Demon Ensnared (Demon Enforcers Book 4)

by Jenn Stark

  “The mind protects what the heart can’t bear,” Gregori said quietly. “It’s normal.”

  She snorted. “Well, it doesn’t feel normal.”

  “If I’m going to help, I need to know the rest of the story about your past. But we can talk first about what I am, if you prefer.”

  “No.” She straightened her shoulders, squaring them, trying to regain her habitual sense of control—though that was a losing effort. “I already know what you are. You’re one of them, those people, but different in a way I can’t really understand. I don’t want to understand it, frankly. Right now, I mostly need to know that there was a purpose in why I was taken all those years ago, tested, and then left at the hospital. Or even what I did the night my grandmother got sick. I just…I just have so many questions. Can you help me at all with that?”

  “I can,” Gregori rumbled, his voice heavy with emotion. “I absolutely can. But I need you to look at me first.”

  She lifted her face to his and realized, to her shock, that he’d gone deathly pale. “I don’t under—”

  And then she met his gaze.

  She…dissolved. There was really no better way to explain it than that. She vaguely had the sense of him approaching her, but that she’d already come apart. The pain was so swift and so all-encompassing, her entire body seemed to shut down. She couldn’t breathe, but she no longer needed oxygen. She no longer needed anything but the touch of his hands on hers. She would have screamed if there was any breath in her lungs, any sound in her throat. She would have ranted and roared, but she couldn’t.

  She was crying. She knew she was crying, yet she had no control over her body any longer. She’d gone numb. She couldn’t feel the tears on her cheeks, but she saw them dripping down, splashing onto her knees without causing any sensation. She hadn’t fully realized that she’d dropped her chin until she swiveled her gaze back up, again not of her own volition, but because of the gentle pressure beneath her chin lifting her up. Gregori now knelt before her, his eyes infinitely gentle but his expression firmly steadfast, as if he was an immovable rock braced against the storm of her emotions. Her heart crumbled a little more, and she barely stifled a sob.

  “Focus on me,” Gregori whispered, his voice hoarse with effort. “You don’t need to do anything more than that, O beautiful child of God, bright light of the angels, precious song of the stars. Just look at me.”

  And she was swept away on a soundless tide into a foreign, faraway night.

  11

  Gregori catapulted through a constellation of torment.

  Lost in the pull of Angela’s gaze, he was forced to experience each moment of her life as she’d experienced it, live each moment as she had lived it, from the cocoon of her earliest development to the chaos of her birth to the blinding fear of her realization that she was alone, separate in the world, destined to forge her way apart from all those around her. The unutterable despair of this moment was balanced only in part with the relief, the joy, the gratitude she felt as she was gathered into her mother’s arms, comforted and cared for. Only in part, because even at that shockingly young age, this child had known the path she was set upon. That she would be taken, stolen, abandoned, lost. She knew.

  A new explosion of terror burst into life before Gregori, hijacking his senses. He was seeing what a young Angela was seeing, but his reactions weren’t those of an eight-year-old girl, the age at which Angela had been abducted. No. This little girl was barely five years old, her mind already a ceaseless flurry of activity, her hands nimble, her eyes sharp. She trailed around after anyone who had an appetite for answering her endless questions, whether they be her mother, grandparents, neighbors, or babysitters. She never rejected anything that was told to her, even when it was patently false, the made-up stories of mortals trying to humor their young into silence. Though she was bright and cheerful and enthusiastic almost to a fault over her newfound treasures of information, she rarely argued or showed any negative reaction when adults were condescending, dismissive, or outright untruthful. She simply absorbed everything that was spoken, testing and verifying and categorizing the eventual results into a strictly coded order in her mind. She was, by all accounts, a gifted child, and she learned to read far earlier than anyone realized. Too early for the books she was exposed to.

  “What…what did your parents do?” Gregori gasped, watching in horror the scene playing out before him, a scene he knew without a doubt Angela didn’t consciously remember. A scene he also knew had led her inexorably to all the trials she now faced.

  Angela, caught up in the trance of her connection with him, answered without hesitation. “They were professors. Anthropology, study of societies and cultures. They went everywhere, brought home everything, studied it all. The house was always filled with books, so many books…”

  Either her voice trailed off or it was Gregori’s turn to be caught up again in the scene unfolding before him, where the young Angela crept into her parents’ study when they were out and her Nana thought her fast asleep. In all the tomes and manuscripts crowded into the warm and inviting space, she had stumbled on one with pretty pictures and symbols and words. She shouldn’t have been able to read the words, except there was a translation on a scrap of paper tucked into one of the books—and her mind quickly identified and ordered and codified the letters the same as she had done months earlier with English. She couldn’t understand what she was reading, but of course, she didn’t have to. The only thing required was for the words to be spoken.

  The mist that had filled the room was enough to pull the five-year-old Angela from the book, but as she blinked around her, there was still no panic in her eyes, no fright. Only curiosity. She was the beloved only child of two academics, living in a comfortable, solidly middle-class home in a comfortable, solidly middle-class suburb just near enough to the local college to be interesting but not so close to be dangerous. She would have no understanding of the demons that roiled and writhed in the smoke, moaning and chittering and calling to her to finish the spell. She would have no frame of reference for the evil that seethed from them. The Serbian spell book was a very old, very corrupt dark grimoire, not at all the usual fare for the vrac, the spell casters, witches, and shamans responsible for the care and healing of the villages. This was something altogether different.

  Angela barely even noticed when the door opened beyond the roiling mass of demons, and her Nana poked her head in, saw what was in the room, and promptly collapsed. Then the five-year-old Angela, frightened for perhaps the first time in her life, leapt up off her chair, abandoned her book, and ran straight for the old woman…directly through the snarl of demons.

  The pain was cataclysmic.

  With his empathic abilities caught in the furor of the scene, Gregori recoiled at what his brother demons were feeling in this moment, their wild, desperate need. This was it—this was their chance!

  The horde leapt for the mind of the child, scratching and thrashing, desperate to catch hold of her light, her soul, anything to bind them to this earth for long enough that they could escape the darkness from whence they sprang. The old woman, unconscious before she hit the floor, they couldn’t reach. But the girl—the girl! This they could take. This they could hold!

  Angela never stopped, never wavered as she raced across the small room toward her grandmother, but the demon horde tried their very best to trap her. Their claws slashed out, scoring deep gouts into her psyche, exposing her to all their terror, making her heart bleed. Their screams rang through the night, a hundred thousand voices, insane and cruel, slavering and wild, filling her ears with the horrors of their kind. She burst into tears by her third step, was trembling violently by her fifth, and by the time she reached the old woman and wailed in fright and terror, she had seen more darkness at the tender age of five years than most mortals could stomach in a lifetime.

  But she hadn’t stopped.

  She still didn’t stop.

  With a strength well beyond her years, sh
e scrambled over her grandmother and yanked the tiny woman out of her parents’ study, then, to Gregori’s continuing shock, returned. Returned! And she leveled the demons with her own fury-filled screams, her outrage so incandescent that it took the horde by absolute surprise. She spoke back the words she’d read at the start of the grimoire, the words of binding and banishment, and even with her untutored voice and her broken Serbian, the ancient spells were of such power that they emptied the room with a hiss of centuries-old magic. Until finally, Angela—who was still Jane at this time, sweet and unwittingly powerful Jane—was left alone.

  She crossed the room to her parents’ books. Righted the stacks. Stood back, surveying the place critically with all the severity a five-year-old could muster. She stood there another long moment, even when her grandmother called out in a confused, wavering voice. Then she nodded and turned on her heel, and left the room.

  She no longer cried.

  She told no one, not even after she’d used her grandmother’s phone to call first 911, then her parents, remaining huddled on the floor next to her grandmother while the operator kept her on the phone. Her grandmother, who’d fainted clean away again when Angela opened the door of the study, remembered nothing. She didn’t have to. Angela remembered enough for both of them.

  Gregori convulsed with the weight of the decades-old terror that the little girl still carried around with her, the shock so great on her young, impressionable mind that she could only wall it away and cement it over so it only came out when her defenses dropped, like when she slept or got too tired. Every dream, every nightmare from that time, he assimilated. Every horror, he took into his own mind. Every terror, he took into his heart. He felt each moment with her and raged and shivered and whispered and shuddered and wept. His empath nature was created to hold every drop of another’s pain, and Angela’s river of agony ran deep and wide for all she’d seen and all she believed she’d done to her grandmother and to the world. Because, to a little girl who didn’t believe in a heaven or hell, there was nowhere for those creatures to go when they left her but into the world itself.

  She believed she’d set them free.

  Gregori’s mouth moved in the imperfect litany of healing that was all he was still allowed to pray over the shattered and the lost. He’d prayed it many times over the past millennia, whispering to mortals who’d long since given up on ever finding their way back to joy. Some already in the midst of crossing over, most wishing they could just end the suffering. And, with his help, they did. And, with his help, so too did the young girl who trembled in the dark, desperate to be strong, burying herself in books and learning, anything to keep her mind busy, focused, separate, apart.

  He bowed over that precious broken little girl, words of restoration dropping from his hushed lips, even as he watched her age to six, to seven, until another beautiful summer’s day, when she was eight years old—

  “Gregori.”

  The sound of Angela’s voice brought him back to the moment with a brutal jerk, and he blinked, momentarily bewildered. Ordinarily, once he’d begun the process of healing, nothing could draw him from it until he was done, and he was nowhere near finished with Angela. Her spirit still cried out from all she had seen and experienced, and he’d not yet begun to break down the walls she’d built around what had happened to her at age eight.

  But her voice wouldn’t let him focus.

  “Gregori,” she whispered again.

  His gaze cleared, and he realized that Angela was leaning back in his arms, arms that were wrapped around her, not tightly, not oppressively, but creating a circle of protection to allow his healing energy to pour through her. The flow of that energy had been cut off, but her eyes were wide as she gaped at him, her expression not one of peace but of shock—and something approaching fear.

  He stiffened, preparing to lean away, but her arms came up and around his broad back, her hands pressing flat against him. “No—please! Please don’t leave me,” she begged, her words tight and fierce.

  The wave of pain and need and desperate loneliness struck Gregori so hard, his knees buckled, and it was only through sheer willpower that he broadened his stance and bowed his shoulders against the onslaught of emotion. It spilled out of Angela in an almost physical wave, cascading forth in mute testimony to a lifetime of denied connection. Her hands trembled against him, her whole body shook, in fact, and though she bowed her head forward, he could feel each tear as it fell from her eyes to drip onto his shoes. The hissing of each drop against the leather spoke to the depth from which those tears emerged, and even Angela gasped as she saw the wisping smoke rise.

  “What’s happening?” she whispered.

  “Allow it,” he rumbled, his voice resonant with the remains of the ancient gift he’d been accorded at his creation, the gift that had so often felt like a curse. It didn’t feel that way now. As Angela crumpled against him, her shoulders shaking as she sobbed, he murmured prayers, not for the child she had once been. He would need to return to that girl soon, to finish what he started. But at this moment, his priority was the woman he held in his arms. A woman whose raw, naked pain opened up a yawning, answering ache within himself, an anguish so great that he wanted to spread his arms wide and cry out to the heavens in horror that any one human should be forced to carry such a weight within their frail bodies, grinding down their fragile bones.

  But he didn’t spread his arms. If anything, he gathered Angela closer to him, his breath whispering over her hair, speaking in English the words barred to him in all things except in the care and healing of God’s beloved children. And gradually, her shaking subsided. Gradually, the burning sting of her tears slowed, until her breathing evened out and she sagged against him. The emotion that emerged from her then was tinged with both confusion and embarrassment, and he held her a little more gently as she cleared her throat.

  “Ah…” she finally managed. “So…right. I’m…I’m okay. Really. I’m good.”

  She straightened, and he let her step away from him, the rapid wash of her words helping him return to normal as well. Strangely, it wasn’t as difficult as it usually was. Healing humans, taking on their pain, always exacted its toll on Gregori, but Angela’s pain had been…different. Taking it from her had been as much a grace to him as a gift to her—and it had been a gift. One she probably didn’t fully realize yet that she’d been given. He found himself aching to take her back into his arms, to complete the trials still remaining before them both, but she took another wobbly step away, once more reaching up to smooth her hair back into its beleaguered ponytail.

  “You should rest,” he suggested, and she flashed him a sudden, startled look, a flush of embarrassment slashing her cheeks a moment later. Gregori blinked, still so attuned to her thoughts that he knew what she’d been thinking. And for the first time in all the millennia he’d served as a demon enforcer, he wanted it as well.

  A rapid thumping started up four feet away, and he turned, blinking in surprise.

  Hellboy raced across the room and leapt for him.

  “Whoa!” Gregori caught the dog automatically, then tried to fend off his assault, but it was a losing battle as the creature wriggled and yipped and scrambled up to reach his face, licking him with frantic affection.

  Angela laughed shakily, and the unexpected sound nearly cleaved his soul in two. He gasped as Hellboy pressed his little body against him, quivering with all his might.

  “I think he really likes you,” Angela said, her voice breaking a bit.

  Their eyes met over the dog’s head, and taking in her tearstained face, her wobbly smile, something new shifted inside Gregori. Something far more dangerous.

  He needed to leave. Now.

  “I’ll make a search of the building, make sure you’re safe,” he said.

  Angela nodded a little too quickly.

  “You’ll stay here tonight?” she asked, then bit her lip, her cheeks flushing at the need they both heard in her voice.

  “On-site
, yes,” he agreed. “You’ll be safe. I swear it.”

  “Safe…” she echoed, and the first hint of awareness of her changed circumstances seemed to skate along the edge of her words. “Safe.”

  12

  Angela smoothed down her suit and kept her expression carefully neutral as she walked up the stairs to the House committee conference rooms, Gregori only a few feet away. To any who cared to look, she appeared exactly as she always did when arriving at the center. Professional, feminine, tough, accessible. Intelligent without lacking common sense, no-nonsense without being gruff, practical without appearing uncaring. The exact combination of personality traits you’d want in a junior congresswoman.

  Inside, she was a morass of conflict.

  A nervous giggle cropped up from somewhere deep, and she gritted her teeth to keep it contained. But the truth was, she wanted to burst out in wonder-filled laughter every time she drew a breath—until that emotion was choked off by a bone-chilling need to scream. She wasn’t sure which reaction was going to win out, but her money was on the scream.

  That was especially unfortunate considering how much work Gregori had done to heal her. She’d felt ridiculously good since the moment he’d touched her the day before, as if a weight of seismic proportions had been lifted from her shoulders. He hadn’t explained what he’d done either, but there was no denying the truth.

  Gregori Stearns was a demon.

  Even thinking the words sent Angela’s internal pendulum swinging back toward the edge of hysteria, because of course, he couldn’t actually be a demon, for all his insistence. He might believe he was, and there were certainly things she’d witnessed that made him appear to be one, but a real demon? Banished by God to wreak havoc upon the earth? No.

  There had to be another explanation. She’d long ago decided that she’d been under the influence of drugs when she’d been incarcerated as a child, and it seemed like those same drugs were in play again, even if unintentionally. Some sort of organic hallucinogen pumping through her system, maybe emotionally triggered, that made Angela see things that simply weren’t there. That had to be what was going on. It had to be.