Shadow Marked Read online

  Still, the rational part of her mind argued that she should call for one of the many demon-control patrols always a scream away in this part of Manhattan. It was their job to keep the streets safe, to make sure the thousands of tourists who came to New York to see the demonic urban habitat didn’t get themselves killed trying to get a picture of some of the more fantastic species.

  Even decades after the initial emergence, people were still fascinated by the dangerous, extraordinary-looking creatures. And as long as they stayed in their tour bus, demons weren’t usually a threat—at least, no more so than lions observed from a jeep trundling through the African savanna. The barriers erected in the collapsed subway tunnels and the Fourteenth Street barricade kept the demons contained, and the demon-control patrols took down the rare beast that dared to leave the habitat they had created during the destruction of the initial infestation. Demon control also dealt with the homeless and the drunks, and looked into the reports of concerned citizens.

  They would take a report, get a police task force down here within a half hour, and—

  The scream came again, higher and even more terrified. “And they’ll be too late,” Sam said, setting a swift pace toward the sound. She tripped twice on the uneven pavement before she reached the first bend in the path, and the smell actually seemed to be growing fainter as she walked, but she didn’t think of turning back.

  She was the only one who could save this woman. Hell, she might be the only one who could even hear her. Whether it was simply that her ears functioned better than an average person’s because she was missing one of her other senses, or something more paranormal in nature, Sam had always heard things other people missed.

  Like the sound of something breathing nearby. Something big. Really big.

  Heart thudding in her throat, Sam edged closer to the crumbling buildings on her right, moving into the darkest shadows, where most people would never think to look. Her gut told her that, whatever she’d heard, it wasn’t human, but getting out of the middle of the path couldn’t hurt.

  There were human predators here as well. Several of the most violent city gangs called the ruins home. With crime in New York at an all-time high, everything below Fourteenth Street was low-priority to the metro police once typical tourist hours were over. They assumed the freaks who chose to live next door to demon nests deserved what they got, including a bunch of thugs for neighbors.

  No one seemed to remember that the prices the government had offered people for their homes in the wake of the infestation hadn’t been enough to pay for the moving trucks out of Manhattan. A lot of the families had been stuck where they were, figuring a home next to demons was better than no home at all.

  And, in the beginning, they’d all expected the government to do something about the infested wreckage.

  But demons were as ancient as cockroaches and just as hard to get rid of. Then there was the matter of demon tourism. In a global economy ravaged by the recession of the early part of the century, anything that brought money into the city was considered a good thing. Eventually, government officials had stopped trying to eradicate the demon habitat, settling for a half-assed kind of population control accomplished largely by freelance bounty hunters who flocked to the city to hunt amid the ruins.

  Bounty hunters who were often just as dangerous as the creatures they hunted.

  Whoever or whatever was watching her, its breath slowly getting swift and shallow with excitement, it wasn’t a good thing. It was a bad thing. A very bad thing, and that very bad thing was ready to pounce upon the prey it had spotted in the shadows. It was simply waiting for the right moment, enjoying the fear it could feel rolling from its victim.

  Sam tasted the mocha she’d made just before leaving the shop and swallowed hard. Now wasn’t the time to lose control of her stomach. She could do that later, bent over the cool bowl in her cozy apartment, worshiping the porcelain god the way she had on her eighteenth birthday, when her brother had finally allowed her to order anything she wanted from his bar.

  God, Stephen was going to go crazy when he found out she’d been wandering around here by herself, acting like some drunk tourist who wanted to dance with the devil in the pale moonlight. He’d warned her a thousand times not to go within fifty feet of the ruins. He was going to kill her for getting killed like this.

  The thought was almost enough to make Sam laugh, even though the giant, breathing thing was so close she could taste it. Fire and sulfur and the hint of some exotic fruit, mixed with the unmistakable smell of demon waste. It was definitely a demon, but not the one she’d smelled before. The scent from her dream was gone, vanished along with the sound of the woman’s screams.

  Whoever she’d heard, the woman was probably already dead. And now, because she was a stupid blind girl who thought she could play the hero, she was going to die, too.

  “But I’m going to hurt you first,” she whispered to the thing in front of her as she thumbed open the secret compartment on her cane, flicking the switch that turned the red-tipped end deadly.

  Switchblades were illegal in the city, so she assumed switch-canes weren’t something the police would approve of—especially when the woman wielding the knife couldn’t see where she was aiming her deadly weapon—but abiding by the letter of the law wasn’t a priority for most Southies. Sam wasn’t any different. Being blind didn’t automatically mean she was a law-abiding citizen or helpless or sweet.

  Or willing to wait for someone else to make the first move.

  “Come and get me already,” she yelled, lifting her cane and lunging forward, aiming a few inches below where it seemed the breath was coming from.

  An outraged squeal echoed off the bricks, but there wasn’t time to celebrate her hit. Seconds later, her cane was ripped from her hands and the smell of fruit got even stronger as something whizzed by her face. Shit! She’d heard of demons that shot poison quills into their prey to immobilize them before they began to feed. They were alleged to be relatively small for demons, but size didn’t matter when you were passed out cold on the ground and the thing coming for you had sharp teeth and claws.

  Sam ducked and felt the air stir above her head. So far, she’d been lucky, but she could avoid a hit for only so long. She had to put some distance between her and the demon before it was too late.

  Whirling around with her hands held out in front of her, Sam started to run, praying she remembered the obstacles she’d encountered on the way in well enough to avoid them. Without her cane, she had no way of “seeing” the ground in front of her before she stepped, no way of—

  She cursed as she tripped over something round and hard and fell to the ground, the whizzing needles of the demon that hunted her pinging against the concrete near her scraped hands. On instinct, Sam curled into a fetal position, her body still trying to protect itself though her mind knew this was it. She was down, and the thing behind her was coming, and this time there would be no escape.

  All of a sudden she was six years old again, bound and tied and waiting for the invisible demons the cult had summoned to take what her parents had invited them to take, to steal what they needed to steal. But this time, it wouldn’t be just her eyes. This time, it would be her life.

  CHAPTER TWO

  If he were a different kind of man, Jace would have let the woman die. The hardened core of him might still have considered it, just for a second, if it had been anyone else. Anyone other than her.

  But watching Samantha Quinn fall to the ground, her long, silky black hair tangling around her frightened face, obscuring those big brown eyes, Jace couldn’t do anything but shoot the creature he’d been tracking for three days. Even though killing the Ju Du demon would mean forfeiting his bounty and facing a death threat or two if any of the other hunters found out he was the one who put the thing down.

  The city wanted demons taken alive or not taken at all. Once it had been decided demons weren’t any more dangerous than other earthly predators, scientists and conservat
ion groups the world over had put pressure on the infested cities to “humanely” dispose of the surplus demon population. And royally fucked the bounty hunters in the process. Gone were the days when a dead body was all a hunter needed. Now there were licenses and quotas and different seasons for open hunting.

  Like deer season, but with animals that could kill you. It was dangerously absurd.

  But absurd or not, the city didn’t pay for dead meat, and his competition wouldn’t be pleased to hear he’d taken out one of the rarest and highest-bountied species to roam the Southie ruins. But he didn’t have a choice. Sam wasn’t just a friend’s kid sister or a girl he’d watched grow up in the neighborhood. Jace couldn’t say exactly what she was to him, just that something inside of him threatened to snap when he thought about a world without Sam Quinn. She didn’t deserve to die like this; she and her brother had been through enough.

  Who does, and ain’t everyone? She’s still screwing your capture, boy. You should charge her for being gracious enough to let her live.

  He could hear Uncle Francis’s old-school Brooklyn accent ringing in his ears as he exchanged his stun gun for the automatic at his hip—the stun wasn’t guaranteed to immobilize prey with the first shot—but it didn’t slow him down. He’d learned a long time ago that he wasn’t as mercenary as the man who’d raised him would have him be, but he was mercenary enough.

  The fact that he’d get only a couple of death threats for killing this demon spoke for itself. Ninety-nine percent of the men working the ruins wouldn’t dare cross Jace Lu, and it wasn’t just that his connections to the old Italian Mafia or New York’s Chinese Triad struck fear into the hearts of the competition. Jace was one scary motherfucker all on his own.

  He’d gotten his Chinese father’s coloring and stick-straight hair, but the rest of him was all Grandpa Joe. His petite mother’s dad had been a six-feet-four muscleman for the mob from the day he turned sixteen until the day he died of a heart attack at age sixty. He’d never missed a day at the gym or a dinner at the family restaurant.

  Jace would have hoped to make it a few more years, since he kept his manicotti consumption to Thursday meetings and the occasional Sunday brunch, but bounty hunting wasn’t a career known for its longevity. He’d be lucky to make it to forty, and usually that was fine with him. The struggle for survival was overrated at best, and damned torturous at its worst.

  Tonight, however, he figured he should do his best to stick around. If he weren’t here, Sam would be dead, which bothered him more than he’d like to admit.

  “Don’t move,” Jace shouted as Sam curled into a ball on the ground, just barely avoiding another set of poison quills the Ju Du shot from its spiny underbelly.

  The quills wouldn’t kill her, but getting ripped open and eaten alive seconds later certainly would. There was no time for strategy. He was simply going to have to blow the demon away and hope Sam didn’t get hit by any poisoned flying debris.

  Sam didn’t scream when he fired. Jace had to give her credit for that. She lay perfectly still and quiet until the Ju Du was in pieces and the sharp reports of gunfire had faded, echoing away down the twisted corridors of the Southie ruins. But when he crossed to her, satisfied to see she hadn’t been hit by any quills, she was crying—big, fat tears that streamed out of her haunting eyes.

  Damn crying women. The sight sickened him. He couldn’t help it. Seeing a woman cry made him nauseous. It made him want to slam his fist into a wall, or run until his lungs exploded, or kill something. Or maybe all three.

  Even knowing why he responded the way he did couldn’t help him get himself under control. In fact, it was all he could do not to turn and run from Sam and her tears. He’d been a bounty hunter since he was fifteen years old and could count the times he’d run from a demon on one hand and still have fingers left over. But facing down a demon never brought those memories to the surface, the ones he did his best to pretend didn’t belong to him. Tears brought them back, big-time.

  “I’m sorry. Sorry,” Sam said, sucking in a deep breath and biting her bottom lip, as if she could tell how her tears affected him. “Thanks, Jace,” she said, tilting her chin until it seemed she was looking him straight in the face.

  It was hard to believe she was blind when you looked into those wide, melted-chocolate eyes. Sam’s eyes seemed to see everything. She looked all the way to a man’s core and took his measure. When it came to Jace, he could tell she’d never entirely approved of what she saw.

  He could understand the feeling. It was one of the reasons he avoided mirrors.

  “What the fuck were you doing back here?” he asked, not bothering to ask how she’d known it was him. Sam always knew.

  “I heard someone screaming.” Her fingers tightened around the hand he placed in hers. Jace hauled her to her feet, marveling at how light she felt, even for a thin woman. It felt like her bones were made of something more fragile than the average person’s, and Jace was suddenly possessed of the urge to go buy her a sandwich. Something big and sloppy, with lots of meat and cheese and mayo.

  Instead, he dropped her hand as quickly as possible. He didn’t buy women meals. He didn’t buy anyone meals, even something as innocent as a sandwich. Sharing food was an intimacy he reserved for the Italian side of his family and no one else, and there were times when he’d have preferred to skip Thursday dinners at the restaurant. Even with family, he liked to keep a bit of distance. It was safer that way.

  “You didn’t hear someone screaming. The Ju Du makes that sound when it’s hunting, to scare the Sqat demons out of their burrows.”

  “No, I’m sure I heard a person. A woman, or maybe a girl,” Sam said, her fingers twining anxiously in the gauzy fabric of her dress.

  It was loose, but transparent enough that Jace could see the outline of the bra she wore underneath, which made him angrier. Someone should have told Sam that her dress was almost see-through. She wasn’t the type who would want to draw attention to herself. It seemed like someone should give the blind girl a heads-up.

  Too bad it wouldn’t be him. If he wasn’t going to buy Sam a sandwich, he certainly wasn’t going to bring up the subject of her underwear.

  “I didn’t think anyone else would be able to get to her in time. I guess I didn’t get to her in time, either. I can’t hear her anymore,” Sam continued, her voice trembling a bit, though her eyes remained dry.

  “Don’t worry,” Jace said, strangely compelled to put her mind at ease. “I didn’t see anyone in the ruins tonight. Except you. There aren’t any other women stupid enough to come in here alone.”

  “Thanks.” Her lips turned down at the corners. “Maybe you’re right. I can’t hear her anymore. And I can’t smell it….”

  “Smell it?”

  “There was this smell. It wasn’t just a demon smell. It was cold and … evil. I know that sounds crazy, but—”

  “What’s crazy is that you decided you’d investigate the evil smell. By yourself. Without a weapon.”

  “I had a weapon. My cane has a knife built into the end.”

  “Yeah, I saw that,” Jace said, glad his tone didn’t betray his admiration. He’d been impressed to see that Sam had rigged a weapon into her cane, but she didn’t need to know that. No reason to encourage this insane idea that she was equipped to protect herself, let alone anyone else. “And how long did you keep a hold on that? Two seconds, maybe three?”

  “I wounded the demon. I bought myself some time,” she said, her usually pale cheeks flushed with two bright spots of red he could see even in the dimness of the lights the community watch had installed on the outer edges of the ruins. “If I hadn’t tripped, there’s a good chance I could have made it—”

  “Made it a few more feet before the Ju Du ripped you open?”

  “I did what I felt I had to do,” she said, tilting her stubborn little chin into the air.

  She looked like a bird when she cocked her head to the side like that, like one of those tiny brown sparrows t
hat covered the statues in the park in winter. Except prettier. Why hadn’t he ever noticed how pretty Sam had become? It was probably the stupid see-through dress, making him look at her in a way no one should ever look at a friend’s little sister.

  “What you did was make a dumb call that almost got you killed.”

  “Thanks,” she said, hurt and sarcasm warring in her tone. “If you’re done telling me how stupid I am, I’d like my cane, please.”

  “I should tell your brother what happened here tonight,” Jace threatened as he fetched the cane from where it had fallen a few feet away. “I’m sure Stephen would love to hear about his little sister wandering around in the ruins by herself.”

  “I don’t care what you tell Stephen.” She snatched the cane from his hand with surprising accuracy. “I’m a grown woman and I’ll wander wherever I damn well please.”

  “Well, you might not want to wander much farther in that dress,” he said, before he could think better of it. “It’s almost see-through.”

  “Really?” she asked. “Almost?”

  “Yeah. Almost. I can almost see … things I shouldn’t see.”

  “Like what? My bra?” Her smile was obvious now. It was a mocking smile, an amused smile, the smile of a woman who knew her goddamned dress was transparent.

  And liked it that way.

  “Turn around,” he said, his words as hard as the bulge pressing against the fly of his jeans. He did not get a boner from girls like Samantha Quinn, even if they were deliberately wearing see-through clothing. The fact that his body was telling him otherwise pissed him off. “I’ll walk you back to your place.”

  “I’m not going back to my place.” She twisted her arm, pulling free from the hand he’d wrapped around her elbow.

  “Oh, yes, you are.” He reached for her, but she sidestepped, almost as if she could see him coming.

  “No, I’m not.” Up came the chin again as she half jogged toward the street, cane tapping quickly in front of her. “I have an errand to run.”