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."