0.5 Deadly Hearts Read Online Free PDF Page A

room. It was acrid and bitter, almost as bad as the sulfur pouring from a demon’s mouth, and tears sprung to James’s eyes.
    “The hell is that?” he asked, flapping his hands in front of his face to clear a precious few inches of air.
    Elise’s lack of response was even more worrying than the smoke itself.
    She reached inside the oven and tossed a cookie sheet on the counter. Pieces of charcoal slid over the aluminum—pieces of charcoal that smelled suspiciously like Nutella. “Shit,” she said. “I ruined them.”
    They were cookies.
    His mind flashed back to Elise emerging from the kitchen with oven mitts. He had assumed that she was just trying to hide her gloves, which were a necessary but unsettling feature of her wardrobe. But she hadn’t been trying to hide anything. She had been baking.
    “You baked cookies. You actually baked cookies,” James said.
    She shifted uncomfortably on her feet and glared in silent fury at the cookie sheet.
    “The Packards left the ingredients out and the cookbook was open on the counter. I thought…I don’t know. I’ve never tried to bake before.”
    Elise didn’t hesitate to punch her hand into a man’s chest to pulverize a demon eyeball, but a batch of burned cookies could bring her to her knees. Kind of cute, really—not that James would ever tell her that.
    He tried to smother his laugh. She wasn’t fooled.
    “You don’t have to pick on me,” she said.
    Oh, and now she was pouting. That just made it harder not to laugh. He finally gave up the ghost and slung an arm around her shoulders as he chuckled. It didn’t brighten her mood at all. “I would never dream of picking on you. Look, they’re not that bad. I can just break off the burned portion.” Which was the entire cookie. But he had to make up for laughing at her somehow.
    “Wait,” she protested, holding out an arm, but James was tall and her efforts to fend him off were halfhearted at best. He snagged a cookie off the sheet and bounced it between his hands while it cooled. “You don’t have to do that.”
    “Of course I don’t,” James said.
    The center of the cookie wasn’t quite as destroyed as the edges, so he crumbled off the blackest parts and popped it into his mouth.
    He tried not to make a face. He really did. But Elise knew him too well, and whatever minute change in expression sneaked through was too much. Disappointment crashed over her features.
    “I told you they were bad,” she said, stomping the trash can lever to lift the lid. She tossed the entire sheet in. As soon as her back was turned, James spit the cookie into the sink and wiped off his tongue.
    She turned back, and he composed himself again.
    “It’s really not that bad,” James said, fishing the cookie sheet out of the trash. The Packards were going to be distressed enough to see what had happened to their bedroom. They didn’t need to lose kitchenware to Elise’s bad mood, too.
    “Screw it,” Elise said. “I don’t even like cookies.”
    “Don’t be ridiculous. Everyone likes cookies.” James’s lips spread in a devilish smile. “There are more ingredients, you know. We could try again.”
    “Try to…what, bake another batch? Seriously? The Packards are going to want their house back eventually.”
    “They’re in a hotel for the night, and Lucas will have to clean up the bedroom before they can return anyway,” he said. “Come on, let me teach you. Your cookies spread out too much and were a bit, uh, salty. Those are both easy fixes.”
    Elise rolled her eyes, but she couldn’t keep from smiling. There wasn’t much James wouldn’t do to make her smile like that.
    “Fine,” she said.
    By the time they stuck the third batch of cookies in the oven, the jar of Nutella had been licked clean, the sun was falling toward the horizon, and the issue of Courevore’s offspring still hadn’t been resolved.
    “He would have to be keeping his eggs nearby,” Elise said, sitting on the counter by the sink