Ravenous

'You put on quite a show, Detective,' Jenny said, as if she had heard his thoughts. Probably had.

She shifted her position on the visitor's chair, uncrossing her long legs, crossing them the other way. Dark jeans. High-heeled boots. Scarlet hoodie. New clothes all around. The evil-entity business must be improving.

'What did you do to me?' Mac barely recognized his own voice. Every syllable vibrated in a raw, parched throat. Vaguely he remembered shouting. Hurting. Both that memory and the present were surreal, as if he were floating along in a theme park ride and events were just murals on the wall.

Jenny heaved a bored sigh and wound a lock of long blond hair around her forefinger. 'Hard to explain what I did. What I am. What you're going to be. A bit like telling a baby how to walk. It'll all make sense soon enough.'

'Spare me the supervillain crap.'

'Don't knock it till you've tried it.' Rising, she crossed to the bed and rested one hip by his knees. The mattress dipped, and he felt the warmth of her body through the covers.

Bending forward, Jenny began unbuckling the strap that held his right wrist. Her hoodie was only half- zipped, showing a skimp of black tank top beneath. He got an eyeful of warm, white, round flesh that looked as soft as goose down. Oh, yeah.

She seemed to be taking a long time with the strap. The blanket over his belly stirred, his mind backpedaling but his body stupidly game.

'In case you're wondering,' Jenny said, 'I sent your friend on her way.'

Holly. He had a fleeting image of Holly's face looking down at him. That snippet was followed by other, harsher sensations. Sickness. An ambulance. Pain. Mac blinked, the recollections quashing his body's reaction. 'Is she all right?'

Jenny kept working at the stubborn buckle. 'Of course. The charm she wore limited what I could do in the few seconds before hospital security came running in answer to your screams. She won't remember being here, though. Nothing, in fact, after finishing the dinner you made. She has great memories of that meal, by the way. Your culinary skills made quite an impression.'

'How did you—'

'As a point of fact, I did not have to do much at all.' She glanced up, eyes glinting with mischief. 'She had to leave. The hospital staff thought she'd been torturing you with a voodoo curse and tossed her out on her ear. Nasty things, those homemade charms.'

'Wait. Wait. What charms?'

'That's what burned you. That's what kept me from really getting a grip on your friend.'

Foreboding suffocated Mac. 'Then how did you wipe her memory? Did you kiss her?'

'Not yet.' Jenny gave a sly smile. 'Don't worry; she'll wake up safe and sound in her own bed, believing you're just fine. I put the rest of her memories back where I found them. There just wasn't time to do more.'

The strap came loose, and Mac flexed his arm, feeling a rush of blood to his fingers. If Holly doesn't remember anything after the meal, she won't know where I am or what happened to me. No one will. Oh, God, what do I do?

Jenny reached across his body to work on the other arm, her breasts close and ripe. 'It wasn't time for me to take her yet, anyway.'

'Huh?' The other strap released, giving him blessed freedom.

'I tried to take her before, but she was too strong. When I'm ready'—Jenny smiled, tapping one finger on Mac's chin—'and I've made her weak, you're going to bring her to me.'

A lock of her hair brushed Mac's arm, too intimate, too close. The strange fascination Jenny held for him snapped like old string. He lunged, his hands wrapping around her slim throat, bearing her down onto the bed.

'Let me go,' he growled. 'Whatever you've done, take it back.'

Jenny gasped, then chuckled, daring him with her eyes. A thrill of revulsion curled his innards. Mac squeezed harder, desperate to silence that mocking laugh, sure the delicate architecture of her spine must snap.

She scrabbled for his hands, prying them apart with horrifying strength. Quick as a cat, she grabbed Mac's shoulders and pressed her mouth to his, thrusting deep with her tongue.

He suddenly knew he wasn't getting out of there alive.

This kiss was nothing like the first time. Her lips were cold, sweet as chilled melon, smooth as moonlight— and she was feeding him something. It was the stuff of life itself clinging to her tongue, slipping over his teeth and into his soul like a pearl of iced honey. He shuddered with an echo of release, as if on some other plane they were having mind-blowing sex.

Here, the orgasm was all about drinking life.

Within a moment all sickness vanished. His body surged with tingling energy. He was reborn, both the spirit and the warm, hard-bodied man. Reborn wholly and bestially ravenous.

She was feeding him her sweet evil.

Demon, he thought. He'd read about them, but now the word meant new things.

Powerful things.

Jenny kissed him again, and his entire being surged toward her with bloodthirsty greed, squandering itself for a taste of that cold elixir. As he begged with his body, with his lips, Jenny licked and sucked, consuming, teasing, devouring Mac's life force and poisoning him with her own, one delicious drop at a time.

That poison was his sole relief. He drank it down even as a dark vacuum blossomed inside him, leaving a damnation of hunger in place of his soul.

Demon!

Chapter 17

Holly woke from a bizarre dream about her big sister, Ashe, driving around in a tiny blue toy car. The car was about six inches long, but in the logic of dreams, her adult sibling fit in it just fine. If the image had significance, it was expertly disguised.

Odd, because Holly seldom dreamed about her family. She and Ashe rarely even spoke.

Rising from her bed, Holly stopped in surprise, her foot halfway into her mule slipper. She never went to bed without getting undressed, and yet she still wore the little black dress from last night. With morning-after- the-night-before paranoia, she began checking herself over, stomach knotting at what she might discover.

The charm bag had wound its way around so it was hanging down her back. When did I put that on? It looked a little deflated, but she had been lying on it.

Holly gazed into the mirror, contemplating the Dalfesque ruin of her makeup. She had raccoon eyes from not-quite-waterproof mascara. Her hair was doing the bed-head thing. Otherwise she was fine. Weird.

Was I drunk? No, if she'd had that much to drink she'd feel sick. Had Mac slipped something into her drink? That didn't seem likely, but everything after dinner was a blank.

This had happened once before, after that big-M spell went bad when she was a kid. The spell that she and Ashe had done. Maybe that's why I was dreaming about her. Something similar happened. Except then a whole year had disappeared. This time she was missing only a few hours. And it tasted different in her mind, a mustiness she couldn't quite place. Not the same, then.

She looked out the window. Her car was in the driveway, paint intact, everything normal. Double weird.

Wheeling away, she went to take a shower. I have to shake this mood. It was the first day of school. Remember? The cute boyfriend, the college degree, the successful business? Time to go for your goals.