She glanced at Michael and shrugged before stepping into the elevator. He followed. Her hand hovered over the panel trying to decide which button to press. There were too many options and not enough time. They rocked on their feet as they jerked into motion.
“Did you press a button?” he asked.
“Nope.” She moved to stand beside him at the back of the car, shifting her grip on the sword. The motion kept her focused on the here and now, kept her brain from imagining a million different scenarios of how this could all turn sour. The bell dinged on each floor marking their slow progression upward. When they reached the seventh floor, they came to a stop. The door opened to reveal a dimly lit room filled with rows of cubicles. Every shadow, every crevice was a new place for the demon to hide. Super.
She sniffed the air as they stepped out of the elevator. The odor was strong. Their prey was here or had been until recently. Michael tapped her arm and gestured behind her. The doors of the other two elevators had been jammed open making those units inoperable. Theirs had obviously been sent for them. Great. She immediately took another look around but saw nothing. Taking a cue from the demon, she took a moment to jam open the door on their unit as well. If anyone else wanted up, they were going to have to take the stairs.
She signaled to Michael that he should go left. He nodded once and headed in that direction. She tried to ignore the blood pulsing through her veins, her heart pounding in her chest. She looked down the length of the first row of cubicles on her side. The toe of a woman’s dress shoe was just visible past one of the walls. Making her way toward the shoe and the person wearing it, she looked in the cubes on either side of her as she hurried down the aisle.
The woman lay sprawled in her chair, arms and head thrown backward. Her chest moved up and down as she breathed. If her skirt were any shorter, Juliana would have had a lot more of a show than she wanted. Leaving the woman, Juliana continued down the aisle. Two more victims were in that row. One slumped over a keyboard and the other lay on the floor beside her. Both alive.
Like the man in the lobby, none of them had any visible injuries but something had knocked them out. Given that there wasn’t a mass of bodies clogging the exits, she suspected there’d been no warning. That they’d all passed out at once. She flashed her gift on only long enough to see the sheen of a spell laid across them. She left it alone for now as it kept them out of her way while she hunted the demon. That’s all she cared about.
When she stepped out of the aisle, she found Michael waiting for her at the end of his. He nodded to her and started down the next row of cubicles. It made her smile that he checked on her.
She made it no more than two steps down the next aisle before a heavy hand clamped over her mouth, covering her nose. At the same instant, her assailant’s other hand snared her wrist in a bruising grip. Her arm bent almost to the point of breaking and she was forced to drop her sword. It hit the carpet with a soft thud no louder than a misplaced footfall.
She clawed at the hand on her mouth, twisted her body but was no match for the strength of the man behind it. He yanked her back against his firm body and she recognized it instantly. Thomas. The demon found her first. Relief warred with anxiety. Thomas was alive, but she was at the demon’s mercy. It shifted its hand so her nose was free and she sucked in a greedy lungful of cinder and ash tainted air.
It dragged her into one of the offices that ringed the room. It spun her in one fluid motion and clamped a hand around her throat, instantly cutting off her ability for speech. With the other hand, the demon closed the door and flipped the lock. It pushed her backward until she hit the wall, lifting her off the floor by the hand still wrapped around her neck.
Wheezing breaths worked their way into her lungs, but it wasn’t enough to keep spots from clouding the edge of her vision. She gripped the arm with both hands trying to pull it away, to relieve some of the pressure. Suffocation was shaping up to be one of her least favorite ways to die. She was going to kick this demon’s rotted carcass straight back to its realm when she came back to life. Just when she thought she was going to pass out, it released her completely.
Her feet slammed against the floor and the rest of her would have followed if the hand hadn’t clamped around her neck again. The grip was looser this time. She could breathe, but only with effort. She’d take it. Any breath was better than none, even if the taint of the demon rode the air and coated her insides.
The demon leaned forward laying its face alongside hers. It inhaled and sighed in contentment. “Hello again, Hound.” It ran its tongue along her pulse point and she shivered. She wished she could say it was entirely from revulsion but the demon inhabited her mate’s body. And she had always responded to Thomas.
“You torment me, did you know that? I’ve been watching you since almost the first moment I appeared in this realm,” it said, its voice low but unmistakably Thomas. It wasn’t him, though. He was merely a puppet acting for his master. A vise grip squeezed her heart. Thomas was the strongest being she knew. If the demon bested him, what hope did the rest of them have? Then its words sank through the fog of panic. She had seen someone outside her house the night she fought the troll. And then later she’d seen him in the warehouse mutilated and destroyed and she’d never even realized it.
She closed her eyes listening for some sign of Michael. She heard nothing, but he’d be looking for her.
“The sole purpose of my summoning was to kill you, to make sure you died in such a way you couldn’t be resurrected.” The demon’s breath was warm against her skin. “But if I kill you, my master, my real master, will hold my life forfeit. You’re not worth dying over. But if I do not kill you, I can’t return to my realm. Decisions, decisions.”
She said nothing. She wasn’t sure she could have even if she wanted to. If the demon didn’t return to its realm, its power would begin to fade. Eventually it would die. So the choice seemed to be a slow death or a quick one. She knew which way she leaned but she didn’t think it wanted her opinion.
It stepped back to look in her eyes. “And this host retains more of its will than any I’ve ever experienced before. He is currently being most vocal about my treatment of you. It is...different.”
It loosened its grip slightly, running a thumb along her pulse point. “That scene at the house? All that destruction? That was him. Mostly anyway. He was most difficult to take over. His rage was the door that let me in. I fed it, fueled it, but I think he rather enjoyed it.”
She wanted to believe he was lying. That her mate had been nothing more than the weapon the murderer used. But she knew Thomas better than that. She was his and they hadn’t protected her. Regardless of the fact she came back, she’d died and someone was going to pay for it. Because Raoul wasn’t immediately available, he’d taken it out on the rest of the coven. She hoped Thomas would have been a little less bloody had he been in control but she couldn’t be sure of that.
She did know that every one of the people she encountered in the building who wasn’t dead owed his or her life to Thomas. The demon had no reason to keep them alive, but the vampire had no reason to kill them. The vampire had evidently won. It made her feel better for Thomas’s chances.
The demon inhaled deeply, its eyelids fluttering. Thomas’s eyes darkened and his fangs extended. Once again, it laid his face alongside hers to speak in her ear. “Should I suck the sweet blood from your veins? Should I drain every last drop from you until you fade into nothingness? It is why I am here and there is no release for me until I finish you.”