He gave her a thoughtful frown, as if he wanted to be sure lesson one had really sunk in—sunk in with needle teeth.
Finally, he nodded. “Remember the man at the bar?”
“If he got slimed, he didn’t seem to notice.”
“Oh, he got slimed. The malice was all over him. If he’d recognized the evil, he could have driven it away. You, seeing and feeling—smelling—the malice, have the advantage.”
“Great. So how do I get rid of it?” Enough theory, already.
“Wish it away.”
She stared at him. “You’re kidding. Do I click my heels together?”
He didn’t smile. “The demon knew the name of your darkness when it chose you. Now the demon’s power is yours. Know the essence of pain, fear, hatred, despair—that is the malice. Know it, and bleed it dry.” He glanced over her shoulder. “Now would be a good time.”
She didn’t follow his glance, not quite ready to skip ahead to lesson three. She squelched the urge to run in circles and wave her arm as if she were on fire despite the hard rain. With her free hand, she reached into the darkness.
Psychic roadkill, Archer had said. Grabbing it was like reaching into a cold, dead thing, past brittle hair and flaking, scaly skin, into rotting guts and the sharp shards of broken bone. The squirm of maggots and crunch of cockroaches gave it a horrific semblance of life.
It thrashed in her grip. A tail lashed, staining the air with streamers of a strange etheric smoke.
Archer stepped closer. The warmth of his body helped dispel her chill, but his voice was colder than malice teeth. “End it.”
She blinked away raindrops. End it how? Assimilate it, as her mother had been swallowed by the voices in her head? Lock it away in a part of her mind, like her father’s ever-spreading forgetfulness? Or should she just deny all feeling, like Archer did, and dishearten the malice into oblivion?
Now that she had control of it, the squirming demon seemed pathetic rather than awful. The malice was wickedness given shadowy shape, but thanks to a really crappy night, she understood how easily that could happen to anyone.
“Do you have it?” Archer wrapped his big hands around hers as if they held a newborn infant.
“We were fighting and it came down on us.” The rain in her eyes cast a blurred shroud over her vision. “Did we make this together?”
“What?” His body recoiled, but his hands were steady on hers. “No. It was always here. Will always be here. We just gave it a little juice.” He scowled at her. “Don’t go all misty-eyed sympathetic on me now.”
“Sympathy means I feel sorry for you. Sympathy is cheap. To truly feel as you do, that’s empathy.” Could the man at the bar have fought the malice? Why did evil have to exist at all? She didn’t have answers, not a one. “I want to feel it—to understand—even if it hurts.”
As if her words had summoned the demon, her senses unfurled. The scene, already cast in a forbidding monochrome of black malice and silver rain on her white skin, shifted toward an otherworldly gray—the demon realm. Her grip slackened.
Archer swore and grabbed the malice. Reaching out to steady herself, she flattened her palms over his and laced their fingers tight together. The malice, snared in their joined grasp, bound them with threads of smolder ing ether.
It was the first time she’d really touched him since that desperate, dangerous coupling in his garden. With her demon ascendant, the firm heat of his grasp reverberated in every molecule of her being. An unexpected jolt of need coursed through her.
At the memory of his big hands tracing patterns on her skin, she looked up at him. His gaze fixed on hers with hungry stillness. She breathed the mingled scents of leather, wet concrete, and male, and her pulse thudded hard.
Mist thickened until it obliterated the world beyond.
“How can this be?” His question was a low growl. “Demon need takes the place of all other cravings. Only the mission remains.”
Heat, equal parts desire and dismay, swept her. Here she stood in the icy rain, arm half eaten by malice, but just because he was with her, nothing else mattered. She almost let go, to slip toward the gray.
His grasp never wavered. “Where do you think you’re going? As if we don’t have enough troubles in this realm.” He pulled her closer, so the trailing edge of his trench coat lapped around her. His knee nudged between her legs. “Damn it, they can’t have any more of you.”
He meant the other demons. Where his fingers twined with hers, faint color bloomed, and she imagined that potency spilling into her. As when they’d made love, his touch drove back the shadows, drove back the demon realm that beckoned.
But he’d reminded her, they had a mission. She wanted to understand. This realm held only questions, and the malice lurked at the root of them.
“I already know the many names of the shadow,” she whispered. “My question is why. You promised answers, demon.”
As she had before in Archer’s loft holding the pendant stone, she focused where the world went gray. She held tight to his hands, like a diver’s safety line, and followed the nebulous link down into the other realm.
To her altered senses, the malice was a thin silhouette against the endless murk; Archer was a restless thunder-cloud shot through with scattered lightning in violet and bronze.
She felt as if she stood on a precipice, shouting into the void, with no hope of anything but an echo. But she had to ask. “Why pain? Why sorrow? Why insanity?”
From the depths sighed a mockery of her word—Wwwhyyy?—as if something gigantic and unseen had roused at her call and breathed out, sending up more impenetrable drifts of darkness.
“Why death? Why damnation?” She shotgunned her questions into the gloom. “And why, for God’s sake, can’t we end it?”
“I can end it.” Archer reeled her up against his chest.
Their paired hands came together between tattered ribbons of ether. The furious raw heat of him through the rain-slicked leather of his coat jolted her from the other realm. The vastness inside her telescoped closed with an almost aural shock wave that vibrated her bones.
The malice gave a shrill cry and collapsed in upon itself with a gritty puff of sulfurous smoke, leaving nothing between them. She staggered. Only Archer’s grasp kept her upright.
Another malice’s squeal sounded in the night, and then yet another, farther off.
Archer’s hands clenched on hers as he straightened, nearly yanking her off her feet again. “What the hell were you trying to do? And I mean literally hell.” Despite the incensed grip, his face was ashen. “Enigma-class demon or not, you can’t psychoanalyze a malice into oblivion.”
She coughed on the lingering scent of rotten eggs. “You didn’t exactly suggest a better way.”
“I prefer to pop them like a balloon. Although that always leaves some shreds lying around. Where did this one go?”
“You tell me, oh popper of many demons. You squashed it.”
“No. You did before I could.”
“How, when you keep holding back what I’m supposed to do?”
They matched glares. In his widening eyes she saw him realize, just as she did, they were still holding hands.
They took identical long steps in opposite directions. She wiped her palms down her thighs, trying to erase the chill of malice goo. And the warmth of Archer’s skin.
Between the anger and embarrassment, his expression was fiery enough. “That’s not how we fight. You can’t just dance down along the demon’s link through the Veil into hell.”
She answered, “I didn’t do it alone. You followed me.”
He opened his mouth, but instead, the shrilling cry of a malice pierced the night.
The scream shuddered down her spine. “I heard the others circling. Will they attack?”