For a Few Demons More(192)

Refusing to shrink away, I let him get close enough that the scent of burnt amber settled deep in me. “No. Where’s the focus?”

“Feel the need to tear out people’s throats?” he asked.

“Just yours. Who has the focus? You took it out, where is it?”

He straightened, and I realized again how tall he was. “Ceri took it out, not me. And if there had been a way to help her do it wrong, I would have.”

“Just tell me who has the damned focus!” I exclaimed, and he snickered.

“Your alpha,” he said, and my stomach knotted. David? We’re back to square one.

“It settled in him as if it wanted to go,” the demon added, and my heart seemed to stop. David didn’t possess the focus; it possessed him? Like it had been inside of me?

“Where is he?” I said, springing off my bed. But there was nowhere to go.

“How should I know?” Minias lifted a bottle and sniffed the top, recoiling. “He’s handling it better than you are. It was made for a Were, not a witch. Taking it in you was stupid. Like dropping a chunk of sodium metal into a bucket of water.” The bottle hit the dresser with a clink.

I shifted uneasily, not knowing if I should believe him. “He’s okay?”

“Better than,” Minias drawled, his fingers still toying with my perfumes. “Giving the focus to the Weres is going to turn around and bite you, but it did accomplish what you wanted.” His goat-slitted eyes focused on mine, and my tension rose. “The Weres are happy, and the vampires think it’s destroyed. Right?”

Right. “I’m fine,” I said tartly, my fear coming out as cheek. “You can go now.”

“The elf did it,” he said, shaking his head. “Al has more drive and talent to teach than I gave him credit for. He taught her extremely well to be able to untwist a curse like that and leave you…relatively unscathed. No wonder he kept her for a thousand years.”

Face scrunched up, he smelled another bottle and set it down. “Al is furious,” he said casually, and even my false bravado vanished. “They caught him seconds after you threw him back to our side of the lines. He’s in his own personal hell. And you still owe him a favor.” Sniffing a third perfume, he looked at me from under a lowered brow. “I wonder what it will be?”

“I’m fine. Get out,” I repeated.

“May I have this?” he asked, holding the bottle upright.

“If you leave, you can have them all.”

The bottle vanished from the cradle of his fingertips. “One last thing,” he said, an odd glint in his eyes. “The focus?”

I stiffened, a trickle of fear growing in the pit of my being. “Yeah?”

“It wasn’t what Newt was looking for when she tore your church apart.”

He began to vanish, and I stepped forward, frightened. “What was she looking for?”

I haven’t the slightest idea, echoed in my thoughts.

“Wait!” I shouted. “Does she remember me? Minias! Does she remember me?”

I searched the night for sound and my mind for thoughts, but he was gone. Another instant and the light he had set glowing in my mirror faded to nothing.

Crap. What had she been looking for if it hadn’t been the focus?

The thump of the front door closing echoed through the brightening air, and I looked to the front of the church. A car started, and tension brought me straight when I recognized Ivy’s soft footsteps in the hall. “Ivy…” I said, then put a hand to my throat when it hurt.

I jumped when my bedroom door was flung open and a gray shaft of light spilled in. “Rachel,” Ivy said, her features lost in shadow.

“Last time I checked,” I said, deciding that mentioning Minias wouldn’t help anyone.

“You’re okay,” she whispered, coming in and gripping my arm. “It’s you. Right? Just you?” Her eyes were wide from the shadow, and there was a bandage on her neck. Seeing my blank stare, she took me in a surprising hug. “Thank you, God.”

My tension, born of surprise, vanished and I relaxed, my face next to hers as I took in her scent as if it were water. I didn’t care if it was chock-full of pheromones meant to relax me, to make it easier for her to bite me. That’s not why she was holding me. She had been worried. And she was alive. A dead vampire wouldn’t have cared if I was myself or not. Ivy was alive. Maybe Kisten is, too. Please let Piscary have lied to me.

“It’s me,” I said, remembering Ivy and Edden grappling with me in the back of a car when I’d been lost to the curse. “Uh, I have to go to the bathroom.”