He loosed her abruptly, pulling away from her touch, away from the perilous sensations that ricocheted through him. “Thanks for the sympathy, but I’m not one of your hospice patients. I didn’t die.” The way she cocked her head made him wary of more questions. “Let’s go.”
When he set his hand against her lower back, she twisted aside, a sinuous contraction of bone and muscle under his palm. “I’m not going anywhere. Not with you.”
He took a breath, as if he could inhale patience. All he got was a lungful of cold air spiked with her faint perfume, a sweet fleeting scent even his enhanced senses couldn’t quite capture. “You need to be in a safe place.” Safe for her. Or for everyone else if her demon was djinn.
She stepped out of reach. “So far, everything that has confused me most has come from your mouth.” Her narrowed gaze flicked over his lips, an almost tangible touch. His skin warmed in anticipation of . . .
He shook himself as she continued. “So you won’t mind if I work this out on my own.”
The unexpected cravings rattled him, and he spoke more sharply than he’d intended. “You’ve worked things out so well on your own. Tell me, after all the long nights on death-watch, have you figured out why your father’s mind has been taken? Or why your mother abandoned you?”
A violet spark bloomed in her eyes, expanding in concentric circles through the hazel irises. He had a half second to acknowledge that his insensitive remarks wouldn’t make reasoning with her any easier. Without a betraying word, she leapt at him, fingers curled to gouge.
Another note to self, he ruminated as he fended off her attack. He slid to the side so her momentum carried her past him. Sensitive to aspersions cast upon her past. Well, weren’t they all?
“Hey,” he snapped as she whirled back. “Watch those nails.”
“You watch,” she growled, slashing at his eyes again.
He had to jerk back more quickly this time. She was already fiercer than he’d anticipated.
The violet spark jagged across the browns and greens of her eyes. He tamped down a twinge of alarm. If the ascension was progressing this fast . . .
“Sera.” He circled her, forcing her off balance. “Come back to me, Sera.”
“I didn’t come for you when I was naked in my bedroom, so you can forget about it now.”
This conversation wasn’t helping his concentration. He ducked her swinging fist, reluctant to engage when the violence was merely a symptom of the demon’s ascension. That, and she was pissed at him. He often wondered if angelic possession was gentler.
He ducked another jab. “Sera,” he said warningly.
“Never,” she hissed. “Never invoke my mother with your forked tongue.”
“My tongue isn’t forked.That must’ve been the demon kissing you.” Exasperated, he caught her fist, holding it tight. “I shouldn’t have been so blunt, but your amateur forays into the physiology of the soul won’t help you now. You have to listen to me.”
Not that tussling on the sidewalk was a good way to build trust. One hand still engulfing her fist, he spun her into a tight embrace tucked against his chest.
“I know what you’re going through,” he murmured. Her hair, tufting out from under her hat, smelled warm with ire and that teasing perfume. He could almost, but not quite, picture the bloom, growing between the fields of his father’s farm, redolent under the Southern sun.
Blindsided by wistfulness, he found himself adding, “I used to be like you, Sera. Trying to force it all to make sense, to matter. It doesn’t.”
As he breathed in again, she slammed the back of her head into his nose and bolted out of his grasp.
Involuntary tears flooded his vision. Through the haze, he saw her duck into the alley. He swallowed back the metallic tang of blood, swearing at his momentary weakness and her sudden strength. The demon was taking hold faster than they’d thought possible, subtly replacing the influence of the human realm; so instead of screaming for the police, she called on the nascent power within her.
He supposed he should be grateful. His task, one way or the other, would be over that much faster.
He followed into the alley, eyeing the Dumpsters and doorways that practically screamed ambush.
At a flicker from the corner of his eye, he raised a defensive arm. He caught the down-swinging slat of pallet hard against bone and winced at the crack. Just the wood, he hoped, and a helluva bruise.
“Damn it, Sera.” He parried her thrust of the shorter and now-sharper plank.
“Damn you, for luring me into this.” She wove a pattern in the air with the tip of her makeshift sword.
“You ran into the alley,” he reminded her. “Who lured whom here?”
She snarled. “Don’t be obtuse.”
He heard the demon in the low thrum of her voice. Unconsciously, she was summoning it. But until the possession was complete, she couldn’t sustain the attack. He could push her to the edge, but that held danger for both of them.
“The demon lured you,” he amended.A strong demon, obviously, though strain and class unknown. “None of it my fault.” He grabbed for the wooden weapon.
With a shout, she jumped back out of reach. And landed some twenty feet away, balanced high on the corner of a closed Dumpster.
He stared up into her shocked gaze. A very strong demon, he corrected himself.
He held his hands low at his sides, unthreatening. If she called on the other-realm energy so readily so soon, she just might be able to escape him, only to lose herself in the last stages of possession or succumb to a djinni with all the destruction that entailed.
That, either way, would be his fault. For carelessness, for underestimating. Enough had been lost under his watch.
He took a breath, tightening supernatural musculature not entirely his own, that did not exist in any dis sectible way. His vision flickered with tracers and auras as the desire to chase, rend, consume, welled up. He channeled the surge of ravening violence and launched himself after her.
He slammed her around the middle, knocking off her hat and scarf. She shrieked, but the sound cut out as he drove her against the wall. He caught himself on the flat of his hands a hair’s breadth before he crushed her into the brick.
“You’ll be good,” he growled. “If you survive. But you’ll not be better than me.”
“I’ll kill you.” Violet incandescence occluded the hazel in her eyes, and the demonic lows lent double octaves to her voice.
“Not yet.” He tightened his grip against her straining. He couldn’t loose her—wouldn’t lose her.
He felt the heat rising in her, a fever out of control. The demon, invoked too soon, trailed other-realm elements leaching from her. Not yet fully anchored in the body and soul it had chosen, a demon during its virgin ascension was both stronger and more exposed, subject to the willful passions that it longed for and feared, such passions having been the downfall of angels. If he could fan those flames just a little higher, the psychic back draft would knock her senseless as her demon fled temptation.
She struggled to break free. But he anticipated every move.
“You want answers, Sera? I have them. The demon can’t tell you anything anymore. It’s locked inside you. Like the memory of your mother’s disappearance, the fear for your father’s vanishing mind. Just more questions, more pain. Until you die.”
“You don’t know anything about it.” Blond tendrils of her hair drifted on currents not of this realm.