Demon Blood

sick. No question. He’d risk death.
    He lifted the nephil’s wrist to his fangs. He pierced the skin and sucked until the lifeless blood flowed over his tongue. Tasteless, just like dead blood, but strong—stronger than a demon’s. Already, the lightness in his head began to clear.
    Rosalia’s face became an unreadable mask, her eyes devoid of emotion. The blood pooled around them vanished. A clean change of clothes dropped to the floor beside him.
    She struggled to her feet, looking away from him as if she couldn’t bear to watch, and limped toward the stairs.

    The bowels of Lorenzo’s home were fashioned of crudely worked iron and dark wood. Centuries of blood had soaked the dirt floor, drying as hard as concrete. The air still smelled faintly of rot.
    Rosalia had known both vampires. Sally Barrows and Gerald Winn had once been part of the London community, but they’d gone off her radar about three years before, only showing up as blips here and there. Strong and clever vampires, passionate about protecting each other and enforcing the community rules, she’d pegged them as future heads of their own group of vampires. That wouldn’t happen now.
    After the nephil had broken free, he’d released his anger here. Sally had been slammed into the cell bars with such force that the iron had cut her into narrow strips. Gerald’s neck was a ragged stump, his limbs ripped off.
    Vin and St. Croix were laying Sally next to Gerald when Rosalia came downstairs. St. Croix crouched beside the ravaged bodies, his face without expression. His psychic scent, anger layered over grief, gave him away. He felt these murders deeply. So deeply that although his mental shields were strong, he couldn’t conceal his emotions.
    Hopefully, his lies would be just as easy to read when she questioned him.
    Though her lungs had pieced back together and filled with air, they still felt too tender to speak. She should wait another five or ten minutes. She could let Vin handle it. He knew everything she’d want to ask, and was capable of handling an interrogation.
    But she needed it to distract her from the pain in her arm, her stomach—and her heart. Deacon had risked the nephil’s blood rather than drink from her. She should have stopped him, but his decision had felt like another blow from the nephil’s fist, and she’d been too stunned to react. Then it had been too late. He’d taken the blood—and now, only her relief that she could hear him moving upstairs, putting on his clothes, was stronger than the ache of his rejection.
    She studied St. Croix. Every picture she’d run across had shown him impeccably groomed, his clothes perfectly tailored, but he’d been willing to get his hands dirty. He’d discarded his jacket and rolled up his sleeves to help move the vampires’ bodies. Crimson streaked his forehead where he’d pushed his fingers through his black hair, either unaware of the blood on his fingers or too angry to care.
    He’d been working for Legion, but she wouldn’t yet ask him why. She wanted to see what he’d give her first.
    “Two vampires,” Rosalia said, coming to stand beside them. “Who were they?”
    He glanced up at her, then stood. “Gerry Winn, and his wife, Sally. Both from London.”
    So he offered the truth to her, then—and apparently they had trusted this man enough to offer it to him. She turned to Vin. “Will you bring two dust sheets from upstairs? They ought to be covered. They deserve that respect.”
    St. Croix’s pale blue gaze followed Vin before returning to her face. “Thank you.”
    “I am sorry we did not arrive earlier and warn them. Who managed to catch and restrain the demon?”
    No need yet to call the creature a nephil. First she’d discover how much St. Croix knew. It couldn’t be much—and what he had was full of errors. He’d known enough to put a nephil down with vampire blood, but not enough to keep it that way.
    “I did.” He nodded toward the stairs after Vin. “The same way he stopped the demon upstairs.”
    By grabbing his arm. The nephil couldn’t shake off a human’s grasp; he had to follow the Rules.
    Rosalia wasn’t certain she believed him, however. St. Croix looked at her as someone might a page full of fraudulent figures, calculating where to shift numbers so that the equations would balance—as if deciding what she wanted to hear and giving an explanation he thought she’d accept.
    “Where did you capture