Demon Marked

if they did, Nicholas didn’t think he’d be laughing. No, he’d be enjoying the view.
    How screwed up was that? He’d ask Leslie when he saw her next. Did sexual attraction to a gorgeous demon suggest that he was even more fucked up than he’d thought, or was it healthier than planning to slay one?
    He tried to imagine Leslie’s reaction and couldn’t help being amused. One of these days, she was going to have him institutionalized.
    “No living things,” Ash said softly, cutting into his amusement. “But Madelyn vanished the body—so that means Rachel had to be dead. Did Madelyn vanish the evidence, too?”
    God. The memory of Rachel’s bloodied chest replaced Ash’s perfect breasts. The memory of his shock and utter helplessness as she died.
    And it was exactly the slap that Nicholas had needed. Gorgeous demon or not, he couldn’t cultivate that physical attraction. Sex complicated everything. Allowing anyone that close meant he lowered his emotional shields and exposed more of himself than he wanted to. Taking that risk with a demon . . . Hell, he might as well put a gun to his head and pull the trigger now.
    A dead man couldn’t pursue revenge. That was all that mattered. This demon didn’t matter, and neither did his screwed-up attraction.
    “Madelyn took everything with her,” he said. “The gun, the bullets, the blood. And so, like I said, I spent money. I hired investigators to look for murders where the body and evidence had gone missing despite witnesses, to track down anyone with a similar story to mine. After a while, they found commonalities, but no answers. Not until about four years ago, when one investigator ran across Sally Barrows.”
    “Another demon?”
    “No. A vampire.”
    “A vampire,” she echoed flatly. “Is that like a dragon?”
    Nicholas couldn’t see her eyeteeth behind her compressed lips, but he guessed she had fangs again. “Yes,” he said. “Because I’m not lying about vampires or dragons.”
    She didn’t respond. Either struggling to believe him, he realized, or flat-out refusing to. Fuck. Never did he imagine trying to prove to a demon that vampires existed.
    He damn well wasn’t going to start now. Let her believe what she wanted. “That’s when I began spending a lot more money. For the right price, Sally and her husband agreed to help me find Madelyn, and told me what they knew about demons.”
    “I notice they aren’t helping you now.”
    “Because they’re dead.”
    That grief must have slipped through his emotional shields, or Ash heard something in his voice. She looked away from the road, studied his face. “What happened?”
    “A demon ripped them apart.”
    Sally and Gerald had known some information about demons, but they hadn’t known a lot. Like many vampires, they were mostly ignorant of their origins, having heard only bits and pieces of the truth about Guardians and demons, but not the whole story. So they’d known enough to capture a demon, to take it down alive, but hadn’t known enough to keep it down.
    “How long did you work with them?”
    “Three years, off and on. Sometimes they went into other vampire communities and gathered information.” And other times, they’d worked together with him—Nicholas making certain their sleeping forms were secure when the sun rose, and then training with and learning from them by night. “I met Rosalia after that.”
    When she’d slain the demon who’d butchered Gerald and Sally. Still, that demon’s death hadn’t been enough of a punishment. Not after Nicholas had seen what it had done to his friends.
    Nicholas had been going it alone since then. He wouldn’t ask any other humans or vampires to risk their lives in pursuit of his revenge, and he sought help from Rosalia only because she could take care of herself—as she’d aptly demonstrated by beheading a demon several times stronger and faster than she was. One moment Nicholas had seen Rosalia and her partner facing the demon, and the next moment she’d been bleeding from her gut and the demon’s head had been rolling across the floor.
    “Rosalia is the Guardian?” Ash asked.
    “Yes. And because that’s what Guardians do—hunt demons—she had more information about how to find them.”
    “And how do you?”
    “The most obvious sign is the temperature of their skin.”
    Ash rubbed the tips of her fingers together, as if feeling the heat of her own skin and considering that. Finally, she said, “It’s