Seduced by Shadows (6 page)

The tear never fell, but his muscles tightened as if reacting to a mortal threat. He held himself still with effort. He wouldn’t reach for her again. “Whatever it was doesn’t necessarily make you guilty, Sera. It just made you vulnerable.”

Despite his soft tone, her instant focus pinned him. Her narrowed eyes left no room for tears. “I still can’t believe any of this. I should have my head examined.”

“You mean your soul.”

She took a hard hit off her coffee. “I don’t go to church anymore.”

Her brusque dismissal cut him off as surely as he’d interrupted her list of existential questions. Well, he didn’t want her to pry into his past either. He should respect those boundaries, as he would the no-touch taboo of the possessed.

“You won’t struggle to believe much longer.” The sleeve scratched at his right arm, and he shifted uncomfortably. The flesh might heal quick and clean, but the pain lingered. She’d find that out soon enough too. “Possession with the demon ascendant is proof enough.”

She stood. “Okay then. Thanks for the coffee.”

He looked up at her without rising. Niall could choke on his cracks about gentlemanly behavior. “That’s it for all your questions?”

“You haven’t answered any of them. I get the sense you’re holding back until I make it to the other side.” She smiled, barely.

He wondered whether he should try reassuring her again, but decided she’d only think worse of him. Because she was right; he was holding back.

And if for a moment he’d foolishly thought to reach out to ease the pain he’d seen in her eyes, well, she’d also been right to fend him off. Just because two lost people found each other, didn’t make them less lost.

He slid a business card across the table.

She placed the tip of one finger over the terse @1 symbol on the card. “ ‘At One’?”

“Demonic possession twists your soul and your sense of humor. See? ‘Atone.’ ”

“Oh. Ha.” Her hazel gaze rose to his. “So tell me one thing, straight.”

He inclined his head solemnly.

“Are the talyan—” She stumbled over the exotic word. “Are the demon-ridden damned?”

He hesitated. From the way she spoke, she’d had more than a flirting relationship with religion. And he’d bet his soul—had it still been his to bet—the penance trigger that made her susceptible to possession had its roots in her beliefs.

Not that evil gave a flying fuck about faith. He opened his mouth.

She shook her head. “Too late. You already answered.”

He scowled. “I didn’t. You’re jumping ahead.”

This time, her smile was genuine. “Let me know when you catch up.”

She walked away. But the business card peeked out between her fingers.

Archer sat back to watch her go. Straight and steady. The sweetened coffee and her pique had given her that, at least. Once upon a time, he’d preferred more sass and sway.

But those times were dead, and she—so far—was not.

The destroyer in him quivered, a taut stretch deep in his muscles as its quarry escaped. The quiver intensified to an ache, muscles cramping, raising the hair on his arms and a black-light hunter’s glow over his vision. It wanted to give chase, badly.

He held himself still as he tracked her progress out of the atrium, down the stairs. There’d be a car waiting for her. He’d taken care of that while he bought the coffee—the least he could do, and the most he thought she’d allow.

He didn’t flinch when a body thumped down in the seat she’d left. “I suppose you got all that for Niall?”

“For posterity,” Zane corrected. “You let her walk away again.”

“She has our card this time.”

“Now that she’s infected.” Zane drummed his fingers on the table, a tinny sound that set Archer’s teeth on edge. “Did you really think she’d deny it?”

If anyone . . . “She wanted to know.”

“Know what?”

“Everything.”

Zane chuckled. “A gambit old as Eve. So the demons triumph again.”

Archer exhaled the worst of his tension. “If you call it
a triumph when demons merge with unsuspecting conscripts to fight in a never-ending war between good and evil.”

“Depends on your alternatives, I suppose.”

No one knew the demons’ circumstances in their own realm. The lies before possession and the metaphysical radio silence afterward guaranteed that. On their own behalf, the demon-ridden humans rarely discussed the alternatives they faced before. And there was nothing to discuss after.

Zane slid an electronic file folder across the table. “Bookie downloaded the rest of the dossier on our new recruit.”

“We’re not sure she’s ours yet.” Archer opened the slim manila-colored folder to reveal a screen of scrolling data. The league expected to market the gadget through one of their anonymous corporations. While he understood all wars had to be funded, he cared for tech in direct proportion to how well it streamlined his mission, and so far he hadn’t found a digital method of slaughtering demons.

He scanned the downloading information. “Preacher’s kid. No wonder she was vulnerable.”

“Pop was old-fashioned fire and brimstone,” Zane abridged from memory. “He’s in a nursing home now. Four brothers in irregular contact. Mama disappeared from the family when Sera was ten. Still digging up dirt on that. We already knew she contracts with a hospital to provide hospice deathbed counseling, but a bad car accident this year set her back physically, professionally, and financially. Mentally too, probably.”

Archer looked down at the black-and-white surveillance photo embedded in the text, the arch glance, the set of that fine-boned jaw. “Maybe.”

He wondered why she’d chosen a job surrounded by the dying. Mama’s abandonment hadn’t been painful enough?

He’d told himself her past didn’t matter, but the demon had voiced her wound when it said she was alone. How cruel then, the only companionship available to her now was a ragged band of misfit soldiers stalked by shadows and doomed to damnation.

“Bookie included a footnote,” Zane said. “Turns out, female talyan may have once matched us in number. Bookie said a postscript from before the creation of the leagues references the catastrophic loss of the mated-talyan bond. The provenance on the note can’t be verified—it was written just this side of antiquity—so established league archives have squat about it.”

A demon-ridden couple, each missing half their soul . . . Archer’s lips twisted. A Hallmark movie it wasn’t.

“Anyway.” Zane cleared his throat. “Some light reading while you babysit the demon’s ascension. Ecco finished securing her apartment. When are you heading over?”

“When she calls me.”

Zane sat back. “I know I’m the new guy and all, but do you always play so close to the chest?”

Archer closed the folder on the picture, which replaced the static monochrome with his memory of bright searching hazel eyes, a high flush across pale skin. He knew better than to be drawn to her. Her light was only a lonely traveler’s campfire in the wilderness to the wolf in him. Such attraction never ended well for the traveler.

He hadn’t lied to Niall when he said he’d purged his Southern gentlemanly charm. That had died with everything else. The quickening in his blood at her scent had been the thrill of the chase, the hard breathing of the scuffle, the raw intimacy of her hands over his wound. The destroyer he’d become roused to the danger of her, nothing more.

Archer rose and gathered the coffee cups, hers with
just the candy scent of butterscotch and a ring where the whipped cream had been. “We don’t know which strain of demon possessed her—one of ours or one of theirs. We won’t know until the mark manifests. I’ll be there when it does.”

“And if it’s not what you want to see?”

Archer dumped the trash. “Then that’s one more demon wishing it were back in hell.”

CHAPTER 4

Lost in thoughts by turns too crazy or awful to indulge, Sera didn’t turn when the town car honked, but the driver leaning out the window stopped her with a wave.

“I’m your ride,” he said. “Guy upstairs said to take you wherever you wanted to go.”

She crumpled the business card in her fist. She was tired of feeling like she was being taken for a ride. “No thanks.”

Dark glasses hid the driver’s eyes, an unnecessary affectation on such a gloomy day. “Hey, I’m already paid for.” He leaned a little farther out, exposing the tattoo curling around the side of his neck.

She backed away. “I said no.”

She’d checked her pockets on the way down from the atrium. As blackout fugues went, at least this one hadn’t been terribly inconvenient. She’d lost time and memory, but she’d remembered her house keys. She supposed she could plunge a key through one of those dark lenses and see if the eye behind was brown or blue or green . . . or white.

As if he sensed the spike of violence in her, he eased back into the car and sped away.

Lots of people had tattoos, she told herself. The car squealed around a corner, out of sight, but not out of mind. Emblazoned in her memory was the same sort of archaic, arcane symbol on the man she’d left inside: Ferris Archer.

She glanced back uneasily. Questions followed close on her heels, seething and maddening and ridiculous as rabid Chihuahuas. He’d teased her that she’d come up with conspiracy theories, as if that would make more sense than legions of demons and idiopathic perpetual whatever forces and penance triggers.

Okay, a conspiracy was sounding pretty good right now.

She shivered as the cold penetrated her uncertainty. She’d ended her postaccident counseling sessions with a colleague when they’d taken her father away. Maybe she needed to rethink her impatient proclamations of health.

Even as she swore to make the next available appointment, she realized she’d walked all the way home and climbed the stairs to her apartment without cane or pain.

She stopped with her hand on the doorknob. She tilted forward to press her brow against the wood.

What was happening to her?

She prowled through her apartment as if she’d never been there, but nothing seemed out of place, nothing suggested a reason for her . . . lapse. A quick check of the television told her she’d lost only a day. She sat on the couch and rubbed her hands over her thighs, frowning absently down the dark hallway toward the bathroom.

That’s where it had started, the peculiar, erotically charged dream about the man—the demon Ferris Archer. Her mind stuttered like a fingerprint-smudged CD, skipping and repeating, and she found herself standing in the bathroom doorway.

She flicked on the light. In front of the mirror, she reluctantly raised her gaze above the opalescent stone dangling from the fixture. Still just herself. No one else. She shook her head in an attempt to dispel the mist gathering in her mind. No one else in the sense that she wasn’t anyone besides who she’d always been; not that no one else was standing beside her. Who else would be here, after all?

In an effort of will she banished the image of Ferris Archer that appeared in her head, if not in her mirror. Just because he was tall and ripped and carried himself as if he could stop a speeding SUV with a single scathing comment was no reason to buy into his delusional fantasies.

As if reluctant to do the job alone, her fingers were slow on the buttons of her shirt and the fly of her jeans. Finally, shirt hanging open between her breasts, she peeled down the jeans. She stepped out of the pool of denim and raised her gaze to the mirror.

Gone. Her breath caught. Almost gone anyway. Once red and puckered, all that remained of the tangle of scars over her thighs and hips were traceries almost as unremarkable as her unbleached cotton underwear.

She turned, craning her neck to look over her shoulder. The contortion was effortless, and for the last six months, impossible. Under her wondering fingertips, only faint raised ridges remained of the scars on her lower back.

“I do not believe this.” She couldn’t stop her smile. She twisted the other way, just because.

What had Archer said? “Don’t bother trying to decide whether to believe or not. It’s true.”

At the thought of him, her smile faded.

And what if everything else he said was true?

“It will be one of the dark.”

The man twisted his fingers as he made his pronouncement.
Ten white twisting worms. Unfortunately, too large a lunch for the crow.

Corvus leaned back in his chair. “Are you certain?”

“With the solvo spreading well, the dissonance should definitely have triggered the crossing of a specimen from the more powerful strain. The crossing was so unusually violent, the Veil is still in flux, which will make our task that much easier. All signs point toward a djinn crossing, and we do have an agreement—”

“Are you certain?”

The crow stabbed its beak out between the bars to grab a paperclip off the desk. It sidled away, working the shiny metal in its beak and cackling.

“Not entirely, no.”

Corvus nodded once. “Then we wait. And continue our preparations. The wound in the Veil will serve us, whether the demon will or not.”

The Worm twitched, as if impatience consumed every cell of his body just as, Corvus supposed, it did all mortal creatures. “Only my work has gotten you this far. I deserve . . .” Again, that twitch, accompanied by a conspicuous pallor.

Corvus let the outburst pass, as he let the thieving crow keep its little toy. “All our efforts shall be rewarded, eventually.” The Worm couldn’t begin to understand how long Corvus himself had waited for his chance.

The Worm nodded until Corvus thought his head would wobble off. “The demon must be djinn. I simply can’t believe the teshuva could muster such force across the Veil. I’ve noticed the impulse toward repentance diminishes in ratio to the threat of punishment. Which explains the remorseful teshuva’s mediocrity in this realm.”