Private Demon

"It is the modern way," he said. "To take an interest in your work is to show support, yes?"



"You support me plenty." Alex added a drop of chemical to the paper strip and waited. The treated paper should have changed color, but it remained clear. "This can't be right." She waved Cyprien away. "This is going to take more time. Go play swords with Val."



He smiled and kissed the top of her head. "Don't be in here all night. I should like a shrieking orgasm myself."



Two hours later, Alexandra marched out of the lab and found Valentin and Michael sitting in his office, going over maps of the city.



"Val, I need some more equipment." She handed him the list. "As soon as possible. I also need to find out everything we can on Dr. Daniel Bradford."



Valentin read from the list. "A genetic analyzer, DNA sorting and matching software—Alexandra, what is all this for, if I may ask?"



"I tested the 'insulin' Jema Shaw has been using. Guess what? It's not insulin." She tossed a lab report on his desk. "It's plasma, two different sedatives, and what I think is a synthetic hormone. I don't know what the hell to call it. Personally I've never seen anything like it before."



Now Valentin looked completely dumbfounded. "What does this mean?"



"I don't know, but I can tell you this much," Alex said. "If Jema Shaw has been injecting herself with the same concoction every day, then she isn't being treated for diabetes. And since she'd be dead without insulin therapy, that would mean—"



The report slipped out of Jaus's hands. "She doesn't have diabetes."



"Good morning."



Jema blinked a few times to clear her eyes, and saw Daniel Bradford smiling at her. "Hi." She yawned and stretched. "Lord, did I oversleep again? This is becoming a terrible habit."



"No, honey, you didn't oversleep. You had a bad night." He checked her pulse. "I heard you moaning from the hall and I came to check on you. You left the window open and the room was like a refrigerator. I couldn't wake you up, either, so I had to give you a shot." His pleasant face filled with sorrow. "I know I said you were taking too many shots, Jem, but I didn't mean for you to start skipping them."



"I didn't." Jema felt confused. The mugginess in her head wasn't helping clarify things, either. "At least, I don't think I did." Her memory was crowded with confusing images from the long dream she'd had.



"I'm not going to say anything to your mother," he told her. "She's been feeling very low the last couple of weeks. I know—how can I tell—but low for Meryl is devastated for the rest of us. Now, keep those peepers open for a second." Brad-ford leaned forward to check her eyes with a penlight. "Do you want me to give you your morning?"



"No, I can do it." She didn't feel sick or weak, just tired and very thirsty. The fact that Daniel was talking to her as if she were a three-year-old made her feel irritable, too.



"I'll see you downstairs." Daniel rose and stared down at her. "You're sure there's nothing you want to tell me about last night?"



"I… fell asleep." She worked up a passably puzzled smile. "That's all I remember."



"If you say so." With one last, troubled look, Daniel left her.



"Except for the visit from the golden-eyed demon, who yelled at me and pushed me around the most disgusting place I've ever seen in my life." Jema pulled up her knees and rested her forehead against them. "Thierry."



Until last night, the dreams she remembered had been like a naughty little secret. What woman wouldn't want to go to sleep each night to be seduced by a demon who would shape himself to be whatever she desired in a man?



Until last night.



Jema clearly remembered every moment of the dream. It was not like any of the others. Everything had felt wrong. The colors, the smells, the places—none of it was anything she could have imagined. It had felt too real. He had been too real.



Thierry was her demon, of course. Same golden eyes, same dark, brooding looks, that air of edgy sensuality. But he had been different. There wasn't any of that demon-lover facade as there had been in the other dreams. Last night he had been a person. Someone as sad and lonely as she was. Even as disgusting as most of the dream had been, Jema wanted to go out and search the world until she found him. A man who was fantasy, who didn't exist.



A man who was more important than anything she had in reality.



"I'm not in love with him." She flung herself out of bed. "You can't fall in love with a dream man. Especially one who works in a slaughterhouse and says he's a seven-hundred-year-old vampire."



It was the pink foam she spit out after brushing her teeth that tried to convince her otherwise. The blood tinting her toothpaste wasn't coming from her gums. It was oozing from the inside of her lower lip.



From two brand-new, fang-shaped punctures.



Chapter 16



Thierry stayed away from Jema for the length of one day, unable to rest, unable to cease tormenting himself, until his own company became unbearable to him. As soon as the sun set, he drove to the museum and parked on the street across from the back lot where her little convertible sat. There was no guard tonight, and the lot gates were left open.



He would wait, and he would watch for her.



The hours passed in silence as Thierry brooded, waiting for her to emerge so that he could follow her home. He had learned nothing from Jema to help him find the men who had attacked Luisa Lopez, and perhaps he had imagined her secret, hidden knowledge. He had certainly deluded himself about many things concerning Jema.



I should never have come here. What was he doing in Chicago? What redemption could be had from slaughtering more men, and using a frail, innocent human woman to get to them? Where is the honor in this?



It was very late when Jema finally left the museum. Thierry hunched down as he watched her walk to her car, her purse swinging, a stack of papers in her arms. Everything inside him cried out for her, for the sanity of her. Once he saw her safely home, he would return to the city and hunt. Perhaps he would return to the residences of the men thought to be responsible for the attack on Luisa Lopez and enter the dreams of their neighbors to glean information from their minds. The men had to be Brethren. Thierry knew there was no redemption for him now, but he could prevent them from harming another human. That much he owed to Alexandra.



Jema stopped a few feet from her car and turned around, as if startled. Glass shattered and the lamp providing light for the parking lot went dark. Three men ran out of the alley on the opposite side of the building directly for Jema. One grabbed her purse, another knocked the papers out of her arms, and the third flung his arm around her neck.



Thierry was out of the car and running for them before the first paper touched the ground.



The men were not men, but animals. Then he saw that they were men wearing masks made to look like animals. They were shouting obscenities as they shoved Jema back and forth between them. Laughing, excited. Enjoying themselves.



Thierry jumped the fence and had his dagger in his hand as he saw the flash of a blade.



He hit the first from behind, pulling him back from Jema and slitting his throat in the same motion. The man ejected blood and his last breath at the same time before he toppled over.



One of the two left dragged Jema back toward the alley. "Get him!"



Thierry pivoted around to parry a small ax with his arm, squinting as the sharp head bit deep into his flesh. Behind the mask, flat eyes went wide with glee as the man hauled the ax backward and swung again.



Thierry caught his arm on the downswing and reversed it, shattering his elbow and driving the ax into the man's belly. Something came from the side and drove a thick bar of steel into his ribs. He wrenched the ax out of the sagging second man and drove the handle end between the legs of the third, who had come running back from the alley. He went down, squealing and clutching his crotch.



Thierry reached down with his bloody arm and pulled the last living man up by the collar. "Where is she?" He shook him, making his head jerk wildly. "What did you do to her?"



The man didn't answer, and his head drooped at an odd angle.



"Connard." Thierry dropped the body and ran for the alley where he had seen the man dragging Jema. He tracked her by her scent, and found her lying on the ground just around the corner, in the dark, unconscious.



He was on his knees, holding her in his arms. The smell of warm, ripe apples rose from her body and blocked out the exhaust-tinged city air. There was blood on her forehead, and she was so still he feared the worst. But no, there was her pulse, beating at the base of her throat. He kept his hand there, fearful that it would stop the moment he lifted his fingers. She wasn't moving, but she was breathing.



The gash across his left forearm was not closed, and more blood spattered the ground as he stood up with her. He carried her to her car and laid her carefully in the passenger seat before retrieving her keys from where she had dropped them. He paused only long enough to spit on one of the bodies before he got behind the wheel of Jema's car and started the engine.



Thierry didn't know how badly Jema was hurt. He could not take her to a hospital; there would be too many questions. He could not leave her in front of one, either. Bradford is a doctor. He will know what to do.



Keeping one hand on the wheel and one pressed against Jema's throat to monitor her pulse, Thierry drove. He didn't dare try to enter her unconscious mind while he was driving—and she could hardly be dreaming, not with that knot on her head—so he spoke to her.



"How could you be so careless to walk out there alone, so late at night, without an escort? Who allows you to do such things? Do these people at the museum wish you dead?"



He took a sharp turn and stepped on the accelerator to pass a slow-moving taxi.



"I think it is you who wish yourself an early death, that is what it is," he muttered. "You go out to crime scenes and pick over corpses, and then you lock yourself in that house or in that museum, surrounded by beauty that doesn't live, doesn't breathe, only grows more mold or disintegrates into dust. What sort of life is that?"