Ripper(31)

“I have a room for you.” Gray frowned my way. “I’m not going to jump you the minute I get you home. If it would make you feel better, you can ask your mother to join us, or your friend Olivia.”

Both of whom would be shoving me into the Ranger’s arms as fast as they could. No, thank you. “I’m not staying with you. You can’t force me to. If you insist, then I’ll take the motel.”

“Why?” He was looking down at his hands. They were big hands. His voice was grave and when his eyes finally found mine, I saw a wealth of pain in his deep blue eyes. It made me stop my sarcastic inner commentary. “I wouldn’t hurt you, Kelsey. I would try hard to never change around you. I have excellent control over my form. You wouldn’t have to see that…side of me.”

Now I was confused. “I didn’t think you would hurt me physically, Sloane.”

“My name is Gray,” he insisted.

“What do you change into, Gray? Why would you be afraid of hurting me?” I was really interested and on more than a personal level. I have excellent instincts and, while I knew that Gray wasn’t entirely human, I couldn’t tell what he was. It bugged me.

Gray’s eyes went stubborn as though he knew he’d made the wrong move and wasn’t sure how to take it back. “I thought Jamie told you and that was why you didn’t want to be alone with me.”

I gazed deeply into his eyes. He wasn’t a vampire, obviously, but he also wasn’t a werewolf or shifter. He didn’t have the right energy. I couldn’t put my finger on it. If he was a witch then he wouldn’t have talked about changing. Hags could change, but they were exclusively female. Fae creatures didn’t shift form, either. They used magic to affect glamours, but they didn’t change their essential forms. I could only think of one other species with the power to change forms and the very real potential to hurt someone they liked. The room turned cold around me as I realized the truth.

“Please tell me you’re only half demon.”

He seemed to retreat, everything about him becoming smaller somehow. His shoulders hunched, his head drooping a bit and his eyes slid away from mine. “My father was a demon. My mother was an ambitious human. I’m a halfling. I seem to be more human than demon, though. I have the physical strength of a demon and I can change my form, but I don’t want to kill everyone I see or cause chaos for no reason. No one ever believes me on that so don’t even try to pretend. I know the spiel. A demon’s a demon. We’re evil.”

A full demon was. I agreed with him whole-heartedly on that count, but I had grown up in the supernatural world. My mother had talked to me about a halfling friend of my grandfather’s all the time. They’d worked for the Council together on several jobs. He’d had a wife and kids and he’d always been a loyal friend. The way my mother told it, halflings came in two kinds—the kind that took after the demon part and the kind that stayed true to their human souls. Though she’d said even that kind could be assholes, too. Assholiness, according to my mother, was not limited to demon DNA.

Sloane pushed his chair back. “I’ll call your brother. He’ll watch out for you. As long as you stay away from this particular case, I think this perp will leave you alone. He seems to want to keep this between me and him. Don’t worry about the check. I’ll get it. I’ll catch this guy, Kelsey. I promise you that.”

He turned to go and the easiest thing in the world would have been to let him. Let him think I didn’t want to have anything to do with a half-demon and I wouldn’t have to ache at the thought of his pain. I didn’t like caring about someone I’d just met. I didn’t like…anything I felt when I thought about Grayson Sloane.

“Why me?” I couldn’t let him walk out like that. “Why this sudden pursuit of me?”

He turned back around and I could see he really didn’t want to walk out either. “It wasn’t sudden. At least, it wasn’t for me. I’ve wanted you since I went to your mom’s for dinner with Jamie and I saw a picture of you and I knew I’d finally found you.”

“Found me?”

He laughed a little and weariness overcame his handsome face. I had the most insane urge to force him to sit down, to massage the back of his neck and kiss his forehead until his troubles went away. “I was never going to tell you this. I was going to pretend we just met through Jamie. Well, it doesn’t matter. My father…one of his powers is prophecy. He can see certain futures and determine outcomes and often change it. I don’t do any of that, but every now and then I get a flash of the future. It’s a little movie in my head. I’ll touch something or I’ll walk into someplace and it triggers the power in me.”