Demon Bound

the Special Investigations warehouse. A moment later, Alice was wobbling behind Jake, who sat on a flat cot with his wings folded at his naked back. A computer topped a small cart in front of him.
    He didn’t startle, but slowly stood in his jeans, vanishing his wings as he turned to face them.
    Face her , Alice realized. Selah had already gone.
    She linked her hands together. “I—Your wings looked well.”
    “Yeah,” he said, his voice flat. “They aren’t there yet, but they’re close.”
    “How close? You should form them again, so they finish.”
    “I don’t think so.”
    “Oh, but—” She stopped. No, she would not argue. She would irritate herself if she argued. As it was, she feared she’d begun to flit. She moved to the nearest wall in order to cover it. “You have a great many books here.” The usual variety of literature, the expected archaeology texts—but also a large number of titles regarding military history and tactics. “You do not keep them in your cache?”
    “No. They aren’t mine.”
    “Oh. Scavenged?” Left behind in other quarters after the Ascension—and likely why he didn’t carry them in his cache. If anything happened to him, they would be lost.
    “Most of them. Some from the Archives. Are you here about my books?”
    “No. I—” She turned, and encountered a pair of large breasts in a tight white shirt, partially unbuttoned to reveal an extraordinary cleavage. Alice took in the arched back, short red pants, curled red hair, and pouting lips. “Oh.”
    Across the room, a brunette slinked in a nightdress and stockings. A voluptuous blonde in black heels straddled a motorcycle seat. And taped on the ceiling above his cot, a laughing blonde tried to hold down the white skirt billowing up around her legs.
    She’d begun to walk over, craning her neck to get a better look at the woman’s dress, when they all vanished.
    “Alice. They aren’t—” Jake closed his eyes, pushed out a breath between his teeth. A dull flush stained his cheeks. “They’re just here . I don’t even notice them anymore.”
    “I see.” She frowned, studying him. “When we were in Seattle, you took the shape of an actor. Why do you not do that more often?”
    “I didn’t know you wanted me to,” he said stiffly.
    “Oh, no. I do not. But during your free hours, it would have been very easy for you to meet women who looked like these women. And they would be willing.”
    He frowned. “Yeah, and that’d make me the biggest asshole on the planet. Speaking of, I’m not giving you back your box.”
    “Very well. I do not believe I have a use for it.” She sat on the cot, her back straight. “I have not for some time.”
    “Gee, that’s good to know now .”
    “Yes, I thought it would be. You should also know, however, that you were wrong. It was not my ‘I give up’ box. It is my ‘I am scared senseless’ box.”
    Warmth melted into his voice, and dulled the edge of his sarcasm. “Then maybe you should make it your ‘I need to scream somewhere I won’t risk Jake’s balls’ box.”
    She glanced at him from the side of her lashes, then quickly tore her gaze from his bare chest. For at least five more minutes, she should not let herself be distracted by lustful thoughts. “With her Gift, Irena could still come through the metal.”
    “The shielded ‘I need to scream’ box.”
    Alice smiled, and to avoid his nude torso, she looked at his computer. Another map filled the screen, but in this one, she recognized several of the pinpointed locations. “What is this?”
    Jake hesitated.
    She glanced back at him. “What?”
    “I, uh—Okay. I was thinking about the temples, and those cylinders with the spells, and how that one cylinder hooked to the last temple that Zakril built—the one we’re looking for now. But there were all those other cylinders around them, and we know which temples at least three of them coordinated with. And I was thinking about how, despite everything else being symmetrical in Khavi’s place, those cylinders were randomly positioned. But they weren’t random.”
    Alice frowned at the computer display. Each pinpoint, she saw, was overlaid by another. She shook her head. “Are you saying that the locations of the cylinders in the room correspond with the temple locations?”
    “Yep. It didn’t work at first. The three reference points were a little off, and the farther away from the reference points, the bigger the difference. But then I