AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“You need to stop wasting time running after bad information then, Dale.”
“How was I supposed to know it was bad until I investigated it? I have next to nothing to go on here.”
Usually, the demons weren’t too difficult to track down. They tended to be over-the-top and arrogant. Which made them stupid. And easy to track.
This one, though, he’d been around for so long.
He was seasoned.
And therefore smart.
Which made him more difficult. And a hell of a lot more dangerous.
“Why are you coming down on me over this? It hasn’t been that long.”
“Long enough,” Gideon said, voice stern. “He’s out there killing babies, Dale. The Council is breathing down my fucking neck here. They want him dead. Soon.”
“Why do I sense an ‘or else’ in there somewhere?” I asked.
“Or else they are going to have me assign the case to another demonslayer,” he told me.
“Who?” I asked.
I saw it in his eyes even before he jerked his chin to where Marsh had been standing.
“You can’t be serious.”
“He has the same track record as you do.”
“And so conveniently doesn’t have a pair of tits. Which, apparently, makes me less capable in the Council’s eyes. Marsh could be taking just as long, but he would get the slack that they won’t give me.”
“I’m sorry, Dale. I’d like to tell you that someday it is going to be fair. But until you and the younger generations end up on that Council, shit is always going to be this way. So buckle down, work hard, and get there. Change it for the other girls coming up. But right now, this is how it is. It’s fucked and it’s backward, but there’s nothing either of us can do about it.”
“Except prove them wrong.”
“That’s my girl,” he said, nodding.
That was the closest thing you could expect to praise from Gideon.
And it was more than enough for me.
“I will get this one. I’m going to crash for a couple hours. But after that, I’m on it until I find him.”
“I believe you,” he said, nodding. “But get it done quick,” he added, moving past me, then out the door, leaving me alone in his office.
Alone was good.
Because it had been a hell of a day.
And I was bursting at the seams with frustration.
Reaching behind the stack of books on the chair, I grabbed the small pillow, raised it to my face, and let out a good, cathartic scream.
It was a first for me, but I decided once I was done that it needed to become a part of whatever other stress management I had in my life.
Mind only marginally clearer, I made my way back into the hallway, opening the doorway that led up into the next floor.
Where my room was.
They kept the current active demonslayers on the second floor, the admins the floor above that, then the students on the top floor. They never expressly said it, but we all knew it was because someone in the adult floors would hear it if the kids tried to sneak out for the night.
Not that any of us gave a shit.
We were those kids once too.
And we did whatever we could to get a free couple of minutes when we could find it. There was a lot of stress on the kids. They had to be allowed to be kids—going out and getting into minor trouble on occasion.
I stayed at The Academy a good chunk of the time, only going to a motel or something when I just couldn’t take the constant noise and possibility of someone showing up at my door.
But I’d been trying to avoid the motel situations lately because, well, it made it a lot easier for me to think it was okay to let down my guard, and send out that little signal to Minos that I was available and alone.
The rooms weren’t much to write home about. They reminded me a lot of a college dorm, but in one of the older, more stately schools, with their exposed stone walls and big, old, drafty glass windows.
I lucked out in that I got a view of the grounds in the back instead of the street out front. And I didn’t have to deal with Marsh in the halls since he was on the other side of the building.
Moving inside, I shut and locked the door before shrugging out of my jacket and kicking off my boots.
I’d been in this room since the day I turned eighteen and killed my first demon. And, well, it looked like I’d been living there for a long time.
My simple metal bed was unmade and covered in at least four different blankets in varying colors and patterns in an attempt to ward off the chill in the room.
The nightstand was a relic of several generations ago, left abandoned in the basement, and therefore, up for grabs. It was loaded with paperwork from various old cases I’d completed, and littered with old to-go coffee cups.
