“I’ve lost more than you could ever imagine, child.” But as she writhed against him, he didn’t feel much like the wise elder.
He pinned his knee between her legs, dimly aware of the grinding sting of brick through his jeans. The resistance of her shoulders beneath his hands excited something in him darker and more primitive even than the demon dwelling in his own soul.
“Give up,” he growled.
“I won’t.”
And that was the difference between them. How long since he’d felt such pure resolve? The lack sent a jealous ache through him, and a dread that he wouldn’t be able to restrain her. “It’s easier.”
Her arch look, while still squashed against the wall, pricked him. “Even the demon wearing your face wasn’t such a coward.”
“You remember that moment well, do you?” He pressed her harder. “You keep mentioning it. Did possession bring you such pleasure?”
The violet wash over her eyes lightened toward amethyst. “You have no right to judge me.”
Judge, jury, and executioner, if she only knew.
Still she was right. He had no right. His grip on her arms tightened, finding places human tender, yet coursing with demon power. She didn’t flinch, only stared up, defiant, with just enough hazel left in her gaze to let him know she would always defy him, demon or not.
That remnant of her swayed him where her lithe body hadn’t quite done the trick. He imagined what the demon—wearing his face, as she accused—had done to gain her compliance.
He breathed her scent again. Honeysuckle, he remembered abruptly. How had he forgotten? It had rambled every lane of his childhood. The pale flowers were touched in purple, sweetly scented but tenaciously climbing, bitten back in winter and ever more wild with the return of the sun.
A wayward lock of her hair curled around his finger, possessed of its own too-human temptation. “I wish I could save you from this. But all I have left in me is destruction.”
He lowered his mouth over hers.
CHAPTER 5
After all she’d been through—her accident and the gru eling surgeries afterward, the bizarre appearance of demonology, not to mention that unbelievable jump just now—she had thought nothing could shock her.
His kiss jolted through her as if she’d grabbed the L’s third rail.
His lips parted over hers, rough and raw, nothing like the doppelganger’s smooth touch. His body, hard against her, drove the thrill deeper, so her every nerve fired at his touch. She dug her fingers into his shoulders. She should push him away. She knew in the depths of her bones that she could, if she wanted.
But, oh, how she wanted.
She stretched, muscle and sinew flexing, matching his strength against her own. He growled into her mouth, and the vibration triggered aftershocks all through her. Still pinning her to the wall, he levered her arms above her head, both her wrists clasped in one of his hands, his other wrapped around her throat, driving her chin up, opening her mouth for him. She answered his growl with a moan, a throaty animal sound far too low for her own voice.
Not like her at all. None of this was like her. To throw sense and caution to the winds, swept by primordial needs she’d never indulged before. The ferocious pounding of blood to her belly and thighs excited and shamed her. What was she becoming?
Her heart pulsed more frantically, and she couldn’t breathe. Her chest was on fire. She wrenched her head to the side, sucking in chill winter air.
He swore and released her, then took a step back. His eyes sparked with unnatural violet light. “My God. I didn’t mean . . .”
He reached out to touch her, and she flinched away from his hand.
Just as a monstrous dark shape slammed into the wall where they’d been. Under her shoulder, the brick trembled at the impact. A chip exploded out, catching her below one eye.
A bestial snarl, like a mockery of the sound she’d made, filled the alley.
Archer grabbed her and spun her behind him. She stumbled in a circle, trying to keep her feet under her.
Her breath froze even as her heart quadrupled its pace. The thing was huge, half as wide again as Archer and every bit as tall, though it slumped, one clawed foot braced against the Dumpster, one gnarled fist on the wall. She took in a confused impression of half-fur, half- insectoid armor plating, and a glowing rust-orange eye.
Not pausing to be admired, it sprang at them. Its gargled cry almost drowned out the squeal of the Dumpster shoved across the pavement.
Archer shouted in reply and leapt forward—low, sweeping the club from under his coat. The axe blades whirled open in a shining arc.
The creature slashed at him and jumped for the wall, caroming off the bricks.
Straight for her.
She felt the weight of death upon her. The stink of excrement and sulfurous rot made her stomach heave. Behind the creature, half-hidden by its bulk, Archer dove forward, blade at the ready, but too far from her.
Under her hand, she found the broken slat of the pallet. She’d wrenched it up when Archer was chasing her, not even thinking that such a move should have been impossible without a crowbar.
She didn’t want to think too much now either. She reached down into the empty place where she went in the moments before a patient passed, when time and chances were exhausted and nothing remained to say.
She was supposed to find peace down there, she knew—acceptance of approaching death.
What she found instead was fury.
Her vision blurred strangely, so she saw the monster trailing a stereopticon afterimage, not just where it had been, but everywhere it might go. When the demon had promised answers, she hadn’t imagined such a practical application. Now she just had to guess which answer was right.
Her fingers closed over the wood, and she lunged into the trajectory outlined most brightly a split second before the monster.
One slash for every person who’d left her, starting with her mother, first when she was ten, then again at thirteen. The thing flinched back. A wild glee, not entirely her own, ripped through her. The demon. Her demon.
The monster recovered, then reached for her. But she knew, somehow, that it would, and her makeshift blade was already in motion. She chopped at its arm, batting it aside. It shrieked. The wood shattered, leaving her with less than six inches of jagged splinters in her fist.
She stepped inside the arch of raking claws and stabbed her much-shortened weapon toward the corroded eye.
The thing wailed and reared back. A glint of steel at its throat caught her gaze. She recoiled just as the spray of black ichor exploded over her head. She threw up one hand to ward off the gruesome cascade, and a few stinging droplets scalded her skin.
A purling whine from the beast, pathetic and foul, made her stomach lurch. It kicked once with curling claws like a dead rat’s clenched foot; then Archer hauled it over backward, where it lay still.
She half turned toward the wall, sinking to her haunches. The unnatural strength and surety that had buoyed her vanished, so she was left floundering on her own.
Archer plunged toward her. “Sera.” The axe clattered to the pavement, and his hands were everywhere on her, searching. “Where are you hurt?”
She looked at the back of her hand where the black blood burned. She was still clutching the wooden stake. She spread her fingers, and the remaining splinters pattered to the ground. “I missed it. Geez, that close, and I still missed.”
Archer sat back on his heels and raised one eyebrow. That was the last she remembered before the hollow-ness inside her reverberated with a cry even more terrible than the dead beast’s wail, and the blackness took her.
Corvus left his tower, three leather satchels bumping against his hip with a tinkle of glass. In his wake, the whining darklings made the shadows quake. A few followed, unbidden.