Demon Marked

by Meljean Brook

  CHAPTER 5

  A steady vibration in Nicholas’s pocket woke him. A text message. Not the kind of buzz a man hoped to wake up to, but it’d been a while since anything more exciting had been in his pants.

  Vaguely aware of the wipers swooping across the windshield and the faint, static-filled country-western music coming from the speakers, he dug out his mobile and angled the screen away from the demon in the driver’s seat. Nicholas kept several private investigators in his employ; his London PI, Reginald Cooper, had begun verifying the demon’s story that morning. Nicholas had been expecting the investigator’s initial report, but unless the man confirmed that the demon had been lying or Cooper ran into something unexpected while digging around, the report should have come via e-mail.

  A text meant that Cooper must have unearthed a lie. Goddammit. Had the demon already broken the bargain? If so, that made her useless to him, and relieved Nicholas of his part in their agreement. He ought to just slay her now.

  But he couldn’t kill her while she drove on the highway, not without risking a wreck. And God knew how he’d explain a demon’s decapitated body to the authorities. He’d have to wait until he could paralyze her with hellhound venom, and either leave her behind—alive—or make certain her body was never found. His plan already forming, Nicholas skimmed Cooper’s message, picking up the words that anyone who’d ever met a demon might have expected: suicide, unusual circumstances, no warning, Cawthorne—Wait. What the hell?

  Thoughts of slaying the demon vanished. Nicholas reread the message and let the meaning sink in. This wasn’t what he’d expected. Cooper hadn’t uncovered a demon’s lie, but damn good news.

  Three weeks ago, Dr. Ian Cawthorne had hanged himself in his office.

  Bemused, Nicholas read the text again. So the crooked old bastard had finally done himself in. Nicholas couldn’t be sorry. Given the chance, he’d have tied Cawthorne’s noose himself. Twenty-five years ago, at Madelyn’s urging, Nicholas’s father had sought help from Cawthorne. After “treating” Nicholas’s father for symptoms of delusional paranoia—all the result of Madelyn’s shape-shifting tricks and lying tongue—the shrink had testified against his character, had taken away his pride, had ruined his business and his life.

  Had Cawthorne been treating this demon at Nightingale House? Nicholas wouldn’t ask her. He wouldn’t ask until he knew more—until he knew whether her answers were lies.

  Cooper hadn’t been able to confirm the demon’s story yet. Although his investigator had spoken to several nurses and administrators, they’d blocked him by citing patient confidentiality. Two nurses had recently quit their positions at Nightingale House, however, and the investigator planned to track them down.

  Good enough. With enough money greasing palms, someone would talk—and Nicholas would have more answers.

  He texted a reply and slid the phone back into his pocket, considering this new information. Cawthorne had killed himself three weeks ago. The same amount of time had passed since someone had first entered Madelyn’s house, using her code and tipping Nicholas off to her presence. Considering the timing, he couldn’t believe Cawthorne’s suicide was a coincidence.

  With demons involved, Nicholas couldn’t be certain of anything—but two distinct possibilities seemed likelier than any other.

  The first was that the demon had lied about her amnesia and about escaping Nightingale House. That she’d lied about everything so far, despite the bargain.

  That was the simplest possibility. Given any other circumstance, Nicholas would have calculated it as the likeliest. But simplest didn’t fit any demon’s scheme or methods, and didn’t account for the lengths every demon would go to avoid breaking a bargain.

  So the second, more probable scenario was that Madelyn had somehow escaped punishment in Hell. Then, for some unknown reason, this demon’s memories had been stripped and Madelyn had left her in Cawthorne’s care. God knew how long the man had been in Madelyn’s pocket—twenty-five years, at least. Compared to destroying a good man’s life and reputation, caring for a demon with amnesia amounted to little trouble . . . until the demon had escaped. Then Madelyn had returned to London and exacted payment for Cawthorne’s failure.

  Was Madelyn looking for this demon now?

  If so, that suited Nicholas perfectly. When Madelyn caught up to the demon, she’d also find Nicholas—and he had a payment to exact from her, too.

  He couldn’t fucking wait.

  Fully awake now, Nicholas levered the seat up and faced a wall of white. Sometime between the last stop for gas and the PI’s message vibrating in his pants, they’d driven into a snowstorm. Fat flakes whipped past the windows, piling in a thick blanket on the windshield almost as quickly as the wipers shoved them away. He couldn’t see a damn thing.

  “Where are we?”

  “Smack dab in the middle of BFE.” Without taking her eyes off the road, the demon jabbed the “seek” button on the radio console. “We just passed into Indiana.”

  He checked the clock. A few past nine. He’d slept longer than planned, but they were also making good time despite the snow. A glance at the speedometer showed him why—and sent his stomach into a dive.

  Christ. A demon’s vision rivaled a hawk’s, but a whiteout was a goddamn whiteout. “Can you see anything through this shit?”

  “Not really. I can hear other engines, though, and can tell how far away they are and the direction they’re in. Once I got used to that, it’s almost like seeing.” She flicked the blinker and angled smoothly into the left lane. A few seconds later, they passed a small hatchback crawling along like a bug. “The road isn’t bad yet, but we’ll need chains if this keeps up.”

  “I’ll buy some when we stop for gas,” Nicholas said.

  “That’ll need to be soon.” The scanning radio stopped on another static-filled country station. Maybe the same one. The demon pressed “seek” again. “The two times we stopped for gas, you paid in cash. There’s really no reason for that except you don’t want the Guardian finding us. But if someone wanted to, they could track you through your phone.”

  Not so easily. He’d also used cash to buy a prepaid mobile, and only Cooper had the number. The Guardians would find him, eventually. No doubt of that. He just had to stay ahead of them, and so he’d taken steps to slow them down: renting the SUV under a false identification, and using yet another name to reserve a hotel suite in Duluth.

  He wouldn’t tell the demon that. “So you have no memory, you’ve only been out of Nightingale for a month, yet you know about tracking phones?”

  “I watched a lot of television there. Cop shows.”

  “Violent television in a mental hospital. Brilliant.”

  “It’s what I wanted to watch. The nurses let me alone to do it.”

  Yeah, Nicholas bet they’d let her alone. A demon was low maintenance. No need to sleep, eat, bathe—or piss. Jesus, he hoped they came across a gas station soon.

  As for the phone . . . Hell. Nicholas wanted Madelyn to find them. He didn’t want the Guardians getting there first—and there was nothing that Cooper could tell him now that couldn’t wait. He pulled out his mobile, powered it down.

  “Thank you,” she said, surprising him. “I don’t look forward to being killed on sight.”

  By the Guardians. Would Madelyn kill her, too? Nicholas didn’t think so. Madelyn wouldn’t have left the demon at Nightingale House unless she had some use for her. Considering the demon’s resemblance to Rachel, that use probably involved some scheme to tear Nicholas’s heart out.

  If this demon didn’t slay him through song first. She jabbed the radio button again, and the dial scanned through the frequencies before coming back to the same station. It must have been pissing her off. Her gaze actually left the road long enough for her to cast a deadly stare at the console.

  Hell, any more force in those jabs, and she might stab her finger through it. “You don’t like country?”

  Rachel had. She’d often joked
that she was the only woman in England who had Martina McBride sitting next to Marilyn Manson in her music collection.

  “Like? That doesn’t matter. Only ‘familiar’ does—and I don’t know this song.”

  “You knew the others that have been playing?”

  “Yes. Most of them. And when I didn’t, I could find another station playing something else that I knew.” Her eyes began to glow faintly red. “I can’t find anything now.”

  “But you remember the music.”

  “As soon as I hear it, yes. I didn’t know it before that—or didn’t know that I knew it. But as soon as the song starts, I remember the lyrics, the singer. And I don’t forget again.” She pressed “seek” again, this time with less force. “But sometimes, it’s more than just knowing the words. Some songs, it’s like there’s more there, some other memory attached, and I can almost . . . touch it.”

  All right. Nicholas understood that. He couldn’t hear the Rolling Stones without remembering his mother dancing in the kitchen. Not Madelyn, but his mother. After the demon had wormed her way into their family, it had been all classical, all the time—to soothe his father’s nerves, she’d said. Now, Nicholas recognized a thousand changes that she’d wrought when she’d taken his mother’s place, claiming that everything she’d done had been to help his father. The demon bitch.

  The Stones sure as hell couldn’t tell him where his mother’s body lay now. “You’ve spent the whole night listening for familiar songs?”

  The crimson faded from her eyes. “Yes.”

  Strange. He didn’t know what to make of that—or of her. Her every response seemed wiped of any emotion, yet she was actively searching for those connections?

  “I should have spent the night plotting against you, I know,” she added.

  He laughed, damn it.

  The demon didn’t even crack a smile. Peering ahead through the snow, she said, “The road sign says gas and food at the next exit. I know you’re hungry.”

  Had she been listening to his stomach? “Not hungry enough to eat the shit they pass through a drive-up window.”

  He’d spent the past few years training—learning to fight, making himself strong, preparing himself to face Madelyn. Now wasn’t the time to start shoving crap into his body.

  “Maybe we can find a grocery. Or if you can hang on a few hours, there’s an all-organic diner at a truck stop north of Chicago that serves—” She cut herself off. Her mouth remained open, as if in surprise. When she continued, her voice barely rose above a whisper. “Great omelets. They serve great omelets. And before you ask, I don’t know how I know that.”

  Nicholas hadn’t been going to ask. He was too damn unsettled. This demon wasn’t Rachel . . . but he’d heard about that diner before.

  The demon stared ahead. “This part of the highway isn’t familiar, but I can almost picture the road from Chicago to Duluth, the same way I can remember a scene from a book or a movie after I think about it. But I don’t remember being there. And no, I can’t explain it.”

  Nicholas couldn’t, either—at least, he couldn’t explain why this demon would know that stretch of highway. He knew why Rachel would, though.

  “Rachel finished her masters’ degree at The Kellogg School,” he said. “She drove back to her parents’ house during breaks, on some weekends.”

  “Oh.” That was all she said for several seconds. Then, “Kellogg has a good program. One of the best in the country.”

  Frustration exploded through him. That was her response? About a fucking business school? And how the hell did she know that?

  “You remember the school’s goddamn ranking?”

  She didn’t seem to feel the blast of his anger. “Some facts are easy to recall. Other things are familiar, but I don’t realize they are until I think about them . . . and now I’m finding out that Rachel was familiar with them, too.”

  “You’re not Rachel.”

  “I know. Oh—and this one is familiar. ‘Friends in Low Places.’” Her gaze flicked to the radio. Unable to hear the music over the wipers and the static, Nicholas took her word for it. “I only mentioned Kellogg’s rankings because it meant that Rachel had to be good enough to qualify for the graduate program. Was she?”

  More than good enough. She’d had a killer instinct for the market, choosing when and where to invest. At the beginning of her senior year of high school, her parents had given her a gift of five hundred dollars. Four years later, Rachel had paid off their new mortgage with it, and, after local papers had run with the story, gained the attention of several financial schools—and Madelyn’s interest.

  “She was good,” he only said.

  The demon glanced at him, as if trying to gauge his expression. “Do you mean that, or are you damning her with faint praise?”

  He sure as hell wasn’t going to damn Rachel with anything. “She was brilliant.”

  “Coming from Stone Cold St. Croix, that’s a powerful endorsement.”

  Stone Cold St. Croix. He’d earned that name buying up businesses, tearing them apart, and selling the pieces—all so that he could eventually get to Madelyn. No one would have used the nickname outside of financial circles, however. She wouldn’t have found it in a news article.

  “Is that nickname a fact you conveniently remember, too?”

  “No. I found it on an old blog entry through Google about a week ago. I also took a look at Reticle. It’s been faltering without you at the head. It’s not nearly as strong as it was six years ago.”

  Not true. His company’s profits weren’t increasing as quickly as they once had been, but he’d left Reticle in capable hands that were guiding it along in a steady climb. And as far as Nicholas was concerned, if he had money to pursue his revenge, it was strong enough. “You read that, too? ‘Not nearly as strong’?”

  “I didn’t need to read it. I saw the numbers. They were easy to interpret.”

  She glanced over again—but not at him. After checking the lane, she eased into the exit. Her gaze never touched his face, as if his reaction to her declaration didn’t matter.

  But this was exactly what a demon did. Sow doubts. Quietly undermine. Perhaps plant the seeds that would lead him to abandon revenge and return to business. Not a fucking chance. He enjoyed working, but that didn’t matter. His business enabled his revenge. Until he destroyed Madelyn, he had no use for his company except the money it provided him.

  She didn’t wait for him to say so. “If Rachel was that good, why was she only Madelyn’s personal assistant?”

  Because Madelyn had tricked her, too. “Maybe because she traveled often and made a six-figure salary.”

  “That’s nothing compared to what she could have made on Wall Street.”

  “Few on Wall Street make as much as Madelyn’s protégée eventually would.”

  “She was being groomed as Madelyn’s replacement?”

  “That’s what she let Rachel think.” Hell, that was what Nicholas had believed, too. Now, he thought differently. “But I’d bet it was the opposite: Madelyn intended to take Rachel’s place.”

  “By shape-shifting and pretending to be her? Why?”

  “Someone would eventually notice that Madelyn didn’t look her age—and she’s too vain to appear as old as she should. But Rachel was gorgeous, young.”

  As his mother had once been. How many women’s lives had Madelyn stolen in the same way? Waiting for her opportunity, then stepping into their shoes.

  “You obviously thought the same,” the demon said. “Rachel was gorgeous, young—and so you got close to her. To find out Madelyn’s secrets, or just to steal her protégée away?”

  He hadn’t needed Rachel to know how to destroy Wells-Down, but luring her away from Madelyn would have been a bonus. Rachel had been loyal, however.

  “Maybe I intended to do both,” he lied easily.

  “But you fell in love with her, instead.”

  This lie twisted like a knife in his gut. “Yes.”

 
“I don’t think so.” The SUV skidded at the end of the exit. The demon tapped the brakes until they came to a stop at the sign. “That wasn’t what I sensed from you when we met in the town house.”

  “And a demon knows what love feels like?”

  “I spent a month walking through London. I’ve felt love. Strong, weak. Between friends, between children and parents, between lovers of all stages—even those who were grieving. You did feel grief, though. So you must have cared for her. It just wasn’t love.”

  She was right. But it pissed him off, knowing that she’d looked into him. “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

  With a shrug, she drove forward again. The snow had let up a bit, enough for Nicholas to make out the gas station signs rising along each side of the road.

  “Kissing you felt familiar, too,” she said.

  Goddammit. He’d kissed this demon once, less than fifteen hours ago, and only so that he could get close enough to electrocute her. There had been nothing for her to be familiar with or remember. So what was she trying to say now? “You’re not Rachel.”

  “As I’ve told you. Several times.”

  “And you’ve also said you don’t know who the hell you are. Yet here you are, so bloody familiar with Rachel’s life. Are you trying to convince yourself or me?”

  “I’m convincing no one.” She pulled into a full-service bay and stopped beside the gas pumps. “You are supposed to be helping me figure out who I am. I am trying to give you as much information as possible, so that you can hold up your side of the bargain. Remember?”

  She snapped off the last word between teeth that had sharpened to points. So he’d gotten to her, pissed her off, too. Knowing that soothed some of his own anger.

  “I remember. And you’ve got fangs now. “

  Her gaze snapped to the rearview mirror. She bared her teeth at her reflection. Her eyes widened.

  Surprised? Not as much as the guy who pumped their gas would be. “You’d probably better get rid of those before the station attendant posts on Twitter about it. I’m sure the Guardians watch for that kind of thing.”