by Jessa Slade
“It’s just a trick,” she said. Then her voice softened. “But it is kind of beautiful.”
He turned his head sharply to stare at her, but she was entranced by the black lines of the reven that spilled like wild swirls of india ink down his neck and over his shoulder, shot with threads of violet and the eerie translucence where his flesh thinned with demonic emanations. Other-realm energies glimmered in the mark, not evident to human vision without a lurking demon presence.
“Mine doesn’t do that,” she noted.
“It will when your demon is sufficiently aroused.”
She peered up at him. “And your demon is aroused.” Her touch skimmed lower, toward the waist of his jeans, and the glint in her eye wasn’t purple at all.
“It responds to any threat,” he said.
Her lips quirked. “How am I a threat?”
“You’re not. I am.”
“Ah. What are you fighting in yourself?”
“I’m not the one who strips myself bare for strangers.” His voice was harsh.
She withdrew her hand—but slowly, showing him she wasn’t fazed by his flare of temper. “You’ve been coming all week. Obviously, you wanted—still want—something from me. But why waste time on this elaborate setup? You could just pay me, you know.” Her fingers curled tight. “Unless you want something kinky. I don’t do kinky. And no sex. No more sex.”
“I’m not vice,” he said as he yanked the shirt over his head. He tucked the hem savagely into his jeans and almost groaned when his fingertips skimmed the upward-straining tip of his penis. Vice, indeed.
“Sure.” She didn’t sound convinced. “If you want me to do some private dance where you pretend I’m damned with a demon and you try to save me—”
“I can’t save you. I’m damned too, possessed just like you.”
“Right, whatever. Then we’ll save each other and—”
“No, we’ll fight together. That’s the only way we’ll be redeemed.”
She huffed out a sigh. “Okay, fine. It’s your scenario, your three hundreds bucks, so—”
He echoed the sigh. She’d stopped believing him and was falling into her old patterns. It was easy to do—in the beginning, at least. She needed more convincing than even her own body could give her, certainly more than his words offered. “You have to come with me.”
She hesitated. “I don’t do outcall.”
“Tack on a convenience charge.”
She scowled at him. “You make it sound so mercenary.”
He laughed.
Her scowl deepened. “I prefer the term ‘entrepreneur’ to ‘mercenary.’”
“If that helps you sleep at night.”
The way she bit her lip made him think it didn’t help at all. He wished he hadn’t teased her. What she did, what she was, had made her a fitting vessel for the demon. And her demon would give him what he needed to offset his lost arm, to let him slay a monster and patch the holes in his tattered soul. He wouldn’t presume to think he could do anything for her soul.
Which made him more of a mercenary than her greedy heart could ever imagine.
CHAPTER 3
Nim dressed quicker than she’d ever undressed, ignored Amber’s rude questions, flipped off the deejay who wanted his tip for one measly song, and wondered what the hell she was doing as she stepped out of the club, into the sweltering darkness where the large, taciturn Captain Hook waited for her.
“If I can’t call you Captain, what’s your name?”
He began walking down the sidewalk as if he had no doubt she would follow, which she did, damn him, because she was curious and she’d already let him do . . . Well, he couldn’t do much more to her.
“Jonah.”
“Another whale name. That’s why you and Mobi get along so great.”
He turned his head to stare at her. “We do?”
“Usually when I wrap Mobi around somebody’s chair, he climbs up and starts getting personal. That’s because I don’t feed him before I dance, to keep him from puking onstage. It’s nice because he’s pretty good at keeping guys in the chair. But he left you alone.”
“I haven’t been so blessed in a long time.” Jonah paused. “If he really feels that way, let me take him.”
He reached for the rifle case. When Nim hesitated to release her grasp, Jonah lifted one eyebrow. “Despite my newly discovered affinity for your snake, you can be assured I won’t run off with him.”
After a moment, she passed the case and adjusted the strap of her camisole. “He’s heavy,” she warned.
“I think I can handle it.”
The edge to his tone stropped her temper. “I didn’t mean because of your arm. I meant because he’s heavy, even for me.”
“So you’re questioning my manliness, not my maiming.”
She held out her hand. “Give him back if you’re going to be like that.”
“I said I’ve got it.”
“See, you are stealing my snake. You have no idea how much trouble it was to steal him in the first place.”
The bitter set of his mouth eased. “Your lack of morals continues to astound me.”
“Now who’s being insulting? A chick at some ass pit where I danced a few years ago was using Mobi in her act. He was smaller then, and she was doing all these fast spins and tossing him around. He hated it, wouldn’t eat, thought she smelled like stale cat all the time.”
“Ah, Mobi thought she smelled like stale cat?”
“Maybe that was me. Anyway, I snagged him and we found another place to dance with better music.”
“At the Shimmy Shack?” His tone edged up in disbelief.
“God, no. It was way classier. But the GM wanted to charge me girl-on-girl tip-out rates for Mobi. Sick, huh?”
“Because Mobi’s a snake?”
“Because he’s a he.”
“Unconscionable.”
He was teasing her again. But she could deal with mockery. She just didn’t like that grim look, as if death would’ve been better than losing his hand. Struck a little too close to home. “I don’t mind the Shimmy Shack. Sometimes it’s nice having nothing tying you down.”
“No doubt that attitude made you very attractive to the demon.”
She pulled a face. “Are we talking about demons again?”
“My apologies. I won’t bore you with the details. For now.”
“Yeah. Let’s wait till we get to the place. Yours, or do you have a hotel somewhere?”
Jonah stopped for a moment, so she did too. He lifted his head, eyes half-closed. The hairs stood up on her nape, and she had the creepy feeling he was listening to something she couldn’t hear, the aural equivalent of that strange emptiness in his flesh around the tattoo.
A trick, she told herself, part of his little demonic fantasy.
“Can we get this over with?” At an apprehensive twitch in her leg muscles, she shifted in her wedge sandals. Maybe she should have worn sneakers. She was faster in sneakers. Although why she had the feeling she should be running . . .
Jonah turned his face one way, then the other, a furrow between his brows as if the signal he wanted wasn’t coming in clear. “I don’t have a home,” he said absently. “I have a boat.”
She bit her lower lip. “It’s expensive to keep a boat.” She let her voice slide up in a question.
“Yes, the Shades of Gray came at a high price, even though I stole her from a thief.”
For some reason, the admission didn’t settle the twisting of her nerves. “I wouldn’t have guessed we had that much in common.”
“More than I’ve told you.” He opened his eyes wide and a glint of violet startled her. “We’ll find one soon. This is a good neighborhood for them.”
“Them? What one are you talking about?” Okay, she was definitely wishing she had her sneakers now. Or at least Mobi in her hands. “I changed my mind. I am afraid.” She wished she hadn’t said that aloud.
But this time Jonah did turn his attention to h
er. “You’re honest. Painfully so. I didn’t expect that.”
“You want honest? Okay, you’re creeping me out. Give me Mobi and we’ll be on our way. And by ‘we,’ I mean me and Mobi.” Not you. She figured she didn’t need to be that blunt. He was crazy, but not stupid.
He ignored her. “This way.” And he walked off.
He had Mobi, so she couldn’t just go the other direction, even with every nerve in her body screaming that she should run.
Actually, not every nerve. Just half of her nerves. The other half . . .
The other half, including the little hairs on the back of her neck, told her to follow him.
That couldn’t be good.
He was almost a block ahead of her and moving fast. She stumbled to catch up, cursing her slutty heels. They weren’t going to get her a bigger tip, as she’d hoped; they were going to tip her over.
Jonah ducked down an alley, and she sighed. Of course. A dark alley. He fantasized about demons, after all.
“Demons could live in hot tubs too, you know.” She paused in the mouth of the alley and scanned the shadows. “Let’s do a possessed-hot-tub scenario. It’ll be all hot, just like hell. But sudsy. Jonah, damn it, where’d you go? You have my snake.”
An echoing hiss from beyond a half-open door lured her deeper into the alley. “Mobi? Shit. I danced alone for years. I could do it again.”
Despite her couldn’t-care-less words, she crept through the doorway. There was too much broken glass to kick off her sandals. At least the cork soles were quiet.
Inside should have been all black, the brick walls broken only by a narrow bank of clerestory windows high in the second story. But when she blinked, a glow hazed the interior, as if someone had rimed the palettes and stacked boxes with white paint and kicked on a black light. Which, she supposed, went with the demon theme. If her dreads had been any shorter, she was pretty sure those would be standing on end too. She was going to be seriously pissed if something jumped out at—
With a shriek, she spun to face the shadow-within-shadow sneaking up behind her. How she’d known it was there . . . “Jonah, you fucker—”
It wasn’t Jonah.
God, it was nasty. Squat like a pile of something left on the sidewalk after the dog walker went by. Its flesh accordioned down to blunt, cloven feet, like cow hooves, except white and bulbous.
Before she could close her slackened jaw, the thing jumped at her with a squeal to match her own. She turned to run, felt the snap in her ankle, and fell headlong across the floor. Her dreads tumbled forward, blinding her.
Damn the strap for breaking now. But it wasn’t the strap. Pain arrowed up her leg, shocking her vision brighter as she pushed her hair from her face. In the sudden clarity, she saw the crest of oily bristles on the creature, could almost count the teeth in its gaping mouth as it bounded over her. Those approximately one million teeth snapped with an evil whistle through the air where her head would’ve been if she hadn’t fallen.
It whirled to face her, its rows of flabby, inflamed skin spinning a split second behind, like a zombie ballerina’s dead-flesh tutu. The row of protuberant orange eyes fixed on her.
She’d gotten one sandal unstrapped, so she threw that. If the monster was going to eat anything first, it’d be the damn shoe that had tripped her up.
The thing didn’t even flinch. It took one step forward, then stopped. Which gave her a chance to throw the other shoe right in its gaping mouth. “Fucker!”
A gout of black ooze spewed from its mouth. Flecks of the noxious fluid spattered over her legs and burned worse than nail polish remover on a torn cuticle. She shrieked again and crabbed backward, dragging her ankle.
“I could do without the swearing.” Jonah’s head popped up over the creature’s shoulder.
She screamed yet again, then realized he wasn’t wearing a monster suit. He was standing behind it, his hook buried deep in its neck, which had kept the monster from coming after her.
“I could do without the screaming too, now that I think about it.” The muscles in his arm stood out in stark relief as he restrained the thrashing thing.
“What the fuck?”
“Wonderful. Screaming and swearing.” Despite his even tone, his face was tense with the effort, and sporadic streaks of purple lightning raged in his eyes. Though the thing was shorter than him, it was three or more times his weight, and it yanked viciously against his hold, frenzied to escape him. Obviously, it was smarter than she had been.
Nim swallowed against the sour tang of bile. “What is it?”
“It’s a demon.”
“I thought you said the demons were in us.”
“The teshuva—the repentant demons—are. This is an impenitent demon, escaped from the demon realm to wreak havoc in this realm.” He twisted the hook and another flow of black liquid gushed from the creature’s throat.
She put her hand over her mouth. “Stop it.”
“You want me to let it go?”
“No!”
“Do you believe in demons now?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounded ragged from the screaming. When he just stared at her, she said more shrilly, “Yes. How can I not?”
“You’d be surprised what people will ignore, even when it’s right in front of them.”
“I believe it’s bleeding on me.” She recoiled from the rivulet of ooze, stinking and smoking across the floor.
“Ichor. The rot of a physically manifested demon like this feralis. I need to incapacitate it before I drain it completely.” He ignored the thing’s half-choked sob.
“You knew it was here.”
“I baited the area yesterday. If you calm yourself—”
She hissed, and he gave her a reproving glance. “If you calm yourself and pay attention with your sharpened senses, you will notice the demon smears on the walls. I drained a dozen malice—another sort of demon—here last night and left their remnants. This feralis came poking around, hoping for an easy meal.”
“And found me.” Outrage warded off the sickness in her belly. “You were going to let it kill me to prove yourself.”
“Don’t exaggerate. I was waiting right here.”
He’d wanted her to come with him just for this. “This wasn’t the scenario I had in mind.”
He stared at her. “No, this wasn’t intended to be sexy.”
At the intensity of his focus, she realized the strap of her camisole had drooped down her shoulder. She dragged it into place with a snort. “Not sexy at all.”
“But you believe. Now watch and learn.”
She couldn’t help but watch in sick fascination as he garroted the creature. Half-decapitated, the thing sank into its own creased flesh. The black flow slowed, then ceased. “You killed it.”
“No. The horde-tenebrae can’t be killed. I merely incapacitated this feralis’s husk, which it scavenged and stole from this realm, to keep it from killing me while I siphon its energy.”
She scooted out of the way of the ichor river. “I’d say it’s siphoned.”
“Not of the demon’s etheric emanations that energized it. See the eyeballs?”
The spidery row still glowed a furious orange. “If looks could kill . . .”
“Not looks alone. Fangs, claws, whipping tails—yes, those can kill us. We are immortal,but not indestructible.”
“Immortal. Monsters.” Nim shook her head. As if emptying his words could stop her spinning head from rotating right off her shoulders. Kind of like the creature sagging from his hook.
“Immortal monsters? Yes, that’s us. But with this act, I win back a piece of my soul from the darkness.” His gaze, almost solid indigo now, held hers, but she felt he was far away. She curled her fingers into the concrete, torn by conflicting impulses. Part of her longed to run while he was distracted. Another part demanded she step up to his side and . . .
And what exactly? She was no crime fighter. If anything, she sometimes slipped a few degrees to the wrong side of that line. W
ith all Jonah’s clear loathing of what he alleged himself to be, she wondered how he had ever done wrong enough to believe a demon wanted him.
A demon. Oh no. She was starting to think like him.
In his grasp, the feralis’s orange eyes dimmed, clouded with white. She remembered her dream, the white eyes crawling with black, and she shuddered.
Jonah dropped the husk at his feet with a dull thud. The tip of the hook gleamed through the clinging gore. “Does that appall you?”
“Which part? The ooze? The reek? The fact my Louboutin sandal just fell out of a monster’s slit throat?”
His jaw worked. “The part where I’m missing half my soul.”
“Aren’t we all?” Nim pulled her knee to her chest and clutched her ankle. She winced at the burst of pain.
After a moment, he came to her side and crouched beside her. “What’s wrong?”
“Broke my ankle trying to escape your little show-and-tell.” She hadn’t even gotten around to feeling the pain of the knee she’d skinned or the bruise spreading across her hip. “If I’d known I’d be sliding across a concrete floor, I wouldn’t have worn short-shorts.”
He bumped aside her hands, gently, and probed the bones. She winced and clamped her teeth down on another scream.
He cradled her heel in one hand, his long fingers brushing her arch. “You can cry if you want. This time it’s justified.”
“They were all justified,” she said around gritted teeth.
“None of the bones are displaced. Just wait a minute.”
“And waiting is going to make a difference how? Oh, let me guess. The demon.”
He nodded. “As recompense for hijacking your body, the teshuva gives you greater speed and strength, enhanced senses, and unnatural healing.”
“I remember. Along with the immortality.” She didn’t bother hiding the snide twist in her voice.
But he just nodded again. “The demon won’t, or maybe can’t, deaden the pain.”
“And apparently it doesn’t rejuvenate limbs either.”
His fingers, warm around her ankle, never tightened, but his face fell into those harsh lines that reminded her he’d just mostly lopped the head off a monster. “No,” he said softly. “It gives much, but what is lost is lost forever.”