Page 1 of Speak of the Devil

Chapter One

One chance.

That was all he had, and Caleb Lockwood knew he needed to seize it…or be stuck in Hell forever.

As soon as he saw the red-haired woman stab her slender blade into Belial’s black heart, there was only a second when Caleb could act.

When he and the other demon-kind had begun to swim their way up from Hell, he’d caught a glimpse of two other red-haired women lying dead on the floor of the huge candlelit room he’d seen just beyond the huge gates the demon lord had summoned, women he guessed must have given their lives to provide the enormous power necessary to unlock a portal to the underworld. Once fully open, those gates would have allowed the denizens of the netherworld to escape their prison permanently and begin new lives on Earth.

Until then, though, they were vulnerable.

No one nearby in the cavernous chamber — not the redhead with the sword, not the group of people huddled on the floor a few yards past her, people he couldn’t see clearly because of the dimness of the room, not Belial himself — had been paying any particular attention to the pair of dead bodies…or to Caleb.

Why would they? He and his kind were considered the lowest of the low in the underworld’s hierarchy, those who’d had the misfortune to have their demon blood mixed with that of humans.

And that meant he didn’t owe the demons swarming in the Stygian blackness behind him a damn thing. They could stay in Hell and rot.

Just as the hellgate fell to nothing around him as Belial drew his last, unlamented breath, Caleb made the leap into the body of the nearest woman. Maybe he was only a quarter-demon, but he could still possess a human being. Not for days or months or even years the way some of Hell’s citizens could if they were sufficiently motivated, but he didn’t need nearly that long.

Just an hour or so.

It was horribly confining in there, though, giving him the sensation of being trapped in a room with the walls closing in from all sides. He’d never possessed a dead person before, and the feeling of the woman’s body shutting down cell by cell made him feel as if he couldn’t quite breathe.

Don’t panic,he told himself.You’ll be out of here soon enough.

Which he was. Because he couldn’t open the dead woman’s eyes, he was unable to see what exactly had happened in the aftermath of the confrontation with Belial. A confusion of voices, some that were brisk and official, obviously police and paramedics and anyone else who’d appeared to clean up a scene that even Caleb had to admit must have been a colossal mess.

He was placed on a gurney — well, the woman’s body was, anyway — and wheeled out to an ambulance, then roughly loaded inside. It wasn’t as if they had to worry about jarring their patient, not when she was already dead.

No sirens, either, no frenzied rush to the hospital to try to save her. She’d been dead for at least ten or fifteen minutes when Caleb leaped into her body, far past any need for heroic efforts.

But then he got what he wanted, which was to have her moved off the gurney and into a locker at the morgue so they could perform an autopsy at their leisure.

No sound that anyone else was working right then, either. He really hadn’t expected anyone to be, not when he could tell it was the middle of the night — or rather, the very early morning, maybe around three or four.

Time to get out of there.

He let his consciousness flow away from the woman’s body and take form outside the storage locker, then paused to gulp in some air. Before now, he’d never had any reason to possess someone, much preferring to use his demonic shapeshifting abilities to further his goals — well, to be fair, those had been his father’s goals, and he’d only been an unwilling pawn in his schemes — and he thought he’d do whatever he could to avoid possessing a person in the future.

It had been way too cramped in there.

No clothes except the tattered pants he’d worn in Hell, and it was goddamn freezing in here. That was all right, though.

He knew exactly where he needed to go.

The room hadn’t changed a bit since he’d lived here, which would be going on ten years now. Caleb wished that he hadn’t been able to detect the passage of time while he was in Hell, but part of the torture was knowing exactly how many years and months and days…and minutes and seconds…he’d been trapped there.

Two years, two weeks, and one day, plus a couple of hours.

But who was counting?

Anyway, he’d moved out of the house where he’d grown up as soon as he turned twenty and had bought a place of his own, but his mother didn’t seem to have touched a single thing in his former bedroom. Same dark blue-gray paint on the walls, same modern metal and glass furniture. God, she’d hated it when he redecorated the room on his eighteenth birthday, even though his parents had told him he could do whatever he liked with the space.

She probably hadn’t believed that he would choose something so jarringly at odds with the Ethan Allen aesthetic of the rest of the house…which was exactly why Caleb had picked out the decor in the first place. Brooke Lockwood never had wanted to acknowledge that the world might not always go her way.

How had she fared these past two years, with both her husband and her only son presumed dead?

Most likely, she’d sailed on serenely as she always had. She’d never been the type to lean toward introspection.

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