Chapter 19
Chapter
Nineteen
Steve’s car was where I’d left it, thank God. I managed to stuff him into the back seat with only minimal additional blood loss. He was going to have one hell of a detailing bill, but that wasn’t my problem.
The ride home passed in a blur. By the time we got to the duplex, Steve was waking up again and full-on delirious.
He wasn’t in any apparent pain, though, so I took advantage of his spurt of energy to get him into the house and onto the couch.
Thirty seconds after I covered him with my grandmother’s afghan, he was out cold again.
I stared down at him for a long moment, bouncing on my toes. After all the action at the club and the ride home, I wasn’t the least bit tired. I was buzzing, on edge, riding high on the night’s events. I felt glorious, actually—filled with power for what felt like the first time in my life.
Without a specific focus, I drifted into the kitchen, which made my smile tease into a grin. I’d confronted my demon in this room, calling it out, straight up yelling at it. Then I’d gone out and rescued Deadbeat Steve over its objections. And I’d exorcised another demon in the process.
All by yourself?
My grin deepened. “Ahhh, there you are,” I said to my muddy reflection in the refrigerator door. “I wondered where you’d snuck off to.”
I did a little shimmy, hips swishing. “And yeah, I did it pretty much all by myself. You certainly didn’t seem to like that hot guy that ol’ Pith—”
Don’t say his name.
A stab of fear jolted through me, cutting me off, and I blinked with surprise. “Why?” I asked, genuinely curious. Had Mordechai ever repeated the name of the demons he exorcised, once he sent them on their way? I didn’t think so, but…maybe?
Either way, my own personal demon didn’t seem willing to enlighten me on this point of protocol. Whatever.
Tired of the fridge view, I turned toward my reflection in the microwave, tilting my head coyly, still surfing on adrenaline.
I squinted, but couldn’t see much, and I wanted to see myself, to see the new and improved nightclub-demon-exorcising badass version of me.
I wanted to know if I looked as hot as I felt.
I snorted even as I headed toward the stairs.
I’d never thought of myself as hot—hell, I never thought of myself as anything, most of the time.
Not pretty or ugly, sexy or stiff, fun or boring.
I’d seriously never considered the idea of “me” at all, outside of a worker, daughter, roommate, student, assistant to an exorcist, and probably definitely a freak.
Why was that?
Uneasiness quivered inside me, and I pounced on the reaction, batting it around like a cat with a ball of yarn.
“Is it because of you?” I wondered aloud as I stopped at the bottom of the stairs, not even bothering to keep my voice low.
Steve was beyond dead to the world right now. “Did you do that to me?”
I mean, it made sense. Of course it made sense. What self-respecting demon wanted its host to have actual self-identifying thoughts?
And then there was its reaction to Max—and especially to the random mafia-looking guy I’d just met at Descent. Met and helped, though I’d hurt him too. Hurt him a lot, now that I thought about it. Oh well.
But he was definitely a smokin’ hot male, and my demon hadn’t loved that.
My demon also didn’t so much as hiss at this assessment, so I knew I was on to something. I bounded up the stairs, faster than I ever had, my mind buzzing with new connections.
I’d never dated in high school or after—never wanted to date.
I’d had a few opportunities, especially at UIC, but though I’d lost my virginity at sixteen and screwed around a few times after that, sex had never really registered on my radar as a desire or focus.
There’d always been something else to deal with, something else to do.
How crazy was it that I’d never so much as thought of a guy in any real way until now? Maybe not crazy at all.
Sex was power, everyone always said.
How much power?
At the top of the stairs, still moving fast, I didn’t head for my bedroom with its bare white walls. Instead, I opened the door into the bigger room right next to the staircase, the one my mother had slept in, and then, on very rare occasions and only right at the beginning, Steve.
I stepped inside and closed the door behind me, then flipped on the light.
The soft glow illuminated light-blue painted walls, a clean white comforter-covered bed, a white-painted chest of drawers, and threadbare but vacuumed carpet.
I’d at least tried to make the room decent for Steve, for all that he never liked it.
I didn’t like it, either. I sure as hell never slept in here. But tonight, it had something I needed,
Mirrors. Over the dresser and lining the closet walls, positioned so you could practically see yourself coming and going. I never used them; I never wanted to look.
Tonight, though…I wanted to look at everything.
Delia.
“Oh, now you want to talk to me.” I didn’t miss the oddly desperate note that reverberated when the demon spoke my name. It was different than how it had warned me against saying Pithius’s name aloud. It sounded more nervous. Uneasy. That was interesting. And new.
So, the thing inside me didn’t want me looking at myself? Why would that be?
I marched up to the full-length mirror and stared at my reflection.
For a moment, nothing happened. Then I felt a flicker of pressure behind my eyes. A tightening in my chest that wasn’t quite pain. The demon, pushing back. Trying to make me turn away.
I smiled at my reflection and stayed exactly where I was.
Tilting my head, I turned a little to the side.
I looked almost pretty, I thought, if you didn’t count the smears of blood or the fading vestiges of Sharpie ink on my skin.
And for the first time in my life, I wondered what he saw when he looked through my eyes.
Did he see the same pragmatic, grim-eyed fighter I was checking out?
Or did he see something else—something he’d kept me from seeing clearly all these years?
The thought made heat curl low in my belly.
For my assault on Descent, I’d dressed up in the most goth thing I could find that still covered me up—black jeans, black tank top without a bra, black hoodie, black boots.
I’d shed the hoodie downstairs next to Steve, and my markered-up arms gleamed with their epithets and slurs, but I didn’t care so much about those anymore.
Instead, I focused on my hazel eyes, my longish dark brown hair, and my too-pale skin that rarely saw the sun. I was neither skinny nor fat, my body way more functional than curvy, but…I liked the way I looked, I decided. I was fierce. I was strong.
I’d had to be, I supposed, given that I was lugging a freaking demon around.
Suppressing a giggle, I lifted my hands to my temples, pressing my fingers along my cheeks, my neck, and over my shoulder blades, as if memorizing new terrain I’d never mapped before. New, wild, delicious terrain.
And I was delicious. Yummy enough to gobble up whole.
Inside me, something shifted. Not quite a flinch—more like attention snapping into sharp focus. Like I’d just walked into a room my demon had been guarding, and now he couldn’t look away.
Good.
I dipped my hands farther down my chest and felt him twist inside me—not away, but toward. Like a hooked fish fighting the line.
“You don’t like this?” I murmured, staring into my own eyes as I cupped my breasts, feeling their weight and roundness. I kneaded them slowly, deliberately, and heard the hiss in the back of my mind.
But beneath the hiss was something else. A low, subsonic rumble that I felt more than heard. Hunger. Want. The kind of need that had been carefully choked off, starved for fifteen years.
My nipples hardened under my palms—from my touch or the demon’s attention, I couldn’t tell anymore.
I also didn’t care.
My lips quirked into a smile. “Is this why I never felt anything for anyone before now?” I whispered to my reflection. “Were you cock blocking me, you sack of shit?”
And since when was that a thing? I knew enough from researching possessions with Mordechai that most demons gloried in the sexual depravity of their hosts—driving their trapped humans to ever-worsening acts of debasement.
“But not you?” I cooed as I squeezed my breasts more firmly, then slid my hands down my thin tank top to drag it free from the waistband of my jeans. “That’s not your thing? Or maybe…it was all along, hmm? But you didn’t want to push your luck?”
When my fingers brushed along the skin of my belly, the demon twisted again, the movement tight, even a little angry. Interesting.
I pulled off my tank in one smooth motion—my brows lifting. I’d forgotten about the words I’d written all over my torso.
No. Not me. The realization hit me cold and sharp. I hadn’t written these phrases and lines. It had. He had. Using my hand, yes, but these weren’t my words.
“Poetry,” I breathed, tracing the shaky letters across my ribs, my belly, circling my breasts like a brand.
My skin prickled beneath my fingers, hypersensitive, as the thing inside me went utterly still.
“You wrote poetry on me. Here—and here, and here. Why? Is there something you want, down there in the dark?” I whispered the challenge, fingers drifting lower, following the text down to my hipbones. “Something you’ve wanted for a while?”
The silence inside me felt like a held breath. Like the moment before surrender.
I played my fingers up over my breasts again, feeling my own rising heat—and something else beneath it. His desire bleeding into mine like ink in water, impossible to separate.
“You could have had this any time,” I murmured, watching my hands in the mirror. “Fifteen years, you’ve been inside me. You could have made me do anything…but you didn’t.”