Before I knew I’d been hit, I found myself crumpled on the ground, face down in a pool of motor oil. My head throbbed, my side ached, and something burned like a bitch down my back. What the hell? Huge scorpion legs skittered into my line of sight. The demon made a curious chuffing sound around its bristling lips and then arched its stinger high over its body, and plunged the barb into my shoulder. I screamed. Fire burst from my skin. My demon slammed into me, evicting my humanity, and the lights went out.
Chapter Seven
I woke with a mouth as dry as a sandbox, throat stripped by acid, and my skull caved in. At least that’s what it felt like. I groaned and winced as a hideous headache ballooned inside my skull. “I’m gonna be sick.”
Jerry filled my vision, not a hard thing for him to do, considering he’s built like a pro-football player. His all-over tattoos swirled and dipped across his cheeks, nose, chin, and continued over his shaven head. A black tank top strained against bulging muscles. He wasn’t the first face I expected to see. Concern knit his brows together.
“Welcome back,” he growled, his voice the verbal equivalent of dark chocolate: smooth, decadent, and delicious. “That deceptively little body of yours is going to punish you over the next few hours. Go with it. It’s ridding you of Scorsi venom.”
Oh, right. The garage. The demons. The kiss. “Stefan?”
“Here.”
I turned my head, even though the shards of glass shifted inside my skull, and saw him standing by the window, arms crossed, one leg leveraged against the wall. Wait, where were we? Bare floors. Oddly bright flower-print wallpaper. One couch, of the well-worn variety. Jerry’s place. “What happened?”
“You were busy ogling me and got yourself sideswiped by a lesser demon.” Stefan frowned. “Sloppy, Muse. How did you pass enforcer training?”
“I didn’t.” I plastered my cool hand against my forehead. “If you weren’t so distracting with those fancy wings of yours, I would have been fine.”
“Next time I’m taking down hellhounds for you, I’ll remember to tone down the pretty.”
Jerry’s deep chuckle washed over me like a calming salve. He had power in his voice. I hadn’t yet figured out what Jerry was, if he was anything other than human. He looked human underneath all those tats. He felt human. But his voice was something else. He straightened beside the couch. “Stefan brought you to me. Caused quite the stir at the clinic, especially considering you were demon.”
Jerry was a vet. He could make babies cry at ten paces and patch up poodles with his eyes closed. And he was a demon doctor in his spare time. “I was demon?”
“We hosed you down with a fire extinguisher. Seemed to do the trick.”
It was Stefan’s turn to chuckle. I glared. “I’m glad you both think this is funny.” Trying to sit up cracked my skull open again. Falling back, I lay still, closed my eyes, and fought the nausea.
The floorboards creaked. Jerry moved away. Jerry’s apartment was the size of a shoebox. He could cross it in two strides in any direction. “I also patched up that day-old wound in your side,” he called from his kitchen. “What did you do, stick it together with glue?”
I cracked an eye open and saw Stefan smile. “Yeah,” I replied. “Learned that from some cocky demon hunter.”
“Great.” Jerry clearly wasn’t impressed. “No more self diagnosis. Next time, come to me for surgical tape.” His rich voice boomed in the tiny space, but where it should have been intimidating, it warmed me. “On the plus side, the gunshot wound in your shoulder is healing well.”
Stefan shook his head. “How have you not died?”
“I did.” I fired back and then regretted it as his lips pressed into a thin line, and his guilty gaze flicked away. I shrugged a shoulder, and then groaned as a wave of hot nausea crashed over me. “Ryder shot me a few weeks ago.”
“Really?” Stefan’s light tone implied mild curiosity, but the slight growl spoiled the effect.
“I don’t think he likes me right now.”
“Don’t believe it. When Ryder had me holed up at the lake house, he wouldn’t shut up about you. I was sick of hearing Muse this, Muse that, especially as I had some…issues with you. He worked damn hard at trying to convince me you weren’t Akil’s pawn.”
I listened to the peaks and troughs of Stefan’s voice. I heard light humor but something else too, something darker, hidden deep. “Well, we sorta had a falling out. He shot me, and I threw whiskey in his face.” I didn’t want to go into how Ryder had executed a nine-year-old half-blood girl in front of me.
“Ryder will tell it to you straight, whether you wanna hear it or not.” Stefan chuckled a soft, gentle laugh. “I knocked him out once. No, twice.”
“You did?” I turned my head again and blinked at Stefan. Even in my beaten-up state, it didn’t take much for my thoughts to wander and the memory of the kiss to tingle on my lips.
“He’s stubborn.”
“Takes one to know one.”
“Yes…” He nodded, “Yeah, it does.” He held my gaze. “He’ll come around. Talk to him.”
That ship had sailed. “Maybe.”
“He cares about you, and he’s proud of you. Maybe leave out how you let a Scorsi demon take you down. It’s not like they’re stealthy. Or particularly bright.”
“Hey, pal, there were car alarms going off, and you were all sparkly.” And I was still getting over the shot of desire he’d dumped into my veins.
“You mentioned that.”
“Well, it’s worth saying again. I can’t be held responsible for my actions around you.” Wasn’t that the truth? Back in that garage, he’d moved like the Prince of Hell he was: strikes lethal, aim true. He’d toyed with those demons. Even the hellhound. He was sexy as hell and too dangerous for me to even entertain the idea of getting involved with. He undid my control with a glance, a kiss. The intensity of that moment, the raging hot lust, the debilitating hunger to have him… I couldn’t get close again. Even now, sick as a dog, remnants of the desire I felt for him tingled in places.
I turned my head away. “Thanks for getting me out of there.”
He strode closer. “Be careful, Muse. To stop Val, I need you.”
Right. I blinked. Because he wouldn’t need me for anything else? I nodded, not trusting my voice. Was that all he had returned for? Was he using me? No, Stefan wasn’t Akil. He didn’t manipulate with every breath. He’d lied, but only to protect me. But, Stefan had said it himself. He was more demon now than human. What if he’d only come back to get what he wanted, by any means necessary, and part of that plan was messing with me? He’d once believed I’d plotted against him. Did he still? I met his level gaze and wondered what his demon was telling him as he looked down at me. Was I a tool? A means to an end? Was there revenge on his mind? The Prince of Wrath had a purpose now. His demon would have what he wanted.
He must have read something of my concern in my expression. “Are we okay?”
“Sure. I’m just…tired.”
He seemed satisfied I would live, gave Jerry his thanks, and left. I squandered the rest of the day virtually comatose on Jerry’s couch in between bouts of heaving. Jerry hung around to make sure I didn’t choke on my own vomit. He asked me if the rumors about Akil’s disappearance were true. I told him the same as I had Stefan. I liked Jerry. He’d helped me out of some tight spots. But I didn’t trust him. There wasn’t anyone left in my life I could trust. Not even myself.
“I wanted to ask you about P-C-Thirty-Four.” It was near dusk, and I’d spent enough time lounging around. I’d tried to leave twice already, but Jerry wasn’t having any of it. Now though, I shrugged my jacket back on, making it clear I was leaving, no matter what he said.
“Do you want some?”
“What? No.” I zipped up my jacket. “Wait, you have some?”
“Sure.” He strode across the room and opened up a Seventies style cabinet to reveal an array of vials and a box of jet injectors. I couldn’t miss the entw
ined scorpion motif of the Institute.
He shrugged a massive shoulder, muscles rippling. “When the Institute went down, Thirty-Four turned up on the demon black-market. Most of the militia use it if they can get close enough to demons to use the injectors.”
“The militia?” I’d heard rumors of people taking matters into their own hands, and I couldn’t say I blamed them given the Institute’s ineptitude.
“The public who think they know better than the Institute.”
“What do you use it for?” Just the fact the drug had been in the same room as me gave me the chills.
“I’m running tests, mostly. It’s potent stuff. It’ll drop a lesser demon in seconds. You already know what it does to half bloods.” He straightened and gave me an all-over assessment. “Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about that.”
“Sure, hit me with it. It’s the least I can do after you keep patching me up.”
“What happens to your human body when your demon takes over?”
“In this realm, she envelopes me, clothes and all. In the netherworld, we sorta combine, blur…” I didn’t really understand it. I wasn’t sure anyone did. Maybe Adam knew all the details, but he wasn’t about to share that sort of information with me.
“When she rides you on this side of the veil, she’s obviously still an integral part of who you are. Inside and out?”
“Yeah.” Whether she was me or I was her? Well, that was for a well-paid psychiatrist to figure out.
He nodded and pulled at his earlobe. “Have you ever used drugs? Alcohol?”
“Why?” I’d gone off the rails and tried pretty much anything and everything at one time. Akil hadn’t exactly been the best of role models, and I’d had what some might call a troubled upbringing. As for the alcohol…that was an ongoing problem.
“What I’m getting at is: can you become inebriated in demon form? Do drugs work on your demon?”
What a terrifying thought. A wasted Mother of Destruction. “No, when I go demon, she burns the toxins out of me. The whole fire as blood thing kinda trumps the alcohol, although I might burn blue for a few seconds.”
He smiled over a laugh. “That’s what I thought. P-C-Thirty-Four is just a drug. It’s not netherworldly. You should be able to burn it out of your system like you would pain-killers or alcohol.”
“Nope. I can’t summon my demon once P-C-Thirty-Four is in me. No demon, no fire.”
“That’s not strictly true, is it?”
A denial stalled on my lips. After I’d had the drug in me for six months, I’d started getting headaches, nosebleeds, and my demon had broken through on several occasions. It hadn’t been pleasant, and I didn’t have any control over her, but she had spilled through the effects of PC34. “You think I can work around it somehow?”
“I think that’s what was happening before. Maybe only fire elementals can do it. Given enough time or enough stimuli, I think your demon could burn it out of you. Fire cleanses.”
“Could?”
“It’s all speculation.”
“What about Akil?”
Jerry immediately stilled while a devastating frown cut into his mask of tattoos. “Why?”
Crap. “Well, y’know, should he ever happened to accidently—somehow manage to get P-C-Thirty-Four in him, could he, hypothetically speaking, burn it out?”
“You’re talking about a Prince of Hell. An immortal chaos demon. Not a lesser demon, not a run-of-the-mill average no-name demon, not a half-blood, but the pinnacle of elemental demons, the top of the netherworld food chain.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
He eyed me like I was trying to con him out of the family fortune. “If, hypothetically, a Prince of Hell succumbed to P-C-Thirty-Four, I’d recommend running for the nearest bunker and waiting for the fallout to settle. If Ahkeel was injected? He’s different.”
“How is he different?” I hadn’t missed how Jerry had pronounced Akil’s old name, drawing out the inflections. That meant he’d known him back when Akil preferred that name. He’d known him a long time. And there I was thinking I’d introduced them the night Akil and I’d brought Stefan back from the netherworld.
“You turned him into liquid fire over Boston Gardens, Muse. He’s about as powerful as they get. Besides you, of course.”
Maybe Akil was King of Hell powerful? I grinned. “Naturally.” Best not to dwell on that. “So he could burn it out too?”
“Burn it out, turn it to steam, sprinkle it on his cereal. P-C-Thirty-Four won’t touch him.”
I knew it. Akil was faking it. Damn him. I so needed a bullshit filter between him and me. Jerry noticed my jaw lock. I flashed him a bright smile. “Thank you. You’ve been exceptionally helpful, as always.”
He beamed back. “I’m just a vet, but I aim to please.”
An idea stilled me. “Jerry, do you have any vials of the antidote?”
“Yeah, why?”
My smile peeked out, one sided. “You’ve just made my day.”
Chapter Eight
“Muse, it’s Jenna. Where are you?”
I wedged my cellphone between my shoulder and chin, and shoved the PC34 antidote into my car’s glove compartment. “Outside Stone’s Throw. I have a meeting with Adam. Why?”
“Okay, wait there… I’ll be right over.” She hung up.
Shrugging my jacket on, I left my car and raked a gaze over the parking garage where I’d recently been bested by a Scorsi demon. Ryder would chew me out about that. It was a sloppy mistake, and it told me exactly what I’d suspected. My head wasn’t in the game. My mind was far, far away. If I was going to help Stefan, and Akil, and Boston, I needed to focus. Easier said than done.
Damn Akil to hell and back. What was he thinking? Had he really been caught? It didn’t feel right. Akil wasn’t mortal. He wasn’t human. He wasn’t a half blood. He was an immortal elemental chaos demon. Those guys didn’t just keel over. Jerry had told me Akil was different. He must want to be inside the Institute for some reason. Was it the half bloods? I had to get in there, and fast. Taking PC34 was the only way. Time wasn’t slowing down. Val was coming. Akil was up to something. I didn’t have the luxury of going into the Institute tooled up. Maybe I could burn it out of me, as Jerry had suggested, but the vial of the antidote he’d given me would have to suffice as my security. Then there was the issue of how my demon would react. My darker half naturally didn’t enjoy being repressed. What if subduing her, and then bringing her back, gave her enough mental leverage to finally take control?
Jenna jogged down the ramp, all long-legged grace and enforcer attitude. I leaned back against the fender and waited, wondering if she’d seen my brother lately. My beloved immortal brother, Val, had gone to town on Jenna, turning her into a minion—Akil’s word. My brother was a potent mix of immortal badass and lust on legs. He’d dropped me with one touch of his velvet wings. Unfortunately, Jenna wasn’t so lucky. He turned all of his netherworldly gifts, namely lust, on her and gleaned information about the Institute, me, and the Institute’s half bloods from her lips. Tough as she was, she had no defense against Val. As far as I knew, he still visited her. She’d admitted it all. She knew what she was, had offered to quit, but Adam had refused her resignation. Now, she fed everything about her encounters with Val back to Adam.
“I didn’t know who else to talk to…” Breathless, she stopped in front of me and dug her hands deep into her pockets, slouching her shoulders. Her lips drew into a stern line. “Something’s up with Ryder.”
“Is he hurt?”
“No, no, nothing like that. He’s acting differently… He’s quiet. He’s not talking with the team.”
I pursed my lips. Ryder wasn’t the talkative type, but what he did say was usually to the point. “Maybe he’s hurting. He should be.” He’d killed a little girl. He should be reevaluating a lot of things, one of them being his own guilt.
She smiled a soft, heartfelt smile, and I began to get the distinct impression this was personal
. “He is, Muse. Since…that day, he’s been distant, cold.”
“He just shot Akil. Ryder and I aren’t exactly friends right now.”
“He was following orders.” Jenna held my stare, which meant looking down on me, and sighed. Perhaps she realized I wasn’t about to back down. “Okay, so he would have done that anyway. But Muse, something is up with him. We…er… He and I… Look, can you try and talk to him?”
“Me?” I snorted a laugh. “That didn’t go so well last time.”
“Please.” Genuine concern pinched her features.
Oh jeez, she was into him. How had I missed that? “Fine, but you gotta do something for me.”
Her eyes brightened with honest relief. “Okay.”
“Tell me, has Val visited you recently?”
The change in her was instant. She shrank back, and her shoulders bowed. I watched a whole array of emotions flit across her face before she locked her teeth together and swallowed hard. “Yes.” She practically hissed the word.
“What did he ask?”
She cut her gaze away. A muscle twitched in her cheek. “The same as he always does. Where are the half bloods? Where’s the Institute base? I don’t know the answers, and Adam knows better than to tell me anything. I stopped giving your brother anything of use weeks ago.”
She wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t blame her. I’d dragged her into this. Hanging around me had that effect on people. She’d followed me when I’d tried to save Dawn. Val had the same idea. He wanted Dawn back. Jenna was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and she still paid for it. Val fucked her in every way, because he could.
Drowning In The Dark: #4 The Veil Series Page 6
