by Stacia Kane
He sighed and looked up. “Now, Justine, let Winston finish speaking before you rush off on one of your little tirades, won’t you?”
Damn it. She should have spoken up, not him. She was letting herself get distracted. Not a good idea, especially not in this gathering.
Especially since that distraction—well, all of the distractions—had kept her from asking him the night before whether he thought Justine’s hatred of humans had led her to try to eliminate Megan not just from the demon world but from the land of the living entirely.
Okay, so now she had motives for two at the table. Who wanted to step up next?
Justine opened her mouth, her beautiful face darkening, but Winston stepped in quickly, shooting Greyson a surprised glance as he did. “The point is, we have reason to believe they’re being attacked by another demon. So we’d like to nip this in the bud here. Have any of our rubendas been stepping on toes? Or is our arrangement causing problems with any of you? You all agreed last year to let us control the area.”
His voice stayed perfectly calm, almost affable, but his anger tickled cold on Megan’s skin.
The others were silent. Winston sighed. “Do we have a rogue demon in the area? Are any of you aware of any problems in other cities that may have been carried into ours?”
Greyson’s voice cut through the general demurrals of the others. “Why are you so sure it’s a demon?”
“What else could it be?” Gunnar pushed his empty plate away—the smear of fruit juice on it looked like blood—and leaned forward. “What else could attack us without our sensing it or being able to overpower it? Seven missing now. We’ve been on alert for weeks. Are you suggesting a human might have been able to sneak up on them and injure them?”
“It could be a witch,” Baylor Regis said. His gray eyes shifted toward Megan. “Has your witch friend been asking questions?”
“It’s not a witch,” Winston said dismissively. “We’ve performed a betchimal on all of them. They would have been aware—”
“Well, well,” Greyson drawled. “Been holding out on us, Win? You never mentioned you know how to do the betchimal.”
“Nobody asked me.” Winston seemed to realize this answer didn’t exactly satisfy the others; Baylor looked as if he wanted to slit Win’s and Gunnar’s throats. “I’ll be happy to teach you all, of course.”
“No need.” Greyson accepted yet another drink from an unobtrusive servant. “I can do it myself.”
What? He’d said—oh, of course. Tera had performed it on her that morning; he must have been listening. She wished she could add it to the long list of reasons to be angry at him, but she couldn’t; she wouldn’t have expected anything less, really.
“I’d certainly like to learn it,” Justine snapped. “Don’t speak for the rest of us, Grey.”
“I wouldn’t dream of speaking for you, Justine. I have far too much intelligence even to be capable of it.”
The entire table held its breath. Justine looked mollified for a second, then realized she’d been insulted; her face flushed, and her icy blast of rage almost knocked Megan out of her chair.
Shit, he really was wasted. She’d never seen him be so rude, at least not without an excellent reason.
“Good thing it wasn’t my intelligence you needed just before Christmas.” Justine’s eyes had gone so narrow they’d almost disappeared; for a second the beautiful woman disappeared, and something much less attractive sat in her place. “It’s—”
He yawned and turned away from her. “Win, you were saying nobody sensed their attacker? If they’ve disappeared, how would you know? Do you have a witness?”
“We did have one,” Gunnar said, after a pause. “He didn’t see anything but was close enough that the betchimal would have alerted him, had it been a witch. So a magical attacker, gone unsensed . . . it has to be another demon.”
“Not necessarily.” Greyson looked at her; their eyes met. Something flared in his, just for a second, and it was gone. “It could be an angel.”
It took a moment for his words to register in her head. She was too busy trying to keep the spasm of sharp pain his gaze had summoned from showing on her face and too busy trying to keep her mind from worrying at Justine’s last sentence like a pit bull with a rodent. Which was just what it felt like: something dirty and riddled with sickness being tugged, a bit at a time, from the depths of her memory.
“What the hell would an angel be doing here?” Gunnar said. “I thought Vergadering had wiped most of them out, and they’d gone into hiding.”
“Oh, there’s one here. I saw it this morning.” Greyson lifted his glass, nodded at a servant. Megan wondered if he would be able to stand when this hellish meal finally reached a conclusion.
Of course, if he wasn’t, little Leora would probably be perfectly happy to help him back to his suite. Now, there was a cheerful thought.
What the hell had Justine done for him? Just before Christmas . . . he wouldn’t be where he was . . .
Templeton Black had died just before Christmas.
But that was a suicide. He’d left a note and everything. Tera said Vergadering didn’t suspect any foul play. Surely if there had been reason to suspect any, they would have suspected it. They suspected just about everyone, of everything.
What difference did it make? It was over between them. Done. He wasn’t her concern anymore.
She wondered if any sentence she’d ever uttered to herself had hurt more. No, it didn’t seem so. That was a personal best in the pain and misery department.
“You saw it?” Winston’s face—always susceptible to coloring, the way all blood demons seemed to be—went bright red. If he’d had a beard, he would have looked like a very angry Santa Claus. “And you didn’t tell us?”
“I believe I just did.”
“Yes, but—yes. I would have thought you would tell us sooner.”
Greyson shrugged. “I would have thought you’d have mentioned your rubendas going missing sooner, Win. Want to explain why you didn’t?”
“That’s different. That’s private business.”
“You thought there was a rogue demon in the city, and you didn’t warn the rest of us.” Baylor glared at Winston and Gunnar each in turn, like a teacher trying to figure out who threw the spitball when her back was turned. “Grey is right. You should have told us before this.”
“We weren’t sure what it was,” Gunnar said. His black hair was slipping from its Gordon Gekko sweep-back; he reached up to try to push it out of his eyes but only succeeded in making it worse. Gunnar didn’t handle stress well. “We didn’t want to alarm anyone.”
Justine licked whipped cream off her fingers. “That was totally irresponsible.”
“And totally our business,” Winston replied. “Have any of the rest of you had issues? No? Then it doesn’t matter.”
“It does to me. You let the rest of us take a risk.” Justine’s impressive bosom heaved.
“We take risks every day. We’re taking a risk even bringing this up. What if it’s one of you, trying to start a war?”
“If it is one of us,” Justine said nastily, “it’s probably Greyson. He’s the one giving us all some bullshit story about an angel.”
“He’s not.” Here, at last, was something Megan felt qualified to comment on. “I saw it too. And I—I felt it last night. It attacked me.”
She wanted to look at him, to see if she’d done the right thing. She refused to let herself. What she said and did wasn’t his business anymore either. Which was the way he wanted it, as he’d proven the minute he’d said “I’ll think about it” to Winston.
Winston, who looked at her with his eyebrows raised. “You felt it? You can feel it?”
Of course. Not “It attacked you?” Not “Are you okay?” But “You can feel it?” The others leaned forward—all except Greyson, of course, who was fiddling with his cell phone—making her feel as if she was in an interrogation room from an old TV cop show, with a bright naked lightbu
lb in her face.
“It feels like an absence,” she said finally. “Like an empty space. I think the Yezer can feel it too, if they focus.”
“Particularly if it travels on the psychic plane,” Greyson added. “But I don’t think it’s doing much of that.”
Gunnar pushed his hair back again. “Oh? Why not?”
“I think it’s found several people to use as shields.”
“Like who?”
He hesitated. “It seemed particularly interested in that reverend person over at the Windbreaker. That’s where we saw it. Megan seemed to think it was feeding on the gullible little crowd, which makes sense, if you think about it. Zealots like that, desperate to believe . . . ripe for the picking, really.”
“Perhaps I’m in the wrong business,” Baylor said.
Greyson raised an eyebrow. “Perhaps you are.”
Another uneasy hush around the table. Megan waited for someone to call him on his rudeness, but no one did. Funny, that.
Win cleared his throat. “The point is, I suppose, that this angel is here. And it may be after us. Is that correct?”
There were general nods around the table.
“I have my Yezer on the alert,” Megan said.
“But we don’t just want to sit and wait for it to attack us. We want to find a way to solve the problem,” Win said. “Since you and Greyson saw it, why don’t you two see what you can come up with? We’ll all think tonight, and we’ll meet in the afternoon to go over plans. You two will have something for us then, I hope?”
Okay. Maybe nobody else felt awkward—she was fairly certain Greyson was incapable of feeling anything at that point—but she certainly did.
But she was pretending nothing was wrong. Vulnerability was not her friend in this situation, and she wouldn’t show any. So she smiled, as if that was a great idea, and nodded, and very carefully avoided looking at Greyson.
But she felt him watching her just the same.
Chapter 21
The view out her window wasn’t anywhere near as lovely as the one from the fourteenth-floor balcony she’d been on the night before, but she didn’t give a shit. She looked out the window but didn’t really see; through the glass more buildings sat silent, watching her right back, their edges blurred.
Everything was blurred. After that hideous meal had finally ended, she’d grabbed Nick and two bottles of bourbon from the bar and hauled all three back to her room. Her puny, lonely little room.
Greyson had left with Leora. She’d put her hand on his arm, and they’d left together. The fact tore at her like a flesh-eating virus.
She could have called Tera. Maybe she should have. But somehow thinking of Tera’s sympathy—damn, Megan had always known there were genuine feelings under there somewhere—combined with her bluntness and . . . whatever. No, if she were honest, the way she was always trying to get her patients to be, she’d admit she didn’t want Tera because she wanted someone more connected to Greyson. She wanted a man who wouldn’t try to make her talk.
And hell, she had to be with Nick anyway, because he apparently still wanted to guard her. So why bring Tera in, so they could snipe at each other and flirt while she watched? If there was a worse way to spend an evening than nursing a broken heart while two very attractive people threatened to have angry sex in front of her at any moment, she had no idea what it could be.
“So what do you think?” he asked. “Think the Yezer will be able to track down the angel?”
“I imagine so.” She looked out the window again. This time the view seemed colder; she pictured the angel out there, watching her. Saw it again falling over the edge of the roof, relived the moment when she’d thought she killed it and couldn’t remember how it felt. It was all overshadowed now; she had much darker memories taking up space. It didn’t seem right that Greyson loomed so much larger, so much higher, but she couldn’t change it; she’d thought she killed a man, yes, but she’d done it to save her own life. And, as much as she tried not to think of it, he hadn’t been the first person—or whatever—she’d killed, had he? She’d killed the Accuser. She’d killed Ktana Leyak.
Had Greyson killed Templeton Black? Or ordered him killed? He’d been ready to ask Winston for the death of Orion Maldon, because Maldon had threatened them—had conspired against them and tried to end their lives.
But why would he openly discuss having Maldon killed with her and not tell her about Templeton?
She hadn’t asked either. Well, why would she? The man was found dead in a Vergadering prison cell with a suicide note. Was she supposed to guess that was murder?
Nick sighed. “I don’t know what to say, Megan.”
Not a topic she wanted to get into. “Don’t say anything. Just pour me another, okay?”
He did, topping up both their glasses. “I never thought this would happen. I always thought you—”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“Okay. Sorry. I just thought you might want—”
“I don’t.”
He smiled. “Okay, so you don’t. What do you want to talk about?”
His straight dark hair fell over his brow; below his strong chin the top couple of buttons of his tuxedo shirt hung open, the bowtie long discarded and the pants exchanged for jeans.
Megan hadn’t bothered to change. They both sat in the middle of the bed, with the bottles between them. She’d tugged the skirt up so she could sit cross-legged. It felt like a naughty picnic.
She smiled back. “Read any good books lately?”
“Tons. Let’s discuss them all, in detail.”
So they did. They talked about books for an hour or so, while the level of bourbon in the bottles steadily dropped and her mood grew giddier and giddier, the kind of manic joy that signaled a huge crash waiting in the wings. They moved around on the bed, finally ending up shoulder-to-shoulder against the headboard, giggling at the TV and everything else.
Nick emptied another glass. “So have you heard anything from your family? Since the funeral and everything, I mean.”
“No. I didn’t expect to, and they didn’t disappoint me.”
“Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said, and she meant it. Would have meant it even if she hadn’t been drunk enough not to care. Greyson, the lying bastard, really had had the right idea; this was much better than trying to sit through that hideous meal feeling as if she’d swallowed a paperweight.
He’d left with Leora. Shit. “Really. I mean, maybe it would have been different if all this demon stuff hadn’t happened to me. But I have people now, I mean, I have . . . I have the Yezer. And Tera and Brian. You know?”
He nodded. “It really makes a difference. I didn’t have anybody for a long time after—after my parents died. Then I met Grey, and he didn’t care what had happened or what I was.”
“What do you mean?”
He hesitated, and her question, which she’d asked in genuine curiosity and nothing more, took on new meaning. “You don’t have to tell me. I mean, if there’s something you’re not comfortable—”
“No, it’s okay.” He poured another glass, downed it. She wondered if he was as drunk as she was. Probably not, but she figured he was close; he’d finished his bottle and was sharing hers. “Well. You know I’m half incubus.”
She smiled, raised her eyebrows a little. “Yeah, I kind of remember that about you.”
“Oh, right. Of course.”
He was so close to her; she reached out and stroked his knee. “It’s okay. Really. Go on.”
“Well. My mom was a succubus. She was . . . she was great. I mean, she was strict, but she was great. And my dad was part psyche demon—a vershet, you don’t really find a lot of them in America—and part water demon. He’d really wanted me to take after his side more than hers, but I’m pretty balanced. Anyway. His family didn’t really approve of her, and they didn’t want them to get married, and that didn’t change after I was born.”
“That sucks.”
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“Yeah. So things seemed okay, he found work finally—the family business wouldn’t hire him, and they talked him down all over so nobody else would either—and I remember things being okay. I mean, I remember being pretty happy. And then . . . I came home one day, I was six, and Vergadering was there, and they wouldn’t let me go inside.”
“They were dead?” Megan asked softly.
He nodded. “They’d had a fight, I guess. I mean, I assume; nobody ever told me or let me see the files or anything. And he killed her, and then he killed himself.”
“Oh my God.” Her right hand tightened on his knee; her left flew to her throat. “Nick . . . I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah. Yeah, it pretty much sucks.” He gave her a rueful smile, sad around the edges. “And then her family wouldn’t take me because they, um, they thought it was my fault. And his family wouldn’t take me because I was part incubus and they thought she’d corrupted him and I was unclean or something. I don’t know. So I went into a Vergadering school, a boarding school for orphan demons or those of us whose parents were threats or just . . . whatever.”
She thought about his energy, so angry and so hurt. And about his comments to Tera. “I guess it wasn’t a very good place to be.”
He gave a short, bitter laugh. “Yeah. You could say that. You could definitely say that.”
“Weren’t there demon schools? Places for the orphan demons?”
“Things were pretty different then, Meg. I mean, it was only thirty years or so ago, but a lot has changed in that time. Back then, because of what my father did, it wasn’t just my mother’s family who considered me tainted. It was demon society as a whole. My father’s dishonor reflected on me. It wasn’t until I turned sixteen and won a scholarship that things changed, really, at least for me. I met Greyson, and . . . well, like I said, he didn’t care.”
Tears stung her eyes. She blinked them back, ducking her head in hopes he wouldn’t see. “Yeah. I guess he wouldn’t, would he?”