Personal Demon

by Kelley Armstrong

  It didn't take long to search the house. It was only a couple of thousand square feet, my father being the sole inhabitant and not inclined to entertain. Paige met me next door to my father's bedroom suite, in a small room where Troy slept. To get to my father's, an intruder had to pass through here, adding an extra layer of security.

  Paige cast a privacy spell, though I now doubted the precaution was necessary. We'd cast sensing spells and if someone was here, even hidden or unconscious, we'd know it.

  "If Troy realized someone broke in, and he got your dad out, they'd call so we wouldn't walk in on a killer. If they took your dad, they'd leave Troy behind." Dismay touched with guilt crossed her face. "Troy..."

  "No," I said. "Yes, it may be a logical explanation--Troy kills the guards with poisoned coffee and kidnaps my father--but no. Not Troy."

  "Maybe not willingly," she said slowly. "But if he was blackmailed. Or someone in his family was threatened..."

  "He doesn't have any family. No long-term girlfriends. No children. No vices that he could be blackmailed with. He is, in short, the perfect bodyguard."

  As I defended him I wondered how much it was rooted in affection, rather than conviction.

  "I cannot believe he'd do it," I said. "But, in light of no other obvious explanations..." I couldn't finish the sentence.

  "Is there anyplace else your dad could be? On the property? I know there's no basement, but--"

  My head jerked up. "The panic room."

  LUCAS

  9

  "I CANNOT BELIEVE I FORGOT--" I strode into my father's bedroom. "It's accessed through the bedroom. Where, I don't know. But surely it's equipped with a method of communicating with the outside world. He should have been able to call for help."

  I walked around the walls, lifting paintings, mirrors, anything that could conceal a panel. Or would it be as small as a latch? I crouched at the dressing table and began examining the underside.

  "Um, the door can't be in here," Paige said.

  I turned sharply, irritated in spite of myself. "It is. He said it was accessed through the bedroom."

  "The bedroom? Or the bedroom suite? Because there's no way there's a hidden room behind any of these walls, Lucas."

  Two sides were exterior walls, the third ran the length of the adjoining bath and the fourth was the length of Troy's sleeping quarters. Not enough space for a panic closet, much less a room.

  I cursed. Thinking before I acted. That had never been a problem before.

  Paige was already in the bathroom, mentally taking measurements. She pulled open the door to the walk-in closet. A flick of the light and "Yes! Here, the east wall. Behind it is the kitchen, but there's plenty of room--"

  She stopped, looking down. A sharp inhalation, then she disappeared into the closet, moving fast. I hurried to the doorway.

  The closet was in disarray. Someone had haphazardly yanked clothing off hangers, dumped shoes on the floor.

  I remembered what Hope had said. A voice, asking how to get into "the room." The panic room.

  Paige was pushing aside hangers, frantically hunting for the door. A stifled gasp. She lifted fingers smeared with blood. There, on the sleeve of a gray suit coat, was a bloody handprint. And at Paige's feet, a stain on the carpet. More blood smears crossed to the door and likely continued outside, where the dark wood in the bedroom and black marble in the bath had hidden the traces.

  Finally, I found the trigger--several buttons recessed into the rear of the lower clothing rod. Those buttons would need to be pressed in sequence. An access code. Perfectly logical--why have a panic room if anyone can get in--but how would I get in? My father was inside, too injured to call for help, and I was stuck out here, pressing the damned buttons--

  Call the Cabal.

  I was lifting my phone when the rack moved with a hydraulic whoosh. Paige stumbled back out of the way. Before I could get around the door to see within, I heard my father's voice, starting a spell.

  "Papa!"

  I swung around the door and pulled up short. He stood there, his shirt front covered with blood. His lips moved, but I could hear nothing, could only see the blood.

  Damn it, move! Help him! He needs first aid, an ambulance...

  I couldn't budge, brain insisting this was impossible. Paige rushed past me and past my father. I opened my mouth to call her back, then saw a body lying in a pool of blood. Troy.

  As she dropped beside him, I strode to my father, finding my voice at last.

  "Are you okay? There's blood--"

  "It's Troy's. I'm fine."

  I saw my cell phone still in my hand and lifted it. "Have you called--?"

  He took it from me, fingers flying over the keypad. I knelt beside Paige. Troy had been shot in the chest and was unconscious. Blood soaked his shirt. There were more bloodied clothes on the floor, where my father must have tried to stanch the flow.

  Paige was ripping off Troy's shirt. I leaned in to help.

  I could see the shot now, an exit wound just below his heart. There was so much blood...

  My father bent beside Paige. "What can I do?"

  She asked him to bring cold cloths.

  A minute later, he returned with wet towels. "The ambulance should be here in five minutes. This damned room..."

  "Built before the cellular age," I murmured as I cleaned the blood from Troy's chest, looking for other injuries. "And never tested for reception later, because it had a land line. But a land line can be cut."

  He nodded. "When the guards didn't call the office for their hourly check-in, the security office would have been alerted. It always seemed that would be fast enough..."

  Unless you had a man dying on the floor, and the gunman possibly right outside the door.

  My father mopped Troy's brow, then looked at Paige. "Is he as bad as--?"

  He stopped and shook his head, realizing he didn't want an answer. Troy was too pale. His breathing was too shallow. As skilled as Paige and I were at first aid, this was beyond us.

  "He was talking to someone," my father said after a moment. "I was in my room. I couldn't make out who he was talking to, but nothing seemed to be wrong, and I thought it was you, that I'd misunderstood and you were already on your way when you phoned. I was heading to the door when Troy walked in. That startled me--he didn't knock first. I think he knew something was wrong and was trying to warn me, but as he walked through that door--"

  My father blinked. No outward sign of emotion, but that blink told me everything, as did the slight catch in his voice. "They shot him in the back. He tried to tell me something, but he passed out before he hit the floor. I managed to get the door closed and cast a barrier spell. I should have looked first, seen who--" He shook his head. "All I could think about was getting him into this room and calling for help. Then, too late, I realized I couldn't." A pause, then he looked up sharply. "The ambulance. It'll be here any minute. You should--"

  "I'll open the gates," I said as I got to my feet.

  "Hope and Karl," Paige called after me. "They'll be--"

  "I'll call them."

  KARL WAS AT the front door, trying to find a way in after discovering that the outside guards were dead. Had he attempted to break a window, he or Hope could have been seriously injured by the protection spell. I should have warned him about that. Another unacceptable oversight.

  Who had been on duty tonight? I almost certainly knew them, had talked to them, inquired after their families, who would be expecting them home in a few hours...

  I shook it off and told Karl and Hope about my father, pointing them to the panic room, then opened the gates. I was partway up the drive when the ambulance arrived. I climbed in and updated them on the situation.

  As the paramedics and I got close to the panic room, I heard Karl and my father arguing, and broke into a run.

  HOPE

  CHAOS-CRAZED

  I stood in the panic room, my brain a swirl of perfect chaos.

  Paige's thoughts were loud
est, a frightened jumble of self-doubt. Did I do that right? Am I missing something? What if I'm making it worse? Where's the ambulance?

  Benicio's thoughts were too muddled to distinguish, one intense wave after another. Under that, I could pick up Karl's steady throb of anger and distress.

  Then there was the man on the floor. Dying...His soul, slipping from his body, the grief and anxiety and fear of the others swirling around him, a cocktail more potent than anything I ever dreamed of. I drank it in, oblivious to my surroundings. I couldn't remember how I'd gotten in there. Couldn't remember why I was there. Couldn't even remember who this man was, lying on the floor, dying. All that mattered was that he was dying and when he did, the reward would be beyond imagining.

  Karl was yelling about getting someone to leave. Not me. He wouldn't do that--wouldn't pull me away, not when death was so close, hanging in the air...

  This was what I was made for. This was where I belonged, in the center of the whirlwind, drinking it in...

  "You need to get her out of here." Benicio's voice.

  "You don't think I'm trying?" Karl's snarl.

  The room spun, pulling me under.

  "It's the chaos." Benicio. "She's--"

  "I know what's happening." Karl. "And apparently you do too."

  His anger spiked and I shuddered. So delicious, so perfectly--Hands went around my waist. Lifted me. I lashed out with everything I had. The arms only gripped tighter and carried me, kicking and punching and screaming, from the room, out two doors, into the bright glare of a white room.

  The chaos lifeline snapped under the glare of those bathroom lights. I looked up and saw my reflection--a nightmarish version of myself, my hair wild, lips pulled back in a snarl, face contorted with pure animal rage.

  The face of a demon.

  Karl carried me into the bedroom. He lowered me onto the bed, and as I gulped air, my throat raw from screaming, I struggled to block the memory of my reflection, telling myself it'd been some hellish trick of my mind.

  The last five minutes flooded back. What I'd felt in that room. What I'd thought. All of it as alien as that horror in the mirror and yet, like the reflection, recognizable.

  "K-K-Karl..."

  I looked up, my eyes filled with tears of shame, and could see only a watery figure. I felt his arms around me as he crouched, pulling my face against his chest.

  "Shh, shh, shh."

  "I-I-I--"

  "Shhh."

  I forced my head up, to find his face, to look him in the eyes.

  "I wanted him to die, Karl. I couldn't even remember who he was. A man I know, I like, and I wanted him to die so I could feed off--"

  My head jolted forward, gorge rising, and before I could stop it, I threw up on him.

  "Oh God, oh God, I'm so--"

  He took my chin and lifted it, looking me in the eye. "It's okay, Hope."

  With his free hand, he deftly unbuttoned his shirt, peeled it off and tossed it on the bed, never breaking eye contact. Thinking of that--throwing a vomit-covered shirt onto Benicio Cortez's Egyptian cotton sheets--I had to bite back a surge of hysterical laughter. My eyes filled at the same time and I started shaking so badly I couldn't breathe.

  My mind was back in that room, wallowing in the chaos, gulping it down, seeing Troy...

  A sudden vision shoved the memory aside. I was peering through bushes, watching a dark-haired young man on a restaurant patio, eating a burger with one hand, writing with the other, gaze fixed on a book. Something about him looked familiar.

  The vision faded and I saw Troy again, dying. Then I saw him sitting across from me, laughing and flirting, and I was thinking what a nice guy he was, how he was someone I'd like to know better, someone I...

  Wanted to watch die?

  My stomach heaved, but there was nothing left.

  Karl pulled my face back to his. I struggled to understand him.

  "Focus on me, Hope. On what I'm showing you."

  His face swam in front of me, then vanished, and I was behind the bushes again. I could see my hand, holding back a branch as I peered through. My fingers were long and slender, masculine but smooth, not a child's but not yet a man's.

  "Hey!" a voice boomed. "So this is where you're hiding."

  The dark-haired man at the table lifted his head, lips curving in a crooked smile that finally made the recognition click. Jeremy Danvers, the werewolf Alpha. Another young man, thickset and muscular, grabbed him in a headlock, leaned over, snatched Jeremy's drink, took a swig and made a face.

  "Get this man a beer," he called to two others stepping onto the patio.

  "Next year," Jeremy said. "When I can legally--"

  "Stop being so damned proper. It's hot. I'm buying you a beer. You're drinking it."

  The man swung a chair around and plunked down.

  "Please, sit, Antonio," Jeremy said. "No, you aren't interrupting my work at all."

  They continued bantering as the other young men joined them, but the conversation faded under the swirling emotions from the watcher. Envy. Longing. Loneliness. His fingers whitened on the branch as he strained to listen, lapping up the camaraderie from the patio, caught up in his feelings. Then others overlapped--those of an adult looking back on the memory. Regret, grief and guilt, as intense as the chaos of the panic room, and it swept me along, giving me something to feed on, a rich substitute devoid of moral consequences.

  After a moment, though, it wasn't enough and the shaking started anew, my chest constricting, breathing ragged--

  "Focus, Hope. Focus on me."

  Another vision. This one black emptiness. Only voices. One I knew, but much younger than I'd ever heard it.

  "You don't understand, Dad."

  "Yes, I do. You're the one who doesn't. The Pack isn't for us."

  "It's for werewolves, isn't it? And we're werewolves. That's how it's supposed to be--living like that, with others, others like us. I feel it--"

  "It's an instinct. You have to fight it. Rise above it. It's not a club with a special handshake, Karl. They won't let us in. They'd kill us."

  "How do you know that if you've never tried?"

  "I know. We have to stay out of their way. We have to--"

  Run. Always running. The coward's way.

  Are you calling your father a coward?

  No, of course not. I'd never...

  The thoughts disintegrated into a muddle of rage and guilt. I drank it up, knowing it was a memory, something Karl was offering me, a gift...

  When my stomach stopped churning, I rubbed my hands over my face.

  "I--I think I'm okay now," I said. "Can we--?"

  "Leave?" He got up from his crouch and rolled his shoulders, working out the kinks. "I plan to."

  I saw the back of a paramedic who'd just passed through with the stretcher. I got up, wanting to ask how Troy was, but my knees wobbled and Karl had to catch me.

  Paige appeared in the doorway. She managed a wan smile, and motioned for Karl to sit me back on the bed. As she checked my pulse, I flashed back to the panic room, to how I'd left it, over Karl's shoulder, flailing like a chaos-crazed demon. Paige had seen that. They saw, and now they knew my secret.

  But as shame flooded me, I remembered how they knew. Not from Karl, who'd never betray my secret. From Benicio. Who'd told Karl to get me out of the room. Who had thrown me into a chaotic situation, knowing I'd thrive on it and, like a junkie, want more.

  He'd used me just as much as Tristan had. There was a difference between seducing a prospective employee with promises of huge bonuses and preying on her weaknesses, feeding her the drugs she wants, knowing she'll become addicted.

  Lucas walked in, but my gaze went past him to Benicio. Then I looked away. I didn't want to lay the blame on him. So what if he'd tempted me? I wanted to be above temptation. In control. Responsible.

  "I'll be at the hospital," Benicio said to Lucas. "I want you and Paige--" A sharp intake of breath. "Your brothers."

  "I'll warn them."
/>
  "I should have thought--"

  "I'll look after it, Papa. You go with Troy. I'll have guards meet you at the hospital."

  After Benicio left, I looked up to see Lucas lost in thought as Paige walked over to him. He murmured something to her, then turned to Karl.

  "I hate to ask..." he began.

  "Then don't," Karl growled. "We've done more than enough already and Hope has paid more than--"

  "What do you need?" I cut in. I met Karl's gaze. "Please."

  "No."

  My insides twisted, and I had to swallow to keep from heaving again.

  He laid his hand on mine, cupped in my lap. "You've done enough, Hope."

  "I haven't," I whispered, too low for the others to hear. "I need to help. To finish this by doing something good."

  A moment's silence as he studied me. Then he turned to Lucas. "One last favor. And I do consider it a favor."

  "It is," Lucas said. "I need to find my brothers--"

  "And what, you want us to make phone calls? Get your Cabal flunkies out of their beds--"

  "No. We need to track them down and warn them. In person. Just find them, please, Karl. Then you can go."

  WE DROVE KARL'S rental, following Lucas as he made calls, trying to locate his brothers. Karl continued to grumble--why did we have to find them when a direct phone call would give them quicker warning? I agreed, but in Lucas's defense, put forward possible explanations. Karl was having none of it. Not only was he worried about me, but playing tracking dog for a thirty-year-old sorcerer chafed. He had enough trouble obeying his Alpha.

  The reminder of Jeremy brought back the memories Karl had shown me, and I longed to ask what they meant. This wasn't the time. I wasn't sure there'd ever be a time. Karl had only shown me that in a desperate attempt to yank me out of a dark place.

  We'd just left the neighborhood when Lucas called my cell.

  "Hector is at home," he said. "Paige and I will visit him. Carlos is out for the evening, and will be difficult to locate, so I'm going to ask you two to go see William, who was apparently working late. My father's other bodyguard, Griffin, will meet you at the office and escort you inside."

  "Okay..."

  I could understand why Lucas wouldn't want a security team swooping in and alarming Hector's family at home, but this made no sense. If William was in the office, there was an entire security division on site to check on him and take him into protective custody.