Free Blood of the Demon by Diana Rowland

the sun was high in the sky. He frowned. “This will not be comfortable for you, but it will get easier.”

    I came awake with a shuddering gasp as nausea twisted through my body. I sucked in my breath, hands tightening in the sheets as a sensation like the worst hangover I’d ever had rolled over me, literally feeling as if it started at my head and rolled down throughout my body to my toes. Nausea and headache and weakness, and then it was gone, leaving me sweating and shaking, even though it had lasted perhaps only half a dozen heartbeats.

    I took an uneasy breath and slowly sat up, images and sensations from the dream shimmering through my head and already beginning to fade like fog under a rising sun. Had that really been just a dream? He’d seemed to know that I was about to feel like shit. But, then again, I couldthink of countless times when my alarm clock had been incorporated into my dream right before I’d woken, so maybe that was the same kind of thing.

    Through my bedroom window I could see that dawn was turning the eastern sky orange and purple, and I abruptly realized what had happened. The potencies had shifted from lunar to solar, and my link with Kehlirik had to re-form. I took another deep breath, nausea all but gone now. Okay, that sucked major ass. Did Kehlirik feel that too?

    I glanced at my clock and sighed. It was barely past six a.m., which meant that I’d managed to get only about four hours of sleep.

    Complete with a dream about Rhyzkahl. I’m dreaming about him only because Kehlirik mentioned him. That’s all. He was just on my mind .

    Suuuure.

    I thought about sticking my head under the pillow and trying for more sleep, but the beeping of the pager on my nightstand derailed that line of thought.

    I sighed and scrolled through the message: Signal 29, Ruby Est . A death—but at least not a murder, since the signal for that was a 30. So it was someone who had died from either an accident or illness. Hopefully that meant it would be a nice and simple open-and-shut case, but even as I thought it, I knew I was probably jinxing myself.

    THE ADDRESS WAS for a section of Beaulac that I very seldom had cause to go into. Ruby Estates was the elite neighborhood for people who had more money than they knew what to do with. It was a gated community with its own security service—though, like any other securityservice, it was mostly staffed by the kind of people who could be hired for eight dollars an hour. All of the lots were on or near the lakefront, at least an acre in size, and the neighborhood in general was lovely, wooded, and quiet. I had no doubt that there was a fair measure of drug use and domestic violence within the walls in this subdivision, but it was kept quiet enough that we seldom got called out to deal with it.

    The address wasn’t hard to find. It was the one with several police cars and an ambulance in front of it—far more attention than any regular person would ever get for a slip and fall. But this was the house of Parish Councilman Davis Sharp and a stunning example of what shit-loads of money could do for you. Davis Sharp had cleared the majority of the trees off his land so that everyone driving by could see his three-story mansion—complete with an absurdly broad staircase that swept up to the second level like some plantation gone mad. Personally, I thought it was a hideous waste of what was surely a few million dollars. But, then again, I lived in a house with peeling paint in the middle of nowhere, so who was I to judge?

    In addition to being a parish councilman, Davis Sharp was a prominent restaurateur and had been making noises about running for the open congressional seat in the district. He was charismatic and well connected, and his restaurant, Sharp’s, was where people went to be seen in St. Long Parish.

    It wasn’t technically a crime scene, but the front yard had been cordoned off anyway, yellow crime-scene tape flapping sluggishly in the dull