Alek flung open the passenger side door to his truck and placed Lily on the seat with as much care as the urgency of the situation allowed.

“Buckle up,” he barked and slammed the door.

He jumped in on the driver’s side, started the truck, and tore out of the parking lot. Heart racing a million miles a minute, he forced himself to slow down enough to avoid cop attention. He focused on his breathing—in, out, in, out—centering himself in the sensations of the air leaving his nose, his chest heaving.

His pulse decelerated. His thoughts cleared.

That was a close call.

He shot a glance at Lily. “You okay?”

She had her fingers buried in her hair on both sides of her face, her palms pressing against her temples. “I attacked a witch.”

“Yes.” He didn’t know what else to say. He couldn’t even start to process the fact she’d done so to help him.

“I almost killed her.” She was staring out the window, her eyes troubled, her face ashen.

“But you didn’t.”

“Not for lack of trying. If you hadn’t pulled me off her…”

He moved before he could second-guess himself, reaching out to clasp one of her hands. Gently he squeezed, anchoring her. The scattered, oscillating colors in her aura calmed, smoothed out. She exhaled—and squeezed his hand back.

“You were overwhelmed,” he said, warmth spreading in his chest, “acting on instinct. This is all still new to you. You shouldn’t blame yourself.”

“Doesn’t matter.” Her voice was but a rasp. “They will.”

“Who?”

“The other witches.”

He frowned. “She attacked you. You defended yourself. In my book, it’s justified to fight back.”

She shook her head, still holding onto his hand, firming her grip. “You don’t understand. I attacked a witch.” She faced him then, shadows in her eyes. “It’s anathema. The highest form of treason among our kind. And it wasn’t even in self-defense. I defended you. A demon.” Her lower lip trembled. “I just committed the worst crime possible in my community. Well, second worst. You kept me from doing the worst.”

He struggled for words. Hell, he’d never been good at talking. Dima, his twin brother, was the one to look to for verbal reassurance. He’d never had to console a female before, and certainly not one as desolate as the witch-turned-demon sitting next to him. And yet he wanted nothing more than to ease her pain, lift her sorrow, and make her believe everything would work out fine.

He cleared his throat. “Your situation is unusual, Lilichka. Far as I know, there’s never been a witch before who was transformed into a demon. If you’d still been a witch, you wouldn’t have reacted that way. Your entire system is in uproar. Your mind is too rattled yet to leash your instincts. I’m sure the other witches will acknowledge that and make concessions.”

She turned away, staring out the window with an air so forlorn he wanted to pull her close and hold her until she felt better. Withdrawing her hand from his, she muttered something that sounded like, “Not bloody likely.”

Silence wove between them, filling the truck’s cabin with sad tension.

Taking a deep breath, he said, “You still need to feed.” He hated that he had to bring it up, now of all times, but the parts of her tvaglakshana peeking out from the neckline of her T-shirt had faded to a light henna again.

She jerked, her hands clenching. “Right.” A cascade of darkness rippled through her energy.

He parked the truck on the street a few blocks from his target. They got out of the car, the mild night wrapping around them, and he led Lily toward the theater’s entrance. He gestured for her to wait with him pretending to peruse the announcements of upcoming plays.

A few minutes later, the doors opened and the audience streamed out onto the sidewalk. He scanned the crowd, the multitude of auras coloring the air in a rainbow of energy. A couple of college-age girls chatting excitedly about the production. A mixed group of men and women, laughing and talking about where to go for drinks. And then there was a smudge within the quilt of colorful auras.

He homed in on the man exuding that energy. Nudging Lily, he nodded furtively toward the older guy. “There,” he murmured, his voice pitched low so only Lily would hear him with her enhanced demon senses. “See that man with the graying hair and red scarf?”

She nodded. “What about him?”

“Focus on his aura. What’s it like?”

Her forehead scrunched up in lines of concentration. “It’s darker. And it feels…wrong. It’s like an oil spill, almost as if it’s polluting the air around him. But he’s not sick.”

“No. At least his body isn’t. We’ll follow him.”

After the man waved goodbye to his friends, he sauntered down the street. Alek and Lily trailed after him, taking care to appear casual, a couple out for a stroll around the neighborhood.

When the old man approached his car, which was parked in an open lot, Alek sped up to catch up to him. He tapped the guy on the shoulder.

The human turned, his expression friendly but wary. “May I help you?”

“Yes,” Alek said. “Yes, you may indeed. Let’s drive somewhere, shall we?”

He slipped into the man’s mind like a breeze through a crack in a window. Easy, so easy. No mental shields at all. Plenty of darkness, though, and he fought bile rising up in his throat at the images he found in the guy’s memories. He wrenched control over his higher faculties from him and proceeded to supply the human’s mind with instructions for what to do.

“Get in the car,” Alek told Lily while mentally ordering the man to open the driver’s side door and sit down.

Lily took the front passenger seat, and Alek slid onto the back seat. Under his mental control, the human steered through the nightly traffic, toward a place where Alek could teach Lily without the risk of being interrupted.

“His energy makes my skin crawl,” Lily whispered.

“Yeah,” Alek said darkly. “Mine, too.” He took a deep breath, trying to shake the nausea boiling in his stomach at the details of the man’s sick proclivities. Rage a hot simmer underneath his skin, he leaned forward, catching Lily’s eyes. “Go into his mind. It’s time you learn how.”

She glanced at the human, who drove obediently in silence, thanks to the grasp Alek still had on his mind. “I know a little about reading thoughts. Witches can do it, too, you know.” There was a slight edge to her voice.

“Not as well as we do. Slip into his mind. Follow the darker threads, the ones that feel like lines of tar. Look for the source.”

Her pupils dilated, power sparking off her as she used her demon gifts to dive into the man’s mind.

“Do you see his memories? That cluster of thoughts, images, feelings, the one that tastes like three-day-old trash smells?”

She gasped, and shook her head once, hard. Fire and night bled into her eyes, her aura a violent red, exploding outward in a crushing wave. “No. Oh gods, no. Those kids…all those children. I— You fucking bastard.” With a roar, she lunged at the human.

The car swerved precariously. Tires screeched. Alek jumped forward, grabbed Lily’s hands and pulled her away from the man. Blood dripped from her claws. Her eyes were an inferno of swirling red and black. Snarling, she writhed in Alek’s grip, panting, straining to get to the human, who—under Alek’s command—had gotten the car under control again.

Lily hissed, baring her teeth. “You godsdamned son of a bitch!”

“Lily, enough!”

“Let me rip out his fucking throat!”

“Stop it.” Alek grabbed her chin and forced her to look at him. “Calm down. You get to kill him, okay? Just not now. We’re on the road, and he’s driving. Do you want us to end up smashed into a tree? Or flagged down by a cop car? Calm. Down.”

Her breath came in heavy pants, her eyes still a vivid display of demon rage.

“Breathe, tsvetochek.” He caressed her cheek, stroked over the pulse point on her wrist with the fingers of his other hand.

Her gaze roved over his face, locked onto his eyes, and slowly the red and black receded, the natural indigo returning bit by bit. “He’s a fucking monster,” she whispered, her voice broken.

“Yes.” He continued to stroke her, petting her down from her wrath. “That’s why I picked him for you.”

“How did you know he was going to be there at the theater?”

“I didn’t. I just figured chances would be good we’d find someone with a despicable skeleton in their closet. If not him, then someone else. If not there, then at some other joint in the city. You’d be surprised how many there are like him walking around undetected, unchecked.”

She blinked, sucking in air through her nose, her lips pressed tightly together. “I always knew the dark figure of these…cases…is a lot higher than the reported one.” When she glanced at the human piece of trash again, her eyes reignited with demon red, but this time she restrained herself.

Still, Alek kept one hand on her shoulder, gently massaging her, grounding her with touch. He steered the man’s mind to drive the car into the deserted parking lot next to a trailhead, and ordered the guy to sit with idle hands in his lap, staring unseeing out through the windshield.

On the outside, the man was the epitome of calm, a perfect picture of a Zen monk immersed in meditation. Inside, though, his mind was in upheaval underneath the cold control of Alek’s grip, his emotions churning, fear eating at him with the knowledge of being in the presence of two predators, both of whom clearly wanted to end his life. Alek didn’t do a damn thing to calm the guy’s emotions or alleviate his fears. Bastard deserved every fucking second of terror before he drew his last breath.

“Now,” he said to Lily, leaning forward again, “our mind-control abilities are stronger than a witch’s. Means that, in addition to reading minds, we can insert commands and basically use humans or weak-minded otherworld creatures like puppets whose strings we pull. Think of something for him to do, and then try to push that thought into his brain, like an imperative.”

She didn’t hesitate for one second. Her eyes blazed with fire, and the next instant, the human punched himself in the face. He grunted with pain. Blood spurted from his nose.

“All right, let’s not take this too far.” Alek laid a hand on her shoulder, squeezed. “Just FYI, when you make your prey hurt themselves, keep it to non-fatal injuries, and—ideally—ones that will prove to be self-inflicted. One reason I like to use mind control when taking prana is to subdue the prey, but another is that the fewer wounds the body has, the less likely the police will rule it a homicide. Too many violent deaths in the city, and the human authorities get nervous. Make it look like a heart attack, suicide, or accident, and you’re good.”

Her aura pulsed with rage. “I want to hurt him some more.”

He regarded her for a moment, studied the darkness in her energy, the bloodlust pouring off her. “How about you take his prana instead, hm?”

* * *

Alek’s gentle words barely pierced the red mist clouding Lily’s mind. Her body hummed with need, with hunger. The desire to hurt, maim, kill crackled over her nerve endings, sparked a low-level buzz of electricity in her system.

She ordered the human to punch himself again. The crunch of his nose giving way under the blow was grimly satisfying.

“Lilichka.” Alek put a finger under her chin, turned her to face him.

Reluctantly, she tore her attention away from the glowing temptation of the human’s life force and met Alek’s silver-gold eyes.

“Stop.” He spoke the word softly, and yet it held a punch of authority.

“Why?” Defiance made her clench her jaw tight.

He rubbed his thumb over her chin, brushed her lower lip. “Because, as much as you want to hurt him right now, you might see things differently later. Hunger and the frenzy of feeding have a way of distorting our perceptions. Once you’re sated and more in control of yourself again, you’ll hate yourself for giving in to that kind of darkness.”

“You don’t know that. You don’t know me.”

“Maybe not as well as your friends and family, but I do know a few things. And one of them is that you’re kind at heart. You may put on a tough and irreverent front sometimes, acting like you don’t take much seriously. But deep down, you care. Maybe too much about a lot of things, and that’s why you play it off with jokes.”

She trembled. Not her hands, though, but rather inside. It was a whole-soul shiver that started deep and spread to the surface. How could he read her so well? The way he casually described her emotional makeup was unnerving.

“If you hurt him,” Alek said, his voice a low, rough caress, “it’ll hurt you. And I don’t want to see you in pain. That’s why I’m asking you to stop.” His eyes, the gold luminous in the night, held her spellbound.

He was asking her. Not ordering, not demanding. Asking.

Something clicked into place inside.

She nodded. “How do I take his prana?”

A smile ghosted over his lips, gone again in a second. “You’ve already been in his mind. Now you’ll need to go deeper. I know, I know, it’ll be disgusting.” He held up a hand to stave off her protest. “But you need to tap into the most primal, subconscious part of him, into his soul. That’s where you’ll find the center of his prana. You’ll feel it. Once you got it, grab it and pull it out. Be sure to let go of his mind before you take the last of his life force. If you hold on too long, he’ll drag you down with him.”

Puffing up her cheeks, she exhaled. “Okay. I can do this.”

He squeezed her shoulder. “I’m here.”

She sent him a quick look of appreciation and then focused on the human. Diving into his mind, she resisted the images that barreled toward her. Revulsion crawled over her skin. If she never had to see those memories again, it would be too soon. Suppressing the shiver that threatened at the sick darkness of the human’s mind, she burrowed deeper. Layers upon layers of thoughts, emotions, urges, motives, memories. The entirety of a human life, compressed into a what seemed such a small space, and was yet vaster than expected.

Finally, she locked onto the dead center of it all. It held the core—or in his particular case, the nadir, the lowest, basest part—of his soul, his life force. His prana glowed here, blindingly bright, even though it was still tainted and smudged in a way that Baz’s energy, for example, wasn’t.

She mentally grabbed the shining ball of power—and pulled. Back she went through the memories and the sludge and the nauseating sickness of the human’s mind, until she resurfaced, reconnected with the here and now, and inhaled the glowing life force she drew from his mouth.

Remembering how Alek had fed, she’d positioned herself so close to the man’s face that less than an inch separated their lips. She took care not to breathe through her nose, having no inclination whatsoever to inhale the guy’s scent.

Her one hand was braced on the backrest of the driver’s seat, and with her other hand she grasped the steering wheel, balancing herself. When the human’s prana fused with her own, every single cell in her body sighed in relief. The ache in her limbs—which had been a constant low-level annoyance—vanished. Her heart pumped faster, blood rushed through her veins, newly invigorated. Power zapped through her, an energetic current that nourished her. The feeling of becoming hollow from the inside out lessened, dissolved in the joy of being once more complete, healthy, strong.

Somewhere in the back of her bliss-soaked brain, swirled the thought that she’d just killed. Not a demon, but a human. Not in defense, or to protect, but to sate her hunger, to slake a need she’d never had before. One she shouldn’t even have. One that was wrong. The thought latched onto to her, clawed its way to the forefront of her mind, pierced and tainted the joy of the new power coursing through her veins.

Her chest rose and fell with her fast breaths, and she jerked back, her hand groping for the handle of the car door. She caught it, threw the door open and stumbled out.

“Lily.” Alek’s voice followed her retreat, and then he was jumping out of the car, too.

Heart thumping against her rib cage, she speed-walked away, toward the trail entrance. Alek’s footsteps sounded behind her on the asphalt of the parking lot, then muffled on the rain-soaked dirt of the hiking path.

Her breath caught in her throat. Don’t think, don’t think, don’t think. She sped up, ran down the trail, deeper into the welcoming darkness of the forest.

“Lily, stop.” Alek’s voice behind her.

No. She had to keep running. If she stopped, she’d start thinking about what she’d just done. Not only that—she’d feel it.

Nope, nope, nope. She could do this, run until—

A hand grabbed her elbow, made her stumble, and spun her around. She gasped and landed in Alek’s arms. Her fingers dug into his T-shirt. He steadied her, his hands on her waist.

“Tell me what’s going on.”