The Demon in Me

was she supposed to function like this? She locked the door behind her. “How close do we have to stay to each other?”

“I have no idea.” He crammed the rest of the peanut butter on toast in his mouth and swallowed a mouthful of coffee from the mug he still held.

How could he be so blase about something so important? If he had to follow her everywhere, then she wanted to know how close he had to be. She needed her space.

She walked down the hall to the elevator and pressed the button. A moment later it opened and she got in.

Darrak looked over his shoulder at the locked door of her apartment. “I need to put your mug back.”

“No time.”

“Okay, but if you—”

The doors on the elevator closed before he had a chance to get in. Eden jabbed at the ground floor button. She heard Darrak yell her name, and a bang as he pounded on the elevator door, and then a crash.

Had he dropped her Snoopy mug?

The elevator began to descend slowly and she stifled the immediate feeling of guilt that swelled inside of her.

She wanted to see how far apart they could be. The opportunity had just presented itself nicely.

By the eighth floor she began to feel a bit light-headed. She brought a hand to her forehead and inhaled shakily. She didn’t remember feeling that way when Darrak tried to walk out of the office yesterday.

The impromptu experiment was working.

Six floors at approximately ten feet per floor? That was sixty feet.

Seventy feet.

Eighty.

A sharp pain wrenched through her stomach. She doubled over and staggered back until she hit the wall of the elevator. A moment later, thick black smoke slithered in through the crack at the top of the elevator door. It moved to pool on the floor, then slowly took form.

Just before the doors opened on ground level, Darrak had fully rematerialized. He crouched on the floor at her feet, his chest heaving. Sweat beaded his forehead. His current expression was anything but that of the pleasant and amiable Darrak she’d begun to expect. In fact, he looked furious.

She’d wanted to see what would happen — to test their boundaries and perhaps find out that they didn’t actually have any, but now the guilt returned to replace the pain that she’d felt before.

“Don’t do that again,” he said darkly. “Please.”

She swallowed hard. Well, at least he said please.

“I just wanted to see if we could—”

He rose to his feet, grabbed her upper arms firmly, and pushed her up against the mirrored elevator wall. In human form, he was very tall. And big. And strong. She suddenly felt extremely intimidated by him — especially by that angry look in his blue eyes that for a split second she swore changed to a strange, flickering amber.

“You want to get rid of me.” Despite the fiery look in his gaze, the words were as sharp and cold as icicles. “I get it. We both want that. Do you think I want to put up with you every hour of the day, either? Think again. But right now we can’t do anything but try to make this work.”

“Let go of me.”

“First I want to make sure you understand me.” His eyes narrowed. “And just so you know, being forced to lose form like that hurts like hell. And I know what Hell feels like.”

“I understand,” she said through clenched teeth, before her own swell of anger faded. She’d only wanted to test a theory, not cause him any more pain. “I felt something unpleasant this time, too.”

“Of course you did.”

She frowned at his quick agreement. “But yesterday I didn’t feel anything when you tried to leave the office. And even during the exorcism… I only felt a twinge. But today it was actually… painful.”

“Lucky you.” A cold, humorless smile curled his lips. “It means we’re bonding.”

“Which means what?”

“Enough time has passed since I first possessed you that not only do I depend entirely on your physical and unusual psychic energy to exist, you’ve also begun to depend on me as well.”

She blinked up at him. “I don’t understand.”

“Think of it like your morning cup of coffee. You get used to having it every day until one day you don’t. Then you get a headache from the caffeine withdrawal. For now it’s still mild. We haven’t quite crossed the line into heroin territory yet.”

Her eyes widened. “I’m becoming addicted to you?”

He raised an eyebrow. “You say it like it’s a bad thing.”

Darrak hadn’t let go of her and still had her effortlessly pressed up against the elevator wall. The doors stayed open at ground level, but no one was in the lobby to see them.

“It is a bad thing,” she said firmly.

“Then it’s just one more reason why testing our limits shouldn’t be on your daily to-do list. Just remember, Eden, I want this over infinitely more than you do.”

Her jaw clenched. “I hate this.”

“So do I. Bottom line, you don’t have to like me and I don’t have to like you. But until we find the witch, we’re stuck together.”

“What if we can’t find her?”

He looked at her for a long moment and any mild edge of humor left his expression completely. “Then a year from now I’ll be looking for a new host.”

“Why?”

“Because that’s when you’re going to die.”

With that, he finally released her and left the elevator.

CHAPTER 8

Eden caught up to the demon outside the building. “What the hell did you just say?”

His shoulders stiffened and he stopped walking. “None of my former hosts have lived more than a year from when I possessed them.”

Her mouth felt dry. “I’m going to die in a year.”

“Only if we haven’t fixed this problem.” Darrak turned so she could see his expression was stony.

Just when she thought this situation sucked as hard as it possibly could, it started sucking just a little bit more.

“So you’ve never possessed anyone for more than a year at a time?”

“That’s what it means.” Some of that angry expression left his face when he saw the reaction his latest newsflash had caused. “One year. And that’s if they don’t get themselves killed before that deadline. Pardon the expression.”

Her breath caught and a wave of nausea rushed through her. She bent over and braced her hands on her knees. “Oh, my God. I think I’m going to be sick.”

“We’ll fix this. I promise. Don’t puke.”

She tried to breathe. “How many people have you killed?”

He looked confused. “What?”

“Some of them probably didn’t even realize what was going on, right? You killed them just by using their bodies. Hundreds of them.” She actually gagged at the horrible thought.

He opened his mouth as if to protest, but then closed it. “I know it doesn’t look good. Being a demon, my first impulse is self-preservation — it’s ingrained in me. I know it won’t make much of a difference to you, but after I realized the problem, I tried very hard to find people the world wouldn’t mind losing.”

Eden took in a shaky breath. “What does that mean?”

He reached out as if he was going to touch her shoulder, but then pulled his hand back when she flinched away from him. “Like the serial killer from yesterday. The world is better off without him in it. I try to choose bad people whose souls are already black.”