“What have you done?” I demanded.
“I told you…” he replied with a smirk. “You’re the one who chose not to listen.”
Link with me… I cried out in frustration. He was right, the son of a—
“You bound me to you?” I exclaimed. “Arsehole!”
Elijah shrugged. “I had to make sure you’d hold up your end of the bargain.”
“You tricked me!”
“I didn’t trick you,” he argued. “I just omitted a few details.”
“That’s the same thing!”
“You really need to lower your voice.” He stood and walked the two steps to the bathroom and opened the door, then turned on the light. “You want a shower? You smell.”
He was so irritating. I vaulted over the couch, grabbed the door handle, and slammed it closed.
Nausea spread through me and I winced. He was tugging at the link. “Stop it.”
“Just making sure you’re still there.” He smirked, pleased with himself.
“Why did you kill that demon?” I demanded, deciding to start small. “The one at the club. You had no reason to help me.”
“It was a Wanderer.”
I frowned, not understanding. “Wanderer?”
“For all your prowess, you Naturals never knew much, did you? Still don’t.”
“If you won’t tell me what it was, then why did you kill it?”
“It was in my way.”
“Your way of what?”
“I can see beauty and intelligence aren’t mutual concepts. How disappointing.”
“You’re really mean, you know that?”
“I am a demon, or have you forgotten?” he scoffed at me. “You Naturals are all the same…just a bunch of arrogant arseholes.”
“Bullshit.”
“Your Twin Flames were nothing but a fluke,” he went on. “The Druids didn’t know what they were doing either. They saw a lost cause and did the smart thing…they left.”
“Was not,” I argued. “The Druids were hunted by—” Wait. How did he know these things? I thought he was a hybrid like I’d been—a human mutated by Human Convergence.
Elijah looked at me, his eyes flashing silver in the muted light.
I tensed and flattened my back against the wall. “You’re a greater demon.”
He snorted. “Hardly.”
His gaze raked over me and despite myself, my heart fluttered. I could think of at least ten regulations I’d broken just by standing here. Wilder was going to blow a fuse when he found out. Scratch that last and make it if he found out.
“Tired?” Elijah asked.
I swallowed hard. “What?”
“Your Light holds back the pain, but the more you struggle, the worse your injuries will get.”
“Shows how much you know,” I drawled. “Given enough time, my Light heals me. It’s been enough time.”
He snorted and took a step towards me. “Have you been seriously injured since your Light returned?”
“I—” I thought about my final months of training at the Academy and the years I’d spent patrolling London. Apart from some bumps and bruises, I’d never been to the infirmary for anything other than routine check-ups.
“If you’re so sure, then let go of your Light.”
I was never one to back down from a challenge. Call me stubborn—or arrogant as everyone liked to tell me—but I wasn’t about to lose face in front of a demon, no matter how hot his outsides were.
“Fine,” I spat.
The effect was instantaneous. My knees buckled as the full force of pain I’d been holding back hit every nerve ending in my body. Elijah caught me before I hit the floor, sliding his arms underneath mine.
“See?” he murmured.
I was shaking. “I don’t understand…”
He eased me back onto the couch. “That little ball of demonic energy hiding inside you is to blame.”
“I never knew it was there,” I murmured. “How could…”
“I’ve been asking myself the same thing.”
My head throbbed. “Something else is going on here.”
Elijah raised his eyebrows. “Is that a question or a statement?”
“Both.”
He shook his head and picked up the throw blanket from the back of the couch. “Think about it,” he said, draping it over me. “You have all the pieces.”
I let my Light flow back into my limbs and as the pain subsided, I thought about his mysterious ‘pieces’. At Adrenaline, the demon—or the Wanderer as he’d called it—had led me into the crowded club only to attack and almost reveal me to the humans. Elijah had saved me, only to lead me outside and away from the scene. He led me away. What did he do next? He’d helped me escape from the Balan.
Now I was lying on a couch in a cottage in the middle of the Scottish Highlands, with a demon who’d just put blanket over me. It was feeling like a perverted doctor-patient fantasy.
Then there were the demons who had attacked me and Trent. They’d said she knows it. She knows it, like I already knew why they were there.
My gaze met Elijah’s. “They were looking for me from the start. At the club, you… They were going to take me then.”
He nodded. “And now you’re free, they will try again.”
“But I’m not special, I—”
His eyes flashed silver. “Stop underselling yourself. It’s irritating.”
I shook my head, though my temples still throbbed. There as only one reason I could think of why they’d want me. “That Balan wants to bring back Human Convergence?”
“I’m not sure. It could be many things.”
I narrowed my eyes. So far, Elijah had done nothing but protect me from the Dark, but he was one of them. His motives were cloudy at best, yet here I was. “And where do you fit in with all this? What am I to you?”
“You were mutated,” he stated.
“Thanks for the reminder. It’s not like I’d prefer to forget that time in my life or anything.”
“And now you’re not,” he finished his earlier thought. “How?”
“We were cured when Mordred was vanquished,” I told him. I had no problems telling him—it was common knowledge.
Elijah’s expression fell. “Your people researched the program. They must’ve found out something. They…”
My revelation seemed to have thrown him and finally, I understood what he wanted from me, because he was me. Elijah was a demon-hybrid looking for a way out.
“You’re looking for a way to cure yourself.”
Something was different about his mutation. He wasn’t a part of Human
