Chapter nine
“Hello, Ember,” Jeremy drawls, his eyes inky, pupils swallowing the irises, his attire still schoolteacher prim and proper. Brown pants with a white button-down shirt. He wears no coat.
“Did you miss me?” he queries, some evil delight in the depths of his question.
An unnatural rush of nausea all but doubles me over. It’s time to admit that there is something not right about Jeremy that reaches beyond his obvious bad habit of killing people.
“What are you doing here?” I demand, reaching for bravado that doesn’t quite find its way into my voice.
“I came to help you greet your visitors,” he explains. “Let’s go inside and prepare to welcome them properly.”
In that moment, I’m certain that if I enter that cabin with Jeremy, I will never leave alive. “Who are they?” I ask, stalling, waiting for help, whoever that may be.
“The police found Joyce Bean,” he explains. “They think you killed her.”
My chest constricts. “Why would they think I killed Joyce Bean?”
“Because I left your DNA behind.” His eyes dilate—almost vibrate.
“I was here when that murder happened. People know I was here.”
“Were they here with you every second? I don’t think so.”
He’s right. And I hate him more than ever. “You’re a monster,” I spit at him.
“Good to know you finally understand me. Took you long enough. It’s imperative that you watch me kill all the cops when they come for you, just so you know that you caused their deaths. You must do more than learn who and what you are. You must feel it in your very being.”
He’s crazy. He’s certifiably crazy.
Panic rises inside me, and I try to shove past him, operating off pure fight-or-flight instinct.
He catches my arm with a vise grip too powerful for a mere man—impossibly strong.
I try to fight him, shoving against his chest and twisting away, but he doesn’t budge.
He drapes his arm around me like a handle, dragging me inside the cabin.
“Be still,” he snarls roughly, shoving me against the wall and kicking the door shut.
He presses against me, his legs shackling mine, melding our bodies close and letting me feel just how horrible it is to be up close and personal with a rapist and a murderer.
“I won’t kill you until I’m done with you, and perhaps I will never be done with you, if you behave.
I have plans for you.” He licks my cheek, and I can’t help myself—I whimper at the disgusting feel of his tongue on my skin that leaves no doubt that rape is, at least, part of that plan.
This certainty creates a new wave of panic inside me, and I begin to fight anew, shoving and kicking, but once again, I’m struck by the sheer magnitude of his strength.
He dives his fingers into my hair, yanking my head back with a fistful of the strands and forcing me to look at him.
“Don’t force me to hurt you. It’s far too soon. ”
“Jeremy,” I choke, “Please, I—”
“Jeremy hasn’t lived here in a very, very long time, my little beauty,” he says, and before I can decipher what he means, there’s a thundering blast of knocking at the door.
I open my mouth to scream, but nothing comes out, as if a band has been twined around my vocal cords. “You speak when I want you to speak, bitch,” Jeremy bites out in a deep, gravelly, animal-like voice, unlike anything I have ever heard.
He grabs me again and drags me toward the living area, where the door is now open, and the minute we’re within view of the porch, I find Ryker standing there.
He’s not only here, he’s in profile, his arm buried in the chest of a plainclothes officer whose feet dangle above the ground.
Ryker looks at me, his eyes just plain wicked, and he actually grins, as if death is absolute joy. No, as if murder is absolute joy.
Gunfire erupts, and Jeremy throws me to the ground.
My head blasts against the chair leg, and stars spin in my gaze.
A wave of sickness washes over me, as if I’ve swallowed a poisonous dose of evil.
Gasping with the rankness of it, I pull myself upward and head toward the kitchen, somehow keeping it together long enough to pull open the drawer I’ve stuck the gun inside for easier access.
Just holding the cold steel in my hand builds confidence, and I stumble toward the door, only to watch a bloodied, mangled body land on my living room floor.
Ryker stands in the entryway, yellow eyes swirling with pure evil. “I brought you a present.”
Demon.
That is the word that comes to my mind. He is a demon.
I stand completely still, trying to decide what to do next, air rasping through my lungs like razors ripping the sensitive flesh. The police had guns, and they are dead. Sensations flood my body, blurring my vision, and warnings echo in my head.
Don’t point the gun. It will ignite his rage, and I won’t get there in time to save you. Run. Get out of there.
The words insert themselves into my mind, and I question how or why they exist. Maybe this is a trick. Maybe it’s Jeremy or Ryker trying to force me to stand down and discard my weapon.
In the blink of my indecision, Ryker is in front of me, throwing me on top of the kitchen table.
He jams my hand on the edge of the marble, and I screech in pain, dropping my weapon.
And then he’s ripping at my shirt. His hands, God…
his hands are all over me. My vision blurs, and I go into fight mode.
I fight like I have never fought in my life.
Some distant part of my mind registers a male shout—the voice in my head. A low, evil growl follows near my ear. Was it Jeremy coming to rape me, too? “Kill me,” I plead. “Kill me and make this end.”
Ash explodes in my face, and I cough at the rancid eruption that replaces what was Ryker only seconds before.
I struggle to sit up, only to find a leather-clad man with shoulder-length, wild, black hair tied at his nape standing over me with a knife in his hand.
I know this man. The man with the pale blue eyes I’d met outside the coffee shop back in Austin.
“Today is not a good day to die, Ember Thorne,” he declares and grabs my hand, yanking me to my feet and to his long, hard body. “But the next time I tell you to leave, you damn well do it,” he growls low and gruff.
“Fuck you,” I say, when really, I never curse. “I don’t know who you are.” I swipe at my face, at what feels like soot or ash covering me, my gaze whipping around the room, afraid of another attack. “Where’s Ryker? Where is he?”
“Ryker is the ash floating around,” he says, indicating his knife. “A gold-lined blade works like Zeus on the lower-level demons.”
“Demons and ash,” I repeat, rejecting this reality despite it being my thought already, but I’m also clearly going crazy. “That’s not possible.”
“And yet, it is,” he says, sheathing the blade in one of his biker boots, which might have been black if not for the ash covering them.
“And fuck you, too, sweetheart. I don’t like risking my life and not being appreciated.
Today is not the day we die. You don’t get to get me killed.
You don’t get to die. So, listen up and listen well.
Again, gold kills lower-level demons. It does nothing but give a little tickle to a high-level demon like Jeremy, who doesn’t seem to want to die tonight, either. Nothing in our arsenal is working.”
“What does that mean? What do we do now?”
“We run.”