Stacia Kane - Demon Inside

If she asked him about it, he would probably know what was happening to her.

She just couldn’t bring herself to admit anything was, and until she was ready, it was her secret to keep.

His eyes searched her face. “Are you okay?”

She nodded.

Instead of the bowl she’d been expecting, Maldon placed an ordinary crystal wineglass on the floor by Greyson’s knee, then said, in his booming voice, “Kre-nagr hin alishta caercaeris.”

Greyson’s face darkened as footsteps sounded on the stairs, and he glared at Maldon. “You’re not sharing anything.”

“I can share the moment,” Maldon replied. “I can have witnesses.”

“What’s—” she started, leaning forward, but Greyson shook his head.

“Let’s just do this.”

Megan had no idea where in the house all these demons lived, but in a matter of seconds the basement went from a dank underground temple to a kinky convention room, full of demons in various states of undress. A few of them had the high pompadour hairdos Megan had come to associate with demons hiding horn stumps; a few more had sgaegas like Greyson’s down their backs, or third nipples, or odd bony protrusions on their shoulders. All of them looked very pleased with themselves. Sweat trickled down her back.

Greyson picked up her left hand and stared at it for a moment. Megan closed her eyes. Best not to look. Bad enough to be taken with crazy vampire urges when it was the blood of someone with whom you enthusiastically shared other bodily fluids whenever you got the chance, but when it was your own…that was just weird.

Unlike everything else about this situation, which was perfectly normal if you ignored the basement, the torches, the furniture, the knife, the demons, and the goblet. Just an ordinary small-town evening, in an ordinary small town.

Which was apparently run by Orion Maldon, who supposedly knew her father…

The touch of Greyson’s lips on her palm stopped her thought before it had a chance to form. He hadn’t kissed her yet, not once this whole night. The gesture was possessive, romantic even, but the icy touch of his anger and the expectant air of the room told her something was wrong.

The room went silent. Something rustled. Greyson’s fingers tightened around hers, and the blade sliced into her palm, so sharp and fast she didn’t realize it had cut her until she heard the knife clatter on the floor and felt her blood run down her hand.

He turned her wrist and pressed the glass against her palm for a moment, the rim cool and smooth against her skin. It took only a second longer for the stinging to start, and only another before the glass was removed and something soft shoved into her hand instead, her fingers closed over it with a little more force than she would have expected.

Megan forced her eyes open, squinting into the dim room, afraid to see too much. Greyson’s handkerchief was balled up in her palm. She bent her elbow, trying to ignore the pain now radiating from the wound as she used her other hand to apply pressure. Cool in a crisis, that’s what she was. She glanced at Greyson, hoping for a smile, a look, some sort of reassurance, but his face was turned away, as if he were studying the floor.

To her right Maldon lifted the goblet—the goblet now filled about a quarter of the way with her blood. “Caercaeris bochylem!”

Nope, didn’t want to see that. She closed her eyes again while great waves of red and black undulated behind her eyelids. Heat radiated from Greyson’s body against her legs, but he did not touch her, leaving her alone to deal with this. Ordinarily that would have pleased her, as she didn’t particularly enjoy being vulnerable in front of him. But this was too much. She reached out, pressing her injured hand with its wadded-up cloth against her thigh and groping for him, hitting his shoulder feebly until finally his fingers closed around hers so tightly it hurt.

He moved, the scent of his cologne and the smoky fragrance of his skin filling her nostrils, his lips tickling her ear and his voice cold as his energy against her. “Come on, Meg. Let’s go.” He started to lift her from her chair. “Let’s go. We’re done.”

“I wanted to ask him about—”

“Another time.”

Was there going to be another time? She didn’t ever want to come back here.

“Oh come now, Grey, there’s no need to rush off like that, is there?”

Megan opened her eyes. Maldon was smiling, the empty glass still clutched in his hand. Jesus, had he licked it clean?

“You got what you wanted, Orion.”

“Oh yes, I did.”

His laughter followed them up the stairs.

Her healed hand still tingled a little, an irritating itch under the skin she couldn’t scratch, as she lay in bed later with Greyson’s chest against her back and his strong arms encircling her body. The bulky forms of Malleus, Maleficarum, and Spud rested in front of the window, horned silhouettes against the curtains.

Her father was dead.

Funny, it wasn’t until now, as she lay thinking of what the next day held, that it really hit her. They hadn’t been close, not in years.

But in those dim, long-forgotten years of her early childhood, he’d been someone special and so had she. He’d taken her out for long rides in the car. He’d carried her on his shoulders to watch the Fourth of July parade in the center of town. He’d bought ice cream and candy and smiled and laughed. He’d called her his little girl.

She thought she’d mourned those years a long time ago, but it seemed there was still something left of them in her heart after all, because the dim, tobacco-stained wallpaper blurred with her tears and her throat ached. She’d been someone’s beloved daughter once. When did that change? When did she become an embarrassment, something to be hidden?

Not just when Harlan Trooper died. It started long before that. She couldn’t help thinking that if she could figure it out, she would find something important. Something related to why she was here now, why she felt so cold inside despite the heat of Greyson’s body wrapped around her.

She wondered if she’d given up first. If her parents had turned from her because she’d pulled away from them, retreating into a world where the emotions of others didn’t color her thoughts, where touching people didn’t put confusing pictures in her head, because there were no people to touch.

Was she still hiding? She’d become a counselor. Her job was to help people, to reach out to them and try to heal their pain.

But part of that meant shutting herself off from them, meant tuning out of their lives the minute they walked out the door, and not thinking of them again until their next sessions.

Part of that meant comforting herself with the thought that she was a good person because she helped people, not a cold person who didn’t care what happened to them. It gave her license to stay uninvolved.

Greyson had asked her once why she did what she did when she knew better than anyone how cruel and inhumane people really were in their hearts.

She didn’t know if she had a good answer for that anymore, because she didn’t know if her choice of profession was really as altruistic as she’d imagined. If that little second heart, that little bit of the Accuser, had nestled beneath her ribs for fifteen years…who was to say she hadn’t been feeding on her clients since the day she started working?

Who was to say she really wasn’t someone so…so bad, her own parents couldn’t even love her? She shivered.

Greyson’s arms tightened around her. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.

“I thought you were asleep.”

“I was. Mostly.”

It wasn’t a question she could ask, not with the boys so close by. She opened her mouth to say it was nothing, but instead she asked, “What do you feed on?”