Demon Marked (6 page)

“Please. Don't go. I don't know who else ... I don't have anyone else,” Emma said, tightening her grip on his hand. For the first time, he noticed the flecks of gold in her deep brown eyes and the insanely thick lashes that framed them. She really did have a lot of potential.

But not
that
kind of potential.

Andre took a deep breath and eased back into his seat, pulling his hand from Emma's. She was a kid and family and possibly a murderer; he shouldn't be considering her potential for anything—aside from landing herself and the Contis in a huge mess of trouble.

“Okay.” Andre leaned close and whispered his next words. “But how do you ‘think' you killed someone? Either you killed him or you didn't.”

“Maybe in your world,” she said, the tension in her expression enough to make Andre's jaw ache. “But for some of us, life is a little more complicated.”

“For some of who?”

“For people ...” She swallowed, clearly not thrilled to be saying whatever she was preparing to say. “For people who have been marked by aura demons. Sometimes we're different. Things aren't so black and white.”

Andre dropped his face into his hands, sending up a silent prayer for patience.

Great. She was going
there
, to the crazy head space where she and Sam had dragged half the men in his uncle's operation. Conti Bounty now employed a dozen hunters who believed in invisible demons. They swore they'd been attacked by aura demons the night they'd helped save Sam and Jace at the museum last spring and couldn't be convinced that there was any other explanation for what they'd experienced.

Andre suspected some sort of nerve gas, but no one seemed interested in his realistic,
plausible
theories. Even Uncle Francis—a man who didn't believe in anything he couldn't see, including God and germs—had taken to wearing a demon-protection pendant from the New Age store beneath his white dress shirts.

It was ridiculous. There was no such thing as invisible demons, especially invisible demons that could turn grown men into monsters or make a blind girl see. Uncle Francis swore he'd seen Sam and Emma's big brother, Stephen, transform into some kind of demon-man hybrid, and Jace insisted that Sam's eyes changed colors and she was able to see people on the verge of major change in their lives, but Andre had a hell of a time believing the stories. Any rational person would.

Demons were animals hunted for money or killed for the mind-melting effects of their various parts. They were flesh and bone, not myth and shadow. And they weren't one-fifth as dangerous as the human monsters roaming New York. People killed thousands of other people in the city each year. The demons took down maybe a couple hundred, even in the years when harsh winters killed off many of the smaller demons the larger depended upon for food. Demons weren't anything to be afraid of, as long as you stayed smart and sober and out of their territory.

People, on the other hand ...

“So, you're saying the invisible demons made you kill this man?” He really didn't want to think Emma was a killer, but people had been making up stories to explain away the horrible things they'd done for centuries.

“No, I'm not saying that at all.” She abandoned her coffee cup to grab a handful of napkins from the dispenser and promptly began tearing them into shreds. She would be a horrible witness. Her every action screamed “guilty conscience.” “I ... I don't even know if I killed him.”

“Once again, I'll ask: How can you not—”

“He and I were talking in the alley behind the bar.”

“Talking? Why were you talking to a Death Ministry—”

“Okay, fine.” Emma rolled her eyes, and her napkin shredding grew a bit more frantic. “We weren't talking. He was the kind of guy I ... Let's just say he met my needs.”

“Oh. Okay.” Andre stared dumbly at Emma's hands for a second, shocked and the tiniest bit ... aroused by her words.

The shocked part was easy to understand—he'd come to think of Emma as a kid, like her sister and his cousin did. The aroused part was just ... wrong. Sex addict or no sex addict, he shouldn't be turned on by the thought of Emma dragging some thug into an alley for a quickie.

But he was. God help him.

“And right after we'd finished ... talking, he started throwing up,” she continued, meeting his eyes, obviously having no clue she'd made him start looking at her full, soft lips in a way he never had before. “I was going inside to find someone to help him, but I passed out before I could reach the door.”

“What?” Perverted thoughts fled in the wake of concern. Once more Emma went from potential sex object to troubled kid. Silently, Andre vowed to keep her in the latter category, where she belonged. “How much were you drinking? You're nineteen, for Christ's—”

“I'm twenty, almost twenty-one.”

“That's still not—”

“And I only had a couple of beers. It takes a lot more than that to get me wasted,” she said, sounding like the petulant near teen she was. “I don't know why I passed out; I just ... did. And when I came to an hour later and tried to wake the guy up, I couldn't. He was dead.”

Andre breathed a little easier. If what she'd told him was true, she had no reason to worry ... aside from the fact that the guy had died outside her place of business. “So he probably choked on his own vomit. Or maybe he overdosed on alcohol or a mix of alcohol and whatever else he might have been on. You didn't kill him; you were—”

“We weren't just talking, Andre.”

“Yeah. I gathered that, Emma.” Andre tried to ignore the odd thrill of intimacy inspired by saying her name. “I'm a big boy. I know how those things work.”

“I'm sure you do,” she said, meeting his gaze with those intense eyes of hers. “But you don't know how
I
work.”

Andre silently vowed to attend the meeting uptown for reasons other than scoring a partner for the night. He obviously needed a meeting badly if he was having inappropriate thoughts about a girl like Emma at five o'clock in the goddamned morning.

“The aura demons ... they did things to me when I was a baby,” she continued, blissfully unaware of his thoughts. “They changed me. I'm not ... I'm not a normal girl.”

“Not a normal girl? You look pretty normal to me, except for the lack of fashion sense and—”

“This isn't funny,” she said, loudly enough to make a couple of heads turn. She bit her lip, visibly forcing herself to regain control before continuing in a whisper. “I really think I killed that man.”

“I get that, Emma. What I don't get is why.”

“The aura demons feed on the pain and suffering of humans,” she explained. “When my parents offered me as a sacrifice when I was little, the demons made me like them. I need the energy of other people to—”

“Emma, I'm sorry.” He had to stop this crazy talk before it went any further. “But I don't believe in invisible demons. And I really don't believe you're some kind of life-sucking vampire—”

“How can you not believe in aura demons? Jace and Sam and your uncle—”

“My family and I are different in a lot of ways,” Andre said, digging out his wallet.

It was time to leave some money for Emma's coffee and go call Uncle Francis to take care of the body behind the bar. Emma clearly hadn't killed the man. She was insane, but she wasn't a killer. Still, she'd touched the corpse, so this had to be taken care of right away. The police would check for fingerprints, and Emma didn't deserve to go to jail.

And the Contis didn't need a dead Death Ministry thug to be found behind a place of business where they had close affiliations—no matter what had killed the guy. It would be better for everyone if this body was never found.

“I love my family,” Andre continued, throwing a twenty on the table. “But that doesn't mean I don't think they're crazy.”

“So you think
I'm
crazy?”

“Maybe
confused
is a better word.”

“I'm not confused.” Her hands fisted in the napkins she had ruined, her anger apparent to anyone who cared to look. “I spent two years in a children's hospital when I was a baby. I almost died
three
times before I learned how to get what I needed from the people around me. I have to—”

“Okay, fine. You eat people. Can we go now?”

“I don't
eat
people; I—”

“Then how does it work?” Andre asked, the part of him that had minored in psychology strangely intrigued. “How do you do this life-sucking thing you have to do?”

“I ... I start off by touching the person. ...”

“Okay.” He kept his face in the neutral position, an expression he'd mastered in his early years of practicing law.

“And then I sort of reach into their mind, their memories, looking for all the bad things they've done,” she said. “When I find the bad stuff, I pull it out.”

“With your hands, or with—”

“No. Psychically. I
psychically
pull the bad deeds, the bad karma—whatever you want to call it—out of them and into me.”

“All right.”

She sighed and drove her long, thin fingers through her hair. “You still don't believe me.”

“No, I don't.”

“Well, you should,” she said, shaking her head in disgust at his lack of imagination. “My hands fucking glow while I'm feeding on people. I'm not making this shit up. Why would I?”

“So why don't you show me?”

“What?” She seemed as shocked as Andre felt.

He had no idea why he'd thrown out the challenge. Did he want to prove to Emma that she wasn't the freak she thought she was, or did he just want to know what it felt like to have her hands on him? He couldn't answer the question, which should have made him get up and leave. But it didn't. He stayed, meeting her eyes, watching her lips part in surprise as she struggled to understand what he was asking.

“Show me the glowing hands,” he said. “Suck my bad deeds.”

Wow.
That
had come out sounding filthy. Thankfully, Emma didn't seem to notice.

“Are you nuts? Haven't you been listening to a thing I've said? I might have
killed
a man tonight because I took too much from him, and you—”

“Then just suck a little bit.”

Still filthy sounding, absolutely filthy. And what's worse, Andre sort of liked it. He had to fight the grin teasing at the corners of his mouth, knowing Emma would probably strangle him if she caught him laughing at her.

“It will still hurt you. That's why I only take from bad people, dumb-ass,” she said, her casual name-calling increasing his urge to laugh at her. Her toughness was strangely ... cute, though he knew telling her that would be a good way to end up on her shit list. “I usually stop before I kill anyone, but what I do still shortens people's lives. I know that for a fact. They all die of heart attacks a few months, or maybe a few years, later. I've been doing this long enough to—”

“Then just take a teeny, tiny bit,” Andre said. “I don't mind giving you a year or two in the name of separating fact from fiction.”

She shook her head, the genuine concern in her eyes sending a sliver of doubt into Andre's assurance that she was nuts. She might be crazy, but she was so sure of herself ...
positive
that she hurt people. How could she have become so sure of something without some sort of evidence?

The part of him that missed the danger of being a bounty hunter, that still craved the high of pushing life's boundaries, thrilled at the possibility that he was playing with something truly dangerous.

“You don't know what you're saying,” she said. “You still think I'm crazy.”

“I do. I really do. I think you're a crazy little girl with dirty fingernails,” Andre said, throwing the words down on the table between them, an open challenge. “Now ... don't you want to suck my life force? Just a little?”

“No, I don't.”

“Okay, then how about this ... ?” The noble part of him screamed for him to shut his mouth, but the ignoble part of him won out. It usually did. “I won't help you get rid of the body unless you show me what you can do.”

“The dead guy's friends saw him go outside with me,” she said. “This isn't a game. They'll think I know something about his death. I'll have the Death Ministry all over me. They could kill me, and they'll know that I have connections to the Contis; they'll know—”

“Then I guess there's a lot riding on you proving yourself to me, isn't there?” he asked, hating himself for pushing her but unable to stop this ball now that it was rolling. He was just so curious about her. ...

“Fine,” she said, forcing the word out through gritted teeth. “But not in here.” Emma stood and headed toward the door. Andre followed, doing his best not to notice the way her ass filled out her jeans, and failing miserably.

Finally, he gave up on nobility and let his eyes roam over Em-ma's subtle but undeniably sexy curves. Sometime in the past half hour, she had transformed from a scruffy girl to an attractive young woman in his eyes, and there was no way he
couldn't
notice her in a sexual way. That didn't mean he was going to treat her any differently, however. She was still family and a great deal younger than he was, not to mention his cousin's kid sister by marriage. Sleeping with Emma would be a very dumb idea, even if she was interested in a purely physical relationship.