It’s possible, but I doubt it, Indigo said.

  Why do you doubt it?

  Silence.

  Indie, I said warningly. Spill it now or I’m going to make life hell for you.

  You already do, she grumbled. But fine. Except for very rare occasions, we weren’t directed to take anything that could pass for human.

  Why?

  I’m not telling you that.

  And why the hell not?

  Because you haven’t earned my story, Lydia. And for the love of the Goddess, will you quit judging me right the spell now!

  I saw what you did! How can I not judge you for it?

  Because you don’t know why I did it. Why I was with them in the first place.

  Unless they were forcing your hand with a hostage, I don’t give a damn. You went into the situation knowing what they were doing, and you helped them to do it, anyway. That makes you a monster in the worst sense of the word.

  I never claimed I was a hero, Lydia.

  Well, you for damn sure are anything but a hero. You killed people.

  As I told you before, I didn’t actually kill anyone. I was a spotter. I scoped potential targets, nothing more. I didn’t like the work I did, no, but it was necessary.

  That’s almost as bad—you basically painted targets on their backs. That’s almost as bad as pulling the trigger yourself. In might even be worse. At least Susan wasn’t a coward, trying to hide behind justifications. She was batshit crazy, but she was at least honest about what she was doing, even to herself.

  Indigo didn’t say anything to that. She either had no defense or, more likely, was tired of arguing with me.

  “Maybe,” I said eventually, answering Angelo’s question aloud. “But I doubt it. They seemed to go after things that weren’t human-passing. Susan was rendering a Grimm when Indie arrived.”

  Angelo poorly hid a shudder. “Jesus.”

  “Yeah, pretty much,” I said with a sigh. “I feel... dirty, being attached to her after learning all that. It’s gross and wrong and now… how am I meant to use her power when I know what it’s done, what it’s responsible for?”

  “That’s why you need to use it,” Angelo said. “Because power was meant to be used better than the way she used it. You take her magic and you do better.”

  I chewed my lower lip, trying to hide a smile. This wasn’t a conversation that should elicit a smile. But Angelo’s attitude was oddly inspiring. Put that way, it made sense to get better at using Indie’s magic—to make up for the things she’d done with it. If I tried, I could probably get to the skill level she’d been at. And when I did, I was going to find every single one of Murrain’s freaks and make them pay for what they did.

  “Thank you,” I whispered.

  I leaned across the space between us, aiming to brush a kiss over his cheek. He turned, mouth open like he might say something, and our lips met. It was just a feather-light touch, but it made me shiver. It felt more genuine, more precious than any soul-searing kiss he’d laid on me since we’d met. Because it was the sort of thing a human man might have given me. Something real.

  “You’re welcome,” he whispered back.

  We turned the corner slowly, and he seized my hand, lacing his fingers with mine. That made me smile, too. Holding hands with an incubus. It was probably the most ordinary, humanlike thing he’d done in his life, and he didn’t seem to mind. His fingers tightened almost painfully around mine a second later and he coasted to a stop, staring ahead with wide eyes.

  A cop car was lying on its side in the middle of the road, its windshield torn loose, a bloodied limb flopping bonelessly out of one window.

  “Hexes and hoarfrost,” he swore. “What the hell happened?”

  Chapter Eight

  Angelo

  Lydia had her seatbelt unbuckled and her door unlocked before I fully processed what I was seeing.

  She’d slipped out of her seat and onto the frozen ground before I had a chance to even utter a word of protest. She cast long shadows when she passed in front of the BMW, and I cursed sulphurously under my breath before throwing the car into park and following her. The woman had no sense, but that shouldn’t be a death sentence. It was probably a good thing that I was rooming with her. I could keep the gypsy from doing something stupid. Like traipsing up to an overturned car, for example.

  I tugged Lydia to a stop a few feet away from the wrecked cruiser. I’d been holding on to the vain hope that the car had been totaled by a mundane collision or an animal hitting the side at speed. That hope was dashed when I caught a glimpse of the thing up close. The side had been split open like an aluminum can and it had been lying on its side long enough to amass a layer of snow and ice. The blood on the officer’s arm had actually frozen in place, keeping the rivulets in gory stasis. His chest looked like raw hamburger and his face was worse. He was clutching a police radio for dear life and had frozen that way post-mortem. This definitely hadn’t been an accident. It was murder, and I sincerely doubted the culprit was human.

  I stepped in front of Lydia before she could venture closer. She shot me a dirty look and frowned, her hands flying to her hips. “Let me pass.”

  “No.”

  Her frown deepened. “I’m not a little girl, Angelo. You don’t need to spare my eyes.”

  “No, you’re a woman who has seen way too many gory things that have left way too many bad impressions on you. Forgive me for not wanting to give you another nightmare visual. It’s not like you’ll scream yourself awake over it in a few nights and drag me out of bed with you.”

  Though in truth, I didn’t mind the late nights. I was built for endurance, which meant I could go all night if my partner was game. My record was currently a week-long sexual tryst. It had been with an imp from one of the lower realms. And it had been fun. Imps were half-demon creatures with enough human in them to be edible, and enough demon to be able to go a very long time.

  But staying up late with Lydia was different. It wasn’t fun. No, the truth was that it bothered me. Hearing her screams and panic unsettled me in ways I’d never been unsettled before—maybe because I felt like I was helpless—that I couldn’t crawl into her mind and remove the offending images. Not only that, but her fear spoiled her scent. A scent I’d grown oddly fond of in the last few months.

  Lydia’s mouth tilted up at the corners, despite the grim situation. “Liar. You don’t care about me dragging you out of bed do you?”

  “No one wants to get woken up at ridiculous hours of the night or morning.”

  She looked at me and cocked a single brow. “You just don’t want to admit you care. It’s kind of… cute.”

  “I don’t care. I’m a demon,” I insisted, mostly to myself.

  “Actually, I think you’re just a big softie, aren’t you?”

  “I will make you eat those words,” I warned her. “Just you wait. When I’m inside you, you’ll say just about anything I want to hear.”

  I watched her cheeks blanch at that, but she recovered herself fairly quickly. “If you’re ever inside me.”

  “Oh, I will be.”

  Her expression changed as she turned her attention back to the destroyed police cruiser. “It seems inappropriate to be having this discussion now.”

  “Sex is never inappropriate, as far as I’m concerned.”

  She looked at me and frowned. “I’m not trying to be a martyr here, Angelo, but I want to see if he still has a pulse.”

  I didn’t have to check to know the answer to that, but I strained my ears just in case. I wasn’t as adept at catching someone’s pulse as other supernatural predators were. The eyes and breathing were better tells of desire. And as far as I could tell, there was only static pouring from the radio. Nothing else.

  “He doesn’t.”

  “We should call the Police Chief, don’t you think?”

  What we should have done was return to Lydia’s loft and lock ourselves in. Whatever could topple a police car like this and whatever was willing to attract the attention of the mundanes was not a creature I wanted to scrap with.

  Unfortunately, Lydia didn’t seem to have any such compunctions about her safety. She rounded the other side of the cruiser and peered into the dark of the interior. Then she shook her head, as if to say there wasn’t anything there of interest, before she turned around to face the house behind the cruiser. The still-strobing bubble lights lit up the house beyond in fitful bursts. The door was hanging on its hinges, and the outside of the house was splashed with more crimson ice. The worst of the hoarfrost was concentrated on the steps and sidewalk, where something had been dragged through the yard and into the street. The drag marks disappeared down the road and into a copse of trees and were eventually lost from sight.

  Lydia once again spurned sense and took off running. Toward the house and its wide-open, blood-soaked door.

  “Devil’s blood!” I hissed. “Lydia, wait!”

  The weather was on my side. She slipped a few times, and I caught up to her before she could actually enter the house. She tried to wrench her arm out of my grasp and scale the stairs, as if she had to know what had happened—as if there was no thought in her head that whatever had done this might still be inside the house.

  “We can’t just sit here and do nothing!” The look on her face was mutinous.

  “You don’t know what attacked these people.”

  “And neither do you.”

  “True, but whatever that thing is, it could still be inside the house, waiting to pounce on its next victim. Do you really want to take that chance?”

  A tremor ran through Lydia’s body, but she didn’t avert her gaze. “It’s a risk we should take. We can’t leave anyone to die.”

  “Unless they’re already dead.”

  I gave the house a clinical once over, assessing it. I remembered this one. A Dutch Colonial, sold at the reduced rate and expedited paperwork that came with a supernatural tenant. This one belonged to a woman named Florence Wilson.

  “She’s already dead,” I announced.

  “You can tell?”

  “I mean, she’s a zombie. She’s undead, but that’s still dead. It means that she’s next to impossible to kill unless the witch that made her actively tries to rescind that life spark or dies herself. Now come back to the car and let me call Taliyah. I don’t want you going in that house and I definitely have zero interest in going in, myself.”

  I seemed to be getting through to her. Lydia’s confidence wavered and her feet shifted toward the road and the waiting BMW. It appeared she was going to do the sensible thing for once. So, of course, fate threw me a curveball. Someone inside the house moaned like they were in pain. It was a soft sound, but we both heard it, all the same. And, just like that, Lydia was moving forward again and there wasn’t a damned thing I could do to stop her. She crossed the threshold and disappeared inside the house with me on her heels.

  “Son of a bitch!” I hissed. “Damn it, Lydia, wait!”

  As soon as I entered the house, I caught glimpses of wood-paneled walls, portraits, and what was once a green carpet. The emerald green was now stained with blood in patches. I didn’t pause to take in much more, my only goal to make sure Lydia was okay.

  When I caught up to her, I found her kneeling over a large, shuddering shape on the ground. I didn’t think the man was reacting to the cold, but it certainly couldn’t be helping matters. As far as the cold was concerned, it was arctic inside the house. Not only that, but snow had begun to pile up in the front hall, arching up against the walls. I slipped twice before reaching Lydia’s side.

  The man on the ground coughed, and flecks of red splattered the floor next to his mouth. He sagged into the carpet, blood oozing from wounds in his gut. There were more savage slashes on his flanks. Meanwhile, a deep furrow had been carved from his chin up to his scalp, bisecting an already rough and forbidding face, transforming it into something nightmarish. A nightmare that I could recognize, even through the blood.

  I felt my stomach drop. “Ivan?”

  His eyelids fluttered and strained to open. Even that small motion seemed excruciating. But he managed. Reptilian eyes stared back at me for a moment, and his mouth tried to form my name. Then his eyes rolled back into his head, and he slumped all the way down to the carpet. The flecks of blood around his mouth trickled from the corner of his lips and into his ear.

  “Damnation and demonology!” I hissed.

  “I’m going to call 911,” Lydia said.

  “No,” I said firmly, realizing the last thing we needed were humans. No, this required supernaturals and then soem. “We’re going to call Taliyah. Now.”

  Chapter Nine

  Lydia

  It wasn’t Taliyah who turned up on the doorstep five minutes after Angelo’s call ended.

  It was a man of immense height, who sported an attitude so sour that it would have made a lemon cry ‘uncle’. In spite of, or maybe due to that attitude, he was gratingly handsome. He settled that bad attitude like a cloak around his broad shoulders and curled his lean frame beneath it to ward off any emotional gut punches. It made me suspect there was a softer heart beneath the scathing image he put out to the world, but his psychic armor was so thick that even my seasoned gift couldn’t penetrate it.

  There was one good thing about him, though. His aura helped me tune out the suffering that clung to the walls of this place. The second I’d stepped inside the house, the walls had screamed at me, burrowing like mites into my skin, until I’d had the desire to itch myself raw. I was pretty sure Indigo’s magic was augmenting my natural empathy because I’d never actually sensed suffering in acute detail, the way I had been and was still now.

  The man folded his long, lean frame over the man on the floor. ‘Ivan’, Angelo had called him. From what I could understand, Ivan worked with Angelo—as a realtor at Hallowed Homes. Now that I thought of it, I could remember seeing Ivan’s smiling face on the Hallowed Homes webpage. That face wasn’t smiling now, though. Instead, it was slicked with blood and twisted out of shape by claws. He was still breathing, but his breath was worryingly shallow.

  “How long has he been like this?” the man asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” Angelo returned the question. “You’re supposed to be the expert here, Maverick, not me.”

  “I’m not a fucking psychic,” Maverick responded, giving Angelo a look that probably could have reduced a lesser man to tears.

  “What the hell does the Council pay you for then?” Angelo continued, seemingly completely unimpressed with the glare Maverick was giving him. “Do your warlock thing.”

  “The Council doesn’t pay me,” Maverick said mildly. “And you, of all people, should know that magic can’t do everything.” Then he paused and looked back at Ivan. “Give me your best guess as to how long he’s been down for the count.” Then he turned to face Angelo again. “You told Tally her deputy was dead. And she’d sent him out hours ago to settle a domestic disturbance and never came back.”

  “Okay,” Angelo said like he was mimicking ‘what’s your point’?

  “Was the deputy in rigor when you found him?”

  Angelo seemed to consider it. “Um... no. He still looked pretty floppy to me.”

  “So, the deputy’s been dead for less than three hours,” Maverick announced, like he’d just solved a math equation. “That gives us a time frame to work with.” He nodded as he glanced back down at Ivan. “The blood hasn’t congealed on Ivan yet, so I’d say you missed the attack on him by around a half hour. That probably means that the thing that did this still is in or near town.”

  “Thanks, Mr. CSI, but I would really rather hear that from the actual policewoman, instead of her glorified bounty hunter.”

  Maverick’s stare was icy when he lifted it from Ivan’s body. “Taliyah wouldn’t have sent me if she didn’t trust my deductive skills.”

  “Why exactly did she send you?” Angelo asked.

  “She wanted to know if this was something she could call the mortal authorities to help with or if we were going to need to conceal evidence.”

  “We always have to conceal evidence,” Angelo argued.

  Maverick nodded, then shrugged. “She just hates doing it. Best case scenario, she could call the authorities and get Ivan medical attention. Worse case, he was half-shifted and we’d have to smuggle him out. Thankfully, there isn’t a dragon on the floor.”

  “No, instead there’s a dying man in front of you,” I interjected. “Could you maybe do something about that? Call an ambulance or magic him better or something?”

  I had my hands pressed to Ivan’s chest, my shirt stuffed into his chest wound to stop the bleeding. If I’d been willing to risk going into one of the other rooms, I could have probably found something better to use, but I was too much of a coward to explore the place. It was probably that hellhound dream making me twitchy, but I just didn’t want to take the chance I’d come face-to-face with something that thought my eyes looked like hors d’oeuvres. I kept expecting Angelo to make some inappropriate comment about the blue satin bra I was now sporting, but he hadn’t. Apparently, there were lows that even incubi wouldn’t stoop to. Good to know.

  Both men had the grace to look sheepish. Maverick sent Angelo outside to call for an ambulance while he hunkered down, extending a hand over Ivan’s wounds. Then he closed his eyes and started moving his lips like he was chanting something.

  “What are you doing? A healing spell?” I asked.

  “Of course not,” he griped at me with a frown as he opened his eyes to glare at me. “Not even witch or, in my case, warlock magic can instantly heal someone.”

  “Then what are you doing?”

  “I’m encouraging his own healing factor, giving him a blessing, slowing his bleeding, but I’m not going to attempt a spell on him.”

  “Why not?” I demanded, throwing my hands up into the air because it didn’t seem like Maverick was fully digesting the urgency of the situation. “He’s dying!”