“I-I don’t know if that’s such a good idea.” She looked around for someone to save her, but this particular street was clear of other Cary Town residents.

He arched a brow. “Such willpower you have. I bet you never indulge in chocolate, either.” He sent her an image of herself licking chocolate off him. He gripped her elbow to keep her steady on her feet when she swayed again.

“I h-have somewhere I need to be,” she said.

Where she needed to be was in her bed underneath him. This was getting tiresome. The demon pulled her to him and kissed her. She moaned against his lips, her body melting into him, giving in. He chuckled and pulled away.

“Now, where do you need to go?”

“M-my house,” she said.

He nodded his approval. “With whom?”

“You.”

“She can be taught.”

Chapter Eight

Cain held back a growl. The blonde was curled against his chest, sleeping, her breathing shallow. He’d nearly killed her, and he should have. And yet, he’d stopped. He wanted to hurl the woman across the room. He was an incubus. His kind killed women. It was just what they did.

Sure, they didn’t have to, and he didn’t always, but eventually he did—when he got bored. But this wasn’t about that. She’d been a quick bite, a distraction, something meant to prove he still had it, that he was still demon enough. He had no plans to come back to her again. There was no reason to keep her alive.

He couldn’t deny the truth of the situation. He’d shown mercy to someone outside his own species. The word made his lip curl in disgust. That witch had worked magic against him. She had to have. This wasn’t normal. And the whole time he’d been in bed with Gloria, who had he been thinking of? Tam.

He slid out of the bed, careful not to wake her. After coming so close to killing her, she really would be weak. Without letting himself think about why, he went to the kitchen and made her a sandwich and poured a glass of juice, then left it for her on her nightstand.

Angry with himself at the display of kindness for a mere meal, he allowed a fireball to form in his hand. It glowed and hissed. He tossed the ball in the air and caught it over and over as he contemplated throwing it at her and ending her.

It was one thing for him to spare Tam. There were multiple reasons that might be a good idea. He could use a witch that powerful as an ally. Anthony clamping down with his police state would affect Jane, and Jane was one of his. It made Tam useful.

At the last confrontation with the vampire king, Tam had fought by his side like one of his demons. There were reasons to keep her breathing. But this woman? This stranger? She was just some woman he’d fed from. Her only redeeming quality was that she resembled Tam. But if he was sparing meals who reminded him of the witch, it would be admitting he kept Tam alive for reasons he didn’t want to acknowledge.

Gloria woke then, a satisfied smile on her face—until she saw him across the room with fire in his hand. It wiped the smile away as the pieces began to come together that something about their encounter was off.

“W-what are you?”

“You know, that nervous stutter was endearing for about the first twenty minutes, but it’s played out now.”

Her eyes welled with tears, her lower lip trembled, and she pulled the sheets up around her to shield herself from his gaze. Too late for that.

“I’m a demon. Incubus. Eat your sandwich.” He’d made it, she was going to eat it, then he was going to kill her. He’d made up his mind.

“So all those stories on the news are true? A-about demons? I thought the protesters were just crackpots.”

“More or less,” he said. The stories were partly true and the protesters probably were crackpots. Or plants Jack had put in place to further his agenda of a big reveal. What did he care if Gloria knew the truth? She’d never see the outside of this room again. He could lay out every detail of each preternatural faction and it wouldn’t make any difference.

She eyed the fireball in his hand, and he allowed it to shrink and puff out. It wouldn’t do to throw fire at her. There was no need to raise suspicion with police, and no identifiable source for the fire would raise suspicion. Things were too delicate for another unsolved mystery that suggested the preternatural. Ordinarily he wouldn’t care, but this was bigger than isolated weirdness. Anything could be tied to a larger magical world by the human media.

“What are you going to do with me? I-I won’t say anything if you’ll just go.”

“Eat. The. Sandwich.”

Her hand shook as she reached for the food on the plate. “Did you put something in it?”

“Guess you’ll find out,” Cain said. He wouldn’t let her tears or pleading affect him. He was a demon for fuck’s sake. Human misery thrilled his little black heart. Only it wasn’t thrilling him right now.

She ate the sandwich as he tapped his foot against the hardwood floor, his arms crossed over his chest, looming over her like some nightmare. He could say it served her right for taking him to her bed, but she’d made a valiant effort to resist him. Maybe that was worth sparing her. No. That was compromise. He wasn’t about to let Tam reshape him into something tame and housebroken. He had to kill this woman to convince himself he wasn’t under a spell.

“The juice, too,” he said when she’d finished the sandwich.

He’d gone to the trouble of making the sandwich. He couldn’t stand to see it sitting there mocking him as a sorry excuse for a demon. Humans are food. They are not pets, or friends, or any kind of equal lover. Did humans keep pet chickens or cows?

The empty glass thudded on the nightstand, clinking against the plate.

“You don’t have to do this,” she said.

“No, I don’t have to, but I want to.”

He knew it was a lie even as the words came out of his mouth. He didn’t want to kill her, but it felt like a line had been drawn in the sand. If he didn’t do this, he was lost. Who was he? What was he? It had always been so simple. Betray. Feed. Kill. When he’d been human, feeding hadn’t been part of the process, but he’d still operated the same. He’d always been alone on a deep level. Human, demon, it didn’t matter. The one thing that made the world rotate right was the knowledge that he didn’t need any of them. He could find pleasure without connection, without risk.

As much as he protected his own kind, if they so much as thought about crossing him, his vengeance would reign down. He’d never been soft. He would never be soft.

“Come here,” he said. He’d put the thrall in his words and watched her fight with herself not to leave the bed and move closer to him, but he’d put too much force in it for her to win, this time. And having already given him her will once, she couldn’t so easily take it back again. The sheet fell off her nude form as she approached.

She was lovely, with a light golden tan and tan lines from a string bikini. He liked the lines. The contrast between darker flesh and lighter. He traced a finger over where the straps had been, and she shivered.

“I can do this one of two ways. I can hypnotize you again and sleep with you and take you out that way, or I can snap your neck. Lady’s choice.”

“Please—”

Cain put a finger to her lips to silence the begging. “Those are the options. Pick one.”

She stood frozen in terror.

“If you pick the first one, you’ll forget all of this fireball demon stuff. You’ll have another good experience, and then you’ll go to sleep and wake up in Heaven.” Why was he trying to comfort her?

“Okay,” she said after a long beat, the resignation dripping from her voice.

But he couldn’t bring himself to do it. If he slept with her again, he’d only end up sparing her. He’d think about how much she looked like Tam, and he’d walk away, losing a piece of who he was in the process.

“Okay, then,” he said. Before she could realize he’d changed his mind about choices, he’d gripped her head and twisted. Then something horrible happened. A tear slid down his cheek.

***

Cain pounded on the door of Dayne’s cottage, still angry at himself for taking the side trip and for all the confusing feelings his tryst with Gloria had produced.

Greta answered the door, a look of apprehension on her face.

“Don’t worry, sweetheart. I just ate. Is Dayne around? I need to speak with him.” Cain saw therians as moderately more worthy of life than humans, and he tried not to get on the bad side of magic users, so Greta would have been off the menu no matter what.

You had to have a grudging respect for the one type of being who could take you down and make all your powers null with a single spell. And from what he’d heard, Dayne had a reputation. Cole had banned him from buying blood from his website, after all. Not that that mattered if he had a live-in cat-shifter.

He followed the skittish werecat into the house. Her hair was dark brown, but short, like Tam’s. He growled at himself for having that thought. The therian jumped and turned around.

“Sorry, I was thinking. Honestly, you’re not in any danger.” He held his hands up like he was surrendering, trying to look nonthreatening, but he knew he wasn’t pulling it off. He didn’t have much occasion to practice the skill without demon thrall involved.

When they reached the living room, the sorcerer looked up from an old, dusty book in his lap. “Greta,” he said.

It wasn’t the word, it was the tone, as if he feared for her and didn’t think he could cast a curse fast enough to save her. Dayne needn’t have worried, because the next moment she shifted, and a black house cat fought her way out of her clothing. She darted under the couch and watched him with glowing, yellow eyes.

“Well, that’s one way to escape my charms,” Cain said, chuckling.

The sorcerer didn’t seem to find the joke funny and raised an arm in a way only a sorcerer could make menacing.

Cain held his hands up again. “I’m kidding. You think I’d mess with a magic user’s girl? You’re crazy. And I don’t kill women just for the hell of it.” Except for that time about an hour ago.

“What business do you have here, demon?”

“I need a favor.”

The sorcerer arched a brow. “I’m not in the habit of fraternizing with the enemy.”

Cain made a pffft sound. “You fraternize with Anthony. If you don’t think he’s the enemy, you’ve been smoking too many of your magic herbs.”

Greta gave a mew from under the couch, and Dayne laughed like it was an inside joke. Could he speak Cat-onese or had they just been together that long?

“The only thing that gets smoked around here is catnip,” he said, “and not by me.”

Despite the angst of the past few hours, Cain chuckled. Greta hadn’t seemed the type to smoke a bowl of anything. So she was a little stoner. He could still be surprised.

He composed himself to get back to the business at hand. “I’m the one thing that stands between The Cycler finding and taking Tam. We are about a blink away from a worldwide war, but keeping her in my dimension carries risk. I can’t have her hexing me. I need protection.”

“Did you lock her books and tools away?”

“Of course I did, but she’s two thousand. There is plenty of magic she can do with just her mouth.” Wrong wording. An image of her talented mouth and all the naughty things it could do to him surged through his mind as if it were the witch who had the demon thrall, putting sexual thoughts and feelings into his head from a distance.

From the look on his face, Dayne seemed to have caught the innuendo. “I see. Let me guess. You think she’s cast a love spell on you.”

“I don’t love her. Don’t be ridiculous. If she cast that, it failed.” Unless it was just starting to take effect, making him think about her, taking the demon right out of him...

“Defensive,” Dayne said. “Why don’t we go downstairs and see what the damage is and what we can do about it? Do you have a personal item of hers?”

Cain pulled the pair of black panties from his pocket and smirked.

“It’s hard to imagine why she’d feel compelled to use magic against you,” the sorcerer said, dryly.

Cain just shrugged and followed him downstairs. The black cat darted past his legs to follow Dayne.

Once downstairs, Greta paced back and forth over a spot at the far corner of the room, looking distressed and deep in concentration.

“What’s up with that?”

The sorcerer shook his head. “I have no idea. I’ve never seen her do anything like that in cat form.”

She sniffed at a spot on the ground, making unearthly shrieking sounds.

“Greta,” Dayne said. No response. The cat continued her bizarre ritual. Pacing, growling, sniffing. “Greta, look at me!”

The cat looked up, seeming to snap out of it. “Mrrawwr?”

“Go upstairs and shift and put some clothes on so we can talk about this.”

She hesitated, but finally went upstairs. Once she was gone, Dayne was all business. He uncorked several bottles, opened some books, sprinkled a few herbs, and chanted some words in a strange language that didn’t seem like Latin. Cain knew Latin. And ancient Sumerian. Some of the other dead languages he’d grown rusty on from lack of use. As he chanted, Dayne glowed much like Tam had in the caves.

The whole ordeal made the demon jumpy. The sorcerer could be doing anything to him. This was why demons didn’t do this. It made them too vulnerable. Going to one magic user to protect yourself from a second magic user raised the odds the first one would hex you. They tended to have a code of honor to protect each other and respected the spells of others most of the time. Cain could be stepping into quicksand, here.

Finally, the glow faded from the sorcerer and the glassy look in his eyes cleared. “There are no spells in effect right now.”