Free Marked: An Urban Fantasy Novel (The Thrice Cursed Mage Book 2) by J. A. Cipriano

together, although I haven’t sewn anyone up inside the bathroom of a cheap motel room in a while.” She grinned at me. “Besides, Mac, I owe you for saving my son and me from Van. There aren’t many people who could have pulled that off.”
    “You know,” I said, weighing my words carefully. “I’ve been thinking about that.”
    “Oh?” she asked, raising an eyebrow at me. “What have you been thinking?”
    “Why did Van want you?” I paused to gesture at her, but as soon as I tried to move my arm, I thought better of it and decided to let it lay on the cool tub. “You seem pretty normal, but he was draining your blood, and you know a lot about, well, everything.”
    “And that makes you think I’m somehow not normal?” she asked with a hint of laughter in her voice. “Maybe he’s just some crazy douchebag.”
    “Maybe,” I replied. “But in my experience, limited as it is, he didn’t strike me as insane. Well, not in the foaming at the mouth insane sort of way. He struck me as more Bond villain insane, like a guy who was too wrapped up in what he was doing to realize he’d skipped past the line to crazy town a long time ago.”
    “Seems like you have him pegged,” Sera replied, leaning down and plucking one of the staples out of my arm with her pliers. It didn’t hurt, thank God, but it didn’t exactly feel awesome. “When did you get so smart?”
    “About the time I punched a helicopter in the face,” I said, looking away as she kept plucking away at the staples because it was starting to make me feel like a Foster Farms chicken. “But you haven’t answered my question.”
    “Can’t I just say it’s because he’s a dick?” she asked in a way that made it clear she wasn’t expecting me to respond. She bit her lip, chewing on it in thought. “Van was trying to find my husband and was using my blood in some demonic ritual to try to find him. Van and his demon Vassago think my husband might still be alive somewhere, but that’s impossible. He died a few years ago. If he wasn’t dead, there’s no way he would just walk away from John and me. He would have come back to us.”
    Tears started to fill her eyes, and as she blinked them back, I felt like the world’s worst kind of asshole. Why had I gone and asked about her dead husband? A nice guy wouldn’t do that, but then again, I wasn’t really a nice guy. I was the kind of guy who would smash a dude’s skull with a sledgehammer and throw a werewolf out a twenty-story window. That was why I’d been able to save her from a demon prince. I wasn’t sure who her husband was, but he’d left her alone with his enemies still looking to settle a score. What a fool.
    I swallowed hard. Was I really any different? My sister was in trouble because of what I’d done and what enemies I’d made. Actually, it was different because I was going to get my sister back. No matter what. Not only that, I’d put my enemy’s head on a goddamned pike and salt the earth with his remains. When I was finished, everyone would learn one thing. Do not fuck with my family. Sera’s husband had not done that, and now she and her son were paying the price.
    “And I’m guessing you did this for your husband from time to time?” I asked, nodding toward my arm in an effort to try to change the subject to a slightly less dreary one while still prying information out of her because yeah, I was that kind of douchebag.
    “Yeah, he was a demon hunter.” I must have given her a weird look because she shook her head and sighed. “Not like Maya. In reality she’s just a witch with a little bit of talent hopped up on stolen demon juju. He was an actual demon hunter who worked with Capital-A Angels to bring down the agents of Hell.” She gestured at my arm in an “Oh, you know,” sort of way. And I did. Her husband had hunted down Cursed. Not to chop off their parts and sell them on the black market, but to actually rid the world of bad guys.
    He sounded like a