Free Demon Hunting In a Dive Bar by Lexi George Page A

Junior said, finishing her sentence for her. “Yes, I’m one of them.”
    “Your granddaddy was the timber magnate,” Beck said, awed and a little star struck. The Petersons were the family in Hannah, the richest, most powerful, and most influential family in Behr County. Their social standing had waned a bit due to recent events, but they were still plenty loaded. “And you’re saying he had a demon?”
    “Oh, my, yes,” Junior said. “He was in his thirties when he got possessed. I reckon that old demon was just looking for a good time, but Granddaddy had other ideas. Cole Peterson was much a man, and ambitious. He liked the power the demon gave him. He latched on to that old demon and wouldn’t let go. Together, they built the Peterson fortune.”
    “Ansgar has told me of this,” Conall said. “ ’Tis most unusual. The demon and Cole Peterson merged, somehow, trapping the demon in Peterson’s body. The demon could not escape and Peterson could not die, though the fiend steadily consumed his body from within. When he could no longer conceal his obvious state of deterioration, Peterson faked his death and the family hid him beneath the house in a secret chamber. He resided there until—”
    He paused, as though remembering their “guest.”
    “Until the fire,” Junior said with a nod. “My parents and my grandfather died when the house burned. Truth is, wasn’t much left of Granddaddy Cole by that time. He’d had that demon so long he was a shriveled-up fig with legs.”
    The Peterson mansion had been reduced to ashes. Mop Webb, a shifter and a volunteer fireman who worked for the beverage company that made deliveries at the bar, had told Beck that an old furnace beneath the house exploded.
    “It was a terrible fire,” Beck said. “I saw the pictures in the paper.”
    “Uh-huh.” Junior sat back and folded his hands in his lap. He had slender hands with long, artistic fingers; the hands of a concert pianist. Or, at least the kind of hands Beck imagined a concert pianist would have. Junior was her first. Like dragons, highbrow types were scarce at Beck’s. “If you read the paper, then I reckon you know about Mama’s letter, too,” Junior said.
    Of course she knew about the letter. It was all anybody in the bar had talked about for days. Heck, folks were still buzzing about it. There hadn’t been this much excitement in Behr County since the boll weevil devastated the cotton crops back at the turn of the twentieth century.
    Clarice Peterson had left a letter in her safe-deposit box confessing to the murder of Meredith Starr Peterson, her grandson’s socialite wife. Beck knew Meredith only by reputation but, according to all accounts, Meredith Peterson had been a bitch on wheels. Evie Douglass had been a suspect in the murder investigation until Trey—Meredith’s husband and the heir to the Peterson fortune—had made a dramatic announcement in court that he’d killed Meredith.
    People had been buzzing about that, too. Real Lifetime for Women stuff. Scuttlebutt was Trey had a thing for Evie.
    Must’ve been a big thing, if he was willing to cop to his wife’s murder and go to jail for her.
    The police were still holding him for questioning when they found Clarice’s letter confessing to Meredith’s murder.
    That was juicy, but there’d been more. Clarice had aired all the Peterson dirty laundry in that letter. By her account, Blake Peterson—Junior’s father and Clarice’s husband—was an abusive, philandering hound dog who’d beaten and bullied her for more than forty-five years. Clarice claimed she’d killed Meredith with one of Blake’s fancy collector knives to frame him for murder and even the score. Worse, to hear Clarice tell it, Blake was a sadistic son of a bitch who’d been murdering women for years to get his jollies.
    Blake could hardly deny it. He’d died in the fire with Clarice. The paper said the matter was under investigation, and that’s as much as anybody knew