Demon Angel

certain that such a thing would be impossible. Yet it made sense of everything he knew of her: her difficulty in carrying out the more horrific demonic tasks, her father's constant disapproval, her low status in the demon strata, and the conflict he sensed within her—all the result of her human side fighting the demon within her. How Lucifer must relish Lilith's internal dilemma, even while hating the human cause of it. Guardians had been created because their humanity assisted them, creating a bridge between humans and Above. Lucifer must have found a way to do the same with the ritual, creating a demonic version Below. Only in those circumstances, the human side would have been a disadvantage: the human propensity for empathy, love and pity warring with Lucifer's demands that she should never feel those emotions.
    Why had she accepted Lucifer's bargain two thousand years ago?
    I didn't want to die . And yet she hadn't seemed to care that Hugh had slain her.
    His steps faltered. He knew what destroying her had done to him. He'd wanted to save her, to give her freedom—but he had lost her, and much of his humanity, in the doing.
    If she managed to kill him, what would it do to her? The only choice was to convince her not to make the same mistake he had. When she tried to tempt him, he would have to wage a counterattack to halt her self-destruction. He knew her weaknesses, had refrained from exploiting them for too long for fear of his own.
    Demons damned humans through temptation—perhaps a human could save a demon the same way.
    Her flight to Los Angeles had taken more time than she'd anticipated, and her clothes still reeked of smog and copy-machine toner when she arrived back at her apartment.
    Sir Pup waited for her; the odor of the park and Hugh lingered on his fur. He glared at her with four eyes, but refused to look at her at all from his middle head. She grinned.
    "I meant police officers. You didn't really think he might be harassed by pigs?" She dumped a pile of dry dog food into the bathtub, promised she'd bring bacon to Colin's house for his dinner, changed into her suit and ran out the door.
    An hour and a half later, she was sitting at a table centered in a small conference room, accepting a paper cup full of coffee from Detective Preston. He took a cup for himself; judging by the exhaustion lining his face, one he desperately needed.
    But his pale blue eyes were alert, and though he gave nothing away in his expression, his psychic scent burned with curiosity. Strangely, it wasn't directed toward the manila envelope and disc that lay on the table between them, but at Lilith.
    Uneasy, she tried to redirect his attention. "Should I—"
    "She should be here in a few. Trying to light a fire under the ME's ass." He leaned back in his chair, grinned. "And Andy's the type to keep someone waiting when she thinks they might be butting in on her case."
    But Preston didn't think so; she felt no animosity from him.
    She rested her elbows on the table and smiled over the rim of her cup. "If that was my intention, Detective, then I wouldn't have told you I was coming in. I like to take over jurisdiction by surprise."
    "I know." His grin faded. "I helped dig up Paula Roberson." Lilith set her cup down. "You were in Seattle." He nodded, scratching his whiskered jaw. "Transferred here about thirteen years ago. Couldn't take any more of Chief Bowman; he was a real dick, and he wasn't going anywhere, so I did."
    Her lips twitched. "I thought it was just me."
    "No." He looked her up and down. "Though he must have been pissed when you showed up, some gorgeous young thing fresh out of Quantico, waving that profile around. And then being right, down to the last detail. Even guessing where White hid the victim's bodies, based on some mumbo-jumbo psychology shit. No offense."
    "None taken," she murmured.
    As if struck by a memory, he chuckled and nodded to himself. "God, you nailed that bastard. I'll never forget his face when we walked into his accounting firm and put him under arrest. Pissed his thousand dollar suit, started babbling about angels." Preston paused, glanced back at her. "You weren't there. You deserved to be. He was under suspicion, but we had nothing substantial on him until you showed up. He'd certainly never have given us the location of those graves."
    "My superiors decided I'd caused enough of a diplomatic problem with the locals," she said dryly.
    His brows rose. "Oh, Bowman cursed your name for at