Silently, she reached for the ever-present hunger, coaxing it to the surface, promising a hearty meal. She didn’t need any more evidence that this man was proper food. The hunger could have him. All of him. She wouldn’t make it stop this time. This time, she’d let it feed until there was nothing left, until the darkness swallowed its victim whole. The snake could drop its jaws and pull the man inside for all she cared.
Light flared from the hands curled against her chest as the altered part of her rushed from the secret places inside. It had smelled blood in the water.
The fierce pleasure of that foreign thing almost made Emma reconsider her promise. Did she really want to leave this man dead on the floor? Did she really want to look into another set of lifeless eyes, no matter how evil a man they belonged to?
“Get the fuck up, bitch.” Swift kicks connected with her spine—once, twice—bruising the knobby bones in her back, bringing fresh waves of pain. Second thoughts vanished in a red rush. The bastard was going to die. Soon. Very soon. As soon as he—
The instant his thick fingers closed around her arm, Emma struck, stomach muscles contracting, spinning her body around to face him. Her hands shot for his throat, latching on like two hungry infants and suckling for all they were worth, draining, consuming.
Her attacker screamed—a raw, shocked sound—as the blue light flooded from her fingers. It was brighter than it had ever been, strong enough to stream through the air and bounce off the bathroom mirrors, illuminating the room like some moody disco while she and the man who had beaten her danced. They swayed to an unheard beat and the dark hunger writhed between them, pulling wickedness to the surface and then down, down, down into the fathomless pit of devouring.
Emma watched the man’s second face prune into his death mask with an odd detachment. Even after the beating, even after seeing the evidence of murder and mayhem in his past, viewing that skeletal soul would usually have hit her hard. But when he issued a final, thin groan and fell to the floor at her feet, she didn’t feel a thing. No remorse, no regret, only a gleeful satisfaction that she’d finally done this horrible thing that she’d held at a distance for so long.
It took several minutes for the pleasure to fade, for Emma to realize that the room still pulsed with the cool, quiet color of death.
“God,” she whispered, choking on the prayer as she forced the hunger back into hiding.
Banishing the darkness was harder this time, harder than it had ever been. For a moment, she feared that the wrinkles where she’d stored it had been ironed away by what she’d done, that she’d committed a sin that would forever erase the barriers between her human self and the part altered by the demons. But finally, ever so slowly, the monster crept back into hiding. The light flooding from her hands faded with a final, petulant pulse, a child angry at being told to clean up its toys.
Emma knelt down, fingers sliding through the oily flesh of the man at her feet, searching for a pulse she knew she wouldn’t find. One second, two, three ... nothing but rapidly cooling skin and a sinking in her bruised stomach. He was dead. She’d killed again. Maybe for the third or fourth time in twenty-four hours. She was a serial killer in the textbook sense of the word. Technically, she had been for years, but not like this, not at all like this. ...
All her big talk about being the professional killer, the one who should come in here solo and take care of Little Francis, came back to mock her with a cruelty that made her skin burn.
“Okay ... okay.” She stood, hands shaking, stomach pitching in protest. This wasn’t okay, but there wasn’t time to think about it now. She had to get back out on the street before someone came to check on the man she’d killed.
After a moment of debate, Emma left the man in the middle of the floor and ran for the window. There was no point in hiding the body. It wouldn’t buy her more than a few minutes at most and would cost her—
She screamed as gunfire exploded near her hands and face. She flinched, hunching on instinct, frozen for a few precious seconds before she dove back through the window, landing in a pile of aching bones on the floor.
Her heart slammed in her chest as her mind took swift inventory of the rest of her body: bullet hole free, for now. But there were people outside trying to shoot her. At least one, maybe two. Who knew how many more enemies Little Francis had stationed throughout the building? Her chances of getting out of here alive were shrinking. Rapidly.
“No. If he wanted me dead, I’d be dead,” Emma whispered aloud, her voice echoing weakly through the bathroom.
If Little Francis had given the order to kill her, the dead man on the floor would have shot her in the back of the head when she crawled in the window the first time, before she had the chance to fight back. And in those few seconds of shock, the snipers outside had been given ample opportunity to fire a second round and hadn’t taken it. They weren’t trying to kill her; they were trying to keep her in the building.
But why? Why wouldn’t Little Francis simply give the order for her to be eliminated? Did he intend to give her the chance to remain a friend of the new Conti family organization? Was this because of his obvious attraction to her in the past? Or was there some other reason Little Francis wanted to keep her around?
No matter what Andre had said, a part of her still suspected that this had something to do with her demon mark.
Andre. God, he could be in danger. She had to call him and warn him.
Emma rushed to the body on the floor, struggling not to think about the fact that the corpse had been a living, breathing person before she’d killed him. “Shit, shit, shit,” she cursed again as a turn of the man’s head revealed that his earbud was an implant. There was no way to remove it and use it herself, but maybe ...
She tapped the bud to life, waiting for the tiny green light to flash before she spoke Andre’s number. She waited for three interminable seconds, praying he had answered before leaving her message. “Andre, it’s Emma. I can’t hear you, so don’t talk—just listen. I’m at the Conti Bounty offices. Little Francis is definitely working with the Death Ministry. He tried to have me killed, and he’s got a ton of backup. You need to stay away from here. I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
Hopefully that would be sooner rather than later. She tapped the bud off and then on again, placing a second, hurried call to her sister, warning her and Jace that a coup was taking place at the Conti Bounty office and that they shouldn’t assume they could trust anyone.
“Except Andre,” she added. “He’s been helping me. Talk to him if he calls. He’ll tell you what’s been going on. I’ll call the second I’m able.”
Emma tapped the bud, then did a quick sweep of her victim’s body. A demon-skinning-sized knife in his belt—way more weapon than she was prepared to handle. Instead, she fetched his gun from the floor. It was heavier than she’d anticipated, making her wrist ache as she held it with one hand and flipped the safety on with the other.
It was probably smarter to leave the safety off, but something inside her insisted she put that small obstacle between her and another murder. If she had to shoot someone, she would, but she wanted that extra second to think about what she was doing, to recognize she could be taking a life. The people outside might be traitors, but a lot of them were also Andre’s family.
Maybe so, maybe not. What if the Death Ministry took over the office and this has nothing to do with Little Francis or any of the Conti family?
The optimistic notion had barely crossed her mind when the bathroom door opened, and a man she recognized stepped into the room. He wasn’t one of the core group of Contis, but she’d seen him at Andre’s parents’ restaurant on the occasional Thursday, eating manicotti and talking shop with the rest of the Conti men. She thought he was one of the several Anthonys, a second or third cousin with bronze Conti skin and pale blue eyes that didn’t seem to match the rest of him. They were odd-looking, a small detail that made him less attractive than the other Anthonys at the table.
Or m
aybe it wasn’t his eyes; maybe it was something on the inside that had turned her off. Like the fact that he was a son of a bitch who would turn on his own family.
All doubts about Conti involvement in whatever was going on evaporated as Anthony raised his gun and shouted over his shoulder to someone in the hall. “She’s in here. José’s down.” His next words were obviously for her. “Drop the gun, Emma. I’m not supposed to shoot you, but I will.”
Deep inside her bones, where marrow twined with hunger, the darkness slithered, cursing her for her weakness. If she hadn’t put the safety on, there was a chance she could have drawn down on the man in front of her. Father Paul had taught all of his charges how to shoot. The normally peace-loving man believed firearms would be required when it came to the final battle of good against evil, that everyone should be prepared if Armageddon came in their lifetime. Emma had shown a natural aptitude for marksmanship from the first time she was handed a child-sized shotgun in the third grade. She had faith she could hold her own, even against a trained demon bounty hunter.
But with the safety on, she didn’t stand a chance. Anthony would shoot her before she could aim, let alone fire. She saw his resolution in his eyes. The body on the floor had convinced him she was expendable, no matter what orders he’d received from his cousin.
Slowly, carefully, she held the gun out to her side and let it drop with a clatter onto the floor. The sound made Anthony jump and, for a moment, she feared he’d shoot her anyway. Her breath caught in her chest as his finger twitched against the trigger, but then Douglas, Little Francis’s assistant, appeared behind him. After a nervous glance over his shoulder, Anthony lowered the gun a few degrees, aiming the barrel at her hips rather than her heart.
For some reason, Emma wasn’t surprised to learn that Douglas was on the wrong side. Considering the way he’d scampered and fetched for Little Francis, it would have been more surprising to find him loyal to the true Conti leader.
Douglas peered over Anthony’s shoulder, brown eyes widening when he saw José. “Oh my god. Did she shoot him?”
Anthony’s eyes flicked to the floor and then back to Emma. “Doesn’t look like it. There’s no blood, no wound.”
“But he’s dead, right?” Douglas eased around Anthony, being careful to stay out of the way of the gun he still held in front of him.
“Sure seems that way.”
“So cool.” Douglas giggled but quickly slapped a guilty hand over his mouth. When the hand returned to his side, Emma was shocked to see a little smile on his face. “Sorry, I mean, it’s not cool. But you know, it’s cool. Did you kill him with the demons? Do they come when you call them? Like ... pets or something?”
Emma sighed, for once hating the fact that her instincts were dead-on. It would have been nice not to have to worry about the demonic implications of a dangerous situation. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. This guy was dead when I got here.”
“Oh, come on, Emma. We know about your powers. I have to admit, I didn’t think—”
Anthony silenced him with a raised hand, then pressed two fingers to his ear. “We’ve got an ETA of ten minutes on the book.”
The spell book. Shit. Andre wasn’t picking it up, after all. Then why had Francis sent him uptown to the safe house? Just to get him out of the way? Silently, Emma sent out a prayer that Andre was even more out of the way than Francis assumed. She hoped he’d gotten her message before he’d reached the people waiting for him and found someplace safe to hide out for a few hours.
“They need her upstairs,” Anthony said, moving to hold the bathroom door open, careful to keep his gun trained in her direction. It was as if he was scared she was going to put the life-sucking demon whammy on him from across the room.
Which ... she probably could ... if she used one of the spells she’d been working on translating for the past few months. If she closed her eyes, she could almost see the ancient words she needed floating in front of her. There was a good chance she could recall the spell she needed by memory ... but did she dare?
Allowing the darkness to feed with impunity for the first time had made it so much harder to tamp down. If she cast from the demon grimoire, if she deliberately turned the hunger inside of her out onto other people with the intent to destroy, would she ever regain control? Or would the line between her human self and the demonic presence inside her be wiped away forever?
Hunger humming along the surface of her skin every waking moment of every day would drive her insane. And then there was the danger that she would physically transform and become some sort of hybrid creature like her older brother. It was the memory of his face, so human, but covered with scales and dripping liquid horror, that made her bite her lip and swallow the words tickling along her tongue. She couldn’t take the chance, not now, not yet. ...
Inside her, the hunger writhed. She could practically hear its screech of disappointment. That alien sound only confirmed that she’d made the right call. Anything that made the darkness happy was a very bad idea.
“Okay! Come on, right this way.” Douglas gestured for her to precede him through the door and out into the hall. “I can’t wait to see how all this works.”
He pulled his own small revolver from the pocket of his suit coat as Emma passed by, but he didn’t seem to be genuinely afraid. Emma stored the information away, hoping she might be able to use it to her advantage.
“Just head straight back toward the elevator,” Douglas chirped. “Everyone’s waiting on the second floor. I didn’t even know we had a second floor, did you? You need a special key to make the elevator go up instead of down. Apparently only the family was allowed up there before. But then, I guess you probably knew that, didn’t you?”
She heard the smirk in his voice and wondered at its source, but not enough to speak to Douglas. Her past had taught her a few things about dealing with people who assumed they were in control. The less she engaged, the better. It was best if they realized up front that she wouldn’t be cooperating. She wasn’t going to talk, she wasn’t going to bargain, and she certainly wasn’t going to help out with whatever demon magic they had in mind.
Besides, why bother talking when she’d have the answers to her questions the second she got her hands on the skinny little bastard bounding into the elevator behind her? Douglas wasn’t any bigger than she was. If she got him alone, she could physically overpower him and let the blue light do the rest. She’d taken down two men at once earlier in the day, and even the emaciated Stewart was taller and stronger than Little Francis’s terrieresque assistant.
Two men ... There were only two men in the elevator. Sure, there were guns, too, but in such close quarters—
“Don’t move.” A sharp click bounced off the elevator walls as Anthony rolled a bullet into the chamber of his weapon. “Put your hands in your pits. In your armpits. Do it!”
Emma obeyed with a slight frown. Either half the Conti men were mind readers or she’d been telegraphing her intentions more than usual today. Shit. She had to get her game face on. She had to calm down and focus. Despite the guns and gang members and trained bounty hunters with intentions to shoot to kill if she didn’t behave, she’d been in worse situations.
The box that housed the aura demons that had marked her as a child was lost forever, its demons banished from the earthly plane. No matter what Little Francis wanted her to do, it couldn’t be as bad as what Ezra had wanted. Without the box, there was no way to bring about the rule of the invisible demons and the infestation of humanity. Even if Francis captured Sam or another person with a demon bond; that could never happen.
The thought gave her comfort as the elevator doors opened and Anthony tapped her between the shoulder blades with his loaded weapon, urging her out into a lushly carpeted hall that looked more like an upscale hotel than a place where demon hunters did business.
All she had to do was refuse to cast, and everything would be okay. The worst they could do was kill her. She’d always thought t
hat death would be preferable to a life ruled by her mark. Now it was time to put her money where her mouth was.
“Did Andre ever take you here?” Douglas asked, gaping at one of the beautifully furnished rooms on the right side of the hall. Emma pressed her lips together and pretended she hadn’t heard him. “This is gorgeous. I can’t believe I never knew about this.”
Anthony’s earbud beeped softly, and he spoke to someone on the other end. “We’re in the hall. Keep your pants on.”
Douglas laughed. “You are funny.” He wagged a finger at Anthony before hurrying ahead to open a heavy wooden door at the end of the hall.
Emma got the joke as soon as she stepped into the giant conference room, where a shining oak table had been shoved against one wall and all its chairs stacked on top, clearing the space for the twenty or so Conti Bounty and Death Ministry men staggered throughout the room. All of whom were wearing nothing but underwear and a smile.
Actually, most of them hadn’t bothered with the smile but were absurdly serious considering they were nearly naked in a room full of other nearly naked men. In spite of the danger and the gun still trained on her back, Emma normally would have laughed her ass off as soon as she stepped in the room.
Whatever or whoever had been schooling these losers in demon magic was a complete fraud. Anyone with real knowledge of aura demons knew nudity wasn’t required to work demon magic. That was as much a myth as garlic repelling vampires. Real vampires—demon-marked people who fed on human blood and life force—couldn’t care less if their victims took baths in the stuff.
But the smile teasing at the edges of her lips faded before it got started. There was nothing funny about seeing Andre—the only man in the room still fully clothed—tied to a chair with a gag stuffed into his mouth.
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