Vowed in Shadows (10 page)

Big hands yanked her from her perch.

“Asshole,” she said.

“Crazy bitch.” The man plunked her on her feet, not gently.

“Ecco, what are you doing out here?” Ducking under the docking bay door, Jonah appeared. “Nim?”

“Whoa,” said the man, gripping her. “Who turned up the AC?”

She yanked free of his hands still on her hips. The Chicago August morning was suddenly cooler. Maybe it was her extra-bare flesh. Or maybe just that bare flesh with Jonah's chilly gaze on it.

She tugged her skirt off the barbed wire and swore under her breath when she heard the rip. “I got tired of sitting in the car.”

“You left her in the car?” The man behind her—No wonder his name is Ecco, she thought with annoyance—laughed. “You thought that would save her from us?”

“No.” Nim leaned over to step into her skirt, and heard the sharp intake of breath from both men. She rolled her eyes before facing them. “He thought he was saving you from me.”

Ecco looked over his shoulder at Jonah, who said nothing.

She stuck her finger through the tear in the front of her skirt, right over the strap of her black thong. “Great. Why don't you just have a front doorbell?”

“Why didn't you wait for me as I asked?”

“You didn't ask,” Nim said. “You told.”

“Ooh, bad move,” Ecco said. “I bet that didn't work with your woman even a hundred years ago.”

Nim tightened every muscle in her body, like she was about to do an inverted lift against the pole, and punched the big man in his biceps. He yelped and jumped away from her.

“Good demon,” she murmured. She fixed Ecco with a hard eye. “Asshole. Don't compare me to other women.”

He rubbed his arm. “I guess not.”

Jonah's lips twitched, but she couldn't tell if he was about to laugh or yell at her. She didn't want to know. “Are you done here?”

He gave a curt nod. “Liam has the video. He'll print from it and make copies for the other talyan. They'll start the hunt tonight.”

“Good for them. Meanwhile, I was thinking. While I was waiting in the car.” She glared at him, in case he thought the punch had been for his benefit. “I think we should go back to the pawnshop.”

“But the anklet is gone. The man who took it won't return for a refund.”

“Maybe not. But those malice might. You said before that the bad demons sniff one another out, looking for a free meal.”

Ecco nodded. “That's why bad seems to always get worse.”

“So,” Nim said, “let's find out where the worse is going.”

Ecco clapped his hands together once. “I love malice. I'm in.”

“No.” Jonah jumped down from the docking bay. The thud of his boots sounded louder than they should have, and Nim lifted her eyebrows. “You were out all night.”

“So were you,” Ecco reminded him. “Only working half as hard as me, of course.” He lifted both hands and the gauntlets flashed as bright as his teeth. “But still.”

Nim cocked her fist and headed toward him again. He angled his forearm to block her, and the embedded razors glinted.

“Nim,” Jonah said warningly. “Ecco, don't be an . . .”

They both turned to look at him, and he rubbed his hand down his face. “It has been a long night. Ecco, go away.” He strode forward. “Nim, we're leaving. If you can keep your clothes on.”

“Now who's being an—” She huffed out a breath as he grabbed her hand. He whirled her into his embrace like an angry Astaire on demon 'roid rage. Then he spun them toward the padlocked gate. “But—”

His kick snapped the chain, and he frog-marched her out.

She scrambled to keep her sneakers under her but managed to wave to Ecco standing in the broken gate. “Bye.”

“Welcome to the party, thrall.” The big man raised one hand in answer.

“He didn't flip me off,” she said in wonderment.

“You made a friend.” Jonah's voice was sour.

“Is that why you wouldn't let me come in with you?”

“I didn't think I'd be so long. Liam had . . . questions.”

“About what?”

He shrugged.

“How I lost the anklet,” Nim guessed. “You told him how I was too dumb to know it was my demon inheritance.”

“Of course not. As leader of the league, he knows better than most how little we know. He would never blame you for your ignorance.”

She wasn't sure she appreciated the “ignorance” part. “But you blame me.”

“I blame myself. As soon as we identified you as the teshuva's target, I should have been with you.”

Like he'd had to be there for his wife, who'd died anyway.

Nim wasn't sure she liked being considered needy any more than ignorant. “Well, we're here now,” she said at last.

“So we are.” At the car, he held the passenger's door for her.

Maybe there were some parts of needy she could get used to. She slipped into the seat, and he closed the door gently behind her. She propped her feet up on the dashboard to keep her wire-scratched thighs off the scorching vinyl seats while he walked around the front of the car.

He was upset; she could tell by the hard edge of his jaw. And still he moved with a strict, almost painstaking efficiency. No screaming. No wild gesticulating. In a way, he was even scarier than some raging drunk. Because when the explosion came, she knew, it'd be bigger for having been held in so long.

When he got into the car, she asked, “Why did Ecco call me thrall?”

“It's a classification of teshuva. Like my bane demon.” He sat for a moment, the hook on the gear shaft. Then he finally looked over at her. “For once, I think he's right.”

His assessing stare, with one dubious wrinkle between his brows, as if she hadn't even lost her soul correctly, raised her hackles. “What's that supposed to mean?”

“The class of teshuva determines its . . . proclivities. ‘Thrall' is an old word for ‘slave.' And you were assuredly that.”

Now her blood pressure rose too. Except the angry pulse at the corners of her eyes didn't have her seeing red, but violet. “Maybe he meant
en
thrall, as in ‘enslaving others.' ”

“Perhaps. All demons specialize in temptation, but thrall demons are especially . . . tempting.”

The insulting pauses hadn't changed, nor had the doubtful set of his expression, and yet something in his gaze sharpened, focused on her. This time, the shiver was goose bumps that swept inward across her skin and tightened her breasts and belly.

“Could've been worse.” She pitched her voice toward husky. “I could've used my shirt to get over the barbed wire.”

“Did you hurt yourself?”

She cocked one knee toward him to reveal the inside of her thigh. The bright red scratches over the black lines of the
reven
were already fading. “Getting better. Good demon.”

His gaze fixed on her leg, and the shivers spiraled deeper to her core. Definitely enthralled.

She let her knee fall a little farther open to bump his thigh. Certain advantages to the bench seats on old crap cars.

Instead of tracking inward toward her thong as she intended, his eyes narrowed. “Don't put too much faith in it,” he warned. He started the car and clacked the hook against the wheel for emphasis.

“You'd know,” she said. When he slanted her a glance, she clarified—only fishing a very little bit—“I mean, you'd know because you were a missionary man, not because the demon let you down and lost your arm.”

But if he heard the question in her voice about the missionary part, he saw no need to enlighten her, unlike most missionaries.
“I
lost my arm.” He shook his head. “No, I didn't lose it. I knew exactly where it was. Trapped under a sheet of broken glass. I could have let Liam's woman die, burned up in a brimstone fire, but I left my arm in the inferno instead.”

Nim crossed her arms. “Yet another woman in your life.”

“Liam's woman, I said.”

She snorted. “I suppose he has both his hands.”

“Last I checked. Although he's juggling league business so fast, sometimes it's hard to tell.”

“His immortal managerial life must be so very hard.”

Jonah gave her another indecipherable look, then U-turned out of the parking space. “Interesting thought you had about the malice. If they'd gathered in such numbers so quickly after the appearance of a demonic artifact, they must have been already primed on you. An unbound demon acts as an attractive nuisance to the tenebrae, which we tried to mitigate with the energy sinks we placed around your apartment and the club.” He drove out of the warehouse district and toward her neighborhood. “In retrospect, perhaps I was unfair.”

“Which time?” Nim examined her nails.

“There was far too much demon sign at the club. I assumed with as much negative energy as the place had, demonic emanations were inevitable.”

“So strippers are automatically evil? Gee, thanks.”

“Actually, the arts usually confer a certain protective effect against the tenebrae. The art specifically, not the artist. I don't know that there has been any research into whether . . . burlesque counts as art, so far as demons are concerned.”

Nim snorted. “I'm a stripper, not a dancer anyway. But naughty isn't necessarily evil.”

“Says the Naughty Nymphette?” He lifted his eyebrows in pointed disbelief.

“It's just a stage name.”

“You mean your parents didn't choose it for you? Your talent wasn't obvious from birth?”

She gave him a long stare. “I like you better when you are silent and morose.”

“As do I. Being with you brings out new facets of my personality.”

“Lucky me.” But she wondered at the second spurt of warmth that went through her. Not embarrassment this time, but satisfaction. Corrupting a missionary man must earn extra points for a demon. “My parents named me Elaine, after the Lady of the Lake in the Merlin stories. I thought Elaine was boring; I liked the other versions better: Viviane, Niniane, Nivian, Nyneve, Nimue. I tried them all.”

“Already with the stage names,” he murmured. “Why did you settle on Nimue?”

She shrugged. “That's who I was when my parents split up. I was fifteen. After the divorce, I saw my dad at the end-of-the-school-year talent show and then never again.”

“You were the best ballerina,” Jonah guessed. “His abandonment ruined your chance at Juilliard.”

“I writhed around and lip-synched to Alanis Morissette. Sort of like ballet.”

His lips curled in amusement. “So you were destined for this career path?”

“Demonic possession, you mean?”

The wry twist of his mouth flatlined at the reminder. “Of course. Your penance trigger made any other path irrelevant.”

She wished she hadn't been so flip. Without that teasing lightness, the handsome lines of his face went stone-cold. “He left because his best friend, the guy in the lakeside cottage next to ours, had sex with me every summer from the time I was twelve.”

Jonah's hand tightened on the wheel until the plastic squeaked. “You were raped.”

“Shit. Who hasn't been?”

“Nim . . .”

She kept talking. Better to talk than to hear what he might say. “He didn't hurt me. I was a very mature twelve and did an exceedingly sultry performance of the lady emerging from the lake, wet T-shirt, pirouette, and everything.”

“I'm sorry,” Jonah said softly.

Damn it, those were the words she hadn't wanted to hear ever again. As if she cared about sorry. “A hundred years ago, when you were saving South America or Mongolia or wherever, what age did those girls lose their virginity?”

“It was Congo,” he said. “And that's really not the point.”

She fingered one dread that had fallen over her shoulder. “Maybe there, if we weren't so proper and civilized, my father could have stayed afterward, or at least looked me in the eye. Maybe when Mr. God-I-can't-stop-myself-I-need-you-so-much saw me getting ice cream at the bait shop, he wouldn't have pretended I was invisible, which made me all the more determined to attract him the next time. Maybe my mom wouldn't have acted like it never happened and told me to keep quiet.”

“No one could accuse you of being invisible or quiet when you dance.” His bland tone told her exactly how little he thought of her half-assed attempt—actually full, bare-assed—at sublimation.

She bristled. Easy for him to be self-righteous. Any idiot could tell, when he was at his most quiet and still, that was when he was most dangerous. “I dance so no one can doubt that it's mine. This body is mine. No one else's. No matter how much they pay, I choose.”

“Except this time,” he murmured. “With the demon.”

A chill crackled up her already stiff spine. But he was wrong. She hadn't handed her admittedly cockeyed principles to the demon. She'd given in to the man.

With a nonchalant shrug, she reminded him, “You said I said yes. Maybe I didn't quite understand, but I said yes.”

“Does that give you comfort?”

“Does it make you nervous that, yes, it does?”

“I wouldn't presume to judge.”

Funny, she heard all sorts of judgment in his tone. “Who wants to go through life feeling guilty, especially if you're immortal?”

He looked ahead. “Who indeed?”

“Oh, right. A missionary man. I guess I'd rather be a slut, then.”