My stomach churned, seeing him on the ground, swarmed by the guards.
“Oh, God. No!” I flipped the lock open and shoved at the door with both hands.
The sight of the guards still attacking Ivarr with both his legs broken turned me into a ball of fury, stripping my mind of any fear or self-preservation or even commonsense.
Aware that I had no way to defeat the demons attacking Ivarr, I jumped out of the truck and went straight for Raim.
“Make them stop!” I screamed, running at the figure draped in white.
Raim moved his gaze from the fight to meet mine. It felt like an avalanche of pure ice rolled over me, suffocating me with its crushing cold.
“Kitty.” He tilted his head to the side.
I had no idea he knew my name, but right now it didn’t really matter.
“Call back your drones!” I demanded, struggling to keep eye contact with his freezing glare.
“Miss Jones!” A feminine voice called suddenly from somewhere behind me. “Step away from him.”
“I no longer have use for you,” Raim stated calmly, paying no attention to whomever was approaching us. “Leave.”
“I’m not going anywhere,” I said firmly, also ignoring the clicking sound of high heels at my back.
“Stop this.” I pumped my fist through the air in the direction of the demons beating up Ivarr.
“Miss Jones.” A hand landed firmly on my shoulder, and I finally shot a glance at the tall, dark-haired woman in a sharp pantsuit at my side. “Kitty, we need to go. I’ll take you home.”
“Who the hell are you?” I shrugged her hand off me. “And I’m not leaving until he calls them off.” Not even then. Ivarr was injured, he needed help . . .
Raim’s gaze slowly glided over to the woman at my side, and the indifference slid off his face for the first time ever. His eyes narrowed, his features sharpened with concentration. His arms dropped to his sides as he stared at her face then down at her chest.
I followed his gaze to the tear-shaped pendant that appeared to be made of the same stone as the amulet I was wearing around my neck. Both of them glowed fiercely in the darkness of the night.
“Hmmm.” The woman briefly touched her pendant. “I’ve never seen it do this,” she muttered softly.
“Who are you?” Raim gritted through his teeth.
“Doctor Delilah Neri.” She looked up, meeting his gaze, then blinked as if in a momentary stupor and even went to offer him a hand in greeting but stopped herself halfway, obviously thinking better of it. “I’m here to take Miss Jones home. I was told you’d been notified. Well, I’m not sure if it was you specifically, but someone in your lair was given the information.” Her tone held authority, but it was the undeniable resentment in her voice that immediately bred a sense of camaraderie in me. Her tone softened when she addressed me. “We need to leave, Kitty—”
“No.” I glanced at the demons crowding Ivarr and made a move to dash past Raim to him. Raim’s sudden firm grip on my left arm stopped me in my tracks.
“Call off your thugs!” I yelled in his face, struggling against his hold. Fear for Ivarr was quickly turning to panic. Tears streaming down my cheeks now, I slammed my fist in the arm holding me. “Get them off him!”
His grip on my arm was like a steel vise. My blows didn’t even make him flinch.
“Leave, and I’ll stop them,” he retorted, his voice as cold as his stare, the black wing of his hair whipping in the wind behind him.
“Let go of her.” Doctor Neri’s voice came in low and threatening.
Incredibly, Raim immediately released me at her command. Even more unbelievably, he took a step back and raised his arm.
The guards halted their assault in an instant, as if he’d pushed some invisible button, cutting off their power supply.
Several uniformed bodies lay on the ground next to Ivarr, incapacitated. Two others stood over him. He rose on one elbow, the other arm hanging motionless from his shoulder, his head bent down, the golden hair matted with blood.
“Ivarr!” Tears blurred my vision. I went to run to him, but a pair of arms around my middle stopped me.
“We need to leave, Miss Jones.” Doctor Neri held me in place, with strength that rivaled that of the demons.
“Go.” Raim held up his arm with a threat. “Or I’ll set them off again.”
“Please, don’t hurt him,” I begged, swiping at my wet cheeks.
Obviously unmoved, he held my gaze in silent command.
“Come, Kitty.” Doctor Neri literally dragged me away, my heels tripping over the pavement. “It’ll be better for everyone if we leave,” she said in my ear soothingly, hauling me past the truck to the vehicle that arrived last at the scene.
“They’ve hurt him,” I sobbed, only half-aware of her opening the door and shoving me into the seat.
“He is a demon. Just like them.” She blew a long strand of black hair out of her face and buckled me in then ran around the front of the car to the driver’s side.
“What are they going to do to him now?” I groaned, leaning forward. With a soft snap, the seatbelt held me in place.
“It’s not our concern, Kitty.” She started the engine, reversing the car to drive away.
Through the blur of my tears, I watched the headlights of the disabled vehicles disappear behind the first curve of the road.
“They have their own laws,” she continued. “Your presence there wouldn’t help him. For us it’s best to stay away, as long as they keep their distance, too.”
I glanced her way, rising suspicion prompting questions.
“Where are you taking me, Doctor Neri? Who exactly are you? And how do you know about them?” I placed my hand on the door handle. Although, I realized that the dark abyss of the mountain drop on my side of the road left no hope of jumping out of the moving vehicle.
“You can call me Delilah.”
“Fine.” I sniffled and wiped my cheeks dry. “Where are we going, Delilah?”
“I’m taking you home, to Seattle.”
“Really?” I asked skeptically.
“Since you took off without discussing your release plan, The Priory sent me to get you, soon after the Council notified us about your escape. I’ll help you get your life back on track and take you to your first counseling session on Monday.”
“What do you mean by escape? And, wait a minute, do you work for The Priory?”
My mistrust grew stronger. A chill ran up my arms, and I realized that I’d left my coat in the truck along with everything else.
“No. Not officially. My father did, and I have strong ties with the organization because of him.”
“So, are you aware then that I didn’t simply take off? I was drugged and abducted from the base.”
“By whom?” She shot me a glance, her eyebrows knitted in a frown.
“You tell me. Whom did The Priory send to take me?”
“I really have no knowledge of what you’re talking about, Kitty.” Delilah shook her head.
“Funny they didn’t share that important detail with you,” I scoffed.
“Because it can’t be true, Kitty. Someone from The Priory called me yesterday, asking to pick you up. They said you ran away from the Incubi Base, but the Council had located you. The organization didn’t have any members nearby to get you, and they couldn’t get anyone fast enough to make it here in time. So, they asked me. I live in Seattle, and I drove here—”
“Well, I certainly didn’t knock myself unconscious with drugs then drove my motionless body from one province to another.” I yanked down the neckline of my top, displaying the bruised injection site to her.
Delilah’s gaze flickered to my neck for a moment before returning back to the road ahead.
“It makes no sense for The Priory to do that to you, Kitty. You were about to be released. There is just no point for The Priory to stage another abduction right now.”
“Who did it, then? In your opinion.”
&nb
sp; “Demons. Who else?”
“There is even less sense for demons to take me from their own base.”
“On the contrary.” Delilah’s frown deepened. “They knew they were about to lose you. I wonder if they decided to move you to another location, to possibly hide from The Priory.”
“Why would they dress in uniforms?”
“Most of them wear uniforms, don’t they?”
“Sure, but they used drugs. Why would they use drugs?”
She shrugged a shoulder.
“To make you believe they’re humans?”
“Oh God, really?” I groaned, my head pounding with confusion. “Demons dressed up as demons and used drugs to pretend they were humans? It’s too stupid, even for their hungry brains. Makes no sense.”
“Why did they lie about you running away, then?”
“Maybe they didn’t know themselves what happened?” I hated to defend the demons but blaming them lacked any logic. Although, I could see Delilah’s point on how useless my abduction would be for The Priory, too. “Besides, most demons can’t lie very well.”
“That’s what I’ve heard.” She nodded. “But doesn’t their ability to lie depend on how well they’ve been fed?”
“Yes.”
“I also heard that Raim has been feeding long enough to invent any lie,” she retorted grimly and added, “It was Raim, wasn’t it? The one in white?”
“Yes.”
“I’ve never come this close to him—to any of them—before. Those eyes . . .” she whispered, a shudder rippling through her body, “Beautiful and deadly. Dangerous combination.” She went silent for a moment. “Did one of them help you escape?”
“Again, I did not escape. I was abducted by someone dressed in demon uniforms then transported in a car by two men in suits. They spoke German and apparently sucked at reading road maps.”
“This is bizarre.” The puzzlement in her voice sounded genuine.
“No kidding.”
“I’ll forward this info to my contacts in The Priory. They need to know this.”
“Please do, by all means, if you think it would accomplish anything. Somehow, I still doubt I’ll be safe, even if you’re telling the truth and will deliver me home in one piece.”
“You’re under the protection of The Priory now, Kitty.”
“It doesn’t make me feel any safer to know this,” I bit out.
“It’s a very powerful organization, with a wide reach and influence.”
“Apparently, that means nothing. They don’t even have the resources to come ‘rescue’ me.”
“The membership is very exclusive. It’s for life and limited to men only, but they have people all over the world helping them. The Priory has been maintaining the fragile peace with Incubi for centuries, keeping it in a complete secret, so the rest of the world can go on undisturbed.”
“With whom?”
“Incubi.”
“Is that what you call the demons?”
“That is what they’re called.”
“So, one of them would be—”
“An Incubus. A sex demon, Kitty.”
I should have known, my constant, irresistible pull to him from the very moment I lay my eyes on him sleeping in the abandoned house couldn’t have been natural. The attraction that came fast and fierce, quickly followed by inescapable affection—both very unusual for me at this pace.
And maybe—just maybe—Ivarr, the sex demon that he was, ended up manipulating my emotions after all. Despite his insisting on the contrary, how much of my feelings for him were natural. Could any of it have been genuine?
Still, the longing that squeezed my heart at the memory of him—and the ache it brought—felt very real now.
“They feed on human sexual energy.” Delilah’s voice reached me.
“I know. I’ve been their food source. Remember? And, apparently, my kidnapping was legal, according to that treaty your organization signed with my captors.”
“When the peace treaty was signed, its terms were deemed appropriate for the times.”
“Appropriate?” I scoffed with sarcasm.
“Listen,” Delilah’s voice rang with the passion of conviction. “There was an unstoppable force of thousands of vicious, starving demons to contain—deadly in their insatiable hunger and their complete disregard to human life. You can argue about the means that were chosen to achieve the peace at the time, but the treaty served its purpose.”
I drew in a lungful of air.
“I would agree with this, Delilah, except that I ended up on the other side. The world was saved at the expense of my freedom and the lives of many other innocent women.”
“That’s why The Priory is working with the demons to revise the system now. There is a strong push from the Incubi side to allow them to feed freely again, but the concern is that relaxing the rules would potentially expose more of human population to danger.”
I thought about Ivarr’s relationship with Margreta. The most “offensive” thing he, the breaker of all rules, did while free was to feed off one woman for six years straight, giving her the comfort she needed in return.
“Has anyone ever tried to give them a chance, instead of beating them into submission with rules?” I asked.
Something in my voice must have made Delilah pause.
“Who was the demon with you?”
“Ivarr,” I exhaled. At the sound of his name, a painful lump formed in my throat.
“How did you meet him? Why was he with you?”
“I—I just happened to run into him, shortly after my escape from the car transporting me.”
“I’ll need details to report to The Priory. Was he involved in your escape in any way?”
“Only that he looked after me and protected me afterwards.”
“Do you think you love him?” she asked completely unexpectedly.
“What?” I blinked in confusion. “No. Of cause not. I’ve only just met him . . .”
“Good.” She nodded. “Don’t trust Incubi, Kitty. The purpose of their appearance is to lure innocent victims. It’s enthralling and hard to resist. But they’re not like us. They have no feelings, no emotions of their own except whatever they have absorbed from humans over their endless lives. Their sole purpose is to feed.”
‘Taking care of you is giving me purpose’, Ivarr’s words rang through my mind.
“How well do you know them, Delilah?”
“Well, like I said, this is the first time I’ve seen one of them close up. But this encounter only strengthened my beliefs. I’ve read transcripts of the accounts of the women held in their captivity.” She shuddered. “I am a psychologist specializing in relationship counseling, which is not the right area for me to be on the team to help counsel the released women. But I want this to stop, to end all kidnappings and release everyone. I volunteered to help integrate women back into their lives.”
“Would you be able to find out what will happen to Ivarr?” I asked, unable to mask the desperate hope in my voice.
“I wouldn’t spend too much time worrying about him, Kitty. As a couples’ therapist, and a happily married woman myself, I would strongly advise you to search for happiness among your own kind.”
She raised a hand to her chest, touching the tear-shaped pendant in a distracted movement. The diamond of her wedding ring glistened in the faint light from the dashboard. Both, her pendant and mine, were just two dull pieces of dark quartz or amber. All spectacular fire inside them completely gone.
“I hate to say it,” she said. “But I’m fairly certain the Incubus wouldn’t remember you for long. You see, one of them deserted from the base recently, taking one of the kidnapped women with him. Somehow, he managed to get her pregnant, which shouldn’t be possible between a demon and a human. This made the demon mortal, which is apparently their ultimate goal on Earth. You see what it means, Kitty? Now they view human women as their ticket to earn their right to die.”
“By getting a woman p
regnant, they earn their forgiveness?” I whispered.
“It appears so.” She nodded. “They get to be forgiven, earning the right to die and ascend to heaven . . . or something along those lines. Getting a woman pregnant grants them forgiveness from the Divine. It has something to do with their being here in the first place. The Priory is looking into this. If all demons became mortal, it would eventually help clear this world of them. However, the cost of this is concerning, as each of them would have to gain unlimited access to a woman. Also, the nature of the offspring of such a union is still unclear . . .”
I tuned out Delilah’s speculations about the potential dangers of demon-human relationships.
The lump in my throat grew, threatening to suffocate me. I might be able to feed an Incubus. But if getting a woman pregnant earned him the coveted forgiveness, he would never get it with me.
Chapter 23
WE CROSSED THE BORDER a little while later. Delilah had my passport along with hers in her purse, claiming it was couriered to her at the time of the phone call from The Priory.
As soon as we entered Seattle’s city limit, she took me to the nearest hospital.
“We need to make sure there is no physical damage as a result of your time at the base and your escape. And that . . .” She gestured at the bandage on my arm. “What is that?”
“Um. It was an accident.”
“There might be a risk of infection.”
“No, I’m fine. I got proper medical treatment for this.” I fingered the bandage lightly, remembering Ivarr’s large hands applying it with so much care just a few hours earlier.
“It wouldn’t hurt for a professional to look at it again,” she insisted undeterred. “Let me do all the talking here for now,” she warned, pulling into the hospital’s parking lot. “Later, I’ll have several cover stories for you to choose from to help you get on with your life with as little disruption as possible.”
“Why would I want to cover up The Priory’s shady dealings with the demons,” I snapped.
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