His odor? God. He wouldn’t ask. She didn’t give him a chance to, anyway.
“Are all demons that obvious, then?”
He didn’t follow. “What?”
“Killing dogs. It seems cliché.”
“Tell that to an eight-year-old boy, and see how much a cliché matters. They do what works—and they do it again and again.”
And he’d said “they,” as if Ash wasn’t included in their number. Maybe that was her game: making him believe that she was different, putting him off guard.
It wouldn’t happen.
“I didn’t say it wouldn’t be effective. It’s just not original. And if I think it’s cliché, when my only experience with demons is what seems familiar from books and movies, then the whole ‘killing a boy’s dog’ thing must be really tired.”
An odd way to come around to it, but she wasn’t wrong. “So it is,” he agreed.
“I’d rather be a clever demon. Perhaps that’s why it is taking me so long to come up with a plot against you. My standards are too high.”
Nicholas bit back his laugh. Damn it. How did she turn his anger and suspicion around so easily? In all probability, she was plotting to destroy him. He ought to be preparing for it, not finding humor in it.
“Have you been trying to think up many plots?”
“Not really.” She gave him a sideways glance. “It ought to be simpler now, knowing that I should think of something cliché. And you never answered me: Are demons all so obvious?”
“It’s not so obvious,” he said. “Not when there are so many humans doing the same things that you demons do.”
“Oh. So what’s one more bit of evil here and there?”
“Yes. They hide in plain sight.”
“Then how will we find Madelyn? How can you tell demons from humans unless they give themselves away?” She paused. “How did you realize she was a demon in the first place? You didn’t know it when she killed Rachel, and you haven’t seen her since that night.”
No, he hadn’t. “I spent a lot of money.”
“Oh, really? How did that help? Is there a code printed on the back of a thousand-dollar bill, like something out of a Dan Brown novel?”
Was she irritated? He couldn’t be certain. She didn’t show enough emotion to categorize her response as snippy, but with just a little more heat he might have. A little drier, and it might have been sarcasm. Either way, she obviously didn’t appreciate indirect answers—or attempts to evade an answer.
Interesting. Demons were all about wordplay and obfuscation. They loved to twist words or give them double meanings. Ash didn’t. At least, not in any way that Nicholas recognized. Every word from Madelyn’s tongue had dripped with sweet poison, killing his father before she’d turned it on Nicholas. Yet even now, when he thought Ash might be irritated, she didn’t attack him. Had she forgotten how to do that, too?
He could easily find out. “She and Rachel vanished. Poof! Gone. For a while, I’d wondered if I’d snapped. Even my therapist thought I might have had a psychotic break—”
“You have a therapist?”
And she’d jumped right on it. What would come next? Telling him that he possessed a weak mind and spirit? That he wasn’t a real man?
He hoped she’d try. He’d better know how to deal with her if she began responding like every other demon.
“Yes,” he confirmed. “With a mother like Madelyn, I needed one.”
“For how long?”
“Since I came to the States at fifteen.”
Thanks to his father, he’d had dual citizenship and enough money to escape Madelyn’s influence. He wouldn’t take the same way out his father had, however—and from the moment he’d stepped off the plane, he’d been planning how to return and destroy her. But Nicholas had also known that Madelyn had already managed to poison him with her words and her neglect, and that if he didn’t seek help digging out the rot, he’d end up like his father, anyway.
Madelyn would have called his reliance on a therapist weak; he saw it as defiance and another form of vengeance. Despite everything she’d done, Madelyn wouldn’t break him.
“You’ve had the same therapist for twenty years?”
“Yes.”
“And he—Or is it she?”
“She.”
Only by mistake. At fifteen, he hadn’t wanted a thing to do with women, especially not someone the same age as his mother. So he’d picked Leslie Sinclair out of a directory, but when the appointment came, had discovered a woman with a man’s name. Good manners had kept him on the couch, but by the end of the session, she hadn’t had to twist his arm to return.
Now, Nicholas believed that Leslie hadn’t just saved his life—she’d probably nipped some nascent misogyny in the bud. Just as well. According to many people he’d worked with or whose companies he’d ripped apart, Nicholas was already enough of a dick. No need to add woman hating to his list of sins.
“Does she know you’re obsessed with revenge?”
“Of course.”
Although the reason behind that revenge had changed over time. As a fifteen-year-old boy, it had been born from a sense of betrayal. His mother had forsaken him. Madelyn hadn’t even attempted to stop him from leaving England, and he’d wanted her to regret that, and to regret every careless or razor-edged remark she’d ever made.
After months of talking to Leslie, he’d recognized exactly why he’d wanted revenge so badly: He’d wanted Madelyn to feel sorry, dammit. He’d wanted her to notice her son, to acknowledge the pain she’d caused him.
Within a year, he no longer cared whether Madelyn regretted anything, but he hadn’t lost the desire to ruin her. Recounting every detail of his childhood to Leslie had shown him that his mother wasn’t just thoughtless and neglectful—he’d realized that she was a sadistic, evil bitch who’d destroyed his father and tried to do the same to him. He’d been determined to destroy her in return by taking away the only thing she’d ever nurtured: her business. Nicholas had formed Reticle with that single goal in mind, putting Wells-Down and his mother in the crosshairs, and he hadn’t let anyone stand in his way.
Then he’d discovered that Madelyn was a demon, that she’d likely killed his true mother and murdered Rachel, and everything had changed. He’d been driven by revenge before, but that was nothing compared to the need to destroy Madelyn now.
“And in twenty years, your therapist hasn’t tried to redirect your hostility?”
“She tried. It didn’t take. Now she just keeps me honest about what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it.”
“You don’t lie to her, then? You don’t avoid her questions?”
At Ash’s narrowed look, Nicholas couldn’t stop his laugh. So that did irritate her. But as much as the demon wanted answers from him, she was also easily distracted by new information. “I tell her everything.”
“Then I want to be your therapist.” She huffed out a breath. “You even told her that Madelyn is a demon?”
“Yes.”
“And she believed you?”
“No. But I don’t pay her to believe me. I pay her to treat me, to force me to acknowledge my motivations and to challenge my assumptions. So far, I’ve met every challenge to my satisfaction—and although she might think I’m delusional, I know I’m not.”
Ash didn’t respond, but her brows lifted and a smile quickly touched her mouth.
“Why is that funny?” Nothing else had amused her, but that did?
“Not funny. It just finally makes sense. I wondered if you were lying about the therapist because you’re too arrogant and certain of yourself to have one. But now that I hear ‘I met every challenge’ and ‘I know I’m not crazy,’ it finally fits what I already knew of you.”
Nicholas wished that something about her would fit. Her assessment of his personality was spot on, but he couldn’t hear any judgment in it. A man as driven as he was required a certain level of self-confidence, but usually people who called him “arrogant” used
the word like a curse . . . and followed it up with “son of a bitch.” Ash didn’t, and it threw him off.
“I focus on what I want,” he said. “And I don’t allow anything to get in my way.”
“I noticed. And in any case, you didn’t have a psychotic break. Rachel and Madelyn did disappear. How?”
Back around to that, then? So she allowed distractions, but was tenacious about following through. He’d remember that. She could be diverted from her course for only a short time.
“A demon can make some things vanish—I think that’s what happened to Rachel’s body. Madelyn took it, and then ran off so quickly that it appeared as if she’d vanished, too.”
“I can make things vanish?”
Distracted again, but not unfocused. She chased after stray bits of information like . . . like he did. But Nicholas was trying to discover everything, just in case the knowledge was useful later. He was trying to form an impression of her that he could understand and anticipate. Ash wouldn’t have the same reasons.
Was she just that curious about everything?
“Everything goes into a psychic storage of some kind.” Nicholas didn’t know much more than that. “Demons and Guardians both have one. They call it a cache.”
“A cache . . . like a pocket universe? Something small on the outside, big on the inside—and we put stuff in there, somehow?” She glanced at him, as if searching for the answer in his face. Nicholas didn’t have one for her. “Like a TARDIS?”
Her references for understanding a demon’s abilities were based on Doctor Who and Schwarzenegger movies? God. “I don’t know if it’s science or magic. You can’t put living things in there, though.”
“Why?” When Nicholas couldn’t answer that, she wondered, “Is that where my clothes go?”
“When I gave you the electric shock? Probably.”
“And the other times?”
Other times? Nicholas fought not to grin. “Do they disappear often?”
“Somewhat often. Then people start laughing, and the clothes come back. Ah, and see? You’re laughing now, too.”
So he was. He could almost picture it . . . Ah, hell. He could picture it. All too easily. When her clothes had disappeared earlier and he’d still believed she might be Madelyn, he hadn’t really looked at her. Now his memory filled in the little he’d seen in delicious detail: the changing shadows beneath her knees as her skin had faded from crimson to tanned; the shallow depression of her navel, which demons didn’t possess in their true forms; the silken fall of blond hair across soft breasts. Glimpses, impressions, because he hadn’t been looking at her sexually . . . and made him wish now that he’d looked a little harder.
He wouldn’t have been averse to her clothes disappearing. And if they did, Nicholas didn’t think he’d be laughing. No, he’d be enjoying the view.
How screwed up was that? He’d ask Leslie when he saw her next. Did sexual attraction to a gorgeous demon suggest that he was even more fucked up than he’d thought, or was it healthier than planning to slay one?
He tried to imagine Leslie’s reaction and couldn’t help being amused. One of these days, she was going to have him institutionalized.
“No living things,” Ash said softly, cutting into his amusement. “But Madelyn vanished the body—so that means Rachel had to be dead. Did Madelyn vanish the evidence, too?”
God. The memory of Rachel’s bloodied chest replaced Ash’s perfect breasts. The memory of his shock and utter helplessness as she died.
And it was exactly the slap that Nicholas had needed. Gorgeous demon or not, he couldn’t cultivate that physical attraction. Sex complicated everything. Allowing anyone that close meant he lowered his emotional shields and exposed more of himself than he wanted to. Taking that risk with a demon . . . Hell, he might as well put a gun to his head and pull the trigger now.
A dead man couldn’t pursue revenge. That was all that mattered. This demon didn’t matter, and neither did his screwed-up attraction.
“Madelyn took everything with her,” he said. “The gun, the bullets, the blood. And so, like I said, I spent money. I hired investigators to look for murders where the body and evidence had gone missing despite witnesses, to track down anyone with a similar story to mine. After a while, they found commonalities, but no answers. Not until about four years ago, when one investigator ran across Sally Barrows.”
“Another demon?”
“No. A vampire.”
“A vampire,” she echoed flatly. “Is that like a dragon?”
Nicholas couldn’t see her eyeteeth behind her compressed lips, but he guessed she had fangs again. “Yes,” he said. “Because I’m not lying about vampires or dragons.”
She didn’t respond. Either struggling to believe him, he realized, or flat-out refusing to. Fuck. Never did he imagine trying to prove to a demon that vampires existed.
He damn well wasn’t going to start now. Let her believe what she wanted. “That’s when I began spending a lot more money. For the right price, Sally and her husband agreed to help me find Madelyn, and told me what they knew about demons.”
“I notice they aren’t helping you now.”
“Because they’re dead.”
That grief must have slipped through his emotional shields, or Ash heard something in his voice. She looked away from the road, studied his face. “What happened?”
“A demon ripped them apart.”
Sally and Gerald had known some information about demons, but they hadn’t known a lot. Like many vampires, they were mostly ignorant of their origins, having heard only bits and pieces of the truth about Guardians and demons, but not the whole story. So they’d known enough to capture a demon, to take it down alive, but hadn’t known enough to keep it down.
“How long did you work with them?”
“Three years, off and on. Sometimes they went into other vampire communities and gathered information.” And other times, they’d worked together with him—Nicholas making certain their sleeping forms were secure when the sun rose, and then training with and learning from them by night. “I met Rosalia after that.”
When she’d slain the demon who’d butchered Gerald and Sally. Still, that demon’s death hadn’t been enough of a punishment. Not after Nicholas had seen what it had done to his friends.
Nicholas had been going it alone since then. He wouldn’t ask any other humans or vampires to risk their lives in pursuit of his revenge, and he sought help from Rosalia only because she could take care of herself—as she’d aptly demonstrated by beheading a demon several times stronger and faster than she was. One moment Nicholas had seen Rosalia and her partner facing the demon, and the next moment she’d been bleeding from her gut and the demon’s head had been rolling across the floor.
“Rosalia is the Guardian?” Ash asked.
“Yes. And because that’s what Guardians do—hunt demons—she had more information about how to find them.”
“And how do you?”
“The most obvious sign is the temperature of their skin.”
Ash rubbed the tips of her fingers together, as if feeling the heat of her own skin and considering that. Finally, she said, “It’s obvious, but difficult to use for identification, I’d think. You’d have to touch a demon to know.”
Not necessarily. Modern infrared sensors could detect higher temperatures from a distance, and the differences were noticeable, especially if the demon stood near a human. No reason to mention that, though.
“It’s a problem,” he agreed. “I can’t walk down the street shaking everyone’s hand.”
“Or kissing them, like you did to me.”
So she’d figured that out? “If I’d shaken your hand, you’d have noticed me grabbing the Taser.”
“So? You could have just not let go of me. You know I can’t pull free without breaking the Rules.”
No, he couldn’t have just held on. He’d needed payback, however small. “You showed up with Rachel’s face, and I thought you were M
adelyn. I wanted to electrocute you. So I got close enough to do it.”
She nodded, as if in understanding. “All right. The kissing makes more sense, then.”
No judgment? No pointing out that he was a sadistic bastard? Who the hell was this demon? He’d given her freebies all over the place, practically invited her to tear into his character, and she sat and nodded her head because it made sense.
“Is the hot skin the only difference?”
Her question made Nicholas realize that she’d been waiting for him to continue. He shook his head. “Demons count on people to explain away the unexplainable. A man disappears, and people tell themselves they must have been mistaken—that they just didn’t see him turn a corner. Someone moves too fast, looks inhuman for just a second, and they come up with excuses: They’re tired, their eyes are playing tricks, they—”
“Are going crazy,” Ash said.
“That, too. Most of the time, they shake their heads and laugh it off.” Others couldn’t, and some, like his father, landed in the care of doctors like Cawthorne—and then took a dive from the tallest bank tower in London. “But if you know what it might really have been, you look a little harder.”
“And then make sure you’re right by touching them?” When he nodded, she said, “So it’s all luck—a matter of seeing something at the right time? You’ll be looking for Madelyn forever, then.”
“We will be looking,” Nicholas reminded her. Though he’d be stupid not to get out of this bargain as quickly as possible. The more time he spent with the demon, the less he could figure her out. He hadn’t counted on that. When he’d made the bargain, he’d been certain of his ability to predict her reactions.
He should have been able to, goddammit. He should have been dodging her slings and arrows, not reminding himself that he shouldn’t be attracted to her, that he shouldn’t be amused by her. He’d expected subtle insults, not . . . whatever she was doing.
“We,” she echoed. “And based on what you’re saying, it really will be forever. Or until we die of old age.”
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