Until she glanced up to see him. Her hazel eyes widened, and the blush that rose under her teeth when she bit her lower lip roused an answering pulse of blood through his veins. Carnal tension and something deeper twisted in him.
“I didn’t call you.” She held up one gloved hand. “Not last time, not this time. Not the time when you were the demon.”
“I wasn’t the demon.” A fine distinction at the moment.
“Whatever.” She marched past him down the sidewalk. “I didn’t call. In fact, I burned the business card. You’re stalking me.”
He fell into step beside her. “You didn’t burn the card. You’re not stupid. And, yes, I am stalking you.”
She frowned at him. “You could at least pretend to feel bad about it.” She shook her head when he drew breath to answer. “Right. No lies. No tricks. No pretending either, I assume.”
“I’m here for you, Sera,” he said simply. He didn’t have to tell her why.
She turned to him, angling her face to make up for the difference in their height. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”
“No. It’s just the truth.”
She walked on. “Strangely, I do feel better.”
She wouldn’t, if she knew what he’d have to do if the demon possessing her wasn’t one of theirs.
“Maybe just because I’m moving,” she continued. “I swear, the walls were crushing me.”
“The demon comes from a place of infinity. They want to be on the move, on the hunt, stretching our senses.” The rhythm of his words matched their steps, her stride matching his. He caught himself eyeing the length of her leg and scowled. “Don’t indulge it too freely. Tempting a demon to run amok is a bad idea. Repentant or not, there’s a reason they were damned.”
She wrinkled her nose. “Never mind the demon. I’m happy to be on the move again. Since the accident . . . Anyway, I feel almost like myself again.”
For the moment. “I noticed you’d left the cane behind.”
“The kids downstairs snatched it. They were riding it around like a witch’s broom.” She shot him a narrow glance. “Do you believe in witches too?”
“Maybe they were pretending it was a hobby horse,” Archer said, still thinking of the cane.
“They’re city kids. They’ve never even seen a horse.”
He realized abruptly he was showing his age with the antiquated reference. “Just because they’ve never seen one doesn’t mean they can’t want one.”
They walked in silence past houses as quiet as if the stones themselves were hunkering down for the night.
“Speaking of not seeing,” she said suddenly, “my scars are all but gone.”
Without a word, he rolled up his sleeve. Only a white thread of puckered flesh remained from his demonstration at the pier.
She closed her eyes, opened them again, but shifted her focus to the black. “That tattoo.”
“It’s my reven, an interrealm rift torn into my flesh to mark where the demon entered.” He touched the pulse point of his wrist. A flicker of violet chased along the black lines. For a heartbeat, the surrounding skin seemed to fade to translucence, revealing not muscle and bone but some glittering void. “It’s our only view into the demon realm.”
“Torn?” She blinked. “That must’ve hurt.”
“No.” Honest enough. By the time the mark appeared, his torment had been too deep to notice.
“I saw a similar tattoo—reven—on the driver at the pier.”
“The pattern identifies the class and potency of demon and its point of entry. In Ecco’s case, a strong chaos-class demon.” Archer smirked. “I’ll be sure to let him know you made him.”
“You’ve been watching me. You said there was no conspiracy.”
“I said it wasn’t a government conspiracy. We’re . . . private contractors. Very private. We keep watch over all demonic activity.”
“You stay together?”
“More or less.” Zane had mentioned an obsolete mated-talyan bond. Maybe in those days they’d taken turns taking out the demonic trash.
“Like a support group? To find a cure?”
“There is no cure.”
“Funny, I don’t feel doomed.” She stared down at her feet. “I’d forgotten how nice a strong body is. My poor patients . . . I could just keep walking forever.”
He caught her arm and forced her to a halt. Forced himself to ignore her supple heat under his hand. Nice body, yeah. “You can’t escape, Sera. Somewhere inside, you sense what’s coming.”
She strained against him, testing her strength. “And what is that, exactly? End-stage demonic infection, I know. Maybe I’ll just take two aspirin and call my pastor in the morning.”
Ah, he knew this moment well. He steeled himself against the pang. Just because she roused the memory of a certain idealistic, naïve young man was no reason to forget the hopeless outcome. “Too late. It’s ascending already, from your soul through your body, and demons can’t be destroyed. If you cast it out now, the demon will just seek a new host.”
She lifted her chin. “That’s easy.”
“No. It came to you through your weakness—in mind, in body. In your soul.”
“Not exactly fair.”
“I doubt fair comes up in the demon handbook code of ethical conduct. Besides, what does it take to resist temptation when you’re strong? Anybody can do that.”
She pulled at him more forcefully. “I’m stronger now.”
“Because of the demon. If you deny it, it will leave the way it came, through your wounds, taking what it has given you.” He tightened his grip, close to bruising as his demon roused to the defiance in her stance. If he gave it free rein, she’d know the folly of questioning him. “This strong body you like so much will be gone with the demon.”
“I got by before.”
“And when it goes, it will take a little more than you had. Call it recompense. Most likely, you’d never walk again.”
She froze. “Maybe that’s the price I have to pay.”
“Willing to sacrifice a chunk of your soul too? The demon burrowed into damage in your body and your soul. Places where it linked would be torn apart. Our theologically inclined believe your demon-mottled soul would be bound into the Veil between the realms to spend the rest of eternity waiting out the final battle in spiritual limbo.”
She wasn’t pulling away from him now. “Final battle?”
He ignored the question. “There’s no bargaining with this devil. You stay and fight for your hold on this realm, or you are crippled, physically and spiritually, for the rest of your life. A life that the most wretched of your former patients would deem a thousand times worse than their own deaths.”
Sera stared at him, eyes so wide he caught a glimpse of the first drifting snowflakes reflected in her pupils. The demon had come to him in winter too, when old wounds ached most deeply. With all he’d lost, the prospect of spring had seemed obscene.
He would do what needed to be done if Sera’s demon was djinn and not repentant teshuva. But he’d be damned—again—if he let Ecco, Niall, or anyone else force his hand.
With his grip still on her, the violet-chased reven he’d exposed shimmered in the lower corner of his gaze, an unspoken reminder of his compulsion. Damned indeed. As he’d told Sera, the demon-mottled soul faced, at best, oblivion upon death.
He just hadn’t told her that eventually oblivion no longer seemed so dire a choice.
He didn’t know what expression was on his face—grimmer than plain old death, for sure. But she put her hand over his, covering the reven. The unexpected heat of skin on skin flared along the demon’s marking. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been touched that didn’t involve blood and ichor, that felt human warm and female soft. The contact shocked him out of his reverie, as did the gentling of her gaze. “Whatever happened to you, I’m sorry.”