I could move. I thought I could move. I just didn’t seem to have the energy to do anything more than stare at him as he advanced on me with hunger and need so clearly evident in every movement, in the glint of darkness in his eyes.
It wasn’t the physical beauty of his body that held me so still. It was the beauty of his power.
Demons were from the underworld, yes. Demons were not to be trusted, and like he’d taken the time to explain to me, they were easily used, natural to betrayal, selfish, cruel.
They were chaos. But just like the gods who walked our beaches, just like the creatures—many who had reputations of being bloodthirsty monsters, boogiemen, evil—demons could not be painted with one brush.
Rossi didn’t let all the vampires in the world live in Ordinary for a reason. A lot of them were horrible people. Same thing applied to demons.
While I would never trust a demon, I knew they were not, could not all be horrifying evil.
There was no denying I was drawn to Bathin. No denying that my father’s soul had seemed whole, unharmed, though that could have been some sort of trickery.
And there was no denying my father and the demon seemed to have come to some sort of understanding between them, that was not jailor and jailed, and not friends. It was, if I had to put a name to it, more like they respected each other’s nature and reason for the contract they had entered into.
That last thing Dad had said to him, that Bathin had a promise to keep, floated to the front of my brain. I wondered what that was all about.
“Delaney.”
All thoughts froze and fell away like brittle snow on the wind.
He wanted me, he wanted my soul in a way that made me tremble, that made me want to turn and scream and run. Or made me want to step into him, into that fire to know what it would taste like on my tongue.
As if.
I wanted my gun, a rocket launcher, a bomb. Anything that would kill him, stop him, make him, and the nightmare promise of his smile, go away.
“Breathe.”
I breathed.
“You’ll want to hold very still now.” His hand extended, fire swaying at the tip of the three fingers he extended. It was warm, that fire.
A fire that did not burn.
“Why?” I shivered, suddenly too cold.
Three fingers stroked down, slashing from my left shoulder to my sternum. There was pain–out there at a distance. A scream.
And then the world exploded.
Chapter 8
Someone was squishing me. I blinked and moved my tongue around in my mouth. It tasted weirdly of burned herbs and cinnamon. Sounds filtered into my awareness. Sights. Sensation.
My back was pressed against a wall, cold, and something dug in the back of my hip a little painfully, not that it seemed to matter much.
My front was covered by the back of a muscular, very pissed off werewolf. Jame.
He was still kicking off a fever, but from the tension in him, I knew he was in full protective mode. There was a threat.
Well, that was probably something I should deal with. I was the chief of police, after all.
“Hey, Jame? You wanna give me a little breathing room, buddy? Let me in on the situation?”
He growled.
Okay, not really helpful. I twisted a little so I could look past his shoulder.
