Demon Marked (30 page)

L
ittle Francis was expecting her.

Exactly how he'd known she was sneaking in through the bathroom window—security cameras, a silent alarm, or a good old-fashioned tail—Emma didn't know, but it didn't really matter. The end result was the same. The big man with the kill scars still had a gun pressed into the middle of her back. He'd been waiting for her in the bathroom, hidden inside the second stall, and he moved so fast, she hadn't had time to think about running.

Now she met his eyes in the bathroom mirror, silently counting how many people he'd killed in the lines covering his face, watching him watch her with a respect he hadn't the first time they'd met. Maybe she wasn't just another dumb blond bitch he'd been ordered to kill.

She recognized him. He'd been at the bar last night, one of the men sitting with Blue Eyes.

“Keep your hands to yourself,
chica
, and we won't have any problems,” the man said, making contact only with his gun, careful not to touch her with any part of his body.

He knew her touch was dangerous. It made her wonder what had happened to the men who'd tried to kidnap her. Were they dead, too? And if so, was there any way she could use that to her advantage?

“How's Stewart? Did I kill him?” she asked, sucking in a breath as
Chica
Hater shoved her forward with the gun.

“Shut up and move. Go to the door; open it up.”

They weren't going back through the window. They were going to walk out into the Conti family offices.
Shit!
This was bad. So bad. If Death Ministry thugs were roaming freely through the building pulling guns on former Conti family friends, then things were much worse than she'd imagined. She'd been a fool to come here alone, thinking she would corner Little Francis and cut the head off this beast. The beast was too big to kill so easily and probably capable of growing another head in a matter of moments.

After everything she'd been through, she should have known better. But the Contis had lulled her in, relaxed her guard. Their generosity and love and acceptance had dulled the edge of her cynicism. Their family dinner nights and Fourth of July picnics and insider jokes had softened her distrustful inner core. They'd made her feel they were family in the true sense of the word, people she could trust and admire, people who defied the lowest common denominator. And most of them did.

Even with a gun pressed to her back, Emma still believed most of the Contis were good people. Too bad it took only one bad apple to ruin the bunch.

“Are you working for Francis, or is he working for you?” she asked.

“I don't answer questions,” the man behind her said, kneeing her in the back so hard she stumbled forward. She grunted as she regained her footing.

So he was working for Francis. If it were the other way around, most men wouldn't be able to resist bragging about having an important man under their thumb.

“You're going to trust a man who would sell out his own family?” she asked as she shuffled toward the door, the grit from her boots scratching against the tile as her mind scrambled for a way out of this latest mess. “Betray his own father?”

“Walk faster.”

“Francis doesn't have what it takes to replace his dad. He doesn't—” Emma's words ended in a moan as the back of her head exploded. Agony flashed down her spine, and her entire body twisted in a half circle before crumbling to the ground. She was on her hands and knees, seeing double, before her mind could process the fact that the man had struck her.

Guess he'd changed his mind about the “hands-off” policy. It wasn't what she'd intended, but it could work.

“God ... please ...” She moaned and slumped closer to the floor, playing up the damage she'd suffered from the blow.

“Get up.”
Chica
Hater's boot landed none too gently in her gut, making Emma's next groan even more convincing.

She fell the rest of the way to the floor, curling in a ball to protect her vital organs from another boot to the stomach, and waiting for her opening. Sooner or later, he'd have to stop beating her and get her to whoever had sent him to fetch her in the first place. The second he put his hands on her, she had to be ready.

Silently, she reached for the ever-present hunger, coaxing it to the surface, promising a hearty meal. She didn't need any more evidence that this man was proper food. The hunger could have him. All of him. She wouldn't make it stop this time. This time, she'd let it feed until there was nothing left, until the darkness swallowed its victim whole. The snake could drop its jaws and pull the man inside for all she cared.

Light flared from the hands curled against her chest as the altered part of her rushed from the secret places inside. It had smelled blood in the water.

The fierce pleasure of that foreign thing almost made Emma reconsider her promise. Did she really want to leave this man dead on the floor? Did she really want to look into another set of lifeless eyes, no matter how evil a man they belonged to?

“Get the fuck up, bitch.” Swift kicks connected with her spine—once, twice—bruising the knobby bones in her back, bringing fresh waves of pain. Second thoughts vanished in a red rush. The bastard was going to die. Soon. Very soon. As soon as he—

The instant his thick fingers closed around her arm, Emma struck, stomach muscles contracting, spinning her body around to face him. Her hands shot for his throat, latching on like two hungry infants and suckling for all they were worth, draining, consuming.

Her attacker screamed—a raw, shocked sound—as the blue light flooded from her fingers. It was brighter than it had ever been, strong enough to stream through the air and bounce off the bathroom mirrors, illuminating the room like some moody disco while she and the man who had beaten her danced. They swayed to an unheard beat and the dark hunger writhed between them, pulling wickedness to the surface and then down, down, down into the fathomless pit of devouring.

Emma watched the man's second face prune into his death mask with an odd detachment. Even after the beating, even after seeing the evidence of murder and mayhem in his past, viewing that skeletal soul would usually have hit her hard. But when he issued a final, thin groan and fell to the floor at her feet, she didn't feel a thing. No remorse, no regret, only a gleeful satisfaction that she'd finally done this horrible thing that she'd held at a distance for so long.

It took several minutes for the pleasure to fade, for Emma to realize that the room still pulsed with the cool, quiet color of death.

“God,” she whispered, choking on the prayer as she forced the hunger back into hiding.

Banishing the darkness was harder this time, harder than it had ever been. For a moment, she feared that the wrinkles where she'd stored it had been ironed away by what she'd done, that she'd committed a sin that would forever erase the barriers between her human self and the part altered by the demons. But finally, ever so slowly, the monster crept back into hiding. The light flooding from her hands faded with a final, petulant pulse, a child angry at being told to clean up its toys.

Emma knelt down, fingers sliding through the oily flesh of the man at her feet, searching for a pulse she knew she wouldn't find. One second, two, three ... nothing but rapidly cooling skin and a sinking in her bruised stomach. He was dead. She'd killed again. Maybe for the third or fourth time in twenty-four hours. She was a serial killer in the textbook sense of the word. Technically, she had been for years, but not like this, not at all like this. ...

All her big talk about being the professional killer, the one who should come in here solo and take care of Little Francis, came back to mock her with a cruelty that made her skin burn.

“Okay ... okay.” She stood, hands shaking, stomach pitching in protest. This wasn't okay, but there wasn't time to think about it now. She had to get back out on the street before someone came to check on the man she'd killed.

After a moment of debate, Emma left the man in the middle of the floor and ran for the window. There was no point in hiding the body. It wouldn't buy her more than a few minutes at most and would cost her—

She screamed as gunfire exploded near her hands and face. She flinched, hunching on instinct, frozen for a few precious seconds before she dove back through the window, landing in a pile of aching bones on the floor.

Her heart slammed in her chest as her mind took swift inventory of the rest of her body: bullet hole free, for now. But there were people outside trying to shoot her. At least one, maybe two. Who knew how many more enemies Little Francis had stationed throughout the building? Her chances of getting out of here alive were shrinking. Rapidly.

“No. If he wanted me dead, I'd be dead,” Emma whispered aloud, her voice echoing weakly through the bathroom.

If Little Francis had given the order to kill her, the dead man on the floor would have shot her in the back of the head when she crawled in the window the first time, before she had the chance to fight back. And in those few seconds of shock, the snipers outside had been given ample opportunity to fire a second round and hadn't taken it. They weren't trying to kill her; they were trying to keep her in the building.

But why? Why wouldn't Little Francis simply give the order for her to be eliminated? Did he intend to give her the chance to remain a friend of the new Conti family organization? Was this because of his obvious attraction to her in the past? Or was there some other reason Little Francis wanted to keep her around?

No matter what Andre had said, a part of her still suspected that this had something to do with her demon mark.

Andre. God, he could be in danger. She had to call him and warn him.

Emma rushed to the body on the floor, struggling not to think about the fact that the corpse had been a living, breathing person before she'd killed him. “Shit, shit, shit,” she cursed again as a turn of the man's head revealed that his earbud was an implant. There was no way to remove it and use it herself, but maybe ...

She tapped the bud to life, waiting for the tiny green light to flash before she spoke Andre's number. She waited for three interminable seconds, praying he had answered before leaving her message. “Andre, it's Emma. I can't hear you, so don't talk—just listen. I'm at the Conti Bounty offices. Little Francis is definitely working with the Death Ministry. He tried to have me killed, and he's got a ton of backup. You need to stay away from here. I'll call you as soon as I can.”

Hopefully that would be sooner rather than later. She tapped the bud off and then on again, placing a second, hurried call to her sister, warning her and Jace that a coup was taking place at the Conti Bounty office and that they shouldn't assume they could trust anyone.

“Except Andre,” she added. “He's been helping me. Talk to him if he calls. He'll tell you what's been going on. I'll call the second I'm able.”

Emma tapped the bud, then did a quick sweep of her victim's body. A demon-skinning-sized knife in his belt—way more weapon than she was prepared to handle. Instead, she fetched his gun from the floor. It was heavier than she'd anticipated, making her wrist ache as she held it with one hand and flipped the safety on with the other.

It was probably smarter to leave the safety off, but something inside her insisted she put that small obstacle between her and another murder. If she had to shoot someone, she would, but she wanted that extra second to think about what she was doing, to recognize she could be taking a life. The people outside might be traitors, but a lot of them were also Andre's family.

The optimistic notion had barely crossed her mind when the bathroom door opened, and a man she recognized stepped into the room. He wasn't one of the core group of Contis, but she'd seen him at Andre's parents' restaurant on the occasional Thursday, eating manicotti and talking shop with the rest of the Conti men. She thought he was one of the several Anthonys, a second or third cousin with bronze Conti skin and pale blue eyes that didn't seem to match the rest of him. They were odd-looking, a small detail that made him less attractive than the other Anthonys at the table.

Or maybe it wasn't his eyes; maybe it was something on the inside that had turned her off. Like the fact that he was a son of a bitch who would turn on his own family.

All doubts about Conti involvement in whatever was going on evaporated as Anthony raised his gun and shouted over his shoulder to someone in the hall. “She's in here. José's down.” His next words were obviously for her. “Drop the gun, Emma. I'm not supposed to shoot you, but I will.”

Deep inside her bones, where marrow twined with hunger, the darkness slithered, cursing her for her weakness. If she hadn't put the safety on, there was a chance she could have drawn down on the man in front of her. Father Paul had taught all of his charges how to shoot. The normally peace-loving man believed firearms would be required when it came to the final battle of good against evil, that everyone should be prepared if Armageddon came in their lifetime. Emma had shown a natural aptitude for marksmanship from the first time she was handed a child-sized shotgun in the third grade. She had faith she could hold her own, even against a trained demon bounty hunter.

But with the safety on, she didn't stand a chance. Anthony would shoot her before she could aim, let alone fire. She saw his resolution in his eyes. The body on the floor had convinced him she was expendable, no matter what orders he'd received from his cousin.