It had taken all night to calm herself after Quution’s complete rejection.

That devious bastard. He knew she was up to something. Why couldn’t he be a mindless male ready to mount her like so many others?

She’d gotten to him. His desire scared him. For a few blissful seconds, he’d dropped his guard and she’d sensed his fear.

He was terrified of losing control. The lust she’d incited bothered him deeply. It wasn’t just that he wanted to fuck her, he was afraid of the innate vulnerability fucking required. He hated being enclosed in tight spaces, but at the same time space and freedom scared him.

So many secrets. She’d only tasted them. To her, they were like the candy beetles in the underworld. Sweet little treats with a satisfying crunch. Quution was full of them.

Ferreting out what he was up to regarding the underworld would take patience and a light touch. The other parts of himself he was hiding might be more attainable.

She started with what she knew about Quution.

His servant was another energy demon, Stryke. He was like the rock star of half-breeds, swoon worthy enough to make full-bloods want him. The last demon who’d tried to bend him to her will had failed so epically, she was dead now and her powers had been co-opted by a human—a former human, at any rate.

Stryke’s sire was a notorious half-breed, a guy who’d duped the Circle about his status as a full-blood and attained a spot. The first ever half-breed on the Circle. At the time, it’d been unthinkable.

Energy demons were unusually uncommon. Was it possible they were related? Had someone in Quution’s genetic pool dabbled with a half-breed? Unless it was him personally, it wouldn’t do her any good.

I’m disappointed in myself.

What would Xera say? Tweak your purple bits and get it together, Xan.

She paced her chamber. Okay, what else?

He hung out with vampires. Those vampires had caused trouble in the underworld. She stopped and scrutinized the floor at the tip of her sharp toenails. Where had the vampires been down here? How could she find out?

If she were Quution, she could trace their energy signatures.

She racked her brain for the name of the demon Stryke had skewered. Herpes? Hanta? Hypna. That was it. Her chamber was a maze away, but it was a place to start.

Xan wove through the interconnecting corridors. Everlasting torches lit the way. The time of day didn’t matter down here.

The stench of rotten flesh reached her before she turned a corner. Three forms huddled over a kill.

Another demon? Probably a halfling like her, killed by halflings like her, though these three were far down any evolutionary chain the underworld possessed. They probably didn’t know who she was, and if they did, they wouldn’t care. Food was their one and only goal.

She wasn’t cannibalistic like many of her kind. But if she didn’t tread cautiously, she’d become somebody’s dinner. Stay vigilant, stay alive. She’d hate to go down as the Circle member who became dessert because she stopped and sniffed the candy beetles.

Damn, they were blocking her way. All three demons had black, stubby horns sticking out of their scalp and patches of hair covering their bodies. Two men, judging from the lump of dangling flesh between their legs. And a woman, who’d pierced both her nipples and used a hunk of rock like the ear plugs humans wore. The being they feasted on—well, it was impossible to tell now.

“Just gotta get around ya here.” She calculated her path through them.

The female chortled and eyed Xan like she was the second course. “Looks like we get dessert, boys.”

Rising to a stooped position, the males sniffed. Or was that a chuckle? The gurgle made it hard to tell. And disgusting. But they hunched farther over their food like they feared she’d take it away. The ever-present terror that they’d starve rolled off them.

An odd concern for a cannibal who lived among its food source. She tilted her head as they shuffled toward her. Uncoordinated. Lumbering. Disorganized.

Ah. Shitty predators. Their food usually outran or outsmarted them. What a coincidence. That was just what she’d planned to do. She’d been fooling cannibals since she was able to spit.

She called on her powers. Would they ever get enough to eat? What if there was easy prey nearby? She gave them the impression that there were two young demonlings, lost and scared behind her a few turns. With short little legs, how could those poor young run away?

Then Xan threw in the suggestion that if the three lingered with her, they risked the mama finding her babies. No more vulnerable, tasty buffet.

The female lurched away from the pack to pass Xan and get at the fake food source. Xan’s lips twitched. The weaker the mind, the more impressionable it was.

Peering beyond Xan, the males had already dismissed her as nothing. Ducking around them, she nodded to the female as she passed.

The pace of the shuffling changed, dirt crunching under someone’s foot. Alarm bells blared in her mind. Xan spun around. The female lunged for her. Xan kicked her foot square in the demon’s chest. The other female stumbled back and tripped over her roadkill. Broken from their trance, the males rushed to aid their companion.

Lowering into to a crouch, Xan sent another image: the fictional demonlings heard their mama and were getting farther away.

Desperate for easier prey than one they’d have to fight, the three snarled at her once then ambled down the hall. Xan straightened. Once the halflings disappeared around a corner, she cursed herself. What had happened to staying vigilant? A good reminder not to get too cocky. She’d dismissed them as mindless and could’ve ended up on the menu when she’d sworn not to let the Circle business go to her head. She had to watch her back now more than ever—she wasn’t anonymous anymore.

It’d do her family no good to get dusted before she saved them. But after that, she’d have to figure out how to tell the Circle to take this damn position and suck it.

Rarely did she have to engage in physical fighting, and she hated unnecessary killing. But she was damn good at it. She could spin in midair and take out two targets, each one with a kick to the head. She could flip and twist, breaking bones and ultimately her target’s will. She healed so quickly that if her adversary had a weapon, it was a minor inconvenience.

Xera was even better than her in a physical fight.

Xan still couldn’t make sense of how Spaeth had caught Xera. The only thing that made any sense was Xoda. Spaeth must’ve gotten hold of her niece and coerced Xera the same way he had Xan.

Her search for Quution’s weakness would kill two scavenger beetles with one heel stomp. He gave her a valid reason to hunt the underworld without Spaeth realizing she was stalking him too.

She slowed as she reached Hypna’s old lair. Dying vines hung on the walls, and the floor was crusted over with old blood. Xan didn’t have to be a total empath to shudder at the terror seeped into the walls. If this room were in the human world, it’d have all those paranormal hunters camped out inside. Bad vibes to say the least. Hypna had tormented several demons in this space.

Xan waited a moment as if information were going to jump out at her. There was plenty of fear stamped into the walls, but it was a jumbled mess. Other emotions, probably lust and greed, and of course terror, clogged the fear.

Frustrated, Xan stomped into the room. Hypna had been up to more than simple torture for pleasure in her chamber. The vampires had hunted her down for a reason and not just to keep Stryke from her toxic clutches.

Carvings caught her eye.

Xan knelt at one wall and cleared away the vines, which crackled and disintegrated like a withered bouquet. The wall wasn’t smooth. Chunks had been gouged out. Epic tantrum, or a victim trying to escape?

Xan shrugged. Neither one helped her. She went to the other wall. Bits of old leaves flittered to the floor as she tugged vegetation out of her way. She crinkled her nose at the musty smell that rose when she handled the dying shrubbery.

The third wall was a bust. Same with the fourth.

Dammit.

She spun, her foot catching in old vines that pulled away from a rock, revealing a squiggly line beneath. Xan crept closer.

“Gross.” Shards of fingernails and claws littered the floor and had collected in the corner over time. Hypna hadn’t been a fan of housecleaning. She peered closer. They weren’t all from the same being. She studied the dried twines with a different eye.

Bindings. Hypna had imprisoned her victims until she’d been done playing with them.

She turned her attention back to the squiggly line. It was so low to the floor. Given the homemade restraints Hypna had been capable of summoning, the line had to be from one of her unfortunate dates and not her. The longer Xan looked, the more squiggles she found—and the more deliberate they seemed. At one end was a stick figure with long horns—Hypna, obviously—and she held a small stick bundle over her head. The bundle, too, had tiny horns. Hypna with a baby? Hypna with someone else’s baby?

Xan traced the line with her finger. A path. The rounded turns resembled the maze of the underworld. It wasn’t pointing to any one place. It was just some poor, suffering being’s last chance to imprint themself on the realm. This demon had been mapping the underworld when it landed him or her in Hypna’s clutches.

Using her forefinger to pierce her skin, she dipped her stout claw into the wound. She healed too quickly to carve the path into her arm, but blood became ink as she lined her arm with a copy of the wall map. There was one area of the drawing that called to her, a section of the underworld she’d never been to. Maybe it had to do with Quution, maybe not. Maybe it’d get her closer to finding her sister, maybe not.

Either way, it was her next stop.

Quution adjusted his position. He was sitting in a black SUV on the outer edges of the vampires’ compound. To travel to the human realm in his own form, he had to be bonded to a being from this realm. Since he refused to sacrifice his precious bond in order to make travel between realms easier, he used human hosts instead.

Thanks to his energy abilities, he was able to choose hosts susceptible to his possession instead of convincing or tricking them into being a host via a series of incantations.

Why had he picked a host with a small bladder? He had to keep stopping his meeting with Demetrius every ten minutes to take a piss.

It was bad enough he kept distracting himself. If he didn’t deliberately concentrate on Demetrius, his mind wandered back to Xan and how she’d rimmed the tip of the scroll with one elegant finger. Regressing back to his formative years, he let his imagination turn the scroll into his dick.

“Q? Dude?” Demetrius snapped his fingers. “You gotta take another leak?”

Quution smiled tightly, vowing never to use this middle-aged host again. “Apologies. I don’t believe this host realizes he has developed diabetes.” The illness was what had made the host an easy target, but disappearing into the tree line to whiz was a pain. He hopped out and found a place to do his business.

Refusing to let the delay go to waste, Quution spread out his senses, dulled as they were in a host. He listened for a change in the energy vibes around him. Strongly suspecting the compound was under surveillance, he never let his guard down when he came here.

But if they were being watched, no one was close. They certainly couldn’t hear him discuss plans with Demetrius.

He treaded back to the SUV and got in. Demetrius handed him a bottle of sanitizer. The male had been around Quution long enough to know his quirks. Not washing his hands after peeing with someone else’s genitals gave him hives.

“The Synod is on board,” Demetrius explained. He was only one of the government panel that oversaw vampires and shifters, but he was also the only one Quution did business with. Bastian was a backup, but the fewer ears that heard plans spoken out loud, the better. “They want to know the spells that will erect the wards and seal off the underworld. They’re too far removed from this type of power to trust the underworld with it.” What Demetrius didn’t say was that the Synod didn’t entirely trust Quution with that power either.

“I’m still researching how the incantations and wards would work. And the know-how must be limited to me—for now,” he added when Demetrius’s gaze grew weary from being tugged in too many directions.

“Not even a loose outline?” Demetrius asked hopefully.

Quution shook his head. “They already want to kill me just because I’m me and it’s the underworld. If this gets out…” He’d be hunted until the all-too-soon end of his days. Then who would the Synod get to do their dirty work in the underworld? Stryke and Melody were the only other options, and they had mates who would stand with them until the bloody end.

No, this was for Quution to do alone. He wasn’t above duping his own kind for the sake of the human realm. Demons weren’t born to work together.

“Worst-case scenario,” Demetrius said. “All hell breaks loose, literally. The Circle finds out that you plan to eternally anchor them to the underworld. Then what?”

Then I die and that’s the end of it.

“Some of the half-breeds will see the need, but I doubt they could overpower the rest of the greedy realm. Sure, maybe Stryke could do it, but then you’re risking Zoey. And Melody can’t, though she’d try. Then you’re also adding Creed into the mix. Either risk me, or risk four others. Thus the need for secrecy. I just need to find the missing part of the binding spell.” To ensure he could bind himself to this realm, or he’d be as imprisoned as the rest of them.

“I’ll get them to understand,” Demetrius said. “One way or another. My entire team trusts you, and that’s the only reason they aren’t waiting outside of this vehicle.”

The Synod would just have to be patient. “The problems in this realm, they are getting worse?”

Demetrius’s eyes darkened and he nodded. “It’s ugly. We’ve found whole houses of vampires slaughtered; we suspect because they refused to host demons. Creed has set up surveillance on every rich vampire’s home, we’re sweeping the streets where half-breeds infect destitute humans like lice, and…we’re fucking losing ground. They’re insidious at best, outright homicidal at worst.”

Right, time was of the essence. “I’d better return this body.” After grabbing a bit to eat. The host’s blood sugar was dropping and the nausea and spinning head wouldn’t make further discussion comprehensible.

Demetrius handed over a vial and started the SUV. To keep the spotlight off Quution, he’d been tasked with collecting hair or blood from Melody. A curly blond hair was coiled inside the container. Perfect.

Quution should’ve collected a drop of blood from Xan when she’d fought for her spot on the Circle, but he’d been mesmerized. She’d been a graceful fighter, and only one of her competitors had managed to shed blood. The droplet had been just as unique as the female, incandescent purple, and once dried it had resembled mother of pearl—just like the gemstone Xan was. But it’d gotten mingled in all the other blood and grit on the ground. He’d missed his chance. He couldn’t miss another.

Except, he had. Turning her down may not have worked in his favor, but it had helped his sanity.

Exiting Demetrius’s vehicle, Quution returned to the one he’d used to meet with the male. The drive back to Freemont was uneventful. Quution stared out the window and watched people go about their evening. Some walked arm in arm. His host lived in the suburbs and it was still early enough to see kids running inside from some unknown errand.

Quution envied them. What would it be like to live in ignorance, to have a demon drive right by and not know, not even think it was possible?

He’d leave his host and go back to his own dismal home. The human he’d possessed would find himself parked in a gas station parking lot, not remembering much of the last several hours. Most hosts knew they were being possessed, but Quution was able to hide himself and take over so completely he could save the humans any angst.

Quution parked at a gas station, went inside, and bought a package of trail mix. Back in the car, he munched on the snack as he sifted through his host’s memories.

He had a wife. Kids. Feared for his health. Wanted to do better for them.

Quution popped a cashew in his mouth. Were they so much different? Quution wanted to do better for future generations of his kind, but most days it was hopeless. Cruelty was bred into them. There was a reason demons had been driven to a different realm. He couldn’t allow that kind of mentality into the human realm. They already fought their own inner demons; they didn’t need real demons too.