FF Rachel Calish - The Demon Abraxas

San Francisco after dark can be full of unusual sights, but the last thing Ana Khoury expects to stumble across is black-garbed figures carrying a body into a building. Her call to 911 is interrupted by a blow to the head, plunging her into nothingness.

Sabel Young has long been attracted to the gentle and alluring Ana, but her esoteric assignments have left her with few options for romance. When she realizes that Ana has been taken—and by whom—her very private life and Ana’s normal world collide. Her orders were specific: she is not supposed to get involved with demons.

Even if Sabel’s interest in Ana weren’t already personal, there is no way she will leave a woman with no magic in the hands of dark powers. With daring and luck she pulls Ana to safety and at first it appears they have escaped dark magic unscathed. At first…



If you like this book support the author by buying it.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17290878-the-demon-abraxas

You can find my entire collection here:
http://kickasstorrents.ee/user/perellopis/uploads/




Chapter One

“We could be out dancing,” Ruben said and rattled the ice in his glass impatiently.

He looked like a Titan standing in the same room as the men Ana worked with. Most of them were short and skinny or short and potbellied, plus they’d given the casual, thirty-second attention to their clothes that most straight guys did. In his short-sleeved designer shirt, Ruben looked like a movie star—even though he was only a semi-employed character actor.

“You invited yourself to this party, remember?” Ana told him and tried to keep from smiling. She wanted him there with her just in case that last-minute invitation she’d fired off actually bore fruit.

“I forgot what a straight wasteland you work in,” he said. His beautiful mouth sulked, but his eyes were bright with teasing.

“Bear that in mind the next time you suggest I find a girlfriend at work,” Ana told him.

She set her empty glass down on a table and peeked into her purse to check the clock on her cell phone. In another half-hour they could make a graceful exit. She could send Ruben off to the bars and…do what? She was all gussied up in a Donna Karan silk dress she’d picked up crazy on sale, maybe she should try wearing it out on the town. It wasn’t like she could do any worse.

“I should go talk to my boss,” she said.

“I thought she wasn’t here.”

“Not Helen, my other boss. The boss of both of us. Can you stay out of trouble?”

“No.”

“Try?”

He pouted and she rolled her eyes at him. At least flamboyantly gay didn’t stand out in San Francisco the way it would have in South Dakota. Ruben could butch it up for events like tonight, but his bearing still screamed “Queer!”

Ana turned away to look for Stephen Detlefsen, but he was already headed her way. His massive shoulders, the remnant of youthful athleticism, were now entirely dwarfed by an expansive belly so large he could have been carrying two children full term.

“Great work on the anniversary announcement,” he said and clapped one heavy hand on Ana’s shoulder. Ana was taller than Detlefsen, even when she didn’t have heels on, but that never seemed to faze him.

“That was mostly Helen,” Ana admitted.

“Where is she?” he asked. At the same time, Ruben said, “Holy shit, is that HER?”

Ana turned in the direction Ruben faced. In a room full of men wearing khakis and ill-fitting jackets, the woman in the ivory suit looked like a swan landing in a junkyard. Dr. Sabel Young, professor and occasional corporate diversity trainer, stepped into the crowd easily, greeting people as she passed, lightly pressing hands offered to her. Ana didn’t know if Sabel remembered everyone who turned to say hello to her, but they certainly remembered her. She wasn’t tall, maybe two inches short of Ana’s five-foot-nine frame, but her body moved with a composed elegance that made her seem taller—or maybe it was the heels. Ana couldn’t see her feet and even if they were visible, she wouldn’t waste her time looking there.

The ivory jacket was gorgeous with a single button below the delicate V of the deep collar and a subtle empire waist. Sabel had paired it with a black shirt open at the throat and showing just the top rise of her breasts. Her straight black hair matched the shirt and the contrasting black and ivory highlighted her pale skin.

Ana felt too tall, too awkward, too heavy, too much shoulder and angle, bone and weight and muscle. She was as uncoordinated as a kid who’d happened into her mother’s closet. Her purse didn’t match her dress, the shoes weren’t right at all, she should have worn the pearls…oh, that’s right, she didn’t own pearls. But of course Sabel did—a tiny strand of pearls strung on white gold that looked almost as fiercely expensive as that jacket. Did she moonlight as a corporate trainer just for the outfits? Ana wondered as Sabel headed for them.

Sabel had worked with Roth Software to deliver two trainings to their nearly four hundred employees and Ana had been the one assigned to help set up the rooms and coordinate the events. At first she believed the frivolous assignment was a hint that the company thought she had too much free time. By the time they were setting up the second training Ana began to wonder if Sabel had asked for her specifically. She couldn’t tell if Sabel was flirting with her in a subtle and completely corporate-appropriate way or if it was only her wishful thinking.

Ana had already spent the whole three hours of the first training mentally undressing Sabel, assuming she was safely inaccessible. But then something she said in their last meeting stuck with her and inspired Ana to forward the invitation. After hitting send, she’d realized that she should have just added Sabel to the batch email list and not waited days and sent the invite personally.

Ana picked Ruben’s glass up off the bar and took a long drink from it. The alcohol burned her back to the present.

“Dr. Young,” Detlefsen said, boomingly because he never said anything quietly. “Are you checking up on us?”

She smiled and inclined her head as she shook the hand he held out to her. He spared her his usual bone-grinding grip.

“You remember Ana?” he asked.

“Yes, she took wonderful care of me.”

“Thank you,” Ana managed through dry lips. “And this is my roommate Ruben.”

“My pleasure,” Ruben said with too much emphasis. He held out his hand but when she reached to shake it, he turned her hand and bowed his head to kiss her knuckles.

Sabel bent with him so that her head remained lower than his throughout the gesture.

“I’m utterly charmed. Is that Armani?” Ruben said. Ana wanted to kick him.

“You have a discerning eye,” Sabel told him and gently reclaimed her hand from his fingers. She turned back to Detlefsen. “I wanted to congratulate you, and everyone, on your fifth anniversary. That’s a landmark for so many companies. I hear you started with four people.”

“And now we’re nearly four hundred,” he said proudly. “Let me introduce you to the founders.”

The two of them went off toward the center of the party and Ana stared after them.

“Yes, you should,” Ruben said.

He caught the bartender’s eye and ordered a fresh drink while pushing the half-empty glass back toward Ana. She sighed and took another sip of the fruity vodka thing.

“Do you really think she plays for our team?” Ana asked.

“You said she was flirting with you.”

“What if I was reading into it?” Ana watched the moonbeam brightness of Sabel’s suit move through the room away from her.

“A diversity trainer? Honestly? Honey, that’s a synonym for queer.”

“I thought you told me to stop chasing ice queens.”

“That was so last week,” he declared. “I’m making an exception. I’ll take your car, you tell her I was a shit that forgot about you and you ask for a ride.”

“Like hell you will. I was thinking I should go by Helen’s place. It’s not like her to miss this event.”

“This thrilling party of the century?” Ruben asked.

He waved his hand around in an arc to indicate the vast room filled with people talking quietly to each other.

“She practically helped found the company,” Ana told him, but the words sounded thin.

“And that’s a reason to go by her place in the middle of the night? Oh, wait, she lives near that gal you hooked up with a few months back, the swimmer?”

“Marine biologist,” Ana said.

“And you’re trying to tell me that an advanced degree beats an Armani suit?”

Ana glanced across the room and got a beautiful view of the way the short jacket ended just above Sabel’s shapely backside. “She has a Ph.D. too,” she said, her voice sounding plaintive to her own ears.

“That’s it, I’m catching a cab to the bars—you’re not allowed home until you have her number.”

“I don’t think the security system has a ‘dateless and denied’ setting,” Ana told him.

“It does now.”

He kissed the side of her head and headed for the door. She could tell the sexual orientation of every man in the room based on whose eyes followed Ruben as he left.

She leaned her elbow on the bar and sipped her way through the rest of Ruben’s drink. Then she fished her phone out of her purse and texted the marine biologist to see if she was home, awake, and interested. She could just swing by Helen’s apartment building and see if the light was on, maybe call up and ask if Helen needed anything and then, having discharged her good Samaritan duty, swing a few blocks over and take care of some other pressing needs.

“Ana,” Sabel’s voice said next to her ear and she jumped. “Hold still.”

A warm touch brushed the back of her neck, sending a shiver down the length of her body. She felt a feathered kiss of fabric as well and then Sabel ran her silken fingertips along the neckline of Ana’s dress.

“There you go. Your tag was sticking up.”

Ana stared at her. Was she serious? Was she flirting? Was she somehow both flirting and serious?

“Thanks.” She was overly conscious of her elbow on the bar and straightened up. Not a single intelligent word came to mind. This close, Sabel smelled like fresh mint and wildflowers and apricot musk.

“Is Helen here?” Sabel asked. “I wanted to congratulate her.”

“No, she, um, emailed me earlier that she wasn’t feeling well. It is her kind of event. I thought I might go check on her, though I suppose it’s late.” Ana clamped her mouth shut. She sounded like an idiot.

“I think that’s thoughtful,” Sabel said. “Are you two friends?”

“We’ve worked together for a few years. She’s taught me a lot about public relations. I was just in marketing before.” Ana stopped but Sabel didn’t say anything else so she tried to come up with something to get her talking, “You’re a professor when you’re not training corporate geeks like us?”

“Religious studies with a focus on social psychology; diversity training gives me a practical application for it,” Sabel said and looked like she would say more, but Detlefsen called to her to come meet someone else and she apologized to Ana and slipped back into the crowd.

Ana waited, but the group of people standing around Sabel talking kept growing. Would all ninety percent of the men in the room, the straight ones who hadn’t watched Ruben’s exit, eventually magnetize to Sabel? I should go over there, Ana thought, just push into the group and talk about something meaningless for an hour.

But she didn’t know how to do that. She wasn’t used to feeling this flummoxed in a work setting. If only she hadn’t considered in detail how she wanted to get Sabel out of the charcoal gray suit she’d worn to the second training, then she might be able to carry on some sufficiently mundane conversation.

Ruben was going to kill her for leaving. She picked her purse up off the bar and headed for the door. Helen lived in Ashbury Heights in an old Victorian that had been cut up into large apartments. Of course there was no parking anywhere near it, even for the little silver and white Mini Cooper Ana had bought to navigate the horrible parking in San Francisco. She had to park two blocks away in a space that was marginally legal. Only after she locked the car and started walking in her heels did it occur to her that it was ten at night and she was trooping the streets in an evening dress and heels to intrude on her boss at home.

On the bright side, after she checked on Helen it was just another mile to the apartment of that tall and charmingly awkward marine biologist she’d hooked up with off and on for the last six months. Ruben was right, she had a thing for smart, inaccessible women, but tonight that could work to her advantage.

Helen’s building was in the middle of the street and when Ana rounded the corner, a BMW sat double-parked in front of it, lights out. She ducked into a doorway and peered around the corner. Could this be Helen’s mystery lover? Ana knew she had someone, but Helen never talked about him. It was a nice car: a 5-series. A man came out of the front door and motioned to someone in the car. Two more men got out, dressed entirely in black. Ana opened her purse and pulled out her phone and can of pepper spray.

The two men hauled something out of the backseat, long and heavy, wrapped in a blanket. Ana’s heart hammered before she fully realized why. This was the kind of scene she expected to see on television, not from twenty feet away. She wanted to believe it was a rolled rug, but the contours of hip and shoulder were too clear: they carried a body between them. They were carrying a body into Helen’s building and there were only three apartments they could be going into.

There was a chance, her rational mind suggested, that it was Helen and she was unconscious for some good reason, like having passed out at a party or…or… Perhaps if Ana meddled she would only embarrass herself and everyone involved.

Her gut told her to call the cops now. She ducked back into the darkness of the doorway and dialed 911.

“Please state the nature of your emergency,” the operator said.

Ana whispered the address and told her, “There are three men in black here, they’re carrying a body into the building. It’s Helen Reed’s apartment, I’m afraid she’s in danger.”

“Are you in danger?” the operator asked.

“I don’t think they saw me.”

“Can you stay where you are?”

“Yes.”

“All right, I have police and ambulance on the way. Can you stay on the line? I only want you to keep talking to me if it’s safe for you to do so.”

“Let me look,” Ana whispered. She turned, crept to the edge of the doorway again and looked.

A man stared at her from two feet away. “There you are,” he said as if he’d found a lost pet.

Ana pepper-sprayed him in the eyes, then ran. A heavy weight, much too large to be a fist, hit her in the head and knocked her into darkness.



Sabel stood in the doorway to the bedroom and stared at the unmoving figure on the bed. She couldn’t risk touching her and leaving fingerprints, but she knelt by the bed, held her own hair up and back, and leaned an ear over Helen’s mouth. Yes, she was dead and no more than a few hours gone based on the warmth still radiating from her skin.

Her instructions were to watch and inform—and not get involved. She still felt like she’d failed. She hadn’t been able to figure out what Helen was mixed up in and now the woman was dead.

She straightened up and went back to the doorway. Then down the hall, across the living room and out the front door. She used a soft cloth to pull the door shut and then a touch of magic to remind the door that it had been locked before she went in. The bolt clicked back into place.

Had Ana come by to check on Helen? Had she rung the bell or just seen the lights off and assumed Helen was sleeping off an illness? Sabel stepped out of the front door into the cool air. There were sirens in the distance coming closer. Were they for Helen? If so, who had called the police?

She started walking quickly back toward her car, but the glint of a streetlight against a piece of metal on the sidewalk caught her eye. It was a cel