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rope-like scar of the axe blade. “I’ve got real responsibilities here.”
    And real fears, Colt thought, but he kept his teeth clamped shut and the words to himself. Winn had never been the same after the attack. Colt tugged his hat down tight around his forehead and stood up, swinging the chair back around to prop it against the wall where he’d found it. “Suit yourself.”
    He glanced back at his brother and saw his face had gone all sternlike.
    “Just be careful. You know you can’t trust a demon.” Winn’s words were simple enough, but Colt could hear his brother’s real concern underneath. They’d lost every male member of their family to hunting through the ages. It wasn’t a legacy he liked to ponder on too much.
    Colt shrugged. “Who said anything about trusting one? I just need to find one and use it to open where Pa’s part of the Book is hidden.”
    “It’ll want your soul,” Winn warned.
    Colt grinned. “That’s just too damn bad. I don’t feel in a very givin’ mood.”
    Winn grinned in return, the smile so similar Colt swore he could have been looking in the mirror—all except for the fat mustache with the pointed tips and the shorter haircut. A log in the small woodstove under the boiler crackled and popped, sending a shower of sparks up the flue. His brother’s gaze flicked to Colt’s hip. “You packing silver?”
    Colt gave a single curt nod, surprised at the unspoken permission Winn was giving him to go hunting in Bodie. He turned the knob on the door, ready to leave. “Always do.”
    “Good.” Winn took a deep breath, his broad chest expanding, and let it out real slowly, his blue eyes steady. “Colt, if you need help, holler.”
    Colt nodded, knowing he could count on Winn if things went to hell, then walked out the door to find a demon.

Chapter 4
    “Hope to hell this works.”
    While Colt had gotten rid of a lot of demons, mostly by hitting them dead center in the forehead with one of Marley’s demon killer bullets or with various other means combined with sheer dumb luck, he sure as shit had never summoned one. He looked at the instructions he’d dug out of a moldy old book he’d borrowed from Marley.
    The high desert seemed immense in the darkness, with only the stars, a thick half moon, and his small campfire for light. Down in the floor of the valley Bodie crackled with life, but out here among the sagebrush and spindly creosote the desolation closed in, scented with wood smoke.
    Colt lit four candles, one at each point of the compass, holding the fifth lit candle in his hand as he sketched a pentagram in the powder-fine dirt at his feet and enclosed it in a circle.
    Marley had told him summoning a demon was about the stupidest thing he’d ever heard of, but had helped him find a reference to it nonetheless.
    Colt eyed the lines in the dirt. The book had said it would hold a demon, and that the demon couldn’t get out of the circle until it was released by the summoner or until sunrise, whichever happened first. Sure didn’t look like much protection to him, but what the hell. Hunting came with risks.
    He drew in a deep breath, letting the Latin words hum and vibrate through his chest and across his lips as he spoke them slowly and deliberately, lending his own sense of urgency to them.
    A shimmer in the air, rather like the warping of a mirage in the desert heat, rippled just above the circle, followed by a curl of black smoke that grew denser until it began to form a physical shape.
    At first he mistook it for a trick of the firelight. His breathing hitched as the shape solidified into a feminine form with generous uptilted breasts and gracefully sloped pale shoulders. He glanced up and found himself face-to-face with a demon far more beautiful than any had a right to be. Damn.
    She looked like she’d just risen out of bed, her deep red hair a silken, fiery cloud that tumbled loose and wavy down her back. Her pale skin flushed a rosy pink, which set off her