When she didn’t speak again, he said, “The danger is greatest in the last stage of possession, during the demon’s virgin ascension. Until the bond between you and the demon stabilizes, your soul might be pulled through the link to the other side.”
“To hell?”
He shrugged. “No one’s come back with a travelogue. But there’s some reason our demons want out.”
“ ‘ Our’?” She’d been thinking only of how this strange fate applied to her.
The gray surroundings were less stark than his expression. “How else would I know all this? I am possessed too.”
Archer took her for coffee. He’d seen that bewildered, undercaffeinated look often enough in his mirror, waking from mostly unremembered dreams.
Preferably unremembered.
They found a secluded table in the glass-ceiling atrium at Navy Pier, where wintry lake light gave the palm trees a surreal cast. She huddled over her frothy, butterscotch beverage, a far cry from the simple black in his own cup, but he figured she needed as much consolation as sugar and whipped cream could offer. “Did you want chocolate sprinkles too?”
At the disbelieving look she shot him, he realized he should have come up with more meaningful conversation to follow his, “I’m demon-possessed” and her mumbled, “I need a drink.”
She leaned back, fingertips brushing her cup. “I’ll pass on the sprinkles. I hear temptation got me into this mess.”
“My demon is annihilation-class, with no special bent for enticement. I can’t know you so thoroughly to tempt you as your unbound demon did.”
“My demon.” Her gaze wandered over him. The track of her scrutiny raised a prickle of awareness in his skin that had nothing to do with his enhanced senses. He couldn’t know her—had no intention of knowing her—but some odd intimacy crackled between them all the same.
After all, the demon had come to her looking like him.
He crushed the thought. No intentions and good intentions seemed to lead to the same inevitable destination. “Is the coffee helping?”
“Making me feel human again? I guess you’ll tell me if I’m not human anymore.”
“You are. Mostly.”
She scowled at the “mostly.” “And the rest?”
“Is an other-realm emanation, latent at the moment, that matched itself to susceptible receptors in your idiopathic, perpetual etheric force.” When she blinked at him, he added, “More commonly called your soul.”
“Did I catch a demon or a cold?”
He slanted her a faint smile. “Our philosophers compare possession to an infection, where demonic viral code overwrites exposed portions of our humanity.”
She shook her head. Her wrists, thin and pale against the black aluminum mesh table, seemed unbearably delicate, ill-suited to the fight ahead, and he wondered why the demon had chosen her. “Demon philosophy. I can’t help thinking. . . .”
He made an encouraging sound, but her glance was more irate than reassured. He made a mental note that she was not a woman to be patronized. First he had to dust the cobwebs off the mental file where he kept his notes on women.
“If this is true,” she continued, “I might finally get some answers.”
Archer lifted one eyebrow. “To what?”
“Heaven. Hell. God. What is the soul?” Her voice picked up speed. “Does it matter if we are good people or bad? How good do you have to be? If God is good and God made everything, why would he make bad? Why can’t—?”
“Is that how it lured you?” She blinked at his curtness, and he tried to modulate his tone. “It won’t give you answers. You’ll only have more questions.”
“There’s nothing wrong with wanting to know.”
“Tell that to Adam.”
“I didn’t cause the downfall of man.”
His body tightened with the remembered weight of her straddling his hips. Most often such a scuffle involved some demonic entity eager to kill him. But she’d wanted to save him, to fall under her again. . . .
He felt the shift within him, not just in the suddenly snug crotch of his jeans, but the restless demon rising at his distraction. Damn. He’d said they weren’t puppets, and here he was, losing control like any newly possessed or rogue talya.
He dragged his mind back to the conversation. “Regardless, Eve didn’t pass along any apples of knowledge. We have generations of historians who’ve filled archives with what they’ve learned, but they’d fill Lake Michigan with what they still can’t fathom. They’d overflow the Great Lakes with what they haven’t even thought to ask.”
She narrowed her eyes. “Are there many like you?”
He noticed she didn’t include herself. “Leagues of talyan exist in pockets around the world.” When she frowned at the strange word, he explained, “One of those first scholars tagged us talyan, an unkind comparison to Aramaic sacrificial lambs.”
She stared off into the middle distance, contemplating. “Aramaic? See, now I have more questions.”
“You’ll find no religion or science with answers. We’ve culled the sects of a hundred cultures to find words for what we face, but the faiths of centuries offer no solace, and the science of today provides no explanations. We are heretic and madman rolled into one.” He reached across the table to take her chin in his hand, forcing her to focus on him. “Your only task now is to survive the coming days.”
Her hazel eyes speared him, and his demon surfaced like a leviathan on a gaff hook. She couldn’t know what lurked below. He was a fool to rile it with the touch it both longed for and feared.
He let go abruptly just as she jerked her chin up. “I’ve probably survived worse.”
His fingertips tingled with the flush of her skin, the heat flickering up his demon’s mark like ignition along black lines of gunpowder. “No doubt you have, or the demon would have chosen another.”
“When I had the vision of it, it said I’d called it.” She fixed her gaze on her hands wrapped around the coffee cup. “It said I was lonely. It said it loved me. How desperate is that?”
Love. The word exploded in an empty place in him, as if that powder had burned to the end of the line. He clamped down until the echo died. “Desperate on the demon’s part? Or yours?” When she glared at him, he shrugged. “It makes a bargain to fill what’s missing in us and then takes what it needs.”
“But why me?” She wilted a bit. “Seems a little conceited to think I’ve had any more tribulations than the next guy.”
“Haven’t you?” He waited while she considered. “But it’s not about the quantity of your suffering. It’s the quality. Demons are quite the connoisseurs of pain.”
She grimaced. “Me too lately, I guess.”
“Exactly. When the demon crosses over, it seeks a matching target, a soul that resonates with its energy. Somewhere in your past is a penance trigger. It defines the headwaters of an invisible fault line in your soul, cutting a path right to the moment when the demon breaks your life in two.”
“A penance trigger?” Some memory brought a hazy glitter to the corner of her eye. “So it was because of me.”
The tear never fell, but his muscles tightened as if reacting to a mortal threat. He held himself still with effort. He wouldn’t reach for her again. “Whatever it was doesn’t necessarily make you guilty, Sera. It just made you vulnerable.”
Despite his soft tone, her instant focus pinned him. Her narrowed eyes left no room for tears. “I still can’t believe any of this. I should have my head examined.”
“You mean your soul.”
She took a hard hit off her coffee. “I don’t go to church anymore.”
Her brusque dismissal cut him off as surely as he’d interrupted her list of existential questions. Well, he didn’t want her to pry into his past either. He should respect those boundaries, as he would the no-touch taboo of the possessed.