Demon Marked

the house, anyway. Ash wished she could kiss him for that, but she settled for shutting up and letting him concentrate on reversing the SUV down the icy lane. He backed into the driveway, as if preparing for a quick getaway. Perhaps he was.
    She leapt out before he cut the engine. Cold air bit into her face, her lungs. Her heel skidded out from under her, and the world seemed to twist, icy and dark and erupting with screams all around her, the dark tower spearing up into the red sky, not trees but worse, Lucifer looking down at them all, but he’d let her free and the agony would be over, and the screaming pain, her body gone, gone—
    No. Ash planted her feet, stayed upright. Her stomach heaved up a scream, but it couldn’t get past the dread tightening her throat. The house was too still, too cold.
    And she could smell the blood from here.
    “Come on.” Nicholas caught her elbow, pulled her forward. He carried a crossbow, the bolt already loaded and ready.
    “Something’s wrong,” she whispered.
    “I know.”
    She followed him to the porch, up the stairs. Nicholas swore at the locked front door. Ash found the key exactly where it should have been, beneath the blue cushion on the front porch swing. He took it from her without question, studying her face.
    “Are you sure you want to go in?”
    Ash couldn’t imagine what she looked like, that he had to ask that. “Yes.”
    “You stay here until I’ve cleared the rooms, made sure no one is waiting.”
    “No.”
    He shook his head, but didn’t argue. The police tape ripped away easily. Opening the door, he took a step inside—and stopped. Though his shields, she sensed the hot burst of rage, the hard bitterness of grief.
    No, no, no.
    Nicholas backed up, began to turn. “Let’s go out—”
    Ash ducked under his arm, was through the doorway before he could touch her, before he could stop her. Oh, God , she knew this house. The wooden floors polished to a high shine, the coatrack that looked like a bowling pin with arms, the pine chest beside it that was the perfect place to sit and remove a pair of boots. Emotions flooded her, so many things that she knew but couldn’t remember. She couldn’t breathe.
    Then she did breathe, and smelled the blood again. She turned toward the living room and saw it.
    The cornflower blue rug that should have been in the center of the living room was missing, and she knew, she knew that somewhere that rug had a huge, irregular stain on it. Because the rest of the blood was splattered and dried against the walls, across the marble fireplace, in handprints on the floor.
    The scene blurred, and she suddenly wanted to stop feeling anything, wanted to go back to the way life had been at Nightingale House, where every emotion skimmed along the surface. Because now the emotions stabbed, and stabbed, and even though she held her stomach and tried to keep her guts in, she could feel how they ripped and tore with every drop of blood she saw in that room.
    With her demon vision, she saw them all.
    Then Nicholas was in front of her, holding her face, forcing her to see him . “Ash. We don’t know what happened here. Who it happened to. And whatever happened, they might have survived.”
    She knew who it had happened to. She knew who’d been in this room. The knitting basket set beside the armchair and the haphazard tangle of a partially finished scarf told her that Rachel’s mother had been here. The tray tipped over next to the recliner, the scattered pieces of a model train said that Rachel’s father had been here, too.
    “Ash.” He shook her a little, and with effort, she focused on him again. “I’m leaving you here to check the rest of the house. All right?”
    No. But she nodded.
    As the sound of his footsteps moved down the hallway, she entered the living room. A framed photo sat on the fireplace mantel. Taken during the summer in the house’s backyard, it depicted a smiling Rachel flanked by a middle-aged man and woman. Her parents.
    They didn’t look any more familiar than Nicholas had the first time Ash saw his picture. How could that be? How could she feel this much fear and dread, this terror that they’d been hurt—or worse—and yet have no memory of them at all? How could she recognize the location where the picture had been taken, but have no memory of being there?
    “There’s no one here,” Nicholas said from behind her. “Ash, we have to go now.”
    Yes, they did. She joined him in the hallway.