Embraced (Eternal Balance) (2 page)

“You’re everywhere. In my house, at my work—”

She pried my hand away and fixed those beautiful brown eyes on me. “Your work? Technically I was here—”

I covered her mouth again. “Everywhere except where I want you. In my bed. In my fucking life.”

She pulled my hand away again, and this time I let her. My resolve was crumbling. “I’m in your life, Jax. No deal is ever going to change that. We need to readjust. Find a new normal. Something that will work for this…situation. Maybe it’s time for me to move out of the house. I’ve saved a little bit of money. Chase has been gone for—”

“No.” Sam moved into my Uncle Rick’s house in case more trouble came beating down her door. It was a multipurpose choice. She’d been kicked out of her old place and needed somewhere to stay, and having her close so I could keep an eye out made me feel better. We’d only intended it to be temporary. Living under the same roof was like spreading a feast in front of a starving man. But the thought of not having her there was more agonizing.

I was a masochist. Clearly.

“No,” I spat again. “That’s not what—”

“Well then, where’s the line?” she asked, pushing forward until she was pressed against me. I held my breath. “
You gave me up
. That’s what you told me, right?”

Sam had sacrificed her life to break a demonic link between her and Chase, allowing me to beat the shit out of him. But it hadn’t been enough. My brother—who’d been hiding his own demon—had been in synch with it from the time he was a kid, and they didn’t have a fair fight in mind. I’d needed more of an edge. That’s where the deal came in. I’d leveled the playing field but had to sacrifice the only thing I loved. Sam. Now, as further payment, we were both bound by our word to serve as “agents of balance”—though the broker of the deal hadn’t bothered to tell us yet what the fuck that meant.

“Right,” I replied, letting out my breath. I held it that way, not daring to breathe in.

Her voice dropped. She shifted, rubbing against me, and I clenched my jaw tight. “But we’re supposed to be partners, correct?”

“Correct,” I confirmed tightly.

“And we live together. So, us spending time together obviously
isn’t
against the rules.” She wrapped an arm around my neck and pulled my head down so that our foreheads touched. “That’s all we’re doing here. Spending time…”

Something inside me cracked. I brought my lips to her earlobe, skimming the smooth skin. “Do you get off on pushing me?” I growled. My own colors swirled, a maelstrom of deep red and orange that mingled with hers. “Testing the limits of my restraint?”

My arms encircled her, hands sliding down to her ass. I gripped hard, pulling her into me, and a shock of sensation hit like lightning. Pain roared to life in my muscles. When I was close to Sam, I was happy. Azi didn’t do happy. It caused the demon pain, which also caused me pain. It wasn’t as bad as it used to be, but it was still there. I didn’t care, though. Neither did the demon. We both wanted nothing more than to be close to her.

She shimmied and a soft laugh escaped her lips. “What would you do if I said ye—”

I crushed my lips to hers. The demon rumbled, triumphant. I’d never been one to welsh on a deal, but I just didn’t give a shit. It would have been easy to blame my lack of restraint on Azi. Since the night Sam and I had sex, it had been pushing for more, making me desperate to a point that I found myself watching her move across a room, counting the ways I could take her, all the things I could do.

Sam moaned into my mouth. The sound was like ten thousand jolts of electricity hitting at once, and it pushed me over the edge. I thrust myself against her, sending waves of current pulsating through my body. I pulled away for a second, mouth lingering at her ear again. With a dark laugh, I whispered, “I’d say it was a good way to get yourself fu—”

A rushing sensation filled my head. The link Sam had unwittingly created between us flared to life, bringing about a
moment—
what we’d started calling the visions that sometimes came from our contact. She stood at the window of her old room in her Aunt Kelly’s house. She stared at the house next door, the window across from hers dark and silent. Tears slid down her cheeks. The sadness she felt was overwhelming, strong enough to make me cringe.

Reality came crashing back, and I made a move to pull away. I didn’t get the chance.

The stairs creaked, followed by the steady echo of footsteps. Sam jerked away and gasped. “Oh my God.”

“Not quite,” said an ominously familiar voice.

Chapter Two

Sam

I
stumbled away from Jax, who’d thrown a protective arm in front of me.

“But that’s probably a good thing.” Chase, Jax’s mirror image, stood by the door with his arms folded. He wiggled a finger between us and winked—a comfortable, familiar gesture that almost made me forget he was the enemy. “I heard this was a no-no.”

I swallowed the newly formed lump in my throat. A part of me wanted to reach out and pinch him to see if he was real. Because he couldn’t be, right? Lies, attempted murder, and all-around chaos… He’d have to be a special kind of moron to show his face here after what he’d done.

Or, be packing a serious advantage.

Jax wasn’t the only Flynn sporting a dark side. His twin brother Chase’s demon, Zenak, was Azi’s sworn enemy. A pair of demon royals, their pissing contest went a little too far once, and they’d been exiled to spend eternity trapped in a continuous string of human bodies.

The Flynn boys had fought a battle of apocalyptic proportions, but Chase, the sneaky bastard, linked himself to me—a parasitic and creeptastic bond that made him untouchable. I’d had to essentially commit suicide in order for Jax to defeat him.

Backing away, I tried not to flinch. I’d known the two boys since I was six. Chase was every inch the predator Jax was. He could smell weakness from a mile away. “Why ever you’re here, just forget it…”

“Let me guess.” Chase unfolded his arms and waggled his finger at the floor. “He was helping you find your contact lens, right?”

From the look on Jax’s face, he was about to reach critical mass. If it’d been anyone else, he might have ripped into flesh and asked questions later, but he had a bit more restraint when it came to his brother. Not because of some sappy fraternal bond, but because Chase’s death—or his own—would herald a demonic apocalypse. The standoff—hell, the whole demonic war—defined a no-win situation. Not that either brother would back down.

Jax made a noise low in his throat and dragged me behind him. “Chase—”

He threw his hands in the air and shook his head. “Peace, brother. I’m not here to make trouble.”

“Kind of hard to believe,” I mumbled.

“So is the fact that you’re here.” Chase folded his arms, cocky grin still in place. It was hard to reconcile that this was the enemy standing in front of me and not one of my closest friends. When Jax left home, Chase had been my rock, the shoulder I cried on and the support that made it possible for me to move forward with my life. But mind control and attempted murder tended to ruin a friendship. “Pretty sure the last time I saw you, you were dead.”

I opened my mouth—to say what, I had no clue—but never got a chance to speak. Jax lunged forward and wrapped his fingers around Chase’s neck. With a graceful pivot, he had their positions reversed, his brother flush against the wall with his feet dangling about a foot off the ground. “What do you want?”

Chase, always amused by Jax’s ferocity, let out a strangled chuckle. “Put me…down…and…tell you.”

I was pretty sure Jax squeezed just a bit harder before finally setting his brother on his feet.

Chase smoothed out his black button-down shirt and rolled his shoulders. With a wink to me he said, “Don’t act all murder and mayhem. If you were going to kill me, you would have done it months ago.”

Jax glowered. “Careful. I might have reconsidered.”

Chase wasn’t convinced—and rightly so. The demon Azirak had lived a thousand lives since its banishment from hell. While it wanted to see its clan restored to their former glory, the demon knew what that would do to the world. Maybe it’d gone soft. Or, maybe it liked what it had going in its current incarnation. It seemed that, like Jax, Azirak had developed certain…feelings for me. Enough that it didn’t wish to see me trampled under the weight of its demonic horde.

Chase turned away from Jax, fixing his gaze on me. A flash of regret, there and gone in an instant, and he was smiling again. “Well, however you managed it, I have to say, Samantha, it’s good to see you alive.”

I waved my hand. “Wish I could say the same, but…”

“Yeah, yeah,” he retorted. “And now that the formalities are out of the way, we might as well get down to it.” He nodded over his shoulder at Jax. “I doubt his patience has improved since embracing the demon.”

“Last time, Chase. What the fuck do you want?”

The music from the main floor drifted down, the beat changing slightly as one song faded seamlessly into the next. Chase sighed. “We’re never going to be good again, Samantha. I know that. And I get it. But I’m here to try and give you back at least a little bit of what I took.”

“What you took?” I asked, skeptical. I wasn’t sure what he was talking about. He’d betrayed me. His brother, too. He’d caused a ton of pain and essentially tried to end the world. But he hadn’t stolen anything as far as I knew.

Jax was tense, but quiet. Chase took it as a sign to continue. “I might be able to offer a solution to your…problem.”

“Problem?” Jax was instantly alert. He pushed me aside. “Which one would that be? The demons or you?”

“I won’t apologize for what I did. The demon’s nature is my nature and has been since the moment I embraced it. That nature takes precedence over the fact that you were once my brother.”

“You’re not helping your argument,” Jax snarled, taking a step closer. His movements were fluid and menacing. Controlled, with deadly intent.

“Get to the point, Chase,” I interjected, trying to keep things on track.

“My point is that my problem is with him.” He hitched his thumb at Jax then turned to me. “Not you.”

“So what exactly are you saying?” I hated to admit it, but all this talk was making me nervous. What if this was a ploy to buy time, and any second, twenty demons would ambush us. It wouldn’t be the first time he’d done something like that.

“I’m saying I’m sorry you were dragged into this,” said Chase. “That your life was affected. I’m sorry I tried to use you to get to him. Zenak may have no use for you, but believe it or not, I care. It bothers me to know that you’re in pain.”

“Pain?” I repeated, even more suspicious.

“Word travels. I know what he sacrificed to gain Heckle’s aid. I know what
he”
—he nodded at Jax—“had to give up.”

“I find it hard to believe you’re bummed because Jax and I can’t be together.” Even though we were living with it day in and out, hearing someone else speak it out loud was a fresh set of knives twisting in my heart.

He shrugged. “I saw how you suffered when he left the first time. I watched you miss him all those years. I’m not heartless, Samantha. He’s an ass, but for some reason you still want him.”

Jax snorted. “So you came back to town—a risky move, by the way—to what? Play supernatural cupid?”

Chase eyed him, clenching his jaw. He took a visible breath, and I realized this must be just as hard for him as it was for Jax, standing here without tearing into his brother. “I came to give you something. A name.”

“A name?”

“There’s a demon in town. A real badass. Serious trouble.”

Jax took another step closer. “There are a lot of demons in town. Why should I care?”

“This one is different.
Malphi
is particularly nasty. Who knows? Maybe Heckle will reward you for taking it out. Lift the…” He gestured to us. “The no-touching rule he put in place when you made your little deal.”

Jax was quiet, but I couldn’t keep my mouth closed. Selfless had never been Chase’s style. “What are
you
getting out of this?”

He didn’t even try hiding it. “Naturally, the death of this demon is beneficial to me as well.”

“And there it is,” Jax snapped.

“This demon, Malphi, is trouble for both of us, Jax. It needs to be taken out.”

Jax jabbed a finger at the stairs. “Then why don’t you take care of it?”

“I told you. If you take it down—”

“Yeah. Bargaining chip. I heard you the first time. I just don’t buy it.”

“He can’t take this thing down on his own,” I said. Despite the secrets he’d kept from me, I knew Chase. His human side, at least. He was manipulative and greedy but, above all else, worried about one thing—himself. “
That’s
why he’s here. This isn’t an olive branch—it’s self-preservation.”

“It’s a little bit of that, too.” Chase gave a sly grin.

“Sucks for you,” Jax said. A truly wicked smile spread across his face as he leaned in close to his brother. “Good luck with your demon. The answer is no.”

“But—”

“It’s not going to happen, Chase,” I said. There was no way this was anything more than a ploy to get us to do his dirty work. If Malphi even existed, then Chase had done something to piss it off, and now he was running scared and looking for someone to clean up his mess.

“I was afraid you’d say that.” He sighed and shot forward. One moment he stood in front of Jax, the next he was beside me, fingers wrapped like a vise around my wrist. It all took place in a matter of moments. His movement. Jax tearing him away and tossing his body across the room. The new, heavy weight around my wrist…

“What the hell?” It was a shiny black metal band decorated with strange symbols. They were slightly raised, and as I watched they seemed to flash several times before going dormant.

Chase picked himself off the floor and smoothed the front of his shirt. “Oh, that? It’s called a demon cuff, and if it’s not removed, it will kill you.” He turned to Jax. “So, care to reconsider?”

Chapter Three

Jax

R
ed bled through my vision, and I lunged for my brother. “What the fuck did you do?”

“Easy, man. Kill me and not only does your clan rise and wreak havoc, but she’ll die a particularly nasty death.”

I tore my gaze from him. “Sammy?”

“I dunno…” Her voice was hesitant. She flexed her hand, wiggling each of her fingers. Whispers of gray, of fear, filled the small space between the two shelves. They curled upward and thickened, and with the link between us, it was almost all I could focus on. “I feel…weird.”

Chase noticed, too. He took a deep breath and gave a contented sigh. “Fear isn’t as good as lust, but still tasty, right?”

I pushed him away and moved to stand beside Sam. The cuff didn’t look like much, but one touch and I felt it hum with power. “Take it off. Now.”

“No way.” Chase shook his head. He took a step back. “I wasn’t lying about Malphi. It’s a danger to both of us. Samantha, too.”

She narrowed her eyes. “And of course Jax taking this demon out makes your life easier, right?”

“Killing it does him just as much good as it does me.” He shrugged and moved carefully toward the door with slow, measured movements, never taking his eyes off mine. “You’ve got a few choices here, Jax. Can’t say I envy you. You can kill me now and unleash hell on earth. Samantha will die and Azirak will take over completely. You can do nothing. Malphi lives, Samantha dies. We’ll all probably die. Or, you can kill Malphi. I will remove the cuff, and everyone gets what they want.”

“Those aren’t choices,” Sam snapped. “This whole thing is one big trap.”

Chase frowned. I’d seen the look a million times growing up, but I’d never noticed the lack of sincerity until right then. “This is no trap, Samantha. Really, if you think about it, I did you a favor.”

“A favor?” she yelled, and I grabbed her arm as a preventive measure. The explosion of red, along with the weight of her fury hitting me through the link, told me she was seconds away from lunging for him. “You sonofa—”

“Malphi would have taken you by surprise had I not brought the danger to your attention. So, yeah. I did you a solid.” He turned to me. “Both of you. Time to repay the favor.”

There wasn’t any part of me that didn’t want him dead in that moment. My human and demon side were in total agreement. To hell with the consequences. Fuck the fact that it would destroy the world as we knew it. He kept crossing me. Kept getting in my way and trying to ruin what little peace I’d gained.

But it was the unadulterated fear coming from Sam, in the air and in the link, that stopped me from acting on my growing bloodlust. Her eyes, so full of dread, were glued to Chase, like she was trying to decide if this was all just some bad dream.

Chase was smart. He’d done it again. Used Sam to steer me in the direction he wanted me to go. I was cornered and he knew it. “If you can’t kill the demon, what makes you think that I can?”

“You’re resourceful, Jax. Plus…” He inclined his head toward Sam. There was hunger in his eyes. “You have powerful motivation. Maybe your buddy Heckle will help. You don’t know it yet, but he owes you.” With a shrug, he added, “Of course, I’ll need proof the demon is dead.” He tipped his head and thought about it for a moment. “How about this? Malphi wears a red stone around its neck. Get me that stone and I’ll know the deed is done. I’ll remove the cuff.”

“Oh, now there’s a stone, too?” Sam cried. “Because that sounds like a great idea. What’s it do, Chase? Because I’ll wager nine of my ten fingers that it’s not just a simple rock.”

I squeezed her hand. “What’s to stop me from stealing the stone and leaving the demon?”

Chase laughed. “Impossible. That rock isn’t coming off until Malphi is dead. It’s…shall we say, the demon’s security blanket.” The top right hand corner of his lip curled upward as he started up the stairs. “And Jax?”

I glared at him, with Azi flashing a barrage of images involving my fist repeatedly pummeling his face.

“This is a limited time offer. The cuff is only removable within the first seventy-two hours.”

“Three days?” Sam squawked. “How are we supposed to find this thing in three days?”

Chase winked then opened the door. Right before he slipped through, he said, “I wouldn’t worry, Samantha. Malphi will probably find
you
.”

E
very time Chase had mentioned Malphi’s name, Azirak reacted strangely, restless and bristling. I got the feeling it knew of the demon, and judging by its reaction we had our work cut out for us. It had been oddly quiet since Chase left. That bothered me but not as much as watching Sam from across the dance floor. She was talking to the other bartender as she slipped into her jacket. Waves of gray swirled around her head and shoulders, a storm of fear that almost swallowed her small frame. We’d told the boss that a family member had been in an accident. The sooner we went to work fixing this, the better I’d feel.

I didn’t believe in that love-at-first-sight shit, but I’d known Sam was special the instant we met. Both carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, even at that young age, we were two parts of the same whole. We’d grown up inseparable. More than friends. Sam was my lifeline, tethering me to reality. The only bright light in an existence cloaked in darkness. As a teenager, I finally found the balls to admit what she meant to me, and it’d changed everything.

My feelings for her drove the demon inside me insane. It pushed my control over the edge and left me teetering on the verge of madness. So to shield her, and everyone else I loved, I’d left her behind. Packed a bag and snuck away in the dead of night without saying good-bye. Then a few months ago, fate shoved us together again. I thought maybe I’d finally get a shot with her. I’d been wrong. The universe seemed to be working against us, but together or not, this world would be cold and dark without someone like Sam in it. I wasn’t about to let that happen.

“Ready?” she called over the music as she crossed the floor. “Heckle is probably our best bet at the moment. He might know exactly what this is. Maybe even be able to take it off.” She gave her wrist a slight shake. If possible, the plume of gray around her head grew even larger, and it took all my willpower not to give in to the demon. It was frantic, desperate to feed and fighting for control. Right now Sam was a succulent buffet with a neon sign that read
Free Food
.

“Yeah.” We wove through the crowd and slipped out the door, past a large crowd waiting to get in. I’d left the car in the lot behind the building.

Heckle
was
the way to go, but right now I had to be as far from Sam as possible. We needed to deal with the cuff, but in order to do that, I needed to feed.
Now
. The link hadn’t settled, and the extra push I was getting from her was driving me insane. Handing her the car keys, I took a long step back. “I’ll meet you back at the house.”

She looked down at my hand, then up again without reaching for the keys. “Meet me back at the house? You’re staying here?”

“No,” I said, taking another step away. I didn’t trust myself—or Azi. In addition to Chase’s impromptu visit and the fear he’d stirred up, I was still charged from being so close to her in the basement. If I allowed myself to be alone with her, I wouldn’t be able to control my actions—or the demon’s. I was a walking grenade and the pin had been pulled. “I’m going back to the house. Just not with you.”

Her expression chilled the air. She was angry, but more than that, hurt. Because of me. My words. My actions. No matter what my intentions were, I was beginning to realize that it would always be this way. Something I said, something I did—what I was—would always end up hurting her.

“You’re going to what, walk? Flap your arms and fly home? Am I missing something here?” She thrust her wrist at me. “We kind of have an issue.”

“I know. And yeah, I’m going to walk,” I snapped, feeling like an asshole. I threw the keys at her and she caught them, mouth falling open. “Is that a problem?”

Her surprise only lasted a second. The shock turned to anger, and she fired the keys back, twice as hard. The days of me pushing her away by being a dick were gone. She knew the game and refused to play. But her reaction was normally less volatile. “What the hell?”

The keys fell to the ground with a clatter that echoed through the alley, and all I wanted to do was scream. At her. At Heckle. At life. She didn’t deserve that because this wasn’t her fault. It was mine. And even though I knew that, it was impossible to keep my anger in check. It was happening more and more since I’d embraced the demon, little random flickers of rage that became jets of all-consuming flame. Moments where it all got away from me.

But this was different. This was all me. “I don’t want to be cooped up in a confined space with you right now,
okay
?” I took a deep breath, then blew out slowly, trying to get myself under control. “If I don’t feed Azi, I’m going to lose my shit.”

She held my gaze for a minute, eyes full of uncharacteristic fury, then bent to retrieve the keys with a jerk. She wanted to hit me. Scream and rage until the anger faded and there was no energy left to expend. The potency of it slammed through me, nearly stealing the breath from my lungs. Without thinking, I grabbed her hand.

The alley next to the Viking fell away. Sam was still in front of me, but she was with someone else. A tall guy with a spider tattoo on his forearm. He leaned in to kiss her and I felt my body coil, ready to pounce. But before I could act, the scene shimmered and faded, and it was Sam and I again outside the Viking.

The
moments
that resulted from our link were mostly innocuous scenes from the past, but once in a while, the visions were intense, coupled with a full gamut of debilitating emotion. Eventually one of us was going to see something that did some real damage.

We still didn’t understand it all. Some demons could create a link to their victims, constructing a parasitic relationship that benefited them at a horrible expense to the human. But this was different.

First, Sam wasn’t a demon. She was…something else, but we had no clue what. Also, unlike with a demonic link, there didn’t appear to be any adverse effects—at first. A few weeks ago, things began to change. We’d become more in tune with each other’s moods. It was subtle at first. So brief that we both thought we were imagining things. The frequency seemed to be increasing, though it was still random.

In that moment—at the look in her eyes—if she had begged me to get in the car, I would have without hesitation. Thankfully she was stronger than me. Without a word, she slid into Rick’s old clunker, slammed the door, and started the engine. The inside of the cab flooded with red as she peeled from of the lot, so thick I could barely make out her silhouette. I hated that she felt that way, but it was a relief. Anger, in my book, was always better than hurt. It was easier to deal with. To conquer. Anger fueled you. It could poison you if allowed to run rampant, or drive you if it remained focused.

I just wasn’t sure whose emotions I was fighting anymore—mine or hers.

I
walked the streets of Harlow for hours before catching a whiff of fear, four miles from the club. When I went to investigate, I found a guy trying to steal some lady’s purse as she unpacked suitcases from the trunk of her car.

While I couldn’t go as far with a human as I could a demon—killing the demonic bastards left me with one hell of a high and virtually no guilt—I could rough them up enough to calm Azi for a time and gain a small amount of peace.

After giving the scumbag a proper beat down, I went in search of answers. Heckle owned a bar in downtown Harlow, The Inferno. Unfortunately, the man behind the bar wasn’t him. All he would tell me was that Heckle was away and he had no idea when he would return. After a few rounds of Q and A—the kind that involved pain and bloodshed—I started for Rick’s.

An hour after getting home and trying repeatedly to reach Heckle’s cell, I gave up. Wherever he was, he wasn’t interested in chatting. I knew I should try to catch a few hours of sleep then tackle this thing with a clearer head in the morning. But it was impossible. Each time I closed my eyes, Azi flooded my mind with images. They ranged from raw, animalistic sex to wicked teasing, all with the same effect. The thing was relentless and I was on fire. It wasn’t long before I found myself standing outside Sam’s door, hands braced against the frame and fingers digging into the molding. It took all my willpower not to bust through and—

“Since we’re both awake, you might as well just come in,” she said softly. She was inside the room, behind the closed door, but since embracing the demon, I couldn’t turn off the heightened senses it afforded me. Before, I’d had to surrender a certain amount of control to the monster to gain access to its more than human abilities. But since turning myself over to it, I had full access without the surrender. It’d been disorienting at first—hearing the heartbeat of everyone in a room, or the sound of their breath as it moved in and out of their lungs—but I’d gotten it under control for the most part.

Except when it came to Sam. I was hyperaware of her all the time. The way she moved, and the subtle hitches in her voice as her mood changed. Being so in tune with the one person I couldn’t get close to was a fresh kind of torture every day.

I sucked in a breath and pushed open the door. Sam was in bed with the covers pooled around her waist. The small lamp on the nightstand beside the bed illuminated her features, accentuating each curve in sharp, painful detail.

“I owe you an—”

“Don’t.” She held up her hand. “I get it, and I
hate
it. But…I get it.”

Of course she did. Always so damn understanding. Everything from my mood swings to the blood that always seemed to stain my hands—Sam was able to look past all of it, and a part of me hated her for it. I was a bastard. A monster unworthy of redemption. If I could get her to see that, to believe it, then it would be true.

But she didn’t. She wouldn’t. When she looked at me, there was nothing but love and optimism, and it was exhausting, trying to live up to her expectations and knowing it was impossible.