Demon Night

whatever damage he’d done? How long had Jane spoken with him?
    Charlie pushed another button, and the pain in her stomach moved up through her chest, her throat. Almost two hours.
    The door swung open. With only a towel wrapped around her, Jane took a quick step back, her hand flying to the tuck of the terrycloth between her breasts. She glanced up at Ethan with a startled expression. She said something, but Charlie couldn’t hear it.
    Jane’s eyes and nose were red. Had she been crying all day, or just recently? She spoke again. Charlie spread her hands, lifted her shoulders—and Jane finally got it, wiped the blood from the symbols.
    “—realized I hadn’t told you that I changed the…” Jane’s gaze fell to Charlie’s phone.
    “You called him?” Disbelief squeezed Charlie’s question into a hoarse whisper.
    Ethan laid his hand against her lower back. “Go on inside,” he said softly. “You want me to come in with you?”
    Yes. But that wouldn’t be fair to Jane. “Do you mind waiting a minute?”
    “I’d wait much longer than that for you, Miss Charlie.” He turned, leaned back against the wall.
    She closed the door, but didn’t activate the spell. Whatever Sammael had told Jane, Ethan would know better than Charlie if it was a lie.
    Jane sank down on the bed. The paleness of her skin made her nose and eyes all the brighter. “I called him. I hadn’t intended to, but I was reading, and it was so quiet, and I realized…” Her mouth set; Charlie felt a chime of fear, faint as a memory. “I couldn’t hear you breathing. And when I checked, not only had your respiration stopped, but your heart rate was at ten beats per minute, Charlie. It wasn’t like that last night.”
    No. Jane had taken her pulse when Charlie had been describing everything that had happened to her, and had said Charlie’s rate was on the low side of average—just as it had been when she’d been human.
    “And then there was your face. You weren’t moving, appeared dead—and you looked petrified , Charlie. Like you were scared, and in pain and skinny as hell…and so I freaked out. I didn’t know if it was supposed to be like that—and I didn’t know if, because you’d gone to bed hungry, you were starving or dying in your sleep.”
    “So you called him.” Though she understood Jane’s fear, Charlie couldn’t seem to get her brain around that fact.
    “Yes. Who else could I have called? Mom? ‘Hey, Charlie’s a vampire, what should I do?’” Jane shook her head. “Anyway, he said it was normal, told me not to worry, that you’d be fine by sunset.”
    Charlie walked to the table. Putting the gun away was a relief; she hadn’t known how to use it, hadn’t really felt any safer with it. “And that’s all?”
    “No.” Jane half-turned on the bed, facing her. “I’m returning to Seattle. Now that I know what I’m working on, Dylan said that—”
    “His name isn’t Dylan,” Charlie said tightly. “It’s Sammael, and he’s a demon.”
    “And what does that mean, Charlie? What does that mean, exactly ? That he’s evil? Yet, unlike the guy you’re with, he’s never killed anyone.” Jane’s brows arched. “At least your standards are getting higher—on the bad boy scale, a druggie musician has absolutely nothing on a murderer.”
    Charlie sucked in a breath. “Low fucking blow, Jane. Did Sammael coach you on that?” she asked, and a flicker of Jane’s eyelashes and a note of guilt told Charlie that had gotten through, at least. But, God, she wished she’d put up the spell so that Ethan wouldn’t have heard her sister say that. He deserved a lot better. “Whatever Drifter did, it was over a hundred years ago. Last night, he was trying to save me, and Sammael was laughing while a vampire sucked my blood out. Guess who I’m going to trust?”
    Jane closed her eyes. “All right. I’m sorry. But that still doesn’t mean—”
    Charlie wasn’t done. “And the only goddamn reason Sammael hasn’t killed anyone is because the Rules say he can’t.”
    At that, Jane straightened up and shook her head. “He wouldn’t. He said there are different factions of demons, and some are looking for ways to be forgiven. He’s one of them.”
    Charlie leapt onto the bed and bared her fangs a foot from her sister’s face. “Turning people into vampires against their will seems like a really shitty way to get on Heaven’s good side, doesn’t it?”
    She felt the flare of Jane’s temper,