Demon Blood

by Meljean Brook

  She hadn’t said anything about help since he’d come in. So her request had been on his mind.

  “I don’t need you for information,” she said. “I need you to kill Belial’s demons.”

  The look Deacon gave her said she was a lunatic. “What do you think I’m doing?”

  “Kill different demons. For now.”

  “Why would I do that?”

  She sighed. He’d taken the tone of a man who asked just because he wanted to hear the answer, not because there was any possibility that he might change his mind. “Because if I do it, they will have a reason to unite under a new lieutenant and move against the Guardians.”

  “That’s not my problem, sister.”

  “Then what of this one? The one who will lead them plans to destroy vampire communities and harvest their blood rather than protect them from the nephilim.”

  “My community is already dead. The others can do a better job of protecting theirs.” But that one had gotten to him. He shook his head, turned away from her, and just as quickly turned back. “So that’s who you’re looking for.” He gestured at the infrared. “The one who will lead them.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’ll slay him?”

  “Eventually. Yes.”

  “But you want me to kill others before that.”

  “Yes. And when the pieces are in place, we will kill them all.”

  “All?” He stared at her. “How?”

  She almost sighed again. He asked, but only to humor her. Or to humor himself.

  “Trap them inside my Gift and blow them up.”

  Probably. She hadn’t worked that through yet. Only the slaughter that came before—only the part where Belial’s demons slaughtered the nephilim. How to destroy the demons that remained, however? Without Michael, she didn’t know yet how she would slay so many at once—but she wouldn’t risk the other Guardians. And if all went well, Deacon would be far away, too.

  Rosalia didn’t think she would be. She didn’t see how she could be, and still be certain that no demons escaped. And without Michael, she simply didn’t see any other way. But she hoped to God she found one.

  “Don’t do that,” he said roughly.

  Startled, she looked up at him. “What?”

  “That sad little . . .” He broke off. Looked away. “I don’t know what you’ve got planned, sister, but leave me out of it. I’m not killing demons for you.”

  No. On behalf of his community. “I’m not asking you to do it for me. But how many will you slay before one kills you? Ten? Fifteen? With me, you can see them all die.”

  He shook his head. “That’s not the same.”

  “You want them dead. Does it really matter if you do it with your sword or arrange it so that they all die at once?”

  His fists clenched, as if he was feeling his weapons gripped within them. A deadly smile formed on his lips. “Yeah. It does.”

  “So it feels better.” Crushing bones. Spilling blood. “That’s not revenge. That’s therapy.”

  Deacon, when he smiled for real, had a slow, sexy smile. Her breath caught. She could count on one hand the number of times she’d seen it in ninety years. This was the first time it’d ever been aimed at her.

  “Sister, there isn’t a shrink in this world who wouldn’t say therapy is exactly what I need.”

  That was probably true. “But they wouldn’t suggest a form that will end up killing you.”

  He wasn’t bothered by that. His smile didn’t fade. “No.” His gaze slipped down her form, then returned to her face, lingering on her mouth. “But the other type of therapy I’ve been getting hasn’t helped.”

  With the women he’d been feeding from. She couldn’t offer him any better. Her sexual skills were limited, and she couldn’t judge herself with him. How would she react if he kissed her? She didn’t know. She couldn’t control her reactions with him as easily as she did around others. Already, her heart beat a little harder, just imagining.

  But it was foolish, pointless. Even if she had experience, it wouldn’t compare to what he’d had with Eva and Petra. He’d been with them for sixty years. Judging by everything that Rosalia had observed, they’d been bighearted, fun-loving women. Partners even before they’d met Deacon, they’d loved each other in a way that their affection for Deacon hadn’t matched. But they’d all shared a deep friendship, and their love for one another was unmistakable, even to an outsider.

  When Deacon had witnessed their deaths, it had ripped out a part of his heart. And she wondered if anyone had said they were sorry for his loss in the past six months. A pariah in the vampire community, no condolences were laid at his feet. Only blame.

  “I haven’t said before, but . . . I am sorry, Deacon. About your community—and your partners.”

  “Me, too.” His shoulders fell. He glanced at the balcony doors, as if they could see through them to Theriault’s apartment. Then anger seemed to slip into him again, straightening his back, hardening his face. “All right. Good luck with all this, sister.”

  He was leaving. Rosalia fought her disappointment. She hadn’t expected differently, had she? But when he opened the door, he glanced back.

  Hope spurred her on. The words tumbled out. “Deacon, I truly need your help. Please.”

  He looked at her for a long second. Then he left, closing the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 5

  The two vampires—one male, one female—lay facedown on the bed, their wrists chained together at the small of their backs. They’d both been sexually violated before their hearts had been cleaved through from behind.

  Or perhaps the violation had been afterward. Taylor wasn’t certain. Perhaps the physical trauma was telling her, but she didn’t know enough about vampires and their rate of bruising, bleeding, and healing to make an educated guess. Not that those details mattered here—those were for the criminal investigation and the courts. And whoever had done this wouldn’t face either.

  Even knowing that, Taylor still took in the details as she walked through the room. These vampires had led the London community, one of the largest vampire communities in the world, and it showed. The enormous carved bed looked like a prop in a castle from an Elizabethan television drama. The sheets had a designer label. An antique lamp lay in shards on the floor—the only indication that they’d fought their assailant. If they’d had any defensive wounds, those had already healed. But in the end, they hadn’t struggled; they’d turned their faces toward each other. To offer strength, to speak of love—Taylor didn’t know. But it was the detail that got to her. The one that made her stomach clench with anger and hate, the one that made her want to hunt the motherfucker down and make him pay, to bring these people just a little bit of justice.

  “So what do you think?”

  Taylor glanced toward the bedroom entrance, where Mariko stood with her shoulder braced against the door frame, her thumbs hooked in the pockets of her low-slung jeans. Dark, solemn eyes watched her from under heavy bangs, and the sharply angled cut of her hair—short at her nape, shoulder-length in front—better suited a comic book convention than a crime scene. Taylor had only met Mariko twenty minutes ago in San Francisco, just before they’d teleported here, and she hadn’t been able to shake the impression that a geeky sorority girl lived in that two-hundred-year-old Guardian body.

  Two hundred years old. That was a hell of a lot more experience than Taylor had. “Why are you asking me?”

  “You’re the detective.”

  Once upon a time, Taylor had been. She didn’t know what she was now.

  But she looked around, gathered her impressions. “It all happened in here. They’ve got a ton of furniture and breakables in the other rooms, but that lamp is the only thing out of place. They weren’t chased through the house. They just . . . didn’t have time to escape.”

  Two vampires, the strongest in the community. If another vampire had done this—or even if there had been several others—there would have been more indication
s of a fight. So someone much faster and stronger had probably done this. Not a nosferatu, though, because there was too much blood, and the bodies weren’t torn apart.

  Taylor had seen what nosferatu did to their victims. Investigating those murders was how she’d first become tangled up in all this crazy Guardian and vampire shit. God, that felt like forever ago, but it’d only been a little over two years. And she was still feeling her way around.

  She glanced at Mariko. “A demon?”

  “Even the rapes?”

  Demons didn’t experience sexual arousal. They could fake it, though. “Rape isn’t always about sex.”

  “Power, right? But that’s the problem here—if he was going for pain, to show them he was in charge, he could have done worse. A lot worse. And if it was about power, he’d probably have done it in front of their community.” Mariko paused, and her troubled gaze landed on the bed. “And I really hope you’ll poke holes in what I just said.”

  Taylor couldn’t. And an all-too-familiar darkness seemed to be pushing its way up the back of her head, just under her skull. Sometimes the darkness screamed. Now it was just there, watching and waiting—and when Taylor glanced at the vampires on the bed again, it became coldly, coldly angry.

  Her stomach churned. Mariko looked at her, the corners of her mouth suddenly tense.

  Taylor knew what she saw. The obsidian eyes.

  Not trusting her voice—not trusting that it would be her voice—she gestured to the door. When Mariko nodded, Taylor fled through the house, out the front. She stopped on the porch, gulping the cool pre-dawn air. Sinking to the steps, she clutched her stomach, trying not to puke all over the sidewalk.

  Get out of me. Get out of me.

  He receded, but Taylor could still feel him. She could always feel him. And she hated that in six months, she’d become so accustomed to his presence that she only noticed when he pushed harder into her awareness, when he tried to take over. But always, he was there.

  A weight in her hand made her look down. She’d called in a dagger. For an instant, she wanted to stab it into her thigh. Into her stomach. Let him drain out with her blood. If that didn’t do it, she could cut him out.

  She’d tried that before, though. It didn’t work.

  Vanishing the steel blade, she pushed her hands through her hair, tried to breathe steadily. Breathing was important. Michael never breathed unless he needed to talk. Too many times, she’d become aware of her breath and wondered how long it had been since she’d taken one. Aware of every little detail that said she was herself—that said the demon-spawned fucker hadn’t taken her over.

  And the brutal thing was, before he’d tethered himself to her from Hell, she’d actually started to like him. Not much. As a big, dark, and scary type, Michael had never been someone she’d felt comfortable around. But he had a protective vibe going on, and she’d appreciated that. In her family, with her partner, when she’d been on the job, they watched each other’s backs. That was what she’d grown up with, a code that went down to her bones: You take care of your own people. Michael’s people were everybody—and he watched everyone’s back. That was something she could admire. And it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes, and that when she’d been dying, he’d kissed her and the whole fucking world had exploded with light.

  But when she’d woken up again, he’d been a dark scream echoing around inside her. Sometimes he was quiet. But when he wasn’t . . .

  Feeling her gorge rise again, she stared out into the street, breathing deeply. A jogger ran by, ponytail bouncing. Farther down the block, a small car started up and pulled away from the curb. London woke up just like any other city, apparently. A man in a suit and carrying a briefcase poked at his phone as he walked toward the subway station.

  No, not subway here. The underground, maybe, or the metro. Tube? Whatever the hell it was, she could feel the train clacking and rumbling beneath the street, could hear it shriek by, then squeal and brake. She’d been able to ignore most of the city’s background noise, but that one drilled into her head every time. God.

  She lifted her hand to rub at her temple, and paused when she noticed the guy watching her from across the street and down the block a little way. A good-looking guy, tall and dark-haired, but since Michael hadn’t come tearing up through her head, not someone to worry about.

  Not really someone she wanted to say hello to, either. That weird little noise in her mind that she’d begun associating with her psychic senses told her the man was curious—maybe wondering whose house the obviously screwed-up redhead had stumbled out of, and would he catch anything if he passed by too close?—but there was coldness there, too. It took a real piece of work to look at a woman hugging herself on a door-step across the street and not feel an ounce of concern.

  He turned away, and she thought about flipping the bird after him, then decided it wasn’t worth the effort.

  The underground train rumbled and squealed. She cupped her hands over her ears, sucked in a long breath, and caught a faint thread of scent—like hot metal, like dried blood.

  Then he was in her, pushing apart pieces of her mind, overwhelming every thought. She gagged and tried to fight, had a flash of memory—not hers, not hers—of a pale hairless monster and long bloodied fangs. Nosferatu.

  Kill.

  No. She yanked at her hair, trying to yank him out of her brain. Pain pushed him back, as if he wondered where it’d come from and whom he needed to fight, but it wasn’t enough. Shoving to her feet, she staggered her way back into the house, where the only scent was blood—fresh blood, vampire blood—and that cold, cold anger swept over her again.

  Then he let go. Taylor braced her hands on her knees, her chest heaving. The vampires’ murders pissed him off, but she thought there was something more to it—that he had realized something else was going on here. Probably the same reason why Mariko had wanted her to poke holes in the “It’s not a demon” theory she’d been forming.

  Something bad. Something that was going to kill more than just two people.

  “Holy shit, Taylor. Are you okay?”

  Taylor looked up. Mariko’s brow furrowed, concern sharpening her voice. Taylor nodded, forced herself to straighten.

  Mariko’s gaze fell to her feet. “Where’d you lose your shoes?”

  Oh, damn him. She didn’t want to see, but she could already feel the cool hardwood beneath her soles. She looked down. Her pale, narrow feet were bare.

  Just like Michael’s always were.

  Realization softened Mariko’s face. “Oh. Damn. Why does he do that?”

  I don’t know, Taylor thought, and she didn’t—but the words came out anyway, “Because even if you can’t see or hear them coming, you can feel them.”

  Mariko tensed. “He thought something was coming?”

  “Not coming. Just . . . somewhere.”

  “What was it?”

  Nosferatu. But she didn’t get a chance to say it.

  On a dark wave, Michael came screaming to the surface and took her away.

  Had she thought persuading Deacon would be so easy?

  Rosalia had known it wouldn’t be. She didn’t know why her failure bothered her so. She would convince him to help her, eventually. He’d already come further in one night than she’d expected him to.

  And she didn’t know why she took his rejection as a personal, emotional blow, when nothing like that existed between them. Yet Rosalia couldn’t let it go. She’d spent the past few hours reviewing every word of their conversation in her hotel room, every nuance of his expression, wondering if she could have said anything differently—or if she’d said something better left unspoken. She replayed him closing that door over and over. And each time was a spike through the heart.

  She shouldn’t do this to herself. Unfortunately, she didn’t have much else to do.

  Clayton Conley had spent the morning exploring Prague with Nikki Waters, an American who’d moved with him when he’d transferred from Legion’s New
York offices. Shadowing the couple through the streets of Old Town hadn’t been a hardship; Rosalia had always loved this city, the pastel buildings with their delicately ornamented façades; the smoky fragrance of grilled sausages that billowed from restaurant doors and lingered; the people at the sidewalk tables, whose conversations over beer or coffee often sounded both intense and lighthearted, all at once.

  Not so Conley and his lover. As they sat for their lunch, Rosalia watched them from a café across the street and listened to their tense silence, broken now and again by her shrill complaints and his insulting replies.

  Such had been the entire morning. Though Nikki’s continual whining irritated Rosalia, she could dredge up some sympathy for the homesick woman. Her primary complaint cited how often Conley left her on her own in the unfamiliar city; Rosalia could have pointed out dozens of other foreign women on the same street who had been getting by on just a little backbone and initiative, but she understood the loneliness behind the woman’s complaints.

  Rosalia couldn’t feel sympathetic toward Conley. Every word he chose cut like the edge of a poisonous blade. He belittled his lover for her ignorance, made fun of the people around them, and treated the waiter like a servant. When he told Nikki to pass on dessert or risk turning into a fat cow, Rosalia began to hope that he was a demon, simply so that she’d have the pleasure of watching him die later.

  And his behavior did resemble a demon’s. Unfortunately, many humans could be just as cruel.

  So could vampires.

  Only seven years before, she’d sat at a café table similar to this one, in the same city, listening to a young vampire beg Deacon to take him into his community and offer his protection. The vampire had been fleeing Rome after serving Lorenzo for only three of the twenty-five years required by the community contract, unable to withstand any more of her brother’s mental cruelties.