The Devil You Know

CHAPTER 18

I was too slow on the uptake. Andy’s words hadn’t even begun to sink in yet when Dr. Neely lunged at me. I tried to fire my Taser, but Andy tackled me.

It was a heroic gesture, trying to get me out of the way of Neely’s charge, but I could have done without it. I cursed him as we both fell down and the Taser was knocked out of my hand.

“Get off!” I screamed at Andy, and jabbed him with my elbow to punctuate the point.

Neely grabbed my arm in a brutal, crushing grip, dragging me up to my feet.

A gunshot nearly deafened me, and something hot and sticky splashed my face. Neely grunted in pain, but he didn’t let go of me. He spun around, putting me between him and Adam and wrapping an arm around my neck.

“Shoot, and I’ll take her head off before I die,” Neely said.

I reached up to grab the forearm he had pressed against my neck, prying at it uselessly. It wasn’t that I expected to be able to make him let go, especially with my taped fingers. I was just playing the helpless human female in hopes he’d underestimate me.

Adam’s gun was still pointed straight at us, but he didn’t fire. Footsteps pounded down the stairs.

“Stay away!” Adam bellowed, but Brian and Dom both ignored him and came charging into the room.

I felt Neely turn to look at them, and in that moment of distraction, I stomped down on his instep as hard as I could.

I already knew pain didn’t bother this particular demon much, but it did startle him. I let myself become a dead weight in his arms, and he had to readjust his grip to keep me from falling.

Everything else seemed to happen pretty much in a split second, and it wasn’t until afterward that I was able to piece together the sequence of events. At the time, all I noticed were the sounds.

Gunshot.

Scream of pain, but it wasn’t from Neely.

Another gunshot.

Utter silence.

Time resumed moving normally, and my other senses caught up with me, when I collapsed to the floor with a limp body on top of me. I shoved Neely away and got to my knees.

Brian and Andy were standing around in shock. Adam was on the floor on his knees, bent over. A trickle of blood obscured my vision, and I had to wipe it away before my mind could finish figuring out what I saw.

Adam was bent over on the floor, clutching someone to his chest. Andy and Brian were still standing, and Neely was dead as a doornail. That left…

“No!” I choked, stumbling to my feet and crossing the short distance between me and Adam.

Dominic lay in Adam’s arms, a huge bloodstain spreading across his chest.

“No!” I said again, eyes filming with tears as I dropped to my knees beside them.

Dom’s eyes were squinched shut with pain, and his face was way too pale. Blood continued to pour from the wound.

“Do something!” I shouted at Adam.

He was a policeman. He had to know some rudimentary first aid! But when I took another look at the wound, I knew that rudimentary first aid wasn’t going to cut it.

“Adam!” Dom gasped, terror and pain in his voice.

“Shh,” Adam said, wrapping one of his hands around Dom’s fingers. His face looked strangely serene, no sign of grief or horror or fear. I wanted to scream at him, curse him, hit him. Make him look like he was supposed to look when his lover lay dying in his arms.

“I’ll take good care of you,” Adam said, his voice a low croon, and the bastard had the nerve to smile.

Dom’s eyes widened, as if he, too, were shocked by that smile. Then he made a pained sound. His back arched briefly; then he went limp and his eyes closed. Adam released the hand he’d been holding.

I put both my hands over my mouth to stifle the sob that was rising in my throat. Adam sighed, then turned to me and held out his hand.

“Nice to meet you,” he said, with a little grin, “though I’d have preferred to do it under better circumstances.”

I just sat there and gaped, not understanding. He lowered his hand.

“I’m Adam,” he said, and I wondered if it was possible for demons to go into shock. I’d never heard of it before, but then his lover had just died in his arms. He blinked. “I mean I’m Adam,” he said more forcefully. “My demon’s taking care of Dom at the moment.”

I shook my head, wondering if that would rattle the pieces of my brain back into place. Then I figured out what he meant and my eyes went saucer-wide.

“You mean he transferred to Dominic?” I cried, and I heard the shrillness of my own voice.

Adam nodded. “It’s only temporary. He’ll probably need about twenty-four hours to get Dominic fully healed, then he’ll come back to me.”

I stared at him, so full of questions I couldn’t even figure out which one to spit out first. “Eighty percent of demon hosts are nonfunctional when their demons leave. And you and Dom are both in the lucky twenty percent?”

“It’s not luck,” Adam said. His voice sounded the same, and obviously he looked exactly the same, but though it might have been my imagination, I could have sworn there was something visibly different about him. Maybe it was just body language.

“Most of the time when you see a host without its demon, it’s because the demon was illegal and was exorcized. Illegal demons generally don’t give a damn about their hosts, so they don’t take good care of them. That’s why the hosts are such a wreck when they’re gone.”

I remembered that we weren’t alone in the room, and I looked around. Brian had sagged down into a chair, his face green. Andy was still standing, hugging himself as if he were cold. I looked more closely at my brother while I continued to talk to Adam.

“So Andy was catatonic because Raphael abused him?”

“That would be my guess.” He smiled. “And Adam’s going to be extremely pissed off at me for telling you this. Humans aren’t supposed to know this deep, dark secret, because then they’d know that even the legal demons aren’t always so pure. He only told me so I wouldn’t worry about Dom.”

I shook my head in confusion. “Adam’s going to be pissed? Don’t you mean your demon?”

“Adam is my demon. As he informed me when he first possessed me, Adam is a very common name among male demons.”

Dominic moaned softly, but his eyes were still closed. I bit my lip. “Is he going to be okay?”

Adam brushed a stray lock of hair off Dominic’s face, an undeniably tender gesture. I wondered whether he intended it for Adam, or for Dominic.

“He’ll be fine.” His eyes swept over Dom’s body, and he actually laughed.

Like a moron, I followed his gaze and saw that even out cold, bleeding from a gaping chest wound, Dominic had a very enthusiastic boner.

“I’d say Adam’s making sure they both enjoy the healing process to its fullest.”

Adam’s strong, even without his demon, so he had no trouble picking Dom up and carrying him upstairs to the bedroom. Andy, Brian, and I hung out in the living room with Dr. Neely’s body.

“What the hell happened?” I asked no one in particular.

“The phone call I got,” Andy said. “It was from Raphael. He was ordered to take a new host so that Der Jäger could ride Dr. Neely to this meeting.”

“Why did you tell Neely you’d told me everything?”

“That’s what Raphael told me to tell him. He said Der Jäger wouldn’t give a damn, and I could use that as an excuse to ‘realize’ it wasn’t Raphael—while still letting Raphael keep his cover.”

Frighteningly enough, that made sense to me. “And how did Dominic end up getting shot?”

“When you stomped on Neely, Adam took a shot and missed. I was trying to keep Dominic and Brian out of the line of fire, but I’m still not up to full strength. Dom got in the way.”

And then Adam fired a second shot, killing Neely. I remembered how close together those two gunshots had come, and I felt a little queasy. I guess I was glad Adam was a demon, because a human might have had at least a moment or two of shock after accidentally shooting his lover, and that might have been enough to let Der Jäger recover.

We had lapsed into silence by the time Adam came back downstairs.

“How is he?” I asked.

“Resting comfortably,” Adam assured me.

I looked at Dr. Neely’s body. “And what are we going to do about him?”

“I’ll take care of him.” He looked grim. “I know where Adam hides the bodies, as it were.”

I shook my head. “Do me a favor and just call him your demon. It’s too weird to hear you talking about ‘Adam.’”

“Have you never known two people with the same name before?” he asked with a very Adam-esque grin.

I decided to let the subject drop, seeing as it wasn’t even remotely important. Of course, considering that what was of top importance right now was disposing of a dead body, I kinda wished we could stick to the unimportant stuff.

The only remotely good news was that for the moment, Der Jäger wasn’t on the Mortal Plain anymore. But I sure wished I knew how long that would last.