Demon Marked

Emma was through the third-story window, down the curling metal steps, and dropping to the ground into the narrow space between Sam’s building and the restaurant next door in less than a minute—making her second bathroom-based escape in less than four hours. By the time Andre came to check on her, she hoped to be far, far away.

She had to get out of Southie. Hell, she had to get out of New York City. The watch on Andre’s arm had confirmed there was no one she could trust. No one except Sam, and she was a million miles away.

Emma didn’t have the cash for a plane, but she might be able to afford a train ticket. She could head up to Penn Station, get on the first train headed west, and find a way to contact her sister along the way. Hopefully, she could meet Sam and Jace between the two coasts.

Andre, whose memories evidently hadn’t shown her everything she needed to know about the state of his soul. She couldn’t believe that he was the man in the suit she’d seen in the minds of the pair who’d attacked her, that Andre was the leader who’d made Death Ministry thugs cower and Stewart cry. But then, she hadn’t wanted to see something like that in Andre.

She’d wanted to believe that he was a good guy, a man worthy of the stupid crush she’d developed, a man she wouldn’t mind remembering as her first ... maybe her only. She must have simply tricked herself into seeing only the not-so-bad in Mr. Conti, because there was no doubt Andre was the one she’d seen ordering Stewart’s beating.

The gold watch on his wrist was exactly the same, down to the gaudy diamonds on the band and the gold and black C etched into the face. There was even a slight crack in the glass ... probably from where he’d backhanded the Death Ministry thug.

Emma’s heart raced and her stomach punched at her lungs until she had to pause for a moment to swallow the bagel rising in her throat. She leaned against the cool stone of the building on her right, sucking in deep, calming breaths, refusing to lose what little sustenance she’d managed to ingest.

She didn’t have time to get sick or to think about what Andre might really want from her. If he was the man behind all this and had ordered the trashing of her apartment, then he had to be after the spell book. Which meant he’d been playing with her all along, worming his way into her confidence in order to steal what his thugs hadn’t been able to find.

Emma’s gut pitched, but she shoved away from the wall and started running again anyway, weaving her way through the tangle of streets surrounding Sam’s building, heading in the general direction of the barricade’s exit. If only the city allowed people to cross over into Manhattan on foot, she could be at Penn Station within an hour. Instead, she’d be stuck in a taxi for half the afternoon, a sitting duck for any of Andre’s minions who might be looking for her.

For the first time since moving to Southie, she felt trapped by the walls surrounding her, the hunted instead of the hunter. Andre had done that. He’d betrayed her and let her down, just like everyone else she’d ever trusted.

She couldn’t believe she’d slept with him, or felt so guilty for losing control of her demon mark. She was a fool, a dumb, horny fool. Just the memory of how Andre had made her call his name as he pushed inside her made her face hot with shame. What had she been thinking? How could she have gotten naked with a man she didn’t even like?

But then, if she hadn’t gotten him naked, she never would have seen that watch. It was usually tucked up beneath the sleeve of his coat. Why he would pay so much money for a status symbol and then hide it under his jacket was a mystery to her, but so was just about everything else about Andre.

Everything he’d told her was a lie. Everything. After all she’d seen in the minds of evil, deceptive people, he’d still managed to fool her.

He was an excellent actor. For a few hours, she’d actually believed he cared. He’d seemed so genuinely affected by what they’d done. The way he’d put his arm around her and just ... held her ... She’d actually started to think they might have a future together: the sex addict and the energy vampire. What a combo that would have been.

Emma was so wrapped up in her thoughts that she didn’t realize she’d missed her second left until the cramped alley opened onto a dilapidated courtyard. She slowed, surveying her surroundings, the nasty feeling in her stomach getting even nastier.

Small, twisted trees and thick vines sprung from the ruined concrete yard, creeping toward the rays of sun that shot through the hollowed-out wreckage of the building across the way. The pavement beneath her feet was buckled in several places—as if some giant worm had passed this way before her—and the smell of demon waste baking in the summer heat drifted through the air.

Even before Emma saw the scaly alien form crouched in the wreckage of the old Spanish-style fountain dominating the yard, Emma knew she’d made a very serious error in judgment. Wandering into the ruins was a dumb call on a good day—when you’d had a good night’s sleep and a solid breakfast and didn’t feel like your stomach was going to leap out of your mouth if you opened too wide.

On a day like today—when her heart ached and her head spun with Andre’s betrayal and her body burned with shame and fear—a stroll through the ruins might just be the death of her.

As Emma turned to run—boot sliding in a pile of demon shit she’d missed on the way in—she wondered whether Andre would find her corpse before it was too late. If he caught her before the demon ate her, he might still be able to use her body to work whatever spell he was hoping to cast. Some of the grimoire’s spells called for the blood or flesh of a demon-marked human, not the human’s aid in working the magic.

The thought made her run faster, legs pumping hard as the click of claws on concrete sounded behind her. That bastard had already used her body once. She’d be damned if she’d let him use it again. She was going to make it out of here alive. Demons were strong, but most of them weren’t particularly fast. If she kept her head on her shoulders and ran straight back toward the more populated streets, then—

Striker demons. Like Ju Du demons, the lizardlike creatures could change the color and texture of their scales to blend in with their surroundings. Unlike most other demons, however, they hunted in packs. Still, you didn’t hear many stories about Strikers killing off tourists. They were about the size of your average five-year-old, with short, stunted forearms and only a handful of teeth in their small mouths.

But if there were enough of them, they could kill a thin woman. Especially if that thin woman was suddenly dizzy and ill, her forearms shimmering with the telltale hint of gold dust.

Stewart’s shimmering neck floated across her mind’s eye, and the truth cracked like a whip through her clouded thoughts. The Hamma claws. She’d pulled the claw venom into her body when she’d fed on Stewart and the Strong Man. She should have realized the truth sooner! Greg hadn’t slipped Hamma into his tequila; he’d had it in his bloodstream and she’d sucked in a contact high.

The same thing had happened once, years ago. One of her victims had been tripping on Inuago pellets at a rave. After she’d fed, she’d gone back inside and danced until she threw up, then fed on one of the women who bent to help her up off the bathroom floor. It was the only time she’d ever danced—or fed—in public. She’d suspected she was as high as a kite. She should have learned her lesson and kept her hands off anyone who might have touched demon drugs. More important, she should have fucking understood what was happening this morning from the get-go.

Most important, she should stop wasting time beating herself up. She had to get out of here and find a suitable human snack before she ended up passed out on the concrete, Striker demons nibbling her flesh from her body while she was still alive.

Emma grunted as she darted to her right, narrowly avoiding the snapping teeth of the second demon, but she didn’t dare cry out for help. She wasn’t going to find help in this part of Southie. All she’d find were more demons or bounty hunters who might very well be working for the man she was trying to avoid.

She just had to stay quiet and move quickly. If there were only two of the Strikers, she would be okay. There was another alley on the opposite side of the courtyard. It had to lead to somewhere better than where she was now. If she just kept moving, she would—

The third demon was crouched on the opposite side of the fountain, waiting for the other two to herd their prey in the right direction. Out of the corner of her eye, Emma spied a flash of gray but barely had time to turn her head before the third Striker was on her, knocking her to the ground.

If she’d been steadier on her feet, she wouldn’t have fallen. But she wasn’t, and so she did, crashing into the concrete shoulder first. Her head came next, pain shooting from the back of her skull to slam between her eyes. The agony was so intense that it took several seconds for her to regain awareness of the body still attached to her throbbing head, to feel the hot noses snuffling at her stomach as the three Strikers scrambled on top of her, each searching for soft flesh to bite.

Emma sobbed and pushed at the wriggling bodies, but the Strikers didn’t even bother to snap at her trembling fingers. They could tell she was weak, easy prey. There was no need to fight her when they’d be eating her in a few more moments. She tried to turn over, to protect her vulnerable stomach, but her writhing only seemed to excite the creatures.

She’d nearly accepted the fact that she was going to die when a sharp blast of stun fire crackled through the air, and one of the Strikers screamed and fell heavily on top of her.

The other two scattered like cockroaches in a newly lit room, scuttling away across the courtyard as the stun gun continued to fire. Emma thought she heard one of them fall but couldn’t be sure. Her pulse was pounding too loudly in her ears, her heart struggling to overcome the trauma of her close call and the drugging effects of the Hamma claws.

Still, it didn’t take her long to guess who had shot the gun that had saved her life. Even before his face appeared above her, lit from behind like some dark angel come to earth, she knew it was Andre. He’d found her, and now he was going to scoop her up and drag her back to that cage near the shelter.

The thought made her pause, but only for a second. Andre needed the book and knew her well enough to realize she wouldn’t let him anywhere near it if she suspected he was going to use it for some evil scheme. That must have been why he’d let her roam free for so long. But now that he knew she was onto him, that she’d run from him the same way she’d run from the doctor and Little Francis, he—

“Is Little Francis in on it, too?” she asked, shoving at Andre’s hands when he flung the limp demon off her stomach and tried to help her into a seated position.

“In on what?” he asked, angrier than she’d ever seen him. He looked like he wanted to shake her teeth loose. Finally, she was seeing the real Andre, and she didn’t like what she saw one bit. “What the fuck are you talking about? Why did you run from me?”

“You know why.” She tensed as he grabbed her arms and hauled her onto his lap. He swiped at the gold on her skin with a rattled sigh.

“Give it a rest. You know I don’t use drugs,” she said, energized by the anger coursing through her veins. She managed to sit up a little straighter. She couldn’t quite stand, but there was no way she was going to lean against his shoulder. “Why don’t you tell me why you’re after the book?”

He froze, a look of genuine confusion marring his face. He was good; no doubt about it. “The spell book? What are you—”

“Don’t lie to me. Not again,” she said, cutting him off before he could. “I know, Andre, so you might as well tell me the truth.”

“You’re out of your mind,” he said, angry again, his fingers digging into her hip with a contained violence that would have been scary if she hadn’t just nearly been eaten alive.

“Tell me,” she said, ignoring the heaving of her stomach as the Hamma venom worked its way deeper into her bloodstream.

“Fine, then I’ll find it myself.” With the last of her strength, Emma drove her hands into Andre’s hair, fingers digging into the pressure points at the base of his skull. She expected him to fight her, to rip her arms away and haul her body to her feet and off to whatever holding facility he deemed fit. Instead, he sat completely still, only flinching slightly as her fingers dug deep into his skin.

After a moment, his lips parted and his face muscles relaxed; then, she was inside his mind. Frantic and enraged, she rifled through his memories, throwing pieces of him in the air as she hunted for the proof she sought.

She watched him running through the ruins, desperate, looking for her; she saw herself through his eyes as he kissed the curve of her breast; she saw her own smile as they walked down the street, the sun glinting on the gold in her hair. Emma pushed the pretty images aside, probing deeper, shoving into every corner of Andre’s mind, scattering memories of beautiful women and childhood hurts and Katie in her wake.

For what seemed like hours she scoured the contents of his soul, finding every little sin he’d ever confessed into the quiet booth at Saint Mary’s and a few dozen he’d been too ashamed to tell anyone. But nowhere in those secret shames did she find anything about Death Ministry connections or Stewart or great plans involving demon spell books and supernatural evil.

She did, however, find a hazy memory of the watch on his wrist, the one his Uncle Francis had given all the male cousins for their twenty-first birthdays, the special watch designed just for the Contis. Andre had cracked the face a few months ago when he’d dropped it on the marble floor of his bathroom. He’d been hiding it under his suit jacket until he had a chance to get it fixed, knowing how important the watch was to his uncle.

That meant at least five men had this exact same watch. It also meant that—if his memories were to be believed—Andre was innocent. Unfortunately ... one of his cousins was not. One of the Contis was up to his eyeballs in shady drug connections and big, bad plans of the demon-spell variety. One of the Contis wanted her in that cage, and she had a pretty good idea who that man was.

But she couldn’t tell Andre, not until she had some kind of proof. He’d never believe that one of his family members had tried to hurt her, especially not now, when he assumed she’d run away from him to get high only hours after nearly overdosing.

“Can you really see inside my mind when you do that?” he asked, for once his tone more curious than disbelieving.

“I can.” Emma took a deep breath, fighting another wave of nausea. She was going to have to find someone to feed on, quickly, or she wouldn’t be investigating anything except the inside of the nearest toilet. “But I didn’t find ... what I thought I’d find.”

“You really thought I was the one after your book?” he asked, having evidently put two and two together and figured out what she was raving about. The hurt in his eyes made her wince.

He shook his head, his disappointment making the air even harder to breathe. “You had more reasons to believe I wasn’t.”

And ... he was right. Completely right. He’d given her no reason to doubt him. He was angry and hurt, and he had every right to be. She’d been horrible to him.

But then, she was horrible to everyone ... sooner or later. She could blame it on her childhood, she could blame it on her time locked away in a madman’s basement, she could blame it on the dark craving and every life it had driven her to steal from the time she was too little to tie her shoes ... but it didn’t really matter why she was the way she was. It only mattered that she was broken, useless to other, normal people. She’d tried to warn Andre that she was bad news, but he hadn’t listened. It was his fault that he felt like his favorite puppy had pissed in his shoes.

Too bad blaming him didn’t make her feel any better. Nothing she could do would make either of them feel better. ...

Andre had said he wanted to try. Had he meant it? Could he really care about her enough to give her his trust? And could she put aside all her bullshit, all her issues, all the fear that she’d never be able to have a normal, human relationship, long enough to give him that same chance?

She didn’t know. But she suddenly realized how much she’d meant those words in her sister’s shop. She did want to try. With Andre. And there was no better time than the present.

“I think I sucked the drugs into my body when I was feeding on Greg this morning and then again with Stewart. Right before the Striker demons attacked, I ... I had a memory of a time when the same thing happened,” she said, watching Andre’s face for some sign that he thought she was lying or crazy or both. Instead, he was quiet, waiting for her to go on, for her to give him a reason to believe. “That time it was Inuago pellets. They made me sick, and I had to feed again to get the drugs out of my system, the same way I had to feed this morning.”

She told him about Dr. Finch, about what she’d seen in his mind, how she’d pulled his energy inside her to banish the torture of the venom and antivenom warring it out in her body. She shared everything she’d seen in the Strong Man and Stewart’s memories, even the things she couldn’t make sense of yet. It was only when she got to the part about the watch that her voice faltered and the words didn’t come so easily. She was ashamed of how she’d reacted. So ashamed.

Andre shook his head as she trailed off and swallowed hard. The strained silence stretched on and on, broken only by the scuffling of tiny claws somewhere in the shadows around the courtyard.

Squat demons, most likely, or something equally harmless. Still, they should get out of here before something bigger came along or the Striker demons decided to come back for their stunned friend. Not to mention the fact that Emma needed to feed. Now. But she couldn’t seem to say any of those things to Andre. She couldn’t say a word, not until she knew if he could at least try to believe her.

“What about all the other bad guys you’ve fed on? Why hasn’t this happened more than once before?” Andre asked, shocking her with his choice of questions. Of all the things she’d told him, she’d assumed he’d be more interested in the fact that someone in his family was working with the Death Ministry. “Weren’t a lot of those people on demon drugs?”

“Not where I grew up. People in our town were too poor to afford fancy drugs. We had to stick to alcohol and cigarettes and the occasional bowl.” She winced as another cramp hit her stomach but forced herself to talk through the pain. “But you’d be surprised—a lot of the really bad guys, and girls, don’t do drugs.”

“Something like that,” she said, searching his shuttered face again for some sign that he’d heard and understood the implications of the watch she’d seen in the men’s minds. “I think, for most of them, violence is its own drug.”

His words made her think. Sex and violence—two extreme human emotions, one capable of creating life, the other all too often dedicated to destroying it. She’d always known that she could feed on anger and evil, but apparently she could feed on sex, as well. Father Paul had never mentioned such a thing, but he was a priest and hardly an expert on sexual energy.

But just because she could feed on sex didn’t make it okay. As far as she knew, the consequences of her feeding would still be the same for her victims, and she certainly didn’t want to make victims of her lovers. Especially this lover.

God, was there a chance they really could be lovers? Could he forgive her? Could she find a way to control her demon mark and make sure he was safe in her arms? She hoped so, hoped so hard it made her ache all over.

“My money’s on Little Francis,” Andre finally said, proving he’d understood what that watch meant for the Conti family. He stood with her in his arms as if she weighed no more than the small demon lying stunned on the concrete a few feet away. “I think his eagerness to work a deal with the Death Ministry must have been a cover for his real agenda.”

“I doubt it, but I can’t be sure. And we can’t go back to the offices or to your sister’s shop or anywhere else Francis will think to look for us until we know who’s turned traitor and who hasn’t. We’re going to have to find someplace else where you can rest and—”

“I know somewhere we can go,” she said, seizing on the first idea to float through her spinning head. She didn’t need rest; she needed food, damn it. Whether Andre believed that part of her story or not, she knew it was the truth. “You know the strip club behind Yang’s Curiosity Shop?”

Emma held her breath, hoping he’d agree that Boudreaux’s was a good choice. The manager, Jeremiah, would perfectly suit her current needs. He’d raped at least three of the strippers at the club since Emma had moved into the area last spring.

Ginger volunteered at the rape victims hotline and had warned Emma against getting anywhere near Boudreaux’s. She’d even insisted on accompanying Emma to buy her miniflamethrowers since the back room of Yang’s shared an alley with the front entrance to Boudreaux’s. Ginger, for all her faults and flightiness, was a good person and a very good friend.

Emma had to find some way to contact her and make sure she was safe and—hopefully—still had the spell book in her possession. Thank god she’d run from Little Francis and his people. If anyone could be trusted with a demon grimoire, it was Ginger. She had no lust for supernatural power; she just wanted to expand her boot collection and find a guy who wasn’t a complete scumbag or married or both.

“I know where it is, and I can guess what you want there,” he said, turning right into a narrow street that ran alongside the main road. “What exactly did you see in Dr. Finch again—what was he doing?”

Emma closed her eyes, pulling up the memory of the dark room and Dr. Finch’s hands deep in the insides of a man with a bloated stomach. She swallowed hard, eyes flying open to meet Andre’s. “Organ harvesting, I think. Definitely illegal surgery of some kind, and he didn’t care whether the man on his table lived or died. He wasn’t even wearing gloves when he reached inside his—”

“So you believe me? You really do? About all of it?” She was almost afraid to hope, but there was no doubt he was headed toward Boudreaux’s and away from the Conti family offices.

“I’m sorry. I really am.” She looked up, catching him gazing down at her. What she saw in his eyes made it even harder to breathe. He was still angry, but there was another emotion in those dark depths, something that looked like a word she was too afraid to think for fear of jinxing their future.

“I forgive you,” he said, the three words a promise she knew he would keep. They were in this together now, for better or for worse. Hopefully, they’d get around to the better part one of these days, after all the madness and mayhem.

“No, you shouldn’t.” She lifted her head again. “It’s better if he has no idea where we are or what we’re up to. But we should call Ginger from one of the wall phones at the club. Maybe she’ll answer if it’s a Southie number.”

“After we take care of you,” Andre said, casting a concerned look down at her bare arm. “You’re getting worse.”

The unspoken words hung in the air between them, making Andre pick up his pace as they eased into the alley behind Yang’s, and Boudreaux’s pink neon sign came into view.