Demon Marked

by Anna J. Evans

  The only thing she could think of was that Ginger was on someone’s shit list. But whose? Maybe an old boyfriend? Or the wife of one of the married men she occasionally messed around with at the bar?

  Unfortunately, Emma had no way of finding out anything from Ginger. Ginger still wasn’t answering her bud. She’d tried to reach her roommate twice on the wall phone at Sam’s.

  She’d also sent Andre a message from Sam’s home computer, letting him know where she was headed.

  Like it or not, she and Andre were in this together. He’d made that call when he urged her to keep Little Francis out of the loop. Besides, she couldn’t deny that she wanted to see him again, wanted to try to convince him that she hadn’t been lying about the drugs.

  Looked like she’d get the chance sooner than she’d expected.

  Half a block away, a tall, handsome man in a ridiculously expensive suit lounged outside Good Stuff market, looking as out of place on this side of the barricade as ever. She should have realized that Andre was smart enough to figure out which direction she’d be coming from and head her off at the pass, but still ... it was surprising to see him leaning against the brick near the market’s recycling machine, looking as pulled together as he had a few hours ago, despite the chaotic events of the morning.

  Emma cocked her head, taking him in as she closed the distance between them. Damn, but the way he wore fancy clothes was almost enough to make her reconsider her definition of wasteful spending. Was it really wasteful to drop a few grand on a garment that made a man look like that?

  “Good morning. Glad to see you got the dust off your suit,” Emma said.

  “You’re crazy, you know that?”

  “Good to see you, too.”

  “I’m serious. What were you thinking?” Andre’s tone left little doubt how very angry he was, despite the fact that his eyes were hidden behind dark sunglasses.

  Too bad it didn’t get in the way of the energy that leapt between them, a spark of sexual recognition that made her acutely aware of how her borrowed jeans clung to her body. She wondered whether Andre would notice, whether he’d check out her ass the way he had when they’d left the diner.

  “I see you found that shower you were looking for. You look ... clean.”

  Emma smiled. Looked as if he had noticed. “Thanks. You look pretty, too.”

  Andre grunted and fell into step beside her, his shoulder brushing against hers as they threaded their way through the early morning shoppers. “Little Francis was getting ready to send a search party until I told him I’d heard from you.”

  “You didn’t tell him we were—”

  “I told him you were meeting me uptown. He assumes you’re in a cab waiting to get through the barricade, so we should have a few hours,” Andre said. “Not that I think it’s a good idea for you to go back to your apartment.”

  “But you think it’s a good idea for someone to go back and check things out.”

  “I do, but—”

  “And I’m the best someone for the job. I’m the only one who will know if something’s missing.” Aside from Ginger, of course. Ugh. Ginger. Why did today have to be the day she went completely off the deep end? “So I guess you heard Ginger ran away from the people trying to take her into the safe house?”

  “I did,” Andre said. “Between the two of you, I think you’ve made Little Francis suspicious that you’re keeping secrets.”

  “I have no idea why she ran,” Emma said, willing Andre to believe her. “We don’t have any secrets. At least not any shared secrets.”

  “Still, this is going to make telling him about your connection to the missing body a hell of a lot more complicated.” Andre sighed, a weary sound that reminded her that not everyone had supernatural energy to draw upon. He’d been up since four in the morning and had carried a hundred-and-twenty-pound woman down two flights of rickety stairs. He was probably starting to feel this day in a major way. “I should have just told him everything when we—”

  “No, I think you were right,” Emma said, strangely tempted to smooth her hand along the tense line of Andre’s shoulders.

  She never wanted to touch people. Ever. Her first impulse was to keep her hands to herself, especially with people she cared about. The mark had made her wary of offering physical comfort, but she couldn’t deny she wanted to reach out to Andre, to feel the strength hidden beneath his clothes, to press herself against him the way she had this morning.

  That kiss ... It had occupied far too much space in her troubled mind. But she hadn’t been able to keep from remembering the way his lips moved against hers, the taste of him, the smell of him. A part of her had wished she could linger in Sam’s shower, take her time moving the soap over her own body, imagining her hands were Andre’s hands.

  Emma cleared her throat and moved a few inches away as they walked, ignoring the way her body began to ache just thinking about the places she wanted Andre’s hands.

  She had to pull herself together. She didn’t have time to ogle some bossy, womanizing lawyer or think about how insanely attractive she’d started to find him. Good guy or not, Andre was still the same man he’d been before.

  And he wasn’t interested; he’d made that clear. He didn’t want to get naked with her. He wanted to check her into the nearest loony bin, or a demon drug rehab, or maybe a demon drug rehab for loonies ... if they had such a thing.

  The thought banished the last of the tingles sizzling along her skin. She had to remember this was business, life-and-death business if it turned into a street war between the Contis and the Death Ministry. She debated telling Andre her theory but decided it was best to wait until she had some sort of evidence. Obviously Andre wasn’t going to believe anything just because it came out of her mouth.

  “I think it’s best if we try to get more information first,” she said. “The fewer people in on the secret, the safer the secret.” At least that’s what her years with Father Paul had taught her. For the second time in less than a few hours, she longed to call the father, to hear whatever words of wisdom and criticism he cared to speak.

  “True, but his younger brother is the one I contacted to do the collection this morning.” Andre turned right, heading back toward her apartment. “Mikey’s going to keep quiet for now, but it’s understood I’ll have to tell the rest of the family about this eventually.”

  “Maybe you won’t.” Emma tilted her face up to catch the sun. She might be a creature of the night most of the time, but she loved the feel of warm summer sunshine, even when it was responsible for baking the Southie garbage until the entire barricaded area smelled like rotten vegetables. “Maybe a demon ate the body and it will never turn up. Or maybe the cops found it and they’ll get my fingerprints from the state database and come arrest me.”

  “One can always hope,” Andre said, the husky note in his voice making her turn her head and catch him looking at her.

  Or she assumed he was looking at her. She cursed dark glasses and fought the flustered feelings swimming around inside of her. She was Emma Quinn, a demon-marked predator—she didn’t do fluster.

  “Ha-ha.” She turned back to look at the sidewalk, counting the squares in the cement, anything to keep her mind off the fact that Andre might be feeling the same way she was feeling—inappropriately lustful and stupidly unfocused, considering the situation they were in.

  “I doubt it was the police, but even if it was ... why would your fingerprints be in the database?” Andre asked. “Have you been taken in for public intox on an illegal substance or—”

  Emma stopped and spun to face him, ignoring the frustrated grunt of the Mohawked man behind her who nearly ran her over before veering to the side with a few choice cusswords. The guy could get over it. He shouldn’t have been following her so closely. She couldn’t deal with Andre’s calm assurance that she was a drug addict for another second.

  “No, I’ve told you several times that I don’t do drugs. My fingerprints were taken when I was admitted
to the hospital when I was a baby. Along with blood samples and DNA that they used to search the public databases,” Emma said, staring up at her own reflection in Andre’s glasses. “The doctors were using genetic fingerprinting to see if they could track down any of my close relatives. For a while they thought I needed a kidney transplant.”

  “This was when you were taken from the cult?”

  “No, it was a year or so after.” Emma wished for the third or fourth time that she could see Andre’s eyes. Not that it would really help. When he was in lawyer mode, she couldn’t read a thing in those dark brown depths, and he was definitely in the mode now. His voice reeked of practiced impartiality. “I was in the hospital until I was three.”

  “They found a way to help you.”

  “I found a way to help myself,” she countered. “I learned how to feed the demon mark with human life force. I—”

  “Emma, I don’t—”

  Emma reached up and snatched Andre’s glasses off his face, shocking him into silence and giving her a glimpse into the man’s true thoughts. He didn’t believe her, but he didn’t completely not believe her, either. She had a chance to convince him she was telling the truth, and there was only one story she could think of that might do the job.

  “It was an accident. There was a night nurse named Betty who worked the children’s floor of the hospital,” Emma said, willing herself to maintain control. She wasn’t a person who cried often, but thinking about Betty always hit her hard, no matter how many times Father Paul had assured her that what had happened wasn’t her fault. “She was so nice to all the kids, but especially to me. She’d let me sit in her lap and read me stories for hours. I ... I really loved her. And she loved me.”

  Emma sucked in a deep breath and dropped her eyes to the dirty sidewalk. Thankfully, Andre stayed silent, as if he sensed the story wasn’t finished.

  “One day, she asked me if I wanted to be her little girl. Even though I was sick, she and her husband wanted to adopt me.” Emma kept her eyes on the ground. “I remember being so excited that I turned on her lap and hugged her around her neck. My hands ended up in her hair, and ... that was the first time the blue light came.”

  Andre stepped closer. “So you’re saying ...”

  Emma lifted her head, a little shocked to find her lips only inches away from Andre’s, troubled by how naked she felt as she looked into his eyes. “I killed her. She died of a heart attack a few hours later.”

  “Emma, you were just a little girl; you didn’t—”

  “I did,” Emma said, maintaining eye contact even when the empathy in Andre’s eyes made her want to turn and run. Sometimes there was nothing in the world as painful as kindness. “Right after I fed on her, I walked on my own for the first time. The man who raised me worked at the hospital and heard what had happened. He’s a priest and has done a lot of research into aura demons. He’s the one who figured out that I must have been marked. He took me away from the hospital a few days after Betty’s death. I’ve never been sick a day since.”

  Andre shook his head, his eyebrows pulling together and his lips opening and closing at least three times before he finally spoke. “I don’t know what to say.”

  “Say that you believe me.”

  “I ... don’t know if I believe you.” The confusion in his tone made her want to kiss him again.

  Instead, she stepped away and shoved his glasses on her own face. “Well, I guess that’s a start.” With a sigh, Emma turned and started back down the street. “And just for the record, I’d like to say again that I never have and never will use demon drugs. I felt fucking awful this morning.”

  “You looked pretty bad, too,” Andre said, noticeably abstaining from any commentary on whether or not he believed her about the demon drugs, either.

  “Thanks. But I don’t really worry about stuff like that. Some people have more important things to do than spend half their lives primping.”

  “I don’t spend half my life primping. Maybe a fourth, at most.”

  Emma snorted. “Right.”

  “It pays off. You should try it sometime.” He nudged her arm with his elbow as they turned one last corner and her building came into view. “At least let me take you to the girl who does my eyebrow wax.”

  She laughed, an unexpected squawk that made Andre chuckle along with her. “Oh my god, you have your eyebrows waxed? That is so weird. Isn’t that against the Conti manly man code, or something?”

  “Screw the Conti manly man code. The eyebrows are the frames of the face, and look at this face.” He smiled down at her, a real smile that made the corners of his eyes crinkle in a way that she found unexpectedly cute. “Of course I have my eyebrows waxed, Emma.”

  Despite the heat, a shiver whispered across her skin. There was just something about the way he said her name. “You are ... unbelievable.”

  “I know.” He winked and his smile took on a predatory edge that made Emma’s body resume its foolish tingling. “That’s what all the women tell me, anyway.”

  This doesn’t mean anything, Emma’s internal voice warned. This man would flirt with a dog as long as it was female.

  Still, she couldn’t help but smile back at him. The bastard really was almost irresistible.

  “I moisturize, too, every day,” Andre continued, playing to his grinning audience. “And exfoliate. The ladies can’t get enough of this girly man stuff.”

  “Hmm, so I’ve seen.” Emma debated whether to tell him she knew about his addiction, that sleeping around wasn’t just recreational for him, but a compulsion he couldn’t always control.

  In the end, she decided to give Andre a break and a chance to believe her story before she pulled out the big guns, detailed all the things she’d seen in his mind, and forced him to believe her. After all he’d done for her, he deserved that chance. Besides, they were nearly at the door to her apartment. It was time to quit flirting and start watching out for bad guys who might have returned to the scene of the crime.

  They really had been flirting. It was a first for Emma. She’d lured men into dark corners with a seductive look plenty of times, but she’d never laughed and teased like this before. It was ... nice.

  “You stay down here. I’ll go up and make sure it’s safe.” Andre moved ahead of her to open the door to the apartment building. It was ajar, as usual, the dent in the metal rendering the first barrier to potential intruders completely useless.

  Emma darted forward, shouldering in front of Andre, her body thrilled to be this close to him once more. “No, I’m coming, too.”

  “No, you’re not.”

  “Yes, I am. You might run into someone up there and need protection.”

  “I brought protection,” Andre said, discreetly opening one side of his suit jacket, revealing a small stun gun tucked in the inside pocket.

  “You know how to use that?” Emma asked, shocked to see the weapon. She was used to seeing her sister’s husband, Jace, with stun weapons and the occasional automatic, but he was a demon killer, not an exfoliating, eyebrow-waxing lawyer. Andre would probably end up stunning himself and she’d have to carry him down the stairs.

  “I do. I worked demon bounty for about five years.”

  “Really?” That was ... surprising. Maybe he’d once used those muscles for something other than flexing in front of the mirror. “I didn’t know that about you.”

  “There are a lot of things you don’t know about me, little girl.”

  “Not as many as you think, old man.” She turned her head, lifting her chin, giving him access to her lips should he choose to take it.

  Andre leaned into her, and for a breathless second Emma thought he was going to kiss her again. Instead, he shifted his head, turning his attention back to the door in his hand. Apparently his self-imposed embargo on twenty-year-old women with unplucked eyebrows still stood. Emma would have felt the snub more keenly if Andre’s breath wasn’t coming faster. She was affecting him, and it was only a matter of time until
he gave under pressure.

  Now she just had to decide whether she wanted to keep applying that pressure. Was she ready for a one-night stand with a man she’d be forced to see with an endless stream of other women at family dinners every Thursday?

  Of course, that was assuming she wasn’t killed by gang members in the next day and a half. She might not have the luxury of worrying about things like jealousy and the stupidity of taking a sex addict as her first lover. If she didn’t want to die a virgin, she might need to take her persuasive efforts to another level.

  “So we’re agreed I’m coming inside?” she asked, watching the way the pulse in Andre’s neck beat faster as her breath puffed against his throat.

  He swallowed, hard, before speaking. “Fine. You can come inside, but stay behind me and get ready to run if there’s trouble.”

  “I don’t run from trouble, Andre.” Emma handed him his glasses and nudged him out of the way with her hip when he tried to move in front of her. “That’s something you should know about me.”

  She stepped into the cramped, moldy-smelling foyer and started up the stairs, grateful for the sunlight streaming in the door, illuminating the bottom steps. She didn’t need light to climb stairs she’d trekked up and down a hundred times, but Andre would need it if he was going to stare at her ass while she did it.

  She could be seconds away from a confrontation with real criminals, and she was focused on some guy and the chances that he’d be checking out her backside instead of the potential danger ahead. It was wrong on so many levels.

  But then, where Andre was concerned, Emma was starting to think she didn’t care that much about being right.

  CHAPTER NINE

  She’s crazy and young and off-limits. She’s crazy and young and off-limits.

  Andre repeated the silent litany half a dozen times as he followed Emma up the stairs, but it didn’t stop him from staring at her undeniably fine backside. The jeans she wore clung to every curve, tempting him, teasing him as her hips twitched back and forth with each step.