Demon Blood

eyes watched her from under heavy bangs, and the sharply angled cut of her hair—short at her nape, shoulder-length in front—better suited a comic book convention than a crime scene. Taylor had only met Mariko twenty minutes ago in San Francisco, just before they’d teleported here, and she hadn’t been able to shake the impression that a geeky sorority girl lived in that two-hundred-year-old Guardian body.
    Two hundred years old. That was a hell of a lot more experience than Taylor had. “Why are you asking me?”
    “You’re the detective.”
    Once upon a time, Taylor had been. She didn’t know what she was now.
    But she looked around, gathered her impressions. “It all happened in here. They’ve got a ton of furniture and breakables in the other rooms, but that lamp is the only thing out of place. They weren’t chased through the house. They just . . . didn’t have time to escape.”
    Two vampires, the strongest in the community. If another vampire had done this—or even if there had been several others—there would have been more indications of a fight. So someone much faster and stronger had probably done this. Not a nosferatu, though, because there was too much blood, and the bodies weren’t torn apart.
    Taylor had seen what nosferatu did to their victims. Investigating those murders was how she’d first become tangled up in all this crazy Guardian and vampire shit. God, that felt like forever ago, but it’d only been a little over two years. And she was still feeling her way around.
    She glanced at Mariko. “A demon?”
    “Even the rapes?”
    Demons didn’t experience sexual arousal. They could fake it, though. “Rape isn’t always about sex.”
    “Power, right? But that’s the problem here—if he was going for pain, to show them he was in charge, he could have done worse. A lot worse. And if it was about power, he’d probably have done it in front of their community.” Mariko paused, and her troubled gaze landed on the bed. “And I really hope you’ll poke holes in what I just said.”
    Taylor couldn’t. And an all-too-familiar darkness seemed to be pushing its way up the back of her head, just under her skull. Sometimes the darkness screamed. Now it was just there, watching and waiting—and when Taylor glanced at the vampires on the bed again, it became coldly, coldly angry.
    Her stomach churned. Mariko looked at her, the corners of her mouth suddenly tense.
    Taylor knew what she saw. The obsidian eyes.
    Not trusting her voice—not trusting that it would be her voice—she gestured to the door. When Mariko nodded, Taylor fled through the house, out the front. She stopped on the porch, gulping the cool pre-dawn air. Sinking to the steps, she clutched her stomach, trying not to puke all over the sidewalk.
    Get out of me. Get out of me.
    He receded, but Taylor could still feel him. She could always feel him. And she hated that in six months, she’d become so accustomed to his presence that she only noticed when he pushed harder into her awareness, when he tried to take over. But always, he was there.
    A weight in her hand made her look down. She’d called in a dagger. For an instant, she wanted to stab it into her thigh. Into her stomach. Let him drain out with her blood. If that didn’t do it, she could cut him out.
    She’d tried that before, though. It didn’t work.
    Vanishing the steel blade, she pushed her hands through her hair, tried to breathe steadily. Breathing was important. Michael never breathed unless he needed to talk. Too many times, she’d become aware of her breath and wondered how long it had been since she’d taken one. Aware of every little detail that said she was herself—that said the demon-spawned fucker hadn’t taken her over.
    And the brutal thing was, before he’d tethered himself to her from Hell, she’d actually started to like him. Not much. As a big, dark, and scary type, Michael had never been someone she’d felt comfortable around. But he had a protective vibe going on, and she’d appreciated that. In her family, with her partner, when she’d been on the job, they watched each other’s backs. That was what she’d grown up with, a code that went down to her bones: You take care of your own people. Michael’s people were everybody—and he watched everyone’s back. That was something she could admire. And it didn’t hurt that he was easy on the eyes, and that when she’d been dying, he’d kissed her and the whole fucking world