Demon's Hunger (20 page)

"But we, um…" She dragged in a breath, gathered her thoughts. "We can use mtDNA—mitochondrial DNA. We'd need access to a lab—"

"Done," Ciarran interjected. "We'll give you a lab at CD Pharmaceuticals."

Vivien glanced at him, the quick movement of her head leaving her faintly dizzy. She focused on what he'd said, ignoring the woozy feeling slithering around in her gut.

CD Pharmaceuticals.

Ciarran D'Arbois. CD.

"Your company?" she asked him.

"Mine, and now Clea's," he replied.

His voice seemed to carry a hollow ring, as though it echoed through a long tube. Vivien frowned, closed her eyes tightly, and opened them again, wide. Ciarran swam in and out of focus, a fuzzy haze.

Leaning forward a bit, Ciarran stared at her, frowning.

"Her eyes, Dain," he said, and she wondered at that. Her eyes? What about them?

Dain moved at her side, his thigh shifting against hers, his forearm brushing her wrist. Electricity ramped through her, from the point of contact on her skin, through her muscles and tendons, until she trembled.

Suddenly, she felt so hungry, starved—not for food, but for… Dain.

Her body felt strange. Oh, God, she knew this sensation, pounding aching need and then the loss of herself. Terror surged. It was happening again. She was going to black out. She was going to—

Unable to help herself, she leaned into him, pressed her nose to his neck, and breathed in the lush scent of Dain's skin. He stiffened as she snaked her tongue out and tasted him.

A stream of lust melted her like a sugar cube.

No! No, not now!

Jerking to her feet, she froze, gasped, vaguely aware of Dain rising at her side.

And just like that, her body turned to sand.

She sifted to nothingness. The room and the floor spun away, and everything was gone, all gone, and she was in a vast black space with no light, no air.

She knew this place. She'd been here before. She'd—

"Vivien!" Dain's voice. "Vivien, stay with me."

She wanted to. She really did.

But she was sand. Sand. Nothing but sifting sand.

Araminta Cairn paced back and forth over the carpet of her suite at the Fairmont Royal York. Her hair was impeccably coifed, her makeup sedate, refined, applied with a sparing hand. The stiletto heels of her elegant black pumps sank into the carpet with each step.

She was agitated, a frame of mind so rare that she'd had to pause and think about it before she could decide exactly what it was.

This was not a good time for Vivien to be out there alone. Not a good time at all.

"My daughter is not answering her cell," she said over her shoulder to the small group assembled around the dining table of her suite.

Someone made a soft sound, perhaps sympathy, and Araminta glanced at the gray-haired woman standing off to one side.

"The number she provided me with last night simply rings and rings when I call. No voice mail. Nothing." She resumed her pacing, stopped by the window, and stared out at the city view. Straightening the flowered curtain until it lay in a pristine line, she continued, "I sent her an e-mail as well. No reply. And that isn't like her."

Pausing, she took a breath, paced out ten more steps, her hands loosely clasped at the small of her back. She didn't want to look at those in the room with her. She just wanted to get the words out, because to ask for help from anyone was so against her nature, so foreign as to make her skin crawl.

"Vivien is out of her depth. That debacle with her house was the start of it, but she sounded quite vague when I spoke with her last night. Quite distressed."

Smoothing her hand over her sleek bob, Araminta realized she was fidgeting and froze. On a slow exhalation, she turned, willed herself to be still as she looked over the silent group.

"I had assumed after our phone call that she would hop in a cab and come here. I did tell her exactly where I was staying. But she isn't here. I don't know where she is," she finished brusquely. She was annoyed with Vivien for disappearing. Annoyed with herself for worrying.

Araminta pursed her lips. Vivien never did behave in a way that Araminta could understand. They were nothing alike. She was her father's daughter.

Raising her chin, she met each set of eyes in turn.

"I need her found. Right now. No excuses. No explanations." Turning away from them, she looked out the window once more and finished softly, "I simply need her found."

Clea stepped from the guest bedroom into the wide hallway. Her gaze was shadowed, her demeanor tense.

Through the open door, Dain could see the faint movement of Vivien's chest as she breathed. It didn't look like she had moved at all since he'd carried her to the bed after her collapse. He made to step inside, but Clea blocked his path.

"I'd like to speak with you for a moment before you go in," she said, and he forced himself to relax, held himself from shouldering past her and falling to his knees by Vivien's bedside. Crazy, he knew, but he thought that if he just stayed beside her, nothing bad would happen to her.

Reaching behind her, Clea pulled the door closed with a soft click. She stepped away, walked along the hallway, and stopped on the far side of the next doorway as though she didn't want her words to carry into the room to Vivien. Turning her head, she met Dain's eyes. He strode toward her, his gut clenched in a tight knot.

He had a feeling this wasn't going to be good.

Clea's gaze flicked behind him, and he felt Ciarran come up beside him.

"How is she?" Dain asked.

"Her BP is eighty-eight over sixty. Costal breathing, short and shallow. Lips cyanotic." Clea shook her head. "But there's something else, something my training doesn't explain."

"Her eyes…" Ciarran said, and Dain glanced at him. "Were they white like that when she was in the building with the
hybrids
?"

"Yeah." Dain recalled the pearlescent gleam of Vivien's eyes earlier in the day, and then again just a few moments ago as she'd bolted from the couch. He'd never seen the like, had no explanation for it. But right now there was only one question that mattered most to him. He looked at Clea.

"Tell me how she is."

"Dain." Her voice was laced with distress, and she shook her head. "I think she's… dying."

Dying.

The hallway narrowed to a black tunnel with a single point of light aimed at Clea, and then burst, expanding into a vortex of pain and denial.

Don't feel. Don't care. Don't want.

He tried to shut down, tried to ice over. But he felt as if he'd been staked through the heart.

Dying. That was not an option.

"Let's get her to a hospital, get her to her own kind," Dain snapped.

"That won't be a solution." Clea looked at him in obvious dismay.

"If a human hospital won't do," he grated, "then
you
fix it."

Clea glanced at Ciarran, then turned her attention back to Dain. "There's something more you need to know." She reached out, hesitated, then placed her hand on his arm.

His whole world became focused on Clea's warm hand against the skin of his forearm, his only link to reality. Everything else tunneled in, and he was left with no awareness of the periphery. Because Vivien was dying, and he wasn't supposed to care.

Only he felt like his insides had been shoved through a wood chipper.

"I can't fix this, Dain," Clea said. "Apart from the fact that it would break the
Pact
, I don't know
how
to fix her. I've got two years of human medical school, and none of my training taught me how to work on sorcerers or—" She made a sound of frustration. "It appears that she's starving."

Dain shook his head. "What do you mean? She's not wasted or emaciated. She's got an athlete's body, all soft skin and toned muse—" He paused, shaking his head. Way too much information. "She eats. I've seen her eat."

He suddenly, remembered what she'd said after the
hybrid
attack, about being so hungry.

"She's not starved for
food
, Dain," Clea said softly.

No. Of course not. He knew then what Clea was trying to tell him, and he didn't want to face it. Despair sank deep and grabbed hold of him with a barbed hook.

He was peripherally aware of footsteps on the stairs, and a moment later, Darqun and Javier joined them.

"She's starved for…
life"
Clea continued.

To his right, Javier gave a sharp hiss.

"The way her eyes turned white… I thought maybe a brain tumor," Clea said.

No, Dain thought, his body rigid, his heart thudding a harsh rhythm in his chest. Not a tumor.

"So I tried that thing that Darqun's been teaching me, using magic to go in and see—"

"You tampered with her mind?" Dain rasped. He'd sworn he wouldn't let them do that. He needed to keep Vivien safe. Her thoughts. Her memories.

He was doing a piss-poor job at this.

"No! God, no," Clea gasped. "I wouldn't even try."

"She did a life-force evaluation, Dain. You know that's harmless to humans," Darqun said as he came off the wall where he'd been leaning, listening to the exchange.

"Harmless to humans. Yes, see, that's
exactly
the thing…" Pressing her lips together, Clea paused, and when she spoke, her tone was wary, hesitant. "Maybe you need to go in there and do that scan again, because by my read, Vivien Cairn is
not human
."

Dain could feel his pulse, slow and steady, but that was wrong, because he knew his heart had stopped, stopped and cracked wide open.

Not human.

"And she isn't a blighted seed, is she?"

Of course, he'd sensed it, known it, suspected so many variations. He'd thought she had a spark of magic inside her, as the occasional human did. Some mortals had sorcerer blood somewhere in their past. Not enough to lend them vast power, but enough to let them sense the
continuum
. Humans referred to the phenomenon as
psychic ability
or
ESP
. He'd thought that was all Vivien had.

But he'd been wrong.

Clea shook her head, confirming what Dain already knew. They'd all felt it. The sudden surge of magic that had twisted the
continuum
as Vivien passed out downstairs, the wave far too powerful for her to be a mere seed.

She was a supernatural, coming into her full power. And how the hell was that even possible? What the hell was she?

Not sorcerer. Which left what… demon? There were no actual female demons, only succubi, and those were extremely rare.

The pain in the center of his chest was sharp, jagged, like ice cracking into a million fragments inside him. How had he missed it? How had they all missed it?

"So what is she?" he asked, his tone bleak and harsh. "A succubus?"

Last night, standing in the apartment with Rick Strasser dead on the couch, Dain had already begun to suspect it. He'd called Javier, asked to check out the possibility.

Only, he'd been thinking about the
murderer
, not about Vivien.

Jesus.
Vivien
.

"She's not human, and she isn't a sorcerer," Clea said.

None of them framed the rest of the thought. They didn't have to. Not human. Not sorcerer. Which left only a succubus, the female equivalent of a demon. Dain reared back, feeling as though he'd been hit by a hammer.

"I don't know," Clea mused. "This is all so new to me. But Vivien's aura is almost like yours, Ciarran, a blend of light and dark."

With his blood roaring in his ears, Dain battled for control, and won. Barely.

Light and dark
. Demon dark.

Polluted by demon magic.

His Vivien.

Panic ripped through him.

Dain struggled to master his thoughts, to reach deep inside for the coldness that had been his companion for centuries, the frozen reserve.

Jesus, he was halfway in love with her. With Vivien. A succubus.

And he was sworn by both duty and hate to wipe out all demons.

Where the fuck did that leave him?

He'd lived off the one emotion he allowed himself—hate-fed off it for hundreds of years.
Demons were the enemy
. There were no shades of gray for him. He wasn't supposed to make exceptions. He wanted to barricade himself behind that hate now, to rebuild his wall, brick by brick.

Only he couldn't find it. Couldn't fucking find it.

Moria. Ciel
He'd failed them. They were his bittersweet, ancient memories, turned to dust hundreds of years past.

But Vivien wasn't dead. She was alive. And he needed to help her, needed to save her.

This time he wouldn't fail.

What the hell was wrong with him? What the hell was he thinking?

She might be more than a fledgling succubus. She might be the killer they sought.

His emotions rocketed to the danger zone, so raw and powerful, scraping him like jagged blades. He spun away from the others, sheer will holding him back from pounding his fist against the wall. He knew they watched him, gave him a moment of space, and he reined himself in, turned slowly back toward them.

Again, he thought of Rick Strasser, lying on his couch with his belly slit open and his guts chewed to shit.

"She's not the serial killer," he said, his gaze pinning each of his comrades in turn, even as he searched their faces for the truth.

He sure as hell didn't trust himself to make this call. He was too involved.

A vast despair swallowed him. He was
bound
to her, on a soul-deep level. The link between souls that could happen only between two creatures of magic synergy had happened here, bonding him to Vivien, to a woman who might be a demon.

No
. He took a step back. His every instinct screamed that there was another explanation and he was missing it, too close to see the forest for the trees.

"I don't know," Clea whispered. "If she is the killer, I don't think
she
knows it. I don't think she knows
what
she is. She mumbled a few sentences while I was in there with her, and from what she said, it seems she thinks she's having a mental breakdown, blacking out, forgetting hours at a time. If she's killed anyone, Dain, she doesn't remember it… if that's worth anything."

"It isn't." He held Clea's gaze for the longest time, disgusted by himself, by the urge to grab on to her words and cling to them like a shining beacon. Because—what?—if Vivien didn't
know
she was a killer, then that made it okay? His head was so messed up.

"One thing I do know," Clea said, unwavering. "Whatever is going on in her body right now, she's in pain."

Dain raked his fingers through his hair. He'd heard enough.

Vivien,
his Vivien
, was in there suffering, alone. The thought ripped a jagged hole in his gut.

His Vivien might be a goddamned demon. Possibly a vicious killer. What the hell was he supposed to do now?

The pain that swelled inside him was a sucking mire, threatening to overwhelm him if he let it.

Don't let it. Lock it down.