She tried to speak around the gag and couldn’t. I peeled it out of her mouth. “Ofelia?”
My baby sister said, “Cèsar,” and then she began to sob.
When I untied her, I realized she was fully dressed. No torn clothes. Same outfit she’d disappeared in. All the wounds were on her face and neck and hands. They hadn’t touched her anywhere else. But her cheeks, her lips, her eyelids—they were riddled with tiny punctures.
The demons had used that bowl of needles on her.
She told me what had happened as I untied her. Turned out that the Silver Needles, despite being sex demons, didn’t rape their victims. They were the sickest kind of sadists—the kind that got off on psychological pain as much as the physical kind. They enjoyed the process of forcing people to give themselves up, so they didn’t use thrall to coerce their captives. They liked the victims to beg for sex.
The Needles gave their captives two choices: get tortured, or consent to being fucked to death. “Willing” demon food.
Ofelia had picked torture.
So they’d tortured her. Lord, had they tortured her. But Ofelia had held out.
She’d been at the mercy of the Needles for a week. An entire fucking week. They’d ripped her so full of holes that she was faint from blood loss, and she hadn’t given in.
I thought about the incubus washing up in the bathroom, the bowl of needles in the kitchen.
I thought about killing him.
But Ofelia was too weak to walk. I tossed her over my shoulder and climbed out of the attic like that.
I took her straight to the hospital. I stuck by her side the whole time that the nurses were bandaging her wounded body, and when the cops showed up to question her. She refused to file a police report. She told me that it’d just get the cops killed if they went after her attacker—he wasn’t human; they couldn’t hurt him.
So once she fell asleep, I went back to get the fucker that had taken her myself.
He was still at the beach house. I found him talking on Ofelia’s cell phone under the pier. He looked agitated. Fearful. He was telling someone on the other end that he’d lost her and that the Needles were going to kill him for it. His eagle tattoo jutted over his collar, so I could tell that it was the same guy, and the sight of him made my vision go red.
I interrupted his call by smashing his head into the rocks.
Saying what I did to him wouldn’t make me sound good. I’m not a violent guy, you know. When I arrested witches on the OPA’s most wanted list, I’d rather sneak up on them than risk a direct confrontation. But this guy, I just about knocked his fucking head off.
He never saw me coming.
That was how I discovered that incubi have a weakness—a big one. When they bleed, they bleed hard. His skull cracked when I dropped him. He poured blood all over the sand. And I realized that I might have gotten what I’d been fantasizing about, but didn’t really want—I might have actually killed the guy.
I used Ofelia’s phone to call for an ambulance. Fucking stupid, right? An ambulance for the demon from Hell.
I didn’t get EMTs. I got black SUVs.
The guy who came out on the beach to greet me had blond hair and a nice suit and a look of surprise. He asked me if I’d tracked and taken down the incubus on my own. I told him yes. And I apologized. I felt like shit for what I’d done to the incubus. I wanted him to face justice, not die.
Apparently, that was the right thing to say. The blond man smiled at me. He told me that his name was Fritz Friederling, and he didn’t arrest me.
He asked me if I wanted a job.
“So did he die?”
I looked at Isobel for the first time. I’d been staring at her beaded curtains the whole time I talked. Didn’t want to have to see what she thought of me. But now I saw, and she was watching me with sympathy in her eyes.
“Fritz said that he was locked up in a union detention facility,” I said. “So, yes, he survived.”
“And Ofelia?”
“She healed. Just about disowned me for going after the incubus on my own, but she’s fine. Back to her usual shit. Getting into trouble.” I couldn’t help but smile to think of her. She was getting in trouble in Mexico now, somewhere with warm beaches and no incubus mafia.
“Sounds like you did all the right things,” Isobel said.
It was the first time I’d told anyone the whole story since starting to work for the Office of Preternatural Affairs. And she didn’t think I was stupid or a violent animal. My heart unclenched a little.
“Fritz probably saved my life from retaliation by the Needles,” I said. “The job’s good. I love my job. And I’ve ruined all of it.” I gave her a sideways look. “Why did you think the incubi were out to kill you?”