How to Kill an Incubus, #1 [SAMPLE]

H2KAI 4: Royally F**ked

CHAPTER FOUR

“Dammit, Ma,” Temp muttered, stepping out of her stifling embrace. “How’d you find me?”

“You think you can hide from me?” she grumbled good-naturedly. Her eyes swiveled in my direction as if she’d just noticed me. “Men,” she said conspiratorially, giving me a wink. “Give them an inch, they take a mile. Well, in my son’s case, several thousand miles – considering the last time I saw him was in Italy.”

She hadn’t noticed that I was completely dumbfounded and had barely heard what she’d just said. Temp hadn’t noticed either. I was too puzzled to even think straight.

Her son, I thought, shocked to the core.

Of course, my own mother didn’t recognize me and I hadn’t expected her to. The last time she’d seen me, I was still wetting the bed and wearing pigtails. She, on the other hand, looked the same – which could only mean one horrifying thing: She’d sold her soul to the devil for immortality. In order to be with the demon she loved, I was willing to bet.

I quickly did the math. She’d been thirty-five when she’d left and Temp looked to be in his early twenties. This meant that she’d been pregnant with him when she’d disappeared, which made him roughly twenty-one or so. But did demon halflings age like normal people? Or could they freeze time as they so pleased? My head was spinning with the possibilities and I could feel a migraine coming on.

“Mom,” I breathed, and she looked at me strangely. The word tasted strange in my mouth, like sushi in peanut butter.

“Fed too hard on this one, huh?” she teased Temp, and he patted my back.

“This is Rainelle, Ma,” he said politely, as if introducing his girlfriend to his mother. God, he didn’t know and the idea of what he nearly did to me – wanted to do to me – made me taste bile. “She knows about us. She’s immune.”

“Rainelle?” Her voice became vague, as if she dimly recalled another Rainelle she’d met a long time ago but couldn’t, for the life of her, remember where.

“Lauren Madeline Wilson,” I snapped, anger surging through me. I hadn’t said that name in years.

Lauren Madeline Wilson’s eyebrows shot up to somewhere below her hairline. “Excuse me?”

“I’m Rainelle Erickson, not that you care or remember.” My voice was cool but inside, something shattered with the realization that what I’d just said was probably the truth.

My mother’s eyes dawned with recognition and she took a step away from me, looking me over in disbelief. I could finally see the little things Temp had inherited from her – namely, her coffee-brown eyes and Phoenician nose – and I felt nauseous, so nauseous it hurt. It was one thing to willingly have sex with a demon but to procreate in the process? Despicable.

“What the hell’s going on here?” Temp asked, impatiently tapping my back with his fingertips.

But I was too focused on staring my mother to death. Immortal or not, she was just as susceptible to my death glares as the next person. The only reason I wasn’t throwing myself at her was because the hotel lobby was incredibly crowded.

“Rainelle,” Lauren murmured weakly, “oh, my.”

“Ma?” Temp’s voice was uncertain.

“How could you?” I snarled, all my pent-up bullshit swelling to the fore. “How could you hurt us like that? Did you even love Dad? Me? Or was good sex just too excellent an offer to pass up?”