Temptation by Fire

by Tiffany Allee

  “Why do you say that? Do you think Thomas knows what I am, too?”

  Karson shrugged. “The shadowman could have been his, or could have been his boss’s.”

  “Is what Thomas is—whatever that might be—the reason he made me feel so cold?”

  “Cold? What do you mean?”

  His expression was hard when I looked up from where I’d been staring at the couch.

  “When he touched me in the hospital, it felt like I’d dipped my hand into ice water. And even before he touched me, it was like a chilly wind rolled off of him.”

  Karson just stared at me, long enough that I shifted in my seat, uncomfortable. “I’ve never heard of that sort of power.” He muttered something I couldn’t make out. “That could make things even more complicated. Whatever you do, don’t tell anyone that part of it. No one, Ava. Not even if you think they’re on the right side of this war.” His eyes met mine, strangely intense.

  It suddenly hit me that Karson might actually care about what happened to me.

  I nodded, not entirely sure if I was agreeing to do what he said, or if I was just doing it to avoid arguing with him. But part of it I couldn’t leave alone. “What war?”

  “The Venators and…them. It’s a war fought in the shadows, using skill and sneakiness more than brute force. A guerrilla war, I guess, but it’s still a war.”

  “What are they? What is Thomas?” I asked, dreading his answer even though I knew I needed to know.

  Scrutinizing me, he moved a few inches closer to me on the couch. He never dropped eye contact while he shifted position. “Are you sure you want to know? Can’t you just leave it here, without them haunting your dreams for the rest of your life?”

  “How do you know I won’t imagine something worse than whatever they are?”

  “Because there isn’t anything worse.”

  I met his stare with one of my own, trying to keep my eyes as hard as his. Pushing him for this information might not be smart, but I couldn’t very well go on with my life, knowing there was something out there, but not knowing what it was, how to protect myself. I’d jump at every noise, hide from every shadow. No matter how he insisted otherwise, I knew my imaginary monsters would be worse than whatever he labeled Thomas Winston. Fear of the known paled in comparison to fear of the unknown.

  And I was sick of being afraid of everything.

  “Tell me,” I insisted.

  “Fine,” he said, then he looked down as some thought took him. He nodded to himself, and his eyes moved back up to meet mine. When he spoke, he said each word slowly, carefully, as if I would misunderstand if he spoke quickly. “They are demons.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Demons.”

  “Demons,” I repeated.

  “Yes. Demons. And I need more Coke.” He shook his cup at me.

  I grabbed his glass and headed to the kitchen, operating on autopilot. He’d saved me from a demon—scratch that, a demon’s shadowman. Nervous laughter crept into my throat and I swallowed it down. This was all unreal. It couldn’t be true.

  As I filled his glass with fresh ice and a new can of Cherry Coke, I wondered if Thomas secretly hid a long tail under his pants, or a forked tongue behind his perfect teeth. The glass chilled me, ice-cold under my palm, and Thomas Winston’s face flashed in my mind. I forced air between my clenched jaws and walked back into the living room.

  I could handle this. Demons. No problem.

  Moving woodenly, I handed Karson his drink and sat heavily on the couch. I didn’t bother scooting to the edge. Instead I sat in the middle, close enough to touch him if I wanted. Which I didn’t. Of course I didn’t. I was cool and collected, and the last thing I needed was to be comforted by the man on my couch.

  A shadow flashed behind my window, and I jumped.

  “What is it?” Karson was up and in a defensive posture, his back to me, before I could react.

  “I just saw something move out of the corner of my eye and it startled me. Probably just the wind moving the curtain.” God, he had to think I was the jumpiest person ever. Cool, calm, and collected. That was me. Yeah, right.

  “Stay here.” Karson walked to the window and peered outside. With a quick motion, he opened it and stepped out onto my fire escape.

  Worry pressed against my chest when he stepped to the side where I couldn’t see him. “Karson?” I got up and took a step toward the window.

  A flash of movement made me jump again, and then Karson was ducking back through the window.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  Embarrassment surged, and my face heated. “Yeah. I’m probably just a little jumpy.”

  He looked at me then, his dark eyes focused on my face. Some of the hardness in his expression faded. “It’s understandable.” He closed the window and curtains, and then returned to his seat on the couch.

  “So what are we talking about here?” I twisted my hands together and sat by him again. Okay, maybe I needed a little comfort, and being close to the big, scary guy who’d saved my life was comforting, oddly enough. “Fanged beings from hell?”

  “I don’t know their history, if they’re related to religion or anything. They don’t shout rhetoric or theology. They just exist, as far as I know.” The barest hint of his scent flowed to me. Sweat and soap, with an underlying smell unique to him.

  I fought the urge to lean toward him. Even the touch of his hand on mine would be comforting, especially for me. Human contact was so rare it was like a gift. When it didn’t come with visions, anyway. “So does Thomas have a tail?”

  I half expected him to laugh, but he just shook his head, face as serious as always. “They don’t have a form of their own. Not on this plane, anyway.”

  “Demonic possession?”

  “It’s what limits their presence here, though they do have damned powerful skills when they possess someone. They’re strong, fast, and brutal. Some can do other things…control people with their minds, and communicate telepathically. Among other things. They live to increase their numbers and torture humans. Most work to accumulate wealth, but that isn’t a universal trait.”

  “Doesn’t sound very limiting,” I muttered. Thomas was a demon? But he’d seemed so normal at the hospital. Could he really be something so…evil?

  “Possession is difficult. It usually requires the victim to agree to let the demon inhabit his body.”

  “Why the heck would someone agree to that?

  “Same reason people do a lot of things. Power. They fall for the sales pitch, I guess. They don’t know that they’ll lose control.”

  I nodded, still trying to wrap my mind around demons being real.

  “Some, like Thomas, genuinely enjoy acting the part of a human. He hasn’t been in this plane long, but he’s picking up the act quickly. Others don’t bother to act human at all. But they all kill people, Ava.”

  I swallowed. “Seriously?”

  His expression turned dark, edgy. “In ways you don’t want to imagine. Torture. Rape. Pain gives them power, allows them to steal energy and life from their victims. I saw a demon skin a man once—while the man was still alive—because he was bored of the regular tortures he used to feed.”

  “Feed?”

  “They feed on our energy. Torture seems to be the most efficient way for them to draw it out. Or hell, maybe it’s just their favorite way.”

  I fought against nausea churning my stomach, trying to push the thought of someone being skinned alive from my mind. No good could come from dwelling on that.

  “They manage to have all that power through possession? How do you”—I struggled to find the right word—“exorcise them from someone?”

  “You don’t. Not really. You can destroy them through ritual. Only very rarely can you get the person back that way, without destroying the body. But that uses vocal magic, which is risky to the hunter.” He shrugged. “Or you can get them to hold still long enough while you cut off their head, which removes any chance of gettin
g the possessed person back, of course. But it’s efficient.”

  I grimaced. “Nice. So you’re saying they’re basically unstoppable. Why haven’t they just taken over, then? Why do they bother hiding?”

  “Like I said, they can’t possess people easily. There are rumors of old objects—most commonly said to be a necklace—that allowed them to possess anyone, but I’ve never seen anything that substantiated the gossip. And the Venators—people like me—keep them in check as much as we can.”

  Nice. Demons roamed Earth, using jewelry to possess people and torture to feed off their energy. My life no longer seemed quite so weird. “So, what now? I’m just supposed to lay low and pray Thomas doesn’t find me because I was dumb enough to search for him on the Internet?”

  “Might not have been Thomas that sent the shadowman. He has a boss—some important demon pooh-bah who controls a lot of shit around Chicago. Could have been him, although I doubt it.”

  “Does it matter who might be coming after me?” I demanded. When Karson shook his head, I continued, saying, “So how long should I go into hiding?”

  “Just a few days.”

  “Why just a few days?”

  “That goes beyond the boundaries of our agreement, Ava. Just trust me. Lay low until I contact you.”

  He reached out and gripped my shoulder, and I managed not to flinch. I could feel the heat of him through the thin veneer of my blouse.

  “Promise me.”

  “How do you know so much about them?” How can I trust you? That’s what I really wanted to ask, but I bit the question back.

  His grip tightened on my shoulder, but his eyes moved to stare at a spot just above my shoulder. When he finally spoke, his voice had flattened.

  “A few years back, I started hunting them. Got lucky, ran into some other people who were doing the same. They showed me the ropes.”

  “So…what? You hang around Thomas, pretend to be his bodyguard or something until you can exorcise him?”

  “You see this?” He pointed at the tattoo around his neck, just above his clavicle. “This tattoo makes Thomas think I’m his. He thinks he owns me. So yeah, I protect him. I run his fucking errands. I manage the empire he’s trying to build. Until the time is right for me to move on him.”

  The tattoo suddenly looked darker, more menacing. Like it could choke him. I shivered.

  Demon hunting. What an occupation. “How long have you been hunting them?”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Almost ten years now, I guess.”

  Ten years? Ten years of hunting demons. He must have been in his late teens or early twenties when he started. I tried to wrap my mind around what that must have been like. Had he been forced to live among groups of them that whole time to get close enough to kill them?

  “So who are these Venators? Are they like some sort of demon-hunting organization?”

  “They’re like a need-to-know organization.”

  “I haven’t held anything back from you.”

  He shrugged and his hand dropped from my shoulder. “I’m trying to help you. That doesn’t give you the right to know everything about me.”

  I opened my mouth to argue but he held a hand up, and his index finger touched my lips. The gesture was meant to shut me up, and it worked. In that moment every thought flew from my head. There was only him. The intense look in his eyes. The roughness of his skin on my mouth.

  The immediate need that curled in my stomach.

  What would it be like to be with a man like him? Rough and wild and freaking amazing, that was my bet. My body ached to find out. The rest of me knew better.

  “You need to hide for a while. Then you can go back to your normal life. Promise me.”

  With a quick jerk of my head, I promised.

  Tension flowed out of him visibly, and a small smile touched his lips. “Good.”

  And if I hadn’t already convinced myself that he was probably right, that laying low couldn’t hurt, his next words would have.

  “Please don’t go back on your promise. Don’t make me watch them kill you.”

  Chapter Five

  I’d slept like shit after leaving Ava’s the night before. Her scent still lingered with me. Not good. I didn’t need the distraction now. The sun beat down on my sunglasses, making my headache feel like it might just split my skull. I was late, but I couldn’t care less at this point. I stalked into Pulse and made my way to the booth where Franklin waited.

  “You look like shit,” he said.

  “How fucking nice of you to notice. Are we dating here, or can I give you my report and get back to work?” I’d had to go into a crappy part of town to check a business Thomas was looking to acquire. Or more accurately, I had to scope out a strip club that Thomas wanted to take over and use to sell drugs. Things had been tense since the shadowman had been banished from this plane. Thomas—if the shadowman had been his, and I didn’t doubt it—couldn’t be certain that the shadowman hadn’t fallen by accident. Sending the not-so-bright creatures out during the daytime was risky. But he still acted as if he was on guard.

  So until it was time for the trap to be sprung, I had to be on my best behavior. Less than one more day. By tomorrow night, the demon inside Thomas would be banished. And Thomas the man—well, he’d be free, one way or another. Hopefully during the exorcism, Thomas would release the name of the demon he worked for. I’d cross my fingers for all to go well, but I never trusted luck.

  “Aren’t you a fucking ray of sunshine,” Franklin said, but there was a hint of a smile in his tone, if not on his face. “Report.”

  “It was the woman from the hospital.” Less than twenty-four hours had passed since I’d left her in her apartment, and yet something inside of me ached to see her again. To make sure she was okay, sure, but her health wasn’t the only thing on my mind. I shouldn’t have touched her, but I’d needed to. And if I was honest, I wanted to do a hell of a lot more than just touch.

  “What was? The Internet search that you checked out?”

  “Yes, the same woman I told you about before. The one who was muttering about Thomas burning.”

  “How the hell does she know about us?”

  I didn’t flinch, but it was a near thing. “I asked her if she was a Venator right after her fit about the fire. Not sure where she got Thomas’s name—probably from her friend. Looked like she worked at the hospital. She put it all together and searched online. The combination of terms caught Thomas’s attention, too. Or one of his drones, anyway.”

  Franklin cursed under his breath.

  “I’ve got it taken care of.”

  “How do you have it taken care of? Be specific,” he snapped.

  The urge to rail against Franklin’s authority hit me. I pushed down the surge of anger. This was exactly why I needed to exorcise Thomas. I had too much demon blood in me, in my tattoos, to be so close to another carrying their mark so heavily.

  It was a fucked-up bit of cause and effect. The Venators’ greatest strength was our greatest weakness. Demon blood in our tattoos made us strong as hell, but every drop brought us closer to being like the things we hunted. It made us less than tolerable human beings. Pretty damn hard to work together when you were all a bunch of half-humans on the road to madness.

  “Thomas sent a shadow to the veterinary clinic where she works. I stepped in before she was taken.” I braced myself mentally for the reaction I knew my next words were going to cause. “She saw it disappear in the sunlight, so I had to explain some shit to her.”

  To my surprise, Franklin’s face didn’t twist with frustration and anger. Instead, he let out a heavy sigh and rubbed his face with his hands. He looked tired. “You could have blown your cover. And for what?”

  “She wasn’t going to take me seriously otherwise.”

  “You risked a mission for one girl’s life?” Some of the anger I had expected crept into Franklin’s tone, and I was glad to hear it. Anger could fuel a man. The weary didn’t last long fig
hting demons. Worse, the weary didn’t last long fighting the demon blood inside themselves. “We don’t do that, Karson. You start pulling heroic bullshit like that, you lose demons. And they’ll take a hell of a lot more than the life of one woman before someone gets a chance at them again.”

  “She’s special.” I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth—Franklin would think I’d gone soft if I didn’t follow that up with something more substantial than the fact that she wasn’t scared of me and was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen. “She’s a psychic, Franklin. A real one. That’s why she went into a fit and started muttering about fire when she touched Thomas.”

  “Not a very good psychic if she didn’t see the road that would lead her down.” Franklin waved a hand at me, stopping my argument before I could open my mouth. “I know it doesn’t work like that, son. Just a joke.”

  “You’ve worked with psychics before?”

  Franklin shot me a sly smile that twisted my stomach for some reason. “Not much out there that I haven’t worked with.”

  I almost asked him how it worked. What could she do? But I stopped myself in time. No way was I going to make Ava an open topic of discussion with Franklin. He was a good man—a smart fighter and a great teacher. But he was ruthless when it came to the hunt.

  He’d see her as an opportunity. A tool.

  I wasn’t going to drag an innocent woman into demon hunting, even if I did have a nagging urge to see her again. Hell, especially because I wanted to see her again.

  I didn’t know much about her, but I was good at gauging people, and I’d learned quite a bit just from our short amount of time together. Her desire to help with my wounds, and the soft touch of her gloved hands on my skin. Her bravery in dealing with me—with the reality of demons. Of course, she had a head start in accepting the paranormal, given her visions. But it was all still damned impressive.

  She was, through and through, a good person. A clean person. Dealing with demons wasn’t work for someone with clean hands. It was work for a killer.