by Selena Scott
The demon had gotten away.
Even now, the thought of Arturo had her mind stuttering. She was no longer swooping as a hawk in her mind’s eye. She was blinking her eyes open on the floor of her bedroom, staring at her own reflection in the black glass of the dark windows.
She rose up.
She took one step and then another toward her reflection.
Look at that woman there. She tilted her head to one side and the other. Pretty, she thought. Wild hair that could probably stand to get a trim. Strong shoulders. Strange eyes. Not just the light green color, but the expression in them. Martine had never managed to look particularly human. Her eyes always gave her away.
Her expression was too young and too old all at once. She knew both too much and too little.
She reached the window and her glass fingers reached up and made contact with her flesh-and-blood fingers. Her face twisted with a helpless sort of thought.
Did Arturo see a woman when he looked at her?
For a moment, she let her energy surface. She let it wash over her skin the way it had last night when she’d sat across his hips.
No. There was no way in hell that he saw a woman when he looked at her. He must see this odd, glowing creature. Not quite a woman and not quite a hawk and not quite light. What was she?
She turned away from her reflection, pained by it and lonely.
A movement in the darkness outside, below her bedroom, caught her eye. It was a shadow moving against another shadow, like a lover.
When she focused her eyes, she saw that it was really just Arturo, slipping through the shadows. He was checking the perimeter for evidence of the demon, just as she’d just been doing within the confines of her mind.
She just watched him walk for a moment. He moved like a cat, fluid and slinky. His body, though quite tall, seemed to keep its center of gravity close to earth. He paused and, as if her gaze had drawn him, he turned to look up at her room.
Martine suddenly realized how she looked, leaning halfway out her window, watching him with her chin on her palm, her black nightgown swirling at her ankles. He could certainly see the entirety of her body, considering that even the bottom panels of the wall were made of glass.
He tucked his hands into his pockets and stared up at her. She stared back. A long minute passed.
“If we were mortals, we’d probably say hi to one another,” Arturo called up to her.
She laughed and brought her chin up off her hand. “If we were mortals, we probably wouldn’t be using our supernatural powers to do perimeter checks.”
He stepped forward a few steps, which made him tip his head back to keep looking at her. She had the strange wish that she wasn’t on the second floor. That she could reach out her hand and he could reach out his and they’d be touching. But there was too much distance between them.
He was quiet for another moment. “Did you mean what you said? About who I was when I was a mortal?”
“That you were considerate?” Martine cocked her head to one side. “Of course I meant that. You were a very considerate man. Do you disagree?”
Arturo dropped his head for a moment, dipping his hands into his pockets again. “No, I guess I don’t disagree. But it’s more like, I don’t really remember.”
“You don’t remember who you were then?” It was such a strange thought to Martine. She remembered Arturo so sparklingly clearly. As if he were a movie she’d just watched last night.
He said nothing, but his body went slightly stiff and Martine understood.
“Oh,” she whispered. “You’ve made yourself forget.”
“More or less,” he replied after a minute. “Try watching your entire family grow old and die without you.”
“And the woman you loved,” Martine added sadly.
“Yes. And Amelia.”
“Arturo,” Martine said gently. “If I get a chance to truly destroy the demon, I’m taking it.”
“I know,” he said, appearing confused that she’d even have to say that out loud.
“Regardless of what happens to those of us connected to him.”
“Ah,” Arturo understood then. She was going to kill the demon even if it meant that she was destroyed in the process. Even if it meant that Arturo was destroyed in the process. “I understand, Martine. I don’t know how you feel, but I’ve lived for long enough already.”
She peered down at him. “I think we need to let some energy off, don’t you?”
She stepped back from the window and reached up to the sleeve of her nightgown, pulling it down and exposing the rounded half-moon of her shoulder.
Arturo’s breath caught in his chest.
Wait, hold on. Was she—yeah. Yup. She was stripping for him. Her nightgown slipped off one shoulder and then the other and then it was an inky black puddle on the ground at her feet. She was gorgeously naked in the dark of her room.
Arturo was violently confused. Her attractiveness warred with her innocence. She was bending over, carefully folding her silk nightgown on her bed. Was he supposed to be going back into the house? Heading up to her room? Was he supposed to stay down here and strip for her? What the hell was going on?
“Oh. Right,” he muttered to himself as Martine turned back to face him and quickly shifted into her hawk form.
She wasn’t stripping for him, or inviting him to partake in her body. No. She was just taking her dress off so that she could shift. That was the kind of energy she was interested in burning right now. Not sexual energy.
Arturo let out a gusting breath and pulled his shirt off over his head. His pants and underwear and shoes came next. He folded everything as neatly as Martine had and set it on the back porch of the house before he turned toward the hawk circling him overhead and shifted quickly into his bear form.
With his heightened bear senses, he could scent her above him. An organic scent, like sand and water and grain, emanated from her feathers. He could hear the almost-silent beat of her wings against the air. The grate of her breath in her bird chest.
Without waiting to see if she would follow, Arturo plunged forward, doing his perimeter check. They couldn’t speak to one another, verbally or telepathically, when they were in their animal forms, but they also didn’t have to. Both of them found themselves extremely comforted by the silence that was somehow defined by camaraderie. Words had been uncomfortable lately, but this wasn’t uncomfortable. This swoop on the wind and the dirt under the paws.
When they’d completed the perimeter check, Arturo didn’t think twice before plunging off into the darkness, away from the house. The land was still warm from the heat of the day but he welcomed the chill on the air. She was right, he had needed this. Arturo picked up speed, full on galloping in the dark. He could feel and hear and smell Martine swooping through the air above him, but he didn’t look.
They made a gigantic, arching circle around their house, running their engines for almost an hour before they were back at the same spot they’d started. Both of them were satisfied that the demon wasn’t anywhere close to their people tonight. And both of them were finally sufficiently exhausted enough to potentially sleep.
Arturo froze in the same place where he’d been standing before, under Martine’s window. She just flew right through her open window, shifting before she hit the ground. Arturo didn’t shift. He stayed in his bear form and watched her, slim and naked, lean back out the window.
“Goodnight,” she whispered, and disappeared back into the darkness of her room.
Arturo finally shifted back to his human form, picked up his folded clothes and headed down into his dank room.
For the first time, the dim darkness wasn’t entirely welcome as he folded himself into his bed. He craned his neck to peer out the small strip of a window at the top of his ceiling. It was barely enough to even see a slice of the sky.
Arturo fell asleep halfway wishing for a bigger window. For more light.
***
The demon was in a dark place.
A cave of pain and nothing. It wasn’t a ‘where’ as much as it was a ‘how’. He was nowhere that could ever be tracked or found or experienced by anyone who wasn’t a demon. He wasn’t far from the group. But he couldn’t get to them, either. He was between atoms, between dimensions, between worlds.
And he hated it there.
Without Arturo at his side, he had no life force to feed upon. He had nothing to keep his centuries-old hunger at bay. His hunger gnawed at his gut, weakened his limbs, seemed to scratch at him from every side. He wanted to eat.
He wanted to kill. And he wasn’t going to settle for a single soul this time.
No. First would be Arturo, of course, the ingrate. After all these centuries of mercifully keeping the little pet alive, this was how Arturo paid him back? By switching his allegiance? No. That couldn’t be tolerated. He’d finally tear Arturo’s soul from his chest and watch him squirm to death, a soulless beast.
Next would be the idiot warrior who’d been sniffing at his heels for centuries. He couldn’t kill her, of course, because their life forces were linked. If he killed the demon hunter, he was killing himself. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t wound her beyond healing. Ever since Arturo had gone, the demon had wished for another pet. He imagined that the demon hunter would fulfill the role beautifully.
When the humans were completely unprotected, with Arturo and the demon hunter out of the way, he’d feast on their souls. He’d glut himself. A demon could live for hundreds of years on a single soul. But he didn’t care. He wanted to be filled to bursting. He wanted to waste their souls. He wanted to kill just to kill. Never before had he been so deprived for so long, and he wanted to make them suffer. To make them pay.
He wasn’t strong enough to materialize, though. The demon hunter had wounded him with her light-magic. It was taking him longer than ever to heal because he was so deprived of nutrients. He needed to eat. But he couldn’t eat if he was stuck there. In the nowhere.
There was only one way to gain access to Earth when he couldn’t materialize. He’d done it before.
The demon concentrated and reached out with his hateful mind. His mind raced by landscapes of lush green and white-tipped mountains. Over flat, gold, cracked land. His mind whipped through whorls of dust and over the top of a pack of roving animals that scattered as he cut through them all. He came upon a house. A strange house, like four houses mashed together. Human nonsense.
Inside the house were so many sleeping souls his mouth watered. He didn’t dare go near where the demon hunter was sleeping. She’d sense him. So instead he wandered silently, invisibly, into the room of two sleeping people. The tattooed woman who’d been so fun to play with and her humongous man who was so faithfully, pathetically at her side. The demon never understood why humans paired up. How limiting.
He graced over them, feeling their heartbeats and the rhythm of their breaths. No. Neither of them were right for this. They were too connected to one another. There was no way in through the armor.
The next room, across the house, was the redheaded man and his innocent woman. He’d possessed the redheaded man before and he hadn’t liked it one bit. There’d been too much loyalty and bravery and love pumping through the man. Embodying him had been akin to laying down in hot wax. The demon had endured it as long as he could have, but he didn’t want to do it again. He attempted to gain entry into the mind of the woman in his arms, but the demon recoiled when he sensed an even purer heart than the man next to her.
Good God, this woman was practically composed of generosity and good humor and kindness. The demon stole away. Besides. They wouldn’t have been an easy partnership to break up anyways. They were knit as tightly as the other couple.
The next room he slipped into he was nearly expelled from in a white-hot cloud of love and connection. The demon watched, irate and agitated, as the blond man and the black-haired woman moved against one another in rising passion. He was on his knees behind her and held her hips fast with one hand while he stroked down her spine with the other hand.
The demon attempted to get close to them, to infiltrate their minds, but the couple was protected by a cloudy shield of love and passion. Their connection to one another was so strong, it lay around them, almost like a glass bowl.
The demon left the room quickly, their whispered words of love and moaned passion like poison to him.
It was in the last room he entered that he hit paydirt. His old friend Arturo, the swine, lay in a tangle of sheets. He was restless, but sleeping. And oh so vulnerable.
The demon was practically licking his lips. If he could have taken his physical form, he would have ripped Arturo’s soul from his chest right then and there. And then he would have eaten his heart for good measure. But as it was, all he could do was possess him. Ah well, beggars couldn’t be choosers. The demon took an acute, sickening pleasure at the fact that he was going to infiltrate the group from the confines of Arturo’s mind.
He was going to force Arturo to break up each one of the couples. He was going to weaken the love and camaraderie in this group until there was nothing left. Until there were seven tortured souls, ripe for the plucking and ready to die.
He’d play Arturo like a puppet. The demon hovered over him and started to reach toward Arturo’s mind. Yes. He could even feel the familiarity of it. It was a mind he’d become very well acquainted with over the last four centuries. Arturo’s mind, so sharp, but so soft in unexpected places. With so many hidden reservoirs of emotion. What a human. But as the demon began to enter the sleeping man’s mind, there was something different about it than before. The demon felt as if a light, too hot and bright, was being shone on him from one corner of Arturo’s mind.
There was something here that hadn’t been there before and the demon hated it. He’d have to snuff it out.
He moved toward the bright, sweet thing hidden deep in Arturo’s mind and moved to kill it. But found he couldn’t move.
He was stopped, stock still, as if he were water frozen in mid-drip. It was then that the demon looked down and saw it. A rope made of golden light, firmly wrapped around his middle. He was trapped. Unable to move forward or backward.
Suddenly he was being yanked, bodily removed from Arturo’s mind. He raced backwards, out of the darkness and back into the dim light of Arturo’s room.
The demon seethed at the indignity of it all, his anger and rage doubling by a hundredfold. But anger and rage weren’t enough to fight the demon hunter who stood over top of Arturo, glowing gold and vengeful. The demon zipped backwards, invisible and horrible. He was gone, back into nothing, and far away from the group.
CHAPTER FIVE
Arturo sat straight up from sleep as if someone had poured a bucket of ice water over his head. His brain split with pain and he couldn’t stop the pained groan that escaped him if he’d wanted to.
He could smell the horrid stench of death. It was familiar and disgusting. He’d know it anywhere. It was how the demon smelled.
His eyes clamped shut and his hands tearing at the hair on his head, Arturo had a horrible realization. The scent seemed to be coming from him. Arturo writhed against the pain in his head. “No.”
“Quiet. He’s gone.”
Arturo gasped and opened his eyes to see Martine crouching over him. She glowed gold, knives glinting in her hands and a fierce expression on her face.
“He’s gone,” she repeated.
But Arturo could barely make sense of her words. He was shaking with the pain now, barely able to crack open his eyes.
He hadn’t registered that Martine had been sitting on him until the weight of her eased up and she was standing beside the bed. She yanked off the sweaty sheets that had pooled at his hips and dragged him bodily from the bed. Arturo heard footsteps and a door slam.
“What happened?” That was Jean Luc’s voice. But it was Jack who was suddenly under Arturo’s other arm, helping Martine support his weight.
“The demon,” she said curt
ly. “Caroline, boil water, but don’t put anything in it. Jack, we need to get him to the shower.”
Arturo tried to make himself walk but his feet just tangled and dragged on the ground. A few clumsy seconds later, he found himself standing under frigid shower water, boxer briefs and all. His shoulders fell three inches as the water began to warm.
He felt the demon’s reprehensible magic wash off his body and down the drain like dirt being flushed from a wound. Warm water was a simple remedy, but it worked. His muscles trembled as he planted his palms against the shower wall and dropped his head under the punishing stream of water.
It was as painful as it was refreshing. An uncomfortable rebirth into the land of the living.
“Drink. Now.”
A mug was shoved into one of his hands and then impatiently tipped up to his lips. Arturo gulped down the burning hot water. He felt the heat race instantly into his bloodstream and with the second gulp, the pain in his head eased. The demon had left behind a disgusting handprint of dark magic within Arturo’s mind, but by the time he’d finished the mug of hot water, the final dregs of pain were gone.
Weak as a baby, Arturo sank to the floor of the shower.
It had been a long time since the demon had attempted to possess him. But it wasn’t a feeling he would ever forget. To rescind the control of one’s mind and body was the ultimate violation. And he’d undergone years of it as the demon’s trusty servant. Whenever the demon had desired the corporeal form of a human, Arturo had been all too handy. He thought that he’d grown hardened to it.
But apparently not, considering he was crouched on the floor of a shower at five in the morning, breathing hard and trying not to throw up.
He heard the door of the bathroom close and he looked up, expecting to be closed in there with Martine.
He blinked when he realized there wasn’t a female in sight.
It was the three bear shifters who were scattered around the bathroom in a tableau that might have been titled ‘freaked-out concern’.