaulted law enforcement, they would actually act.”

He shot me a knowing look. We were about to drag Saul to his favorite den of sin. It might already have been handled when we got there. If it wasn’t, his current temptation could walk in wearing tight leather and showing too much skin. Solomon was also a little too fixated on her for my liking.

I’d also faced down all manner of supernaturals and was currently living with a hex.

I was not about to turn down a job because of a woman.

Ipassed several bars in the Quarter, but my destination was The Salty Worm on Frenchmen. I cringed at the number of tourists wearing flip-flops on Bourbon Street. It was warm, but the party gravy on the street was probably radioactive.

I carried my dog, Pandemonium, if I had to walk on Bourbon Street so he didn’t have to walk in that. He was secretly a Hellhound who was immune to magic, disease, and any type of weapon, but I didn’t trust the party gravy. Pan was just there guarding the hole I was hiding in the night my mother was murdered. He wasn’t aggressive, and he wouldn’t leave my side.

When my uncle found me and the Hellhound, he told Pan he needed to look more like a regular dog, and he told me if I was going to keep it in his house, I was making sure he didn’t piss and shit everywhere. Pan was an angel. He only pissed on people he didn’t like.

Pandemonium was also sassy. When he was ordered to shift into a regular dog, he did it in his own way. Instead of going for big and scary, he went for memorable and flashy. It looked like a very ambitious dachshund managed to mount a female Pitbull and put puppies in her. Yes, that looked exactly how you’d imagine. If anyone asked about him, I called him a purebred mullet—business up front, party in the back.

Frenchmen Street used to be where the supernaturals and the Flame partied and got together to keep New Orleans safe, but word had got out about the music, food, and markets. We got tourists who didn’t want Bourbon Street now, but they all avoided the Salty Worm.

They didn’t have the typical music scene of Frenchmen Street. The Salty Worm was a little dive bar where members of the Flame could come for a job and get intel. We had cover bands doing classic seventies rock. If we wanted jazz, blues, reggae, or soul, we could find it up the block. Those were awesome, but they didn’t really make a good soundtrack for monster hunting.

Hellhounds were intelligent, but I couldn’t find much research on them when I ended up with one. I knew there was no known way to kill one, but I’d never heard of one domesticating itself before. They mostly stayed in Hell. They only came out if there was major demon trouble or they were being used by bad demons.

Pan swore me to secrecy, but he could talk to me telepathically. He explained as much about what happened the night my mom died as he knew. That night, my mother heard a noise. She shoved me into a hidden compartment under the rug with a really weird, ornate knife and told me not to make a sound.

The noises and screams were horrific. Pan said he’d been sold as a puppy to a group of thugs. It was hard to abuse a Hellhound since if you tried to strike them, your fist just passed through. These assholes still managed. They starved him, and as a hyper-intelligent being, a lot of it was psychological.

He was separated from his mother way too early, and since he wasn’t around other Hellhounds growing up, he didn’t know how to use all the magic he had. He couldn’t just open a portal and escape.

The group that had him kept him in a small cage he could barely move in. They only let him out and fed him if he went on a job with them and did a good job.

He didn’t know why they brought him to my house that night. He said he could scent me in the floorboards. He knew what they would do to me if they found me, and he turned on his masters. Pan said based on what he knew of scents now, some were human, some were different supernaturals, and a few were demons.

There were plenty of supernaturals who could open portals. One grabbed my mom and got out of there when Pan started eating people. Everyone else ran, portaled, or died. Pan stood right over the floorboards until my uncle came in case they came back.

My uncle was Flame by blood. He knew damned well a Hellhound wouldn’t be sitting like that among all the carnage unless they were protecting something. He knew about the crawl space and knew it had to be me.

My uncle was a grumpy fuck who didn’t want to raise a kid, but I was also Flame by blood, and he taught me how to hunt monsters and the people who took my mother that night. My uncle got knocked down the stairs on a ghost job and was retired now. It was just me and Pan.

“You could take a few days off and take me to the dog park, you know.”

Pan was spoiled. I spoiled him after I found out what it was like for him before he guarded me like that. He was allowed on all the furniture, slept in my bed, got any treat he asked for, had a million dog toys, and yeah, he liked the dog park.

“I think you just want to see that cute beagle again.”