And here he thought he couldn’t feel any worse. “You’re right.”
“But don’t be with her out of guilt,” Georgie said, her lips curving into a knowing smile. “A woman can always tell. She needs you, Dalton, in ways even you don’t yet understand. You just need to be clear in your motivations. Either help her get through this with all you have-and by that I mean body, heart, and soul-or leave her alone.”
Dalton already knew which way he had to go, because the thought of never touching Isabelle again caused him physical pain.
He was going to have to figure out how to deal with this-having her and still doing what he needed to do. He wasn’t sure how he could do both, but maybe an honest approach was a good way to start.
It would sure be a first for him.
Tase sat in the darkness, smiling.
Isabelle’s power was strong. He only had to keep pushing her, to bring the darkness within her to life again, and watch it grow.
Oh, she still fought him, but her resolve weakened. And Tase felt her. Every time the dark side of herself tried to emerge, he felt her. And the more the demon blood in her surged, the happier Tase became.
Because with his guidance, her human side had no chance to win.
It would only be a matter of time now. Soon the Isabelle he wanted would surface completely. Then he’d have his Queen of Darkness again, under his control and ready to do his bidding. The human Isabelle was weak. His queen would be powerful, a half-human puppet whose strings he could manipulate as he desired.
And her first task would be to bring about her lover’s downfall. Tase looked forward to the day when Isabelle destroyed Dalton.
The Master would be pleased by that coup, the bringing in of not only Isabelle, but Dalton, too.
Tase’s smile slid into a wide grin, and he let the flames surrounding him explode into a shower of orange and red fire, enveloping him like a blanket.
CHAPTER TEN
Mandy and Michael had brought the demon into one of the hidden Realm of Light locations-this one fully equipped with a lab-so they could run some tests on the creature.
The demon had a wallet on him, with all the usual things a normal human would have, including a driver’s license and credit cards.
The demon’s “name” was James McAdams. He lived in the suburbs with his wife, no kids. Drove a nice car and had a job as a real estate developer, income in the mid six figures. He had a ton of credit cards with high limits.
“So who is this guy, really?” Mandy stood outside the lab now, pacing in front of the two-way mirror while they hooked up the demon to more wires, more IV’s, stuck more tubes and needles and doodads in the damn thing.
“Obviously a demon,” Michael said.
“But the I.D. was legit. Do you think this guy used to be human?”
“He has a full background. His fingerprints match his military record. I’d say that the demon in there is the same body that used to be the human James McAdams.”
Unbelievable. There was so much they didn’t know.
“This is bullshit,” she said to Michael. Poking and prodding the comatose demon was doing no good. How were they going to find out anything if they kept it unconscious? “Wake it up and let me go in there fully armed. Give me five minutes alone with that thing and I’ll get some answers.”
Michael shook his head, braced his feet in a wide, military stance, and faced the two-way mirror head-on. “Not the way it works around here, Mandy and you know it. There’s protocol.”
She scrunched her nose and stopped pacing, mimicking Michael’s stance as she, too, turned toward the mirror. “My way is more fun,” she grumbled.
Michael’s lips curved.
“Careful, Mike. You might have just smiled.”
He kept his focus on the activity in the lab. “Tell anyone and I’ll have you vaporized. I have a reputation to protect. My team needs to believe I’m an asshole.”
She snorted. “No worries there. I’m sure they’ll have no trouble buying into that.”
“With your help.”
“Of course.”
She studied the creature. It looked so human. She hated that.
“So what are they doing to it?” she asked.
“Testing blood and tissues, running MRIs and CT scans. Basically a full external and internal workup. We’ve never had a live demon to examine before. We want anatomical and physiological makeup on it, to see how, or even if, it varies from human.”
“And if it’s not at all different?”
He shrugged. “Then we’ll go at it another way.”
“Interrogation?”
“Yes.”
Groovy. Maybe she could help. She really liked interrogation. “Won’t it be able to disappear once it’s conscious, though? They have the ability to vaporize.”
“I know. We’re working on that.”
Leave it to the Realm to figure out a way to keep the demon from evaporating in front of them. If anyone could do it, it was the group of scientists who worked for the Realm.
The door opened and one of the doctors came out, handed Michael a clipboard, and went back inside. Michael flipped through the pages.
“Christ.”
“What is it?”
“Preliminary results from some of the tests.”
“So what do we know so far?”
“That if the thing lying on the table in there were human, it would be dead.”
She arched a brow and peered over his shoulder. “Really?”
“Yeah. All these lab results are insane. All way too high. Sodium, potassium, BUN, creatinine, glucose levels-everything is off the charts. There’s no way it should have been up and walking. A human would have been in a coma, or dead.”
He flipped the page. “Body temperature way below normal, too. No one with a seventy-five-degree temperature should be alive. And the freezing agent I injected into it wouldn’t have lowered its temp that much, so it was already cold.”
Mandy made mental notes of all these things that would help the Realm identify a demon. It frightened her to think the Sons of Darkness had come up with a demon that could mix with the human population in daylight. But at least they knew the demons had some characteristics that would allow the hunters to identify them.
“Anything else?” she asked.
“Not yet. Let’s hope we can come up with more, because it’s not like we can run lab work on every human in the population, or take their temperatures. And if there was one wandering around, chances are there are more.”
“In multiple cities.”
“Probably. We need to wake this thing up and ask it some questions,” Michael said.
“You really think it’ll answer?”
He shrugged. “Don’t know until we try. Let’s just hope we can be persuasive enough that it’ll be forthcoming with answers. Nobody wants to die. Not even a demon.”
Mandy was looking forward to that part. “So how soon will you wake it up?”
“We don’t want to wait too long. They’ll finish testing today. After that, we’ll figure out a way to keep its body temperature low enough that it can’t dematerialize on us, but will still remain conscious.”
“I can’t wait.”
“Neither can I.”
“Too bad we can’t use some kind of truth serum on it.”
Michael turned to her, a gleam of something absolutely wicked in his eyes. “Well, it is human in many ways, isn’t it?”
Isabelle did her best to avoid Dalton completely the next day. She made it a point to get up early, then left Dalton a note that she was going up to the main house to spend the day with Georgie. At least the storm had subsided and the power was back on now.
She had to get away from Dalton, couldn’t bear to be so close to him again. Not after what had happened between them last night, after what continued to happen between them. Getting closer, and him backing away at critical moments. She couldn’t continue to put herself through it.