EPILOGUE
Five months later…
“Let me do it,” Sam
whispered, curling her hand at the back of Jace’s jeans and tugging
him into the shadows. “You promised you would let me do
it.”
“That’s when I
thought we were hunting Sqat demons,” Jace hissed. “This is a Ju
Du.”
“I know! It’s
perfect. Just like the first night we kissed.” Sam stood on tiptoe
to place a quick kiss on Jace’s cheek, loving the feel of his soft
skin against her lips. It was only one of the things that more than
made up for the fact that she couldn’t see him
anymore.
Sam had been dead on
arrival at South Methodist last March, but the emergency room staff
had managed to get her heart beating again. She’d stayed in a coma
for several days, drifting in the darkness. Still, she hadn’t been
afraid. Jace had been there, too. When she’d awoken she’d known
instantly that he was across the hall.
Since then, the
connection between them had deepened every day. Sometimes Sam would
swear she could still read his mind, though the ability to hear
Jace’s thoughts had vanished when they’d shut Pandora’s box. Emma
had been right about it taking two people who had been touched by
the aura demons to banish them from the earthly plane.
The years Sam’s
little sister had spent in a halfway house for demon-marked kids
might have left her with scars inside and out, but she’d learned a
thing or two about the evil that her parents had summoned into the
world. While there, she’d gained access to a demon grimoire—a spell
book—that had taught her ways to beat the beasts that had touched
her and her siblings.
Unfortunately, Emma
had also learned about guilt and suffering. While Stephen had spent
time as a monster and Sam had endured horrific dreams, Emma had
been left with an aura demon’s hunger.
She needed to
psychically feed on the pain and misery of other human beings in
order to survive.
She’d learned to feed
on the kind of people who didn’t deserve better than the shortened
life span she caused when she stole their vital energy away, but it
wasn’t easy. It made her keep to herself.
Even though she’d
risked her life to try to save the brother and sister Ezra had told
her about, Emma still kept her distance from Sam. She managed the
Demon’s Breath, attended the Conti family dinners, and seemed to be
getting along well with Ginger, her new roommate, but Emma was
still a mystery to Sam in a lot of ways.
Sam had a feeling she
always would be, which made her sad. And angry. Hence her new
appreciation for shooting things.
“It’s fate, Jace.
This was meant to be my first capture. It’ll be
romantic.”
“Getting killed,
really fucking romantic,” Jace grumbled, but he turned and claimed
her lips for a slow, sultry kiss. Damn, but the man could still
take her breath away, even when he was getting on her last
nerve.
“I’m not going to get
killed,” she whispered, frustrated that he seemed to be going back
on his promise to let her take point tonight. “I’m almost as good
with the stun gun as you are, and you know it.”
“You can’t see the
demon, Sam. What if—”
“So what? You can.
It’ll be just like shooting pool.” She’d taught Jace to help her
play pool by giving cues based on the three hundred and sixty
degrees of a circle. He’d used the same trick to teach her to shoot
his stun gun so she could protect herself when she joined him on
his bounty-hunting missions.
Thus far, however,
he’d only let her shoot in the simulator at his uncle Francis’s
training building. Which was no fun at all, and did nothing to help
banish the nervous energy that had plagued her since the night at
the museum.
Sam sensed that her
thrill for the hunt had something to do with anger over losing
Stephen, who had been declared a missing person after his
“disappearance” last spring. His body, along with the bodies of
Sunshine, Ezra, and Marcus—the one bounty hunter who had been
killed by friendly fire in the museum—had been disposed of by the
Conti family while Jace and Sam were still in the
hospital.
Uncle Francis said
her ex and his lover had been melted into yellow goo by the time
the bounty hunters got Jace and Sam to the hospital and made it
back to the museum to clean up the mess. Sam chose to accept that
story. Whether their connection to the box and its demons had
killed them or Francis had done them in with something a lot less
paranormal in nature, it didn’t much matter.
She was glad Ezra and
Sunshine were dead.
The fact that she
could feel satisfaction over the loss of two lives would have
shocked her even a few months earlier, but that was before she’d
absorbed a bit of the darkness that had tormented Jace his entire
life. His father hadn’t given Jace’s blood to the demons the way
her parents had, but Jace had still felt some of the effects of
being offered as a sacrifice. He’d battled with anger and a lust
for violence inspired by the demons for years.
The good news was
that his bursts of rage had been a lot easier to control since the
aura demons were banished from the earthly plane and the damned box
sunk somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. So maybe she hadn’t absorbed his anger, after all. Maybe her
anger was all her own. Maybe she’d always liked to hunt things and
hadn’t known it.
She was discovering a
lot of new things about herself now that she could sleep the night
through without visions of shadow fingers and evil demons dancing
through her head. Her paranormal power still remained with
her—enabling her to literally see people who would soon be
experiencing a major shift in the course of their lives—but it was
no longer something she considered a curse. Sometimes the people
she saw died or were diagnosed with cancer, but sometimes they had
a near-death experience that changed their life for the better. And
sometimes they met the love of their life or learned they were
pregnant with a much-wanted child.
She’d learned to look
each person in the eye and silently pray for the best for each of
them. It wasn’t her job to meddle with fate. Most of the time she
doubted there was much she could do to help the people she saw
anyway. Some things were beyond the influence of mere
mortals.
Of course, that would
change if she ever saw Jace’s face. She would quite happily spend
the rest of her life never looking into his eyes again. Just the
thought of it made her anxious, edgy, ready to do something
already.
“You give me the
signals and I’ll get the ball in the corner pocket,” Sam
said.
“This is nothing like
playing pool.”
“It’s exactly
like—”
Jace turned to her,
grabbing her by the arm and pulling her back a few steps. When he
spoke again, his voice was even softer. Sam assumed that meant the
Ju Du was close. “This isn’t a game, Sam. The Ju Du can change the
texture and color of its flesh to blend in with almost anything.
What if I lose sight of it?”
“The Ju Du only
attack things smaller and weaker than they are. It won’t come after
me with you here,” Sam said. “Come on. Trust me. You have to trust
me sometime.”
“I’ll trust you when
we’re after Sqat demons. Now, stay here. I’m going—”
Sam fisted her hand
more tightly in his jeans. “I’m not staying here. Let me do this.
I’m ready.”
“No, and that’s my
last word.”
“Since when do I give
a shit about your last word? Screw your last word,” she hissed
beneath her breath, wishing she could light into Jace at full
volume.
“I’d rather screw
you,” he said, his hand sliding down to squeeze her ass through her
own tight-fitting jeans.
They were gray, to
match the demon habitat. Jace called them her demon-hunting jeans
and had picked them out himself. The fact that they were tight
enough to show every little curve gave testimony to the fact that
her husband was a sex fiend as well as a practical
man.
“You won’t be
screwing me for a long time if you don’t let me—”
“The Ju Du is gone,”
he said at full volume. “You scared it away.”
“I scared it away?”
“Yes, you did. And I
don’t appreciate it. We could have paid for this entire trip with
that bounty. And threatening me with sex deprivation less than two
days into the marriage is not giving me warm fuzzies,
Sammy.”
“I promised to love
and honor you,” she said, smiling in spite of herself as Jace
wrapped an arm around her waist. “Not give you warm
fuzzies.”
Jace grunted. “I knew
this marriage crap was a bad idea.”
“And I knew
honeymooning in a city with a demon habitat would be too much for
you to resist.” She let her lips play over his neck, interspersing
kisses with nibbles of her teeth, until she felt things stir inside
Jace’s jeans. She wiggled a little closer, nudging his swelling
length with her hip. “We could have gone to San Francisco instead
of Seattle.”
“But then we wouldn’t
have been able to see the Space Needle.” He cupped her breast,
teasing her nipple through her thin T-shirt, making her
moan.
“Yeah, I really enjoyed seeing
the Space Needle,” she said, voice ripe with sarcasm.
“Oh, cry me a river,
blind girl.”
Sam laughed, a
full-throated laugh that echoed off the ruins that surrounded them.
“You are such a fucking asshole.”
“Did I ever tell you
that nearly fucking you in the street that first night was one of
the hottest sexual experiences of my life?” Jace asked, abandoning
her breast for twin handfuls of her ass.
“No, I don’t think
you did.”
“Well, it was.” He
pulled her closer and claimed her lips for a long, slow
kiss.
Her entire body lit
up, just like it did every time Jace kissed her. He truly was her
other half, everything she’d dreamed of in a man and
more.
“You are the hottest
woman I’ve ever met.”
“You’re not so bad
yourself,” she whispered against the soft skin of his neck as he
grabbed her behind the knees and hitched her up around his waist.
Her breath rushed out as her clit pressed tight against where he
was hard and hot and ready.
“I want you more than
I’ve ever wanted anything.”
“Enough to let me
shoot something next time?”
“Enough to take you
back to our hotel and make you forget about every gun but this
one,” he said, grinding against her, drawing a sound from her
throat that was half moan, half giggle.
“Did you just call
your cock a gun?”
“I did. And this bad
boy is ready to fire, baby.” He was smiling so widely that their
teeth bumped together with their next kiss, making them both
laugh.
“You’re a mess.” She
swatted his ass as he set her down, then took the hand he placed in
hers. “Good thing I love you.”
“And I love you. More
than anything in the world.” And she knew he did.
And it was better
than any dream, any fantasy, better than anything the evil demons
inside that box could have promised, strong enough to withstand any
fear, any darkness, any demon bond.