by Jessa Slade
Jilly rolled her eyes at their flirting and pushed aside a display of corkscrew bamboo shoots on the counter to make room for the tray. She took her soup and a teacup and went to perch on a ceramic plant stool.
Liam cradled the small cup in his big hands. “I find I have a deepening appreciation for Far Eastern exotics.” When Jilly choked on her scalding tea, he went on blandly, “Jilly tells me you liked the bracelet I gave her.”
She set down her cup with a clatter. “You didn’t—”
Liam glanced at her. His eyes were half lidded, but the warning clouds in the dark blue stopped her. “I didn’t appreciate the nuances before, but I always knew it was perfect for you, sweetheart.”
Lau-lau’s glance shuffled between the two of them.
Jilly knew the only gossip to beat a charming romance was a bitter breakup. She eased back on her hard seat. “Well, xiao-long, at least you know when you need to make amends.” She hoped her sideways glower told him the reparations would be steep indeed.
Lau-lau chuckled. “Xiao-long? Have you forgotten your Mandarin? Haven’t I told you not to ignore your past?” She lowered her voice, as if Liam weren’t right there. “I very much doubt he has a little dragon.”
Jilly smiled sweetly and sipped her tea.
Liam cleared his throat. “Of course not. After all, you did tell Jilly the bracelet is good luck. And she sure needed it.”
Lau-lau nodded. “True, true. And good luck for you too that she brought you to me for your little . . . ailment. I have an infusion for that.” She rose to poke through her herb cabinet. With each drawer she opened, another scent wafted into an invisible whirlwind of florid and dank that puckered Jilly’s sinuses.
Over the scuttle of dried leaves and paper packets, Liam whispered, “This won’t kill me, will it?”
“If not, maybe I will. ‘Sweetheart’?”
“ ‘Little dragon’?” he shot back.
She shrugged.
“Chinese knot work does more than bring good luck,” Lau-lau said over her shoulder. “But confusing demons won’t help your problem either.”
Jilly and Liam locked glances.
“What kind of demons?” Jilly kept her voice as casual as when she asked one of her kids if they really thought getting double-digit piercings would help with their job hunts. And speaking of hunts, the stark pattern of Liam’s marking blazed as he fixed the old woman with an intent stare. “Just bad demons?”
“All demons are bad.” Lau-lau dumped the ingredients she’d collected into the hollow of a marble mortar. She tapped the matching pestle briskly against the bowl. “But little-dragon syndrome is caused by poor circulation, not demons.” She chuckled.
Jilly managed a weak echo. “Confusing demons. How quaint.”
“In the old stories, demons get lost in the intertwined patterns of the knot and bother you no more.” Lau- lau crushed the herbs, releasing a scent unlike any that had gone into the bowl. The faint musk evoked moonlight on rumpled bedsheets.
Jilly shook her head. She certainly didn’t believe in that herbal crap.
Of course, she had to believe in demons now too. She held her breath until the leaf dust had settled. Or until her hormones had.
Lau-lau whisked around the counter and dumped the contents of the mortar into the remains of Liam’s tea. “There. That’ll put the snap back in your New Year dragon firecracker.”
“Why, thank you, ma’am.” He smiled, looking only slightly less green than the contents of the cup.
As Lau-lau cleared away the soup, Jilly smirked at Liam. “What are you waiting for? I thought talya fighters were immortal.”
He peered doubtfully into his tea. “We don’t die, but we can be killed.”
She snorted. “Lau-lau has only been a person of interest in one poisoning.”
“Oh. Well, then.” He downed the tea in a gulp, then set down the cup.
A droplet lingered on the center of his bottom lip, and Jilly realized she was staring. Worse, she wanted to brush away that drop. She dropped her gaze guiltily and tucked her hands under her seat.
He huffed out a breath. “Not bad. Tastes like . . .”
She glanced up and caught the flicker of his smile. If he did that more often, smiled like he had a secret he wanted to share, she might actually be in some trouble here. “Tastes like what?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you should take a sip.”
“You finished it all.”
He just looked at her.
Heat flashed through her, sudden and overpowering. Only Lau-lau’s return kept her from leaping to her feet and . . . she wasn’t sure. Even if the knot-work bracelet was capable of leading demons like hers astray, that still didn’t explain the waywardness of her purely human response to the man sitting just out of arm’s reach.
Lau-lau glanced at his cup. “Good man. You don’t fuck around.”
Jilly swiveled on her seat to goggle at the old woman.
Liam inclined his head solemnly. “Ma’am, indeed I don’t.”
“Up you go, then.” Lau-lau grinned at Jilly. “You can pay me later.”
CHAPTER 6
They left the shop and climbed the steep, narrow stairs past Lau-lau’s second-floor apartment to Jilly’s garret loft on the third floor.
Liam hummed to himself as she unlocked the door. “A knot-work labyrinth. The Celts had similar stories in their mythology.”
So the calm, cool, and collected commander wanted to ignore all the irrelevant stuff that had happened downstairs. How very calm, cool, and collected of him.
“Sacred path or trap,” he continued, all professorial, “depends on what you find in the center.”
God knew what happened in her center every time he turned that deep gaze on her. Butterflies, felt like. Butterflies couldn’t be evil, could they?
She opened the door and stripped off her jacket. She paused, looking down the entry hall, past the cheap pine table with its collection of random papers and knickknacks to the kitchen doorway and the living room visible at the far end. Lately, whenever she stood here, it seemed that the place should be different. She had changed so much over the last year.
The attack. Rico’s subsequent trial and conviction. More recently, her firing. And now the demon.
“What’s wrong?” Liam’s hand was a solid, warm pressure between her shoulder blades. “Is something out of place?”
Besides her? For a weak moment, she was glad he stood there, a convenient focus for her confusion.
“I found the bracelet on the floor here. After I . . .” She turned back to the hallway table. She rummaged through the catchall bowl. The etched glass chimed with the discordant music of spare keys and loose change. “I tossed it in here somewhere. Ah.”
She lifted the bracelet. The matte silvery metal was an intricate design of finer strands woven over and under each other, coming together and separating again, doubling back to form a flat cuff just wider than her two fingers when she held it aloft. The convoluted weave, glimmering between the strands, made her eyes ache.
“It needs polishing,” she said.
“Nothing in this realm would touch it.” He showed no inclination to, peering at it from a short distance. A flicker of violet deepened his blue eyes to a midnight storm. “Gangue—that’s the waste rock around a mineral deposit—and fluorspar. See the shine? But it’s a demon artifact, all right. The etheric mutation is strong enough that the base matter of it isn’t even rooted in this world anymore.”
She clenched her fist, and the edges of the bracelet bit into her palm. She wanted to drop it, punt kick it back to whence it came, along with the demon who’d presented it.
“I came home late after the homeless outreach at the park. That was the first time I saw you, wasn’t it? I didn’t remember until I saw you in the alley last night.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling him. Except who else could explain the beginning of this end she had come to?
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We talyan have a
knack for blending into the shadows. Occupational hazard.”
“I think I was still furious that Envers had fired me and then been so kind as to ‘let’ me work the event. Anyway, I went out for a drink after.” She hesitated, then met his gaze levelly. “Maybe it was more than one drink. When I came home, you were here.”
The violet flare in his eyes was unmistakable this time. “I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, I figured that out already. At the time, though, I wasn’t thinking quite right. I wanted a fight. Or something. And then here was this guy, too skinny and sad looking to be scary.”
He pursed his lips. “Definitely not me.”
The violet highlights of the demon overlay in his eyes almost distracted her, but underneath, she caught a glimpse of the imaginary man in her apartment whose ass she’d hesitated to kick that night. What had the demon teased her with? A lie? Or some deeper truth?
She shook her head, not agreeing with him, but banishing the distracting thought. Whatever—whoever—was hiding under his duster and feral tattoo didn’t matter; the clan chieftain he’d become would never let it out.
Probably best. For both of them.
She continued. “The thing pretending to be you gave me the bracelet.”
Liam studied her as if he heard the reticence in her tone. “Just gave it to you.”
“Sort of dropped it. After I punched you. It.”
“Punched it. What happened to sad and skinny?”
“Well, there was a strange man in my apartment. And it was standing too close. And then its eyes turned creepy.”
“Creepy?” Liam cut himself off and said between gritted teeth, “Can you just tell me what happened? In order?”
She huffed out a breath. “I came home from the bar. You—it was waiting for me. For some reason, I wasn’t afraid.”
“Back to the skinny and sad thing.” He sounded irked.
“Am I telling this story? We talked for just a minute about . . . nothing, really. Then it tried to kiss me. But its eyes turned all solid white with little black slashes.” The remembered horror made her voice shake, and she cleared her throat. “Anyway, I took my comic books seriously as a kid and I know that’s never going to end well. So I decked it. It dropped the bracelet, and the sound of metal hitting the floor woke me up.”
“Or sobered you up, since you said you were drunk.”
She tapped the bracelet against her leg in annoyance. “I said I had a few drinks. I wasn’t drunk enough to black out or hallucinate.”
“Just drunk enough to let it touch you.”
Her thigh, where she’d flicked the bracelet, tingled. “That’s how I was possessed? Because I wanted . . .” She swallowed the rest of the words. After all, it didn’t matter what she’d wanted. Whom she’d wanted.
After a moment, he shook his head, his expression shuttered. “The demon had chosen you. Your possession was inescapable.” His blue gaze pierced her, so unlike the eerie white of the demon’s eyes that had finally snapped her from her daze. “What did you want, Jilly?”
She felt she could fall endlessly into that deep blue. Except he was a trap worse than any other, the kind where a girl could forget to fight her way free. “You said it didn’t matter what I wanted. Maybe I’ll give the parting gift back.”
“Impossible. The only thing worse than your having it would be leaving it for something more evil to find.”
“More evil than me. You sure know how to charm a girl.” She slipped the bracelet over her wrist and backed away from him.
“The demon had time for that. I don’t.” He stalked after her, and the prickle that had started in her spread at the predatory intentness of his gaze, until every nerve seemed to stand at attention. She wondered if she’d have to attack him as she had his demon double. And if she’d have any better luck this time around.
He made no move to touch her, only circled around her to cast sidelong glances into the tiny galley kitchen, then the living room with its mass-produced Scandinavian furnishings.
She watched him narrowly. “Nothing so cool as your warehouse. And I only got the one piece of weird jewelry.”
“I was just checking to see if the surveillance equipment was in place as I ordered.”
She froze. “Excuse me?”
“You’re obviously on the verge of your virgin ascension, and it will be enlightening to have the event on tape.”
The short hairs on the back of her neck rippled. Fury, she recognized idly. Even the demon—an entity of pure, if repentant, evil—hadn’t pissed her off so bad. “I am not a guinea pig.”
“No. Presumably a demon wouldn’t find much use for a guinea pig.” He poked at the phone on the table beside the couch, then peered under the fringe of the lampshade. “Ah, there it is. Good.” He swiveled on his heel and settled onto the couch. He flicked aside the hem of his duster and splayed the dark canvas across her generic but easy-to-clean upholstered cushions.
She narrowed her eyes. How easy to clean—now, that would be worth analyzing as she scrubbed his blood out. “I’m not going to transform before your eyes.”
“You are already.” Violet gleamed as he swept her with a glance. “I can see the dilation in your eyes, the capillary expansion flushing your skin.” He took a long breath.
She shot up a hand before he told her what she smelled like. “That’s annoyance you’re seeing. Because I’m thinking about killing you.”
“That would be the demon,” he said patiently. “Jilly, we’ve all been through it, we talyan. Unlike Andre, you may still be saved. In that, at least, your demon didn’t lie.”
She walked slowly toward him. “And you’re going to give me that chance, lead me out of danger?” Eyes half lidded, he watched her as she edged between his knees to stand over him. “You going to be my hero tonight?”
He angled his face up. She bent just a little at the knees.
And reached sideways to grab the lamp by its base. She hefted the ceramic over her head, and brought it smashing down on the table. The cheap lamp exploded, and the cheaper table crumpled under the blow. Impossibly, in the indirect light from the kitchen, she glimpsed the arcing flight of the tiny black transmitter.
Liam watched her with one eyebrow raised as she snagged it midair.
She crushed the transmitter. The sting of crystallized components biting into her palm stirred a sharp delight. “Well. Now we are alone.”
Liam pursed his lips. “What will Lau-lau think?”
“That we’re having mind-blowing sex. That is what we’re going to do next, right?”
He stiffened. Not the part of him she was leering at, but the rest of him. “We were just getting information from her, not actual marital aids.”
“You haven’t kept pace with the times. You don’t have to be married anymore to have sex. And you obviously haven’t talked to Sera about the birds and the bees and the demons.” She tossed the transmitter over her shoulder and started to turn away, bumping his knee aside.
He grabbed her wrist and—in a move she couldn’t quite reconstruct in her head, although it had something to do with putting her over his knee—had her flat on her back on the couch. He loomed, pinning her arms above her head. “What do you mean? What haven’t I been told?”
Oh sure, threaten to beat him to a pulp and he yawned. Imply that his troops weren’t marching neatly in order and he snapped. She strained against his hold until her joints creaked. To no avail. Possibly that’s why he yawned when threatened.
The bracelet pressed hard against her flesh. She relaxed, the better to lure him into a false sense of security. “I figured Sera hadn’t actually told you how she and Archer made sure she survived the ascension of her demon. She seemed a little embarrassed to be pimping for the big daddy.”
Liam scowled down at her, a deep V between his brows. “The veteran talya has to make sure the tyro isn’t ripped apart in the tangle of intertwined demon and human energies. Ancient league texts detail a prescribed formula of meditations an
d purifications to mark the first ascension. But usually the two talyan go out drinking and fighting and that keeps the novice nailed down in this realm.” He trailed off.
Jilly knew she shouldn’t be enjoying his fumbling so much. “Yeah, go back and think about that nailed part.”
He reared back, glaring at her.
She caught her breath, not at the fierce look, but at the grind of his thighs against hers. She wasn’t in the best position to tease him.
Or, actually, she was in the perfect position to tease him, but she wasn’t sure it was a good idea.
Or, more actually, she was perfectly sure it was a terrible idea, and yet . . .
She stared up at his aghast expression and started to wonder whom the joke was on. “Is it so hard to believe that a man and a woman facing possible destruction, not to mention evil at its core, would join up against it in the most intimate way? Or is it just that it wasn’t your idea first?”
“I’d do whatever it takes to keep my men—my people—safe.” He made it sound like a desperate prayer.
“Including step out of the way?” She lifted her hips, denim against denim hissing. “Or including this?”
He jumped off the couch so fast the breath whooshed back into her lung almost painfully. Maybe it was just the speed of his dismount that stung.
“I guess not that,” she murmured to herself. So much for praying.
“This is demonic work indeed,” he muttered darkly, even more to himself.
“Gee, thanks.”
He stood staring at her, hands fisted at his sides. “I cannot—”
She refused to drop her gaze halfway and snicker like a silly teen, but thanks to the snug fit of his jeans, the problem was quite obviously not that he couldn’t. “I don’t mind drinking and fighting. Although I hear dying is out of my hands now.”
The twist of agony on his face only made her more furious.
“Maybe we never had a chance after all.” Her voice came out harsh, cracking into a second octave not her own.
Despite the implied violence—or maybe because of it—his expression finally calmed. “Perhaps not, but if I can save you, then I will.”