Demon Bait: Children of the Undying Book 1 Read online

  Thank you.

  What the hell sort of world had the humans of Nicollet built for themselves? A world where women thanked men for not raping their minds, as if restraint was a favor instead of a goddamned expectation?

  The sanctimonious bastards lived in the pretty little underground cities they’d built while everyone else had been fighting a war. His mother had been fighting that war, battling on the front lines as a young soldier eager to defend her country while the generals retreated to the safety of virtual reality. No blood there, no chance of capture. And when the demons razed Minneapolis, just like they’d leveled every other city in the country…

  Well. There’d been plenty of room for menial workers in their new civilizations—as long as they were pure. The generals had no compassion for the broken and the wounded. No compassion for anyone who wasn’t a safe little worker, content to accept scraps of a virtual life in exchange for endless work with little reward.

  And Marci wanted to stay here.

  Thank—

  Gabe snarled and rocked to his feet. He’d had a quiet chat with his darker nature, but it hadn’t been pleasant. Proclivities he couldn’t control recognized the feel of summoner blood, and the need to possess throbbed with every beat of his heart.

  Summoner. An antiquated word for a power that no longer existed. Before the Fall, summoners had been able to control the demons they called forth from whatever world they inhabited. But now demons walked the earth, and they had the power.

  He had the power. Just a little lean, a subtle push, and he could flip her. Tangle his magic with hers, invade the spaces in her aura until she bent to his will. She’d be soft clay in his hands, pliable and sweet, and he could edge her around to his way of thinking with nothing but a whisper.

  Wrong. So very, very wrong. In Rochester, a halfblood who got caught leaning would find himself facing exile—or execution. Free will was not something Dominic Wetzel played around with, not even in service of the greater good.

  Maybe not even when a stubborn summoner was going to end up getting herself killed—or worse—because she was too afraid to acknowledge how real the danger was. Gabe had seen summoners who’d been thrown to the mercy of the demons. He’d seen the husks—slack-eyed, vacant bodies with nothing inside. A demon could slip beneath a person’s skin and pop his spirit free, but summoners were so easy, so fragile… Sometimes their spirits could be called back, but the trauma never faded.

  Too easy to imagine Marci’s sweet face empty of emotion. Her beauty was the sneaky sort, the kind you might never notice when she sat quietly. The way she faded into the background had to be intentional.

  A defense mechanism, her way of hiding. Anger brought out her passion, the spark she must have worked so hard to crush.

  He had twelve hours to fan that spark into flames. And if he couldn’t…

  Well. She could safely hate him for the rest of her days. At least in Rochester, those days wouldn’t be numbered.

  A soft knock interrupted his thoughts. “Gabe?”

  Breathing deep, he tightened his grip on control and relaxed his hands, hoping the rest of him would follow. “Come on in.”

  Marci ducked her head inside. “I threw some stuff together for dinner, if you’re hungry.” Feeding one kind of hunger might distract him from another. “Sure. Food’s good.” She let the door swing open. “The lounge doesn’t have a full kitchen, but some of the rations are self-heating. It won’t be gourmet, but it’s…” She stopped and squeezed her eyes shut. “I should still be so mad at you. You kept me here when I wanted to leave and that’s not okay.” No, it hadn’t been, but in the moment he literally could not have stopped himself. “So why aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know.” Her shoulder hit the wall, and she leaned there and regarded him thoughtfully. “I guess…because it would be a stupid way to hurt someone, if that was what you really wanted to do.”

  “Is that so?” The innocence of the statement scraped at him, so much that he prodded at her. “You can’t think of any unsavory reasons why a man might like to have a pretty woman trapped at his mercy for a few days?”

  “Sure, but what would you have to gain by pretending?” She shrugged. “We’re locked in. You could just take what you wanted now.”

  Not innocent, then. Practical, and ruthlessly so. “I’m not going to take anything. I never do.”

  “Because you don’t have to.” It seemed more like an observation than an accusation. “Vegetable stew?”

  “Better than what I’ve been eating lately.”

  Marci had already set out mugs and spoons, and she took a seat at the small round table. “You can handle breakfast in the morning, if you want. After that, the local should be back online.” He considered the four chairs and took the one opposite hers. The stew smelled edible enough—better than the rations in his pack, or the rough camp food he’d left in his bolthole down the road. The equipment he’d need to boost a signal to Rochester’s network was there, too, leaving him well and truly cut off until Trip figured out he was missing and found a way to reach out.

  Twelve hours, at least. Probably twenty-four, since he wasn’t always prompt with his check-ins. Once Marci was asleep, he could start scoping out a way to break out of the room, because he sure as hell wasn’t going to be waiting for the soldiers from Nicollet.

  She might be able to help him, even if she didn’t know it. “You were up in the control room. Is that where you work?”

  “Usually.” She sipped her water. “It’s mostly network maintenance, nothing too difficult.”

  “So you’re a techie?”

  “Depends on your definition of the word. I do some programming, VR and otherwise, but I don’t handle hardware.”

  Every time she swallowed, his gaze drifted to her throat. “I’m shit with all of it. I can barely operate a tablet.”

  Marci laughed a little. “I think you’re exaggerating.” This time he held back the power and only gave her the charm of a smile. “I’m better at mechanical things. Working with my hands.”

  “Ah, so you’re into hardware.”

  “The kind with gears and pistons, not the kind with tiny microchips.”

  “I gathered.” She tilted her head and watched him. “Tell me more about Rochester.”

  “It’s…” He considered half a dozen trite sales pitches, but in the end discarded them all. “It’s the closest thing to freedom that’s left in the world, I think. People living together with halfbloods and summoners. We don’t always get along, but that’s the point. We don’t have to.”

  “Because Dominic Wetzel keeps everyone in line.” She stirred her stew absently. “The Council has a file on him, you know.”

  Gabe didn’t doubt it—though he did doubt a minor network tech would have had access to it.

  “Someone’s been snooping.”

  Her cheeks heated in a blush. “Information is power, right?”

  “Of course.” Modest clothing hid her body, which was a pity. He wanted to know how deeply she blushed, and where. “What did you learn about—” He bit off Zel’s name at the last moment and used his given name, the one strangers knew. “Dominic?”

  “Zel,” she corrected. “That’s what everyone calls him, isn’t it?” He couldn’t quite hide his surprise. “Good file.”

  “The Council is very thorough,” she told him simply. “They’ve been watching the nearby settlements for years, you know. It was the best place to go for information when I considered the possibility that I might have to leave the city.”

  “Mmm. So maybe you should tell me about Rochester.”

  “Not likely.” Marci shrugged. “It was my best source, but I’m not naive enough to think the Council’s files weren’t biased and needlessly unflattering.”

  Gabe raised both eyebrows. “Zel’s a rampaging monster who eats babies and spirits their mothers off into his personal harem, then? Or does he eat the mothers too?”

  “Something like that.” She set down her s
poon. “I think I prefer the way you describe the place. It sounds…” Her voice trailed off, and a wistful expression stole over her face.

  He wanted to stroke her cheek, press his lips against her ear and whisper. Instead, he offered the word to the empty space between them. “Safe.”

  “Sa—” She broke off and blinked, as if she hadn’t meant to echo the word. “Yes, I suppose that’s it exactly.”

  “It’s not perfect,” he said, quashing an instinctive pleasure at her clear distraction. “There are fights, squabbles. Sometimes there’s not enough space or supplies. But no one is hurt or exiled for what they are. Only what they do.”

  “And those with summoner blood?” A hint of nervousness thinned her lips into a tense line. “My mother told me stories her parents had told her, about halfbloods fighting to the death for the prize of binding a summoner.”

  Binding. The word sang through him, stirred his blood and woke a yearning that made the world more vivid. Oh, to bind her. To feel the sweet slide of her aura, tickling warmth smoothing over all of his sharp edges until they dulled under the satisfaction of being tamed.

  His senses were more alive, his own voice like gravel in his ears. “What do you know about binding?” Her lips parted, and her gaze locked with his. “I know I’d be powerless. Completely at someone’s mercy. Is that what happens in Rochester?”

  Flushed cheeks, glazed eyes, short little breaths… She was nervous and aroused, and his pants were too fucking tight. “It’s always what happens. A literal deal with the devil. The mark keeps you safe from every other demon.”

  Her brows drew together, though the desire pulsing through the room didn’t abate. “I don’t like not having a choice.”

  “Who said you don’t have a choice?” It took everything in him not to reach across the table and touch her. “You give your partner the power. They don’t take it.”

  “You can’t tell me no one would hassle an unbound summoner.”

  “They wouldn’t do it twice.”

  That broke the spell—mostly. “So the alternative is to get someone killed for trying to convince me? No, thanks.”

  He felt his eyebrows trying to climb again. “If all they were doing was trying to convince you, they wouldn’t get killed. We’re not savages. Halfbloods would try to get to know you, and try to prove their worth. It’s courtship, not a hassle. But if it became known that you weren’t interested, they wouldn’t hassle you, because it’s against the rules.”

  “Okay.” She leaned toward him, her eyes alight with challenge. “I’m not interested. Now is it against the rules for you to put the whammy on me? ’Cause that’s what you were doing a minute ago, right?” It took effort not to back down and apologize. “Yeah. If you come back to Rochester with me, you can get my ass in serious trouble. Good enough reason, huh?” She met his volley with silence, then shook her head. “You’re a tricky one.”

  “Sometimes.” Gabe let himself smile as he leaned back in his chair. “I slipped. It happens when we’ve gone too long without taking care of business, but that doesn’t let us off the hook for it. Halfbloods are expected to behave themselves or get help.”

  “Taking care of business.” Marci pushed away her mug. “Do you mean sex in reality, sex in the network, or plain old self-supplied orgasms?”

  Somewhere, the gods—or demons—were laughing at him. “Honey, if jerking off solved that little problem, I’d have spent the last two hours with my hand around my dick.” She blushed—hard—but didn’t look away. “And virtual sex?”

  “Only makes the itch worse.” The urge to tease her rode him hard, but the need to make her understand the truth was even more important. “It’s not just about sex, though. If you’d been trained, you could wrap me around your little finger.”

  Her tension didn’t ease, but the corner of her mouth kicked up. “Now that’s a mental picture.” Her amusement faded, and she gave him a thoughtful look. “I’m willing to try it, you know. On the off-chance that it works.”

  His mouth went dry.

  The demon purred.

  “It’s—” He had to clear his throat and shift positions in his chair in a hopeless attempt to ease the uncomfortable pressure of arousal. “I wouldn’t know how to explain it. They fold magic around us somehow. Like a blanket.”

  “I have—I don’t know how to explain it, either,” she said helplessly. “But I think I know how. It’s a…a sort of gathering. A force. I can feel it a little already.”

  He’d been gone from Rochester for more than a week. Eight days without sex or soothing contact of any kind, and he didn’t know which need was going to swallow him first. “It feels different to everyone. For me it’s…sharp edges and water.”

  Marci rose and rounded the table with determination, stopping to stand behind him. After a single long moment, she laid her hands on his shoulders. When she spoke, her breath stirred his hair. “Do you have to let me in?”

  He was going to blow. Come in his pants like a teenager who’d hacked his way into an adult sector and discovered naked women. Just the touch of her hands set his pulse to pounding, half of the struggle tied up in how hard it was not to let her feel it. Trust was so fragile…

  Too fragile for anything but honesty. “If I do, I can’t promise you won’t feel everything I’m holding back.”

  Her breath hitched. “I thought you said this didn’t have to be about sex.”

  “It’s not,” he whispered, closing his eyes. “Soothing the itch isn’t about sex, but the original condition sure as hell is. You might feel it before it goes away.” Her breath caught again, her hands shook—and he realized she was laughing. “You mean I’m going to feel like a voyeur?” She stroked her thumb over his shoulder.

  “You’ll feel—”

  The words choked off as magic pounded into him. Not slow or subtle, but an uncontrolled, glorious wave. She wasn’t a babbling brook, smoothing away edges over time. Marci was the ocean, powerful and wild, smashing rocks into sand.

  He shuddered and closed his eyes, tasting her aura as it spun around him in dizzy circles. She was smart, but he’d known that. Cunning too—again, no surprise. She’d hidden herself amongst humans, had blended in until no one suspected she wasn’t one of them. And beneath that…

  Hunger. Passion. Wild curiosity and a sensuality that was pure in a way that made him wonder if a man had ever touched her outside the network. Sex in the Global was clean. Sterile, which was the point, but it left the wildest orgies a fleeting dream that might never have happened at all.

  His demon half was putty in her clumsy hands. His cock was hard as steel.

  Her lips brushed his ear, so quickly he could have imagined it, and then her touch vanished entirely.

  “Uh, no,” she whispered huskily. “That is one hundred percent about sex.” He took a deep breath. Another. “Did you want it to be?”

  “That matters?”

  If he hadn’t been turned on to the point of pain, he would have laughed. “Yes, Marci. That matters.” She crossed her arms over her chest and took a step back. “I think I’m going to get a shower and turn in.”

  It would be so easy to follow her. She’d let him. He could see it in her eyes, in the flush in her skin, the trembling in her hands. No need to lean, because she’d open for him and he could show her the sort of pleasure a man with sex in his genes could bring.

  Soon, he promised himself. Knowing the advantages of a slow hunt was in his genes too. She was soft, but not melting. Not yet. “Thank you for helping.”

  “Sure.” She nodded to a door on the far wall. “That’s the bathroom. The showers are through the—past the bunks.” Then she fled, turning on one heel to hurry away.

  The urge to follow brought him to his feet, but self-control kept him from moving. Instead he rubbed his hand over his aching erection and eyed the door to the bathroom.

  If Trip didn’t find his chip signal soon, Gabe was going to get awful familiar with that room. And the shower. And his own h
and.

  At least the thought of water sliding over Marci’s naked curves gave him plenty of inspiration.

  He wasn’t coming after her.

  Marci gritted her teeth and shook her head, sending drops of water splashing on the tile. She didn’t want him to come after her. She didn’t want—

  The arousal throbbing through her proved the lie, and she groaned. The sound echoed in the steamy but otherwise empty space, and she leaned her head back against one wall of the small shower stall.

  Water sluiced over her, hot and yielding, tracing the lines of her body like a lover’s hand. Her skin sure as hell reacted like it was—it was already ridiculously sensitive after her stupid stunt with Gabe, and the warm shower only made matters worse.

  Marci twisted the knob all the way in the opposite direction and braced herself for a cascade of chilly water. When it hit her, she bit her lip to stifle a yelp and groaned again when the cold spray hardened her nipples almost to the point of pain.

  Almost.

  She turned the hot water on again, spun around and pressed her forehead to the tile while she waited for her shivering to subside. Only one thing would ease the hunger that had wound her into knots, and she deserved the discomfort.

  She should have known better than to try out her magic on him. It had always been with her, simmering under the surface, the instinctive knowledge that she could do something other people couldn’t do. Summoning and commanding demons was a thing of the past, but Marci harbored the remnants of that gift inside her. Now, here, faced with the chance to test herself and that power…

  She hadn’t been able to resist, though she should have.

  Gabe could push her. When he let his defenses down and forgot to guard against his own power, the tiny bit that escaped rendered her weak. Who was to say she couldn’t do the same to him? And it wasn’t as though she’d slipped and teased him with it; she’d pushed, reached deep inside. Tapped into the raw reserve of magic she’d always carried inside her.

  He had shuddered under her hands, gone tense and taut when that magic had washed over him. Just the echoes of it had rocked her, stroked her inside and out somehow. Left her aching.