by Stacy Gail
“Yeah, and it’s what we’re trying to prevent now.” She watched his hands turn into fists, while the volatile atmosphere threatened to explode around them. “If Dantalion reaches full strength...things will get bad.”
Right. And the sun was a bit warm. “How bad?”
“This isn’t a lower flight of demon we’re dealing with here, Nikita.”
“In my world, flights are things you take out of airports. Dumb it down for me.”
“Dantalion is a Great Duke of hell. If he gains full power, he’ll control the minds of all humans everywhere. That doesn’t sound bad at first, but since it’s speculated that Emperor Nero—the guy who fiddled while Rome burned—was one of Dantalion’s victims, it puts everything into perspective. This demon can push any thought imaginable into the minds of the world’s population. He could make people believe that a steady diet of human flesh is the only way to go. Or that friends and neighbors need to have their hair trimmed with chainsaws. Or that the Miami Dolphins are going to win this year’s Super Bowl. No one will escape the madness.”
Horror washed over her, overtaking the anger in a heartbeat. “Why hasn’t he taken over already? What does this thing need to fully manifest?”
“Ten deaths done by the hands of his proxies—the people who’ve sold their souls to Dantalion. That’s what I meant by the capacity for human evil acting as his fuel. Semi-manifested as he is now, this monster has to stay close to a human—preferably his proxy, but it can be anyone—so he can feed off the energy of whatever negative memories they possess. But, if Dantalion can get the people whose souls he owns to kill ten times, he can emerge fully. Then nothing but a miracle would be able to get rid of him.”
“Ten deaths.” That seemed like nothing for a demon to pull off, and her blood iced over as the ultimate question formed in her mind. “The people who have sold their soul to Dantalion...his proxies, as you say. Do you know how many murders they have accomplished so far?”
“If what Paul said is true and he killed his father in cold blood, then the body count’s up to nine. You were supposed to be the tenth. I believe that’s why Dantalion told Paul you’d be ‘the final one’.”
“No.” The catastrophic enormity of it took her breath away, and for the second time in her life Nikita learned that fear could sink so deeply into her bones it could actually hurt. “That explains the question I overhead—whether or not Paul’s suicide ‘counted’.”
“I’m sure it doesn’t. If Dantalion was already at full power, we would know about it.”
“Maybe not.” She stared down at her hands and wondered if she was actually seeing them, or if everything around her was an illusion created by an all-powerful demon who could warp her perception of reality into anything he wanted it to be. “Maybe we’re not even having this conversation. Crazy people never know when they’ve gone crazy, isn’t that pretty much how it goes?”
“I’d be able to perceive a difference,” he said, surprising her. “Since we’re partially spiritual beings, the Nephilim are immune to Dantalion’s reality-warping mind tricks. It’s why he wants us gone. We’re the only ones who can see him for what he is, so that means we’re the only ones who can stop him.”
She couldn’t help the bitter smile. “So you really are a special little snowflake.”
“I have an addictive personality that could send me off the rails at any second. If I take in too much energy from a storm it could kick off a dopamine-induced schizophrenia for which there’s no cure. My synapses fire at a crazy level because I’m always charged with more electricity than my almost-human body can handle, so I can’t help but be the poster-boy for ADHD. And if the whole world suddenly goes insane, I’ll be left wishing I could join the rest of you, because I can’t imagine a worse hell on earth. So, if that makes me a special little snowflake, then yeah. I am.”
Damn it. When he put it like that, it was hard to be grateful he was finally offering up some bitter truths instead of feeding her more sugar-coated lies. “What about the person who started us out in this direction to begin with? Bambi Dominguez?”
“I can’t even begin to figure out the answer to that one,” he admitted, grimacing. “If she’s dead, basic arithmetic tells me that she’d be the tenth and final death Dantalion needs to bring on a demonic apocalypse. But that hasn’t happened, so...why? Paul had plenty of opportunity to do her in. Yet what happened at Lady Jayne’s suggests that murdering Bambi was the furthest thing from Hardy’s mind. Or Dantalion’s, for that matter. They were trying to kill Lynette, not Bambi.”
“Could she be another one of Dantalion’s proxies?”
“I...don’t know.” From the look on his face, it was clear that thought had never occurred to him. “Dantalion’s never had more than one proxy in play before.”
“Does that mean it’s impossible?”
He lifted a shoulder. “In a semi-manifested state, Dantalion is supposed to be as weak as a kitten, a mere shadow of his true self. That’s why he has to lurk in the shadows, hiding behind his proxies as he pulls their strings. I would think juggling two proxies at once would stretch him to his absolute limit, but...hell, I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Maybe is not a good enough answer. I suppose the only way we’ll know for sure is to find Bambi and ask her how she fits into this mess.”
Kyle stilled. “What do you mean, find her?”
“What do you mean? I’m a bounty hunter, yes? You are too. We’re looking for a jump, and Bambi Dominguez is that jump. Seems pretty obvious to me what I’m talking about.”
“Bullshit. We’re not going anywhere. You’re safe here, so this is where you’re staying.”
“Safe?” She stared at him, hardly believing her ears. “Didn’t you just say this demon guy is one murder away from screwing up every human mind on the planet?”
“Well, yeah...”
“And that your group, the...the Nephilim people or whatever, are the only ones who are immune to his hocus-pocus mind tricks? But everyone else is screwed?”
“Nikita—”
“I don’t know what you mean by safe, so could you explain it to me? Because the way I see it, with you sitting on your ass doing nothing while that monster runs around in our own backyard, no one is safe. Don’t you get that?”
“I get that you weren’t some goddamn random victim of Dantalion’s.” His voice rose to a yell, an overwhelming, rolling-thunder sound she’d never heard from him before. It shocked her so much she almost missed the rattling of the windows in their frames from the sheer force of power he clearly kept on a tight leash. “He chose you, Nikita. He chose you because of your connection with me.”
“I don’t understand. If this thing can’t see into your mind, how did this monster know we’re even aware of each other’s existence, much less that we’re...” She floundered, not sure herself what they were to each other now.
“Do you remember the headache I had outside of Paul Hardy’s house? The Nephilim can feel the demonic when it’s nearby, but since I’d never run into a demon before, I didn’t understand what that headache meant. I have no doubt now that Dantalion was somewhere in that house with Hardy, and you were close enough for him to read. We’d just shared our first kiss, and while I know it didn’t make the whoa-nelly impression on you that it made on me, I’d be willing to bet that kiss was still on your mind when you were there.”
“That kiss changed everything for me.” Unaware of his softening expression, she tried to put her chaotic thoughts in some kind of order. “So...am I right in saying that this thing saw you in my mind, and that’s why he attacked me?”
Kyle nodded. “Dantalion’s sending a loud-and-clear message that while I might be immune to his abilities, I’m not immune to him. His brand of evil can still reach me through you, and that’s too much for me to take. I will never allow that to happen again, Nikita. I swea
r it.”
“If he comes to full power, I’m going to lose my mind whether I’m hidden here in the middle of nowhere or not, and there’s nothing you can do to stop it while you’re sitting here. But there’s a hell of a lot you can do if you put your special snowflakyness into action, hunt this thing down and fry it out of existence.”
For a long moment he contented himself with trying to glare her into submission. Then, because he was Kyle and no doubt couldn’t help himself, he raised a brow. “Snowflakyness?”
“It’s a word!”
“If you say so.”
“I say I’m right about going back, and you know it.” But just to make sure there was no misunderstanding how serious she was, Nikita planted herself in front of him and hoped her hobbling gait didn’t detract from her ferocity. “We are not going to just sit in some stinking swamp listening to frogs mate while the world literally goes to hell. We’re going back, Kyle. Now.”
Ruthlessness carved into the lean planes of his face, and again she couldn’t help but wonder if she knew him at all. “I’ll do it only if you promise me something first.”
“What?”
“Promise me you’ll stay with me. Unless it’s absolutely necessary, promise me you won’t do anything without me.”
The turbulent rush of dark emotion running through his words made her throat clench, a weak reaction she hated. She wasn’t stupid enough to think he meant something more than his natural protectiveness. If he’d truly cared about her, he never would have let her drown in the harrowing belief that she was going insane.
“Nikita?”
She struggled to harden her heart. “Won’t that be embarrassing when one of us has to pee?”
She had no warning. One minute her messed-up feet were painfully rooted to the spot in front of him, and the next she was off the floor and reclining not so comfortably on the stairs, her forearms caught at the small of her back between her own body and a stair step. For a bewildered moment she recalled the attendant at Lady Jayne’s describing very much the same thing. The whole world had blurred, and in the next instant she was across the room, in this case halfway between the first and second floors. No wonder Kyle had spotted that telltale behavior as belonging to something not human. As a being who wasn’t entirely human himself, he’d recognized the signs.
God help her.
“You obviously think this is all a joke, but allow me to prove to you how serious I am.” With that unfamiliar ruthlessness hardening his face into a mask that bore only a passing resemblance to the man she thought she knew, he pressed deeper between legs she couldn’t remember parting, his viselike hands gripping under her thighs so that her knees were on either side of his hips. “I started out wanting to save the world, but that’s not how I’m ending up. You are the only person I’m interested in saving, and I’ll do it even if I have to sacrifice every belief I hold dear. You’re the reason I breathe. Yours in the only face my eyes search for in a crowd, even when I know you’re not there. And you are the one who holds all my fucked-up pieces together and keeps me from turning out to be just like my strung-out mess of a father. Yet you stand there cracking jokes over the security of my precious treasure—you—like you don’t hold my goddamn fate in the palm of your hands. If I didn’t love you to the point of madness, I’d kill you for being so cavalier with your life.”
And with those words still ringing in her ears and reshaping her world, he crushed her mouth with his.
Chapter Seventeen
Something had snapped in a big way inside of Kyle—some hitherto unknown emergency brake that had always been in place when dealing with Nikita. Even when they’d found their fumble-footed way through the years-long mating dance, the one last hidden truth of what he was had kept him separated from her as surely as if it were a prison wall.
Now that it was gone, he was nothing more than a runaway train.
The situation couldn’t get much worse. Now that it was too late, he realized he probably should have manned up and told her about Dantalion, those telepathic-shapeshifting abilities, and his own crazy-ass DNA before they got to the edge of a demonic apocalypse. Heaven knew that if he had to do it all again, he’d have preferred to tell her the truth himself. But bottom-lining it, it was a done deal on the total-disclosure front. All cats were officially out of the bag.
Too bad it had been just about as nightmarish as he’d thought it would be. She’d flinched at the word demon, then put the rotten cherry on top by referring to him as a thing, and not human. And now...
Now she was looking at him as though she’d never seen him before.
He could sympathize. With all the barriers gone, he didn’t know who the hell he was when he was with her. It was something he’d never tried before, so he was as much in the dark as she was. One thing he did know—he had to protect her. Even if he had to employ the worst sort of tactics. So what if she’d said she wasn’t sure how to forgive him? Forgiveness and consequences—those were complicated things he’d worry about later, after the threat of an apocalypse was in the rearview mirror.
A man had to have his priorities. Hopefully she’d understand that.
“Your name, Tesoro. It means treasure, right?”
She nodded. Still looking at him like she didn’t know him. Still looking at him like she didn’t want to know him.
He couldn’t hurt more if she’d plunged a knife into his heart.
“That’s why I call you my treasure.” Crushing tension tightened his muscles as he kissed her again, the weight of his body holding her exactly where he wanted her. She wriggled, a furtive attempt at freeing her arms, and he pressed down harder. She knew what he was now; she had every reason to push him away in horror and disgust. So he wouldn’t give her that chance. Somehow he’d find a way to become as necessary to her as she’d become to him, with her volatility and lush sensuality, her surprising sense of humor and that priceless patience she showed when he was bouncing off the walls. Oh God, he’d die inside if she rejected him now.
But...
He’d deserve to die if he forced himself on a woman who now saw him as a thing.
A shudder went through him, borne from a world of pain and regret and bitter self-loathing at what he’d been on the verge of doing. In what he realized was probably the last kiss he would ever share with her, Kyle danced his tongue first along one side of hers, then the other. By now he knew she was sensitive there, and in this final kiss goodbye he poured every ounce of passion and longing he had into it. It was the least he could do after using his power of speed to manhandle her into place, when Dantalion had tripped her up by wielding his powers against her only hours earlier.
That was one hell of a note. To use his powers to gain the advantage on her made him no better than a fucking demon. No wonder she was frantic to run back to civilization. She wanted to get as far away from him as she could.
One thing his messed-up childhood had cemented in his brain was that he couldn’t force those he loved to stay with him. He hadn’t been able to do it with his father. He wouldn’t be able to do it with Nikita. Not now. Not when he’d screwed up every step of the way.
Before he could pull back, her body arched up into his. His mind reeled when she returned his kiss, biting and sucking his tongue until his brain went blank. A sigh escaped her as her hips undulated against him, teasing his lengthening shaft. Pleasure clenched his muscles until his breathing trickled to almost nothing, and the caveman in him wanted to grind their bodies together until he achieved absolute fusion. Instead, he eased the pressure off her, giving her the opportunity to shove him down the stairs in an explosion of rejection. His heart stopped dead when her arms slid around him, bringing him back to settle against her, the rounded softness of her breasts flattening against his chest.
It was a miracle, was all he could think, dumbfounded and so grateful his eyes stung with it.
An absolute miracle she wasn’t turning him away, or likening him to Dantalion. Somewhere in the back of his mind he suspected he’d probably just used up his luck for the rest of his lifetime with this reprieve, so now he had to be smart enough to not blow it. Now was the time to show her how precious she was to him. He’d never give her a reason to fear him or make her regret taking a chance on someone she called not human.
And, yeah. He’d even save the world for her.
“Sometimes I’m an asshole, and sometimes my brain doesn’t work right.” The words were no louder than his disturbed breath as he freed a hand to make quick work of the fastenings of his jeans, pulling out a much-depleted string of condoms from his pocket as he went. Impatiently he put the protection in place before he pushed up her skirt, and smiled in sheer gratitude when he found she liked going commando just as much as he did. “I’m so screwed up, I’m happy even when you’re mad at me, so sometimes I’ll go out of my way just to make that happen. Isn’t that nuts? But at least then I know I have your attention. When it comes to you, I’m such a hopeless attention whore it’s not even funny.”
“Kyle...”
The hint of what sounded like uncertainty in her tone spurred him into action. He didn’t want her to doubt. Or think. Or feel anything but sublime pleasure. His one mission now was to get her hooked on him so that he was her number-one fix. And if he did things right, she’d never have a chance to regret anything. She’d be too satisfied to care.
“I’m going to make you say my name like it’s the only word you know.” Supporting her with one arm under her butt, he rained open-mouthed kisses down the side of her neck while boldly sliding his free hand between them until it was cupped over her sex. The damp heat radiating from her scorched his palm. He searched for and found her entrance, and his approval of her innate sensuality soared into the stratosphere when he found her already wet and ready for him. But as much as he wanted to sheath himself inside her, he wanted this to be memorable—life-altering in every way. Something like that couldn’t be rushed, no matter how every instinct howled at him to let mindless pleasure rule. For a multitude of reasons, he needed her to remember this time together forever.
