“Don’t think?” She gave a bitter laugh.
“Nothing is certain. Which is why your search for answers is doomed.”
His axe couldn’t have cut deeper. She walked to the kitchen area, washed her cup, dried her hands on a paper towel, and finally turned to face him. “Why are you trying so hard to convince me? Will it make this possession easier?”
He hadn’t moved. “No. But what comes after might not hurt so much.”
“I was told by one of my first patients that pain isn’t the purpose of life, just sometimes the price.”
His lips twisted in an unkind smile. “Too bad we couldn’t ask him for bonus insights after he died and went to the heaven I’m sure he deserved.”
“
Her
last postcard was from her third Caribbean cruise. The doctors called it a miraculous recovery.” She lifted her chin. “Or are you going to tell me there are no such things as miracles?”
When he didn’t answer, she wadded the paper towel
and tossed it toward the garbage can. Two points. “If I’m stuck here, where’s the shower? I have demon guts in my hair.”
He waved her toward a glass-blocked corner of the loft . When he flicked a switch inside, the space glowed like a candle, lit from within. She eyed the translucent glass.
“Whatever,” she muttered, and marched forward.
Archer let out a long, slow breath to soothe the dangerous coiling inside him. Damn demons. Damn hers, damn his, and damn that crazed feralis, attacking in the waning daylight. Couldn’t keep its damn half-rat paws off her.
No more than Archer himself, apparently.
Damn.
The water came on. A whiff of hot wetness spiked with honeysuckle snagged his breathing again. He wheeled away. The message light on his phone blinked with ever greater urgency as the number of messages increased. At its present speed, it could cause seizures. Just as well he never left the ringer on.
He’d been too preoccupied with the limp weight in his arms. Calling on the demon had shorted her out.
Until that moment, though, she’d been magnificent. The image of her lunging at the feralis, her puny weapon brandished high, was shock-locked in his brain. She should be dead, of foolishness if nothing else.
If he’d been a kinder man, perhaps he’d have let her die.
Instead, he brought her home, wiped away the blood from the nick under her eye, and watched her sleep.
Now who was the fool?
He punched SPEED DIAL on the phone. “Quit leaving messages you know I’m not going to answer.”
Niall grunted. “We hauled the feralis off for de comp.” He hesitated. “Any other bodies we should know about?”
At the word “bodies,” Archer couldn’t stop his gaze from drifting to the shower. “Not yet.”
Niall let out a sigh. “I’d hate to lose her to a bad-luck encounter before her demon even had a chance to save her.”
“Yeah.” She’d shown no fear, no hesitation. Once she and the demon meshed, she’d be a formidable opponent.
Still no match for him, of course. Even the fierce and fearless fought to win, and that, in the bitter end, would fail against someone who fought to die.
Archer went to the dark window. “That feralis didn’t just stumble into the alley. It was tracking us. It wanted her bad.”
Niall was silent a moment. “Homing in on her demon?”
A lot of etheric energy had soaked the alley, and not all of it Sera’s. There’d certainly been enough wide-beam annihilation-class violence, thanks to that kiss, to warn off even a stupid feralis. “Maybe.”
Niall jumped on the note of reserve. “I told you this war is changing.”
As if he didn’t have enough to deal with. Archer cut him off. “You might also notice, I changed my security codes. Don’t send anyone here. Don’t contact me until this is over.”
Niall clicked his tongue. “I want updates. Bookie thought he’d record the last stages of an ascension.”
“Thinking and wanting just don’t have much place in what’s going down.” Archer’s breath fogged the win dowpane except where the print of her hand cleared the glass.
Wanting might still be a problem.
He scowled at the imprint. “I’ll call you when the possession is complete. Either way.”
“Good luck.” Niall’s soft voice barely registered down the line.
Archer hung up without answering.
The water cranked off. In the charged silence, he realized he’d invoked his demon-boosted perceptions. Listening for the last droplets to fall. Tasting the tang of warm, moist flesh. His heightened nerves prickled in anticipation, keen for the faintest pulse of air as she moved through space.
Cursing even more softly than Niall’s parting words, Archer clamped down on his control. He rifled through the armoire beside the bed for a fresh shirt.
He’d wait for his shower until she slept. God knew, those glass blocks barely hid a damn thing even from purely human eyes.
He stripped off his torn shirt. His twenty-four-hour dry cleaner had commented once that pinning a note over stains would ensure spots were properly treated. Archer just gave him everything in a duffel bag stenciled with the word “stained.” The man had blanched, but his daughter was a tidy seamstress who’d saved his trench coat more than once.
He turned sideways to the mirror, tracking the wound that curved around his shoulder. Only a little worse than the bloody nose. The demon was as efficient as his seamstress.
Sera’s gaze found his in the reflection. “That was definitely the feralis’s fault. I don’t have claws like that.”
He reached for his shirt. “Not seven in a row anyway.”
“Don’t you need to bandage it?”
“It won’t kill me.” He should be so lucky. “Let the demon earn its keep.”
She shook her head and marched back to the bathroom, returning a moment later with a soap-bubbled washcloth, a roll of gauze, and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.
She hefted the bottle. “This is all you have for first aid supplies?”
“I use it to soak out the worst of the stains.”
“Out of your skin?”
“Out of my clothes.” He waggled the shirt in his hand. “My dry cleaner has convinced himself I’m a butcher.” Archer started to slide into the shirt. “I guess he’s right.”
Sera plucked the shirt from his hands. “Not until you disinfect.”
He opened his mouth to tell her off, knowing the demon’s wariness of close quarters would lend its double-octave warning to keep her distance, to not distract them from its mission of atonement. But nothing came to him. He blinked. “Fine.”
She sat him at the kitchen island under the pendant lights. “These gashes go right through the dermis into the subcutaneous fat.” She swabbed at his shoulder with the soapy cloth. “Not that there’s much fat on you.”
He held himself straight, struggling not to lean into her hand despite the twanging pain. “You sound like Bookie.”
She wiped away the suds. “Who’s Bookie?”
“The Bookkeeper, our records keeper and historian. We call him Bookie.”
“Imaginative.”
“It’s an honorable title, passing down centuries of study. I’m sure he could whip out a damage-infliction chart categorized by demon subtype.” He hissed as she upended the bottle of peroxide over his shoulder. “Burns worse than ichor.”
She caught the runoff with a towel at his elbow. “Are you always such a wimp about cleaning up?”
“Never been cleaned up before.” He glanced up from the bubbling scratches and caught the momentary softening in her eyes. “Don’t feel sorry for me,” he warned.
“You’ve been hurt worse than this. I see the marks on you.” She traced one finger near his spine. Though the demon lay dormant in him, still strangely undisturbed by
her closeness, he couldn’t stop the shiver that wracked him at her touch. “Even with preternatural healing, you must’ve been laid up for weeks with this one.”
“I don’t remember.”
“How can you not remember a wound that almost filleted you?”
“It was a long time ago.” At the thought of how long, he slipped out from under her hand and grabbed the roll of gauze. Might as well keep the oozing blood off his clean shirt. “Flesh heals. The scar remains, faintly. Bookie has theories why the demon can’t take away the last of the scarring. Or won’t.”
She watched him wind the gauze awkwardly around his shoulder. “Maybe it’s supposed to be a reminder.”
“Not to get mauled? Thanks. Next time, send a memo.”
He was glad, at least, to see the snap back in her gaze. He didn’t need her pity. Or her help. He gritted his teeth as he fumbled the gauze over his shoulder.
“I meant,” she said coolly, “a reminder that you aren’t immortal.”
“Oh, but we are.”
CHAPTER 6
Sera gasped. “Immortal?”
“We can be killed, in case tonight hasn’t made that obvious. But until the demon leaks out with our last drop of blood, we endure.”
He knotted off the end of the gauze, and the bitter twist to his lips made the last word a curse.
“Exactly how long have you been doing this?” She waved toward the wall of weapons. “Inducting wayward women into your demon-slaying hall of maim?”
“You are the only female possessed in living memory.”
Considering the immortality thing, that was saying a lot. “Are demons sexist too?”
“Bookie’s working on a theory. Maybe it’s just long odds. Possession by the teshuva is rare. The last man joined our league almost thirty years ago.”
“Thirty—” She shook her head, bemused. “How old are you?”
“Old enough.” He eased into the new shirt.
She told herself she was trying to guess his age as she let her gaze roam the hard planes of his chest, the curls of dark hair funneling down to the button fly of his
jeans. A man in his prime, certainly, despite the shadowy collection of old scars. Her pulse tripped a beat for each rippled muscle in his abdomen.
The doppelganger demon had come to her as a whitewashed version of this: smooth and cool, unmarked.
Apparently demons didn’t know everything about perfecting temptation.
Archer turned abruptly to face her, and heat rushed to her cheeks. “So,” she said to cover her embarrassment at being caught gawping. “I’m going to live forever.”
“Most likely you’ll be killed in one of your first fights. War’s a bitch. And I’m not sure you’re enough of one.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Gee, thanks.”
“Assuming you survive—”
“The next few days,” she chimed in. “Yeah, I remember. You’re taking a lot of the fun out of this.”
He looked at her a long, long time, as if he had to translate her words from some foreign language. “Fun?”
Her cheeks heated again. “I was teasing.”
“Teasing.”
She wondered again exactly how long he
had
been at this. “I’ve had end-stage patients cheerier than you,” she muttered.
“They got to die.” He retreated to his office space, where he hunched over his computer, with his back to her.
Okay, she could take the hint.
After a restless circle of the room, she thumbed through the books stacked on the end table by the couch. Sun Tzu’s
The Art of War
. Homer’s
Odyssey
. A collection with
Macbeth
,
King Lear
,
Othello
.
She set them aside. No wonder he was such a grouch. She’d have to get him a few good romance novels, something to reawaken his faith in hope, his sense of humor, his desire for . . .
Her gaze strayed across the room to linger on the breadth of his shoulders. But broad shoulders weren’t
reason enough to fantasize about being the one to soothe his tortured soul. Other not-good-enough reasons included lean hips in fitted jeans, sculpted abs, a faded Southern drawl. . . .
Maybe romances weren’t a great idea right now when her own emotions seemed so . . . aroused. Maybe later.
“Maybe if I survive the next few days,” she muttered. She realized she’d been compulsively running her pendant back and forth on its cord and forced herself to calm.
She’d slipped the cord over her head before she left her apartment a million years ago. She couldn’t say why. All it did was conjure up disturbing memories of the demon’s pale eyes.
As she lifted the stone, a spark leapt across the inner curve. Just a trick of light. Or maybe not. She’d had enough weirdness to make her question everything, even if—especially if—her common sense said ignore it. The pendant had come from a demon, after all.
She half closed her eyes, so the darkened apartment was like a tunnel, the gleaming stone a light at the end. So easy to drift down toward it. Not like she was doing anything else.
Just waiting to be consumed by her demon.
She blinked, and the world went gray.
“Oh, damn it. Here we go again.”
But this wasn’t the lakeside pier. The gray was softer, vaguer. She’d been focused on the light, as she’d done in a therapy session once. “Did I just hypnotize myself?”
A low sound, half moan, half whisper, echoed back. The hair on her arms prickled.
She wasn’t alone.
She turned a tight circle and caught a glimpse of some misshapen form, its outline half eaten away by the mist. Her heart thudded. A feralis? It faded back before she could tell.
No wooden stakes here. No Archer either.
“Nothing can happen to me in hypnosis that I wouldn’t allow in my waking life,” she reminded herself.
Of course, in waking life she’d been half paralyzed, half addicted to painkillers, more than halfway to despair. Easy pickings for a demon.
Another whisper-moan behind her. “Sera.”
She whirled.
It was right behind her, pallid and gaunt. Its single weeping eye fixed on her with appalling hunger. The eye was hazel, same as her own.
Bony fingers reached for her. “Oh, Sera.”
She screamed, a gurgle of terror.
“Sera! Sera, come back.”