Free First And Last by Stacey Kennedy Page A

in the rural part of New York City. The only thing that made it stand out at all was the large backyard. Simple home, but great land.
     
    Haven giggled. “This seems easy now, doesn’t it?”
     
    “I’d say.” Considering what I’d been up against these past couple weeks, this was actually quite refreshing, and it felt wonderful to be back in my element.
     
    Just as we approached the backyard, I could see a man with his back to us, bent down as he examined the ground. As we drew closer, he stood and turned toward us. “Nice to see ya again,” Detective Foley said.
     
    The Weretiger looked exactly as he did the last time I saw him, sometime before Lazarus. Lordy, that seemed like a thousand years ago. Foley’s everything a Weretiger should be—scary. Built to the hilt, with his shaved bald head and grayish blue eyes, he was definitely a force to be reckoned with.
     
    “Likewise,” I replied. He offered his hand. I took it and gave it a firm shake.
     
    After a few more niceties between us, Kyden glanced around, then back to Foley with a curious look. “There is nobody here?”
     
    “Very observant of you.” Foley guffawed.
     
    Kyden snorted something close to annoyance, but before he could put a voice to it, Foley continued. “We were contacted and told if we came to this scene we’d find that a murder happened here.”
     
    Just as Kyden stepped forward to examine the ground, a loud squish came from beneath his foot. “Bloody apples.” He shook his foot to get the sticky mess off, then nudged Haven’s arm. “Time’s a wasting, let’s see what happened here.”
     
    She raised her hands, and in seconds, the scene was before us thanks to her gift from the Earth Element. She can manipulate time to recreate past events. Cool, right?
     
    Once the scene was before us though, my pride about Haven completely vanished as I sighed in total exasperation. “Oh, just fucking wonderful.”
     
    A Demon, yeah I recognized one, was doing some kind of ritual. He drew a rune on the ground with black ash, and to my horror, used human blood as well. The rune was a simple pentagram, but on each point of the star was a tribal symbol, looked almost like music symbols, but just different and evil.
     
    The man who lay dead in the center had a deep cut in his stomach, and the demon kept dipping his hand into it, then slowly walked around the circle to let the blood drip into the ash.
     
    The worst part was that the human’s face was frozen in a state of deadly shock. Mouth wide open, eyes terrified—complete yuckiness! Like, never get the image out of your head, icky.
     
    After a final drop of blood landed on the ash, the Demon shimmied into a black ghostly nothing and they vanished into a black puff of smoke. All that remained was the pentagram.
     
    The vision froze and we all just stared at each other. I’d never seen anything like this, nor heard of it for that matter.
     
    “This is peculiar,” Kyden finally said.
     
    I laughed. “Peculiar? You’re kidding right?”
     
    “Right alarming, does that suit you better?”
     
    “Yes, much better,” I said aloud, which earned me an odd glance from Foley.
     
    “A demon.” Foley bent down and examined the pentagram on the ground, which still sat before us. “We were contacted by an anonymous source who told us of this incident. Nothing about demonic forces was mentioned. Leads me to wonder who would’ve known about this?”
     
    Yeah, I wondered that myself. I glanced down at the pentagram and noticed an image in the center that appeared to be just a fancy pitchfork, and looked tribal. My gaze snapped back to Foley. “Dark ones, that’s who.”
     
    “What do we do?” Haven asked. “I’ve never seen anything like this before. What the heck was that demon doing?” She pulled back her magic and the rune vanished before our eyes. Apparently, whoever had called it in, had taken the time to clear the ground of the ritual that had been