12. Holy Desecration, Demon!

St. Magdalene's loomed on the city's fringes. It was a gothic carcass, aged, pious, primed to crumble. Chipped stone gargoyles snarled down at anyone who approached the mammoth building. A ring of yew trees guarded its slow decay.

Its spire was a rusted scalpel gutting the storm-swollen sky. The rain had only stopped minutes earlier. His hair was damp against his nape. Clouds rolled over the stars, fissured with ruby. It felt like an omen.

He chose to believe it was a promise. His mouth slanted cruelly, showing a flash of white teeth as he looked around. He'd followed her the old fashioned way.

With his nose, his instincts, and some brute force. He could've used his cell phone, but he wanted to play his part right, ensure he missed nothing. It helped to follow the ever-changing temperature in him.

When he strayed too far from here, permafrost blew through his arteries and stiffened his marrow. Needle-sharp and unrelenting. It hadn't been his usual chill.

This one drove deeper and left no room for error. He had given into it, let it lead him and good job, too. He hadn't thought a demon would wage a battle in a church.

Blasphemy must be a kink of hers, he mused. His breath had fogged the air despite the mild night until he reached this place. Heat hit him like a kick in the gut as he drew close.

Fiery and bright, wrong, incredible for him. It seared his bones. Reminding him of scorching summer days he hadn't seen in the last five years. The bite mark on his neck pulsed in agreement.

Ashton's boots crunched gravel as he circled the perimeter. He'd seen a lot of death since his own murder, but none of it compared to this.

He compiled a mental ledger of what he saw. He observed no traps, or hunters waiting to snipe him. And no Liora. The coppery tang of spilled blood and more warmth were all that existed.

It hit him mid-stride, a freakish flush crept up his neck. His flatlined pulse stuttered like a corrupted file flashing with pixilation, and his hand rose to his chest. He froze.

What the hell?

His breath still frosted in his lungs, but his skin—his skin burned. It was impossible.

He glared at the church doors. "Overclocking," he said, muttering. "It's a stupid vampire glitch. That's all."

He didn't believe himself, but he'd gotten good at ignoring things he didn't want to think about. It all went to the locked vault within his mind. He sighed. Liora wasn't outside.

But she was close enough he could sense her, like a live wire in his chest, it soared with every step closer. His eyes narrowed, and his brows slammed together.

Logic was gone. He couldn't find a reason for it and gave up trying. This was— Movement distracted him, a shadow darker than the night, inside the church. One sinuous ribbon of smoke fluttered in the stained glass. Gone the next time he looked.

His head shook, mouth flattened as he scanned the other windows. Nothing else moved.

Concentrate, he ordered himself. He'd smothered every emotion but his grim, ruthless determination on the way here.

He couldn't afford to let them sneak through his mental walls. Too much was riding on this going his way. Ash crouched low as flame licked at his veins.

The damp earth oozed hunter sweat, blood, and Wolfsbane. Amateur hour aromatics. Their Silverthorn traps didn't have a chance to go off before she'd destroyed their creators.

He skirted around them, just in case one detonated. He doubted she'd heal him again, not yet, anyway. The scent made itself known then.

Bergamot, pomegranate, and hellfire, cut through with rot. It coiled through the morass of hunter blood and death. Liora, she hadn't fled.

His olfactory nerves reconstructed her exact position from molecular traces leftover from her hunt. She'd found a perch high inside the old place of worship, high enough to gaze upon the havoc she'd wrought and keep an eye out for him.

Keep going, his every changed cell cried, a biological homing beacon she would come to regret. It smoldered in his soft tissue.

His jaw tightened, tongue tasting venom as it dripped into his mouth.

Craving her heat?

Ridiculous, but his body disagreed with his mind.

The freezer burn cavity behind his sternum thawed, cells singing as if she'd injected liquid sunlight into his nervous system.

He smirked, fangs bared for a brief moment. Hunter's blood soured the air, watered down and reeking of cruelty. But underneath their stench lay hers. She was starving, furious, and drained.

She hadn't fed after all. He'd been right despite the doubts still murmuring. He let out a long breath, lips parted as he looked to the heavens.

Tension bled out of him as that knowledge sank in. A muscle twitched beneath his collarbone, where her claws had scraped.

It was a phantom pulse, as if every mark she'd left on him had its own heartbeat. Ash knew she'd stopped before she took enough from him the other night.

She hadn't fed before that either. Her scent had thinned out. The pomegranate had turned sour, and the sugar gone acrid, nowhere near as strong as it had been in her bed.

It thickened in the atmosphere like a noose around his neck. Or maybe a leash. Was it just starvation or self-destruction, too?

They're the same thing with her, he thought. The hunter's corpses were intact unless she'd torn something out. Her teeth hadn't marked them. The telltale glaze of ecstasy in their gaze was nonexistent. It was a message.

For me or them?

His boot nudged a shattered handgun, unspent silver bullets scattered like tears in the dewy grass. "You could've at least left a note."

There was no hint she'd so much as licked her claws clean. She neared famine levels, if he remembered the lore correctly. She neared the critical point where she either gave into it or let it temporarily kill her. Her scent had clotted into something calcified, fraying, and wrathful.

She was a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and no God was coming to help anyone from it. His fangs abruptly dropped again, aching, venom pooling fast and hot under his tongue.

The hollow under his ribs tightened, throat tensing and drying out almost in sympathy. It was a hook, no, a string.

Yanking him toward the church's shadowed maw like a marionette. To the visceral painting she'd left waiting for him.

Stupid demon. You left a trail.

He moved closer, the blanket of freshly watered grass muted his steps. Something inside him throbbed, a furnace where his freezing heart should be. He studied the beginning of her lethal masterpiece of six dead bodies.

Two littered the church steps, a male and a female. Their throats torn not with claws. Left-handed strikes, northeast to southwest, like them all on the way here.

The Iron Districts brick held onto her signature. Every grime soaked alley, every wrought-iron fence bore her talon tracks. Primitive artistic, but art all the same.

Here, the true beautiful artistry of her violence had thrived. Ash cataloged the angles, the splatter radius, and accuracy. It was grotesque—her fury had been surgical.

You killed them but you didn't take. Why, Liora? Self control or self loathing?

The heat surged, almost blistering, as it pulsed and flared through him. He flexed his gloved hand at his side, feet planted wide. He answered his own questions in his head.

Because you wanted it to hurt. Your show of malignant strength to prove you aren't weak.

He paused, a brow arching as his smile broadened, and a thrill laced through his nerves.

And because you wanted me to see.

He sighed, head shaking, and spine strengthening. The game had started without him and he didn't get to witness the opening sequence.

Such a shame. The least he could do was catch up and play it clever. One hunter lay apart from the other two, tucked behind a pillar.

Unbloodied, jaw unhinged in a scream that never got out. He kneeled in front of the older man. His haggard face wasn't one Ash recognized, his milky gaze raised to the sky, lips parted. His gloved finger brushed aside the man's lapel.

A Silverthorn dagger glinted, peeking out of the corpse's coat. It was unused."Poor little hunter. She didn't even let you try," Ashton said, voice nothing more than a murmur of cool air dripping with sarcasm.

The hilt bore a sigil, a serpent coiled around a cross, its fangs piercing the vertical beam. Ash traced the grooves. Familiar, hypocritical bullshit, another relic for his collection.

He pocketed the blade. Its icy thorn-infused alloy bit into his palm even through the leather.

He smiled grimly as he studied the scene.

He had no sympathy for the hunters; they brought it on themselves. They'd made it their mission to destroy him, destroy any supernatural they could.

Karma had come calling with shadows, near bottomless power, and talons. The human Liora used as bait still lived, still whole, too. She hadn't so much as scratched him.

The mortal's heartbeat skittered like a cockroach as Ash's ears strained for signs of life inside the church. Behind his ribcage, that strange heat radiated, molten, throbbing, and mocking.

He studied the entrance as he inched up the stairs. The oak doors stood ajar. Entrails glistening like macabre bunting across the immense arches.

Jawbones cracked open, tongues ripped out—her handwriting. He recognized the flourish in the claw marks' ornamental shapes. Elaborate, and identical to the scars she'd left, scoring down his back. It was a sermon in unholy sin and viscera.

As though she crooned, come closer, see what happens.

It was elegant coding for a monster who needed no algorithms or secret servers to destroy her targets. The blood sang in his arteries. Sang with the impulse to unravel her carnage into something he could own.

He paused at the threshold, shoulders squaring, face morphing into his practiced mask of snark and smirk. Lights, camera, action.

Show time.

Ash's boot crunched a rib as he stepped into the nave. His eyes sliced through the gloom. Skimming over the broken bodies decorating the floor. Unnatural darkness saturated the room.

The atmosphere thrummed with her hunger. Holy silence had vacated the building while she killed the hunters. Her hunger was a rabid baseline shuddering through the pews, shivering in his chest, and vibrating in his DNA.

Fresh blood streaked the marble altar, steaming and hanging like a mist in the air. There was enough to feed a dozen succubi, a dozen of him. Yet it remained unclaimed.

His pulse flickered again, only for a second, a spectral sting where his heart lay lifeless.

Why starve, Red?

The shadows hissed and writhed in answer. Serpentine, bloodthirsty, and blacker than the craving tearing him up inside.

Because you're waiting for me, aren't you?

A coarse laugh escaped him. Brittle as the stained shattered glass crackling under his feet."What's wrong, demon? Squeamish?" His voice ricocheted off the vaulted ceiling, honed to a velveted blade. "Or are you just...

picky?"

Somewhere amongst the slaughter and darkness, claws scored stone. The sound echoed through the building for what seemed like an age. The healed bite on his throat warmed again in silent confirmation.

He came to a halt as tendrils of her shadows slithered toward him. Head cocking, hands fisting, and stomach flipping as they wound around his ankles, coiling up his shins to lock him in place.

They twisted around his wrists as though claiming him softly, a lover's grip he didn't pull away from. His traitorous breath hitched.

His own shadow, a pale imitation of hers, rose to meet them, like a dormant thing had awakened in his marrow and let it loose. Their edges had frayed, and they hungered as she did.

He nodded as they shivered up his thighs, wound his hips, and wreathed around his back. He grinned, fangs glinting, and a chest full of flame. His arms spread wide.

"Don't worry, dinners on me. I brought takeout."

Ash stepped over a hunter's severed arm. Boots crunching bone shards into gruesome paste. His eyebrows rose as her shadows loosened their grip on him but tightened it on the slivers of moonlight that snuck through the cracked windows.

As if they wanted to suck every last drop of holiness from the air. He held his breath. She still hid. A frown tried to form.

He kept his expression blank, but his thoughts cycled faster. She could vanish, merge with her darkness until she got back to the hotel. But she stayed.

"Dramatic, much? You could've just snapped their necks." He gestured to the carnage. Intestines strung like tinsel, bone fragments glinting dully, and spines severed mid-prayer. "But no. You had to go full Hostel: Vatican Edition."

He stared at the ceiling, the roiling shroud veiling Liora from his eyes. Every muscle he'd earned tensed, fingers tingling as they curled into his palm. The temperature abruptly dropped.

The darkness boiled and thickened until it became a living lung, breathing in rot and iron.

Another rasp of claws on stone answered him. He loosed a low breath.

His mouth opened to try something else, when the shadows swirled, swelled, and encompassed the entire church. He braced himself, hands fisted behind his back, and he held his ground as she blocked the exits.

The mortal's heartbeat was slowing. Her venom would kill the man, eventually. Ash noted the arrhythmia with cold, clinical detachment.

His dead veins coagulated with something slimy and venomous. It wove through his insides like an invasive vine, strangling and crushing his organs as he fought with himself.

His lip curled and his tongue curdled at the taste of a jealousy he couldn't shove down. Because this stranger's pulse still synced with Lioras when Ash's never could.

He missed the feeling of his heart beating more than he'd ever admit to anyone else. His tongue traced his sharpening canine, craving to sever the man's carotid himself.

He would outlast the mortal, outlast everyone to ensure his freedom. He really should put the human out of his misery.

Never leave a witness alive. It was a rule he followed to the letter. But he'd never been one to ruin a game.

Not when it was so magnificently rendered. Crimson splattered across white walls and floors, and glazed shimmering glass. Their silver weapons melted to slag or cleaved in two.

Torn sanguine hymn sheets, crushed candles, and scarlet speckled bibles finished the tableau off.

Intimidating, his mind yelled.

Easy, Ash. She'll break first.

He filed everything away in a mental folder to admire later. You know that bite in the wind before a snowstorm? It nipped at him a second before his life forever changed.

Liora dropped from the rafters. Silent as a spider's kiss and thrice as lethal. Serpent darkness framed her as she landed soundlessly.

For a fractured second, the scars across his chest flared gold under his black henley. The matching scar on her throat glowed amber through the darkness.

It was a thought they were paired circuits that completed some ancient protocol. She hadn't realized. She hadn't accounted for any of this.

He didn't know how he knew that, he just did. He swallowed surreptitiously, tendons in his neck jumping. His expression flickered, his smirk sliding slightly before he smoothed it out. He scanned her from head to toe.

Her leathers clung to her like she'd painted them on, seams straining as if her very form rejected containment, every carefully crafted curve was a taunt. His cock stirred, more foreign warmth spreading fingers up his torso as her black gaze raked him.

She was an apex predator sizing up prey she already owned. Then a whisper wormed through the healed scar on his chest.

He tastes like starvation too.

The voice wasn't his own.

His nerves fired. It felt like a ghostly tongue licking the words from his jugular. He didn't know if it was memory, prophecy, or her fucking with him. Ash didn't care.

He'd let her try.