Demon Bound (7 page)

Finally, he looked at her. “So, spiders are safe to discuss, right? And everything else is off-limits.”

Alice lifted her brows.

“All right. I can do that.” Jake looked toward the spiders again, then his gaze shifted to the room beyond. “So, do you have any . . . Okay, I probably shouldn't ask if you have—”

“Black widows?”

He slipped the toothpick into the corner of his mouth and dug his hands into his pockets. “Yeah.”

“Thirty in the upper levels of this building.” She paused. “You must have a dog.”

His forehead creased in puzzlement. “No.”

“But I have heard that in San Francisco, the woman who doles out your assignments calls you Ethan's puppy.”

His short laugh was not the abashed response she'd anticipated. Her frown deepened.

“That's true,” he said. “But coming from Lilith, ‘puppy' is practically a declaration of love.”

“How so?”

“Well, there are two things in the world she loves more than any other: her hellhound, and Hugh Castleford. Hugh mentored you, didn't he?” At her nod, he said, “Me, too. Until Drifter took over.”

“Ethan is a brave man. And patient.”

Jake's eyes narrowed, and he regarded her steadily before shrugging. “Yeah, he's a hero. Anyway, Lilith named both Hugh and her hellhound ‘Sir Pup'—and she also calls her hellhound ‘puppy.' So I see it as a compliment.”

“How very optimistic you are.”

With an easy grin, he strolled into the room. “I am. And
you
called Lilith ‘woman' instead of ‘Lucifer's hellspawn.' So you don't have a problem with her heading Special Investigations? Some other Guardians do.”

“In truth, I hardly know of her.” Except that, through trickery and lies, Lilith had convinced Lucifer to release her—Lilith—from a bargain. Alice had taken particular notice of that. “Michael approves. As does Hugh, who knows her best. I will defer to their judgment.”

“And she's human now, so you couldn't kill her without breaking the Rules, anyway.”

Alice smiled thinly. “That is also true.”

Jake stopped in front of her, and Alice decided she did not like that he stood over her by several inches. Why had she never shape-shifted into an immense height? But doing so now would be too obvious.

“You shouldn't have shown me your spiders,” he said. “Now that I've seen you with them, you don't freak me out anymore. If you'd bitten their heads off, maybe. But being so careful with them? Nope.”

What a terrible miscalculation. “That is unfortunate,” she said. “What if you need to teleport?”

“I'll manage. If it helps, you're still creepy. Thirty black widows—and you're feeding them vampire blood? Weirdsville.”

She would
not
be amused. “I also have a tarantula.”

“I think I've seen it.” His gaze dropped to her mouth. “All right, aside from Daddy Longlegs, that taps out my knowledge of different spider species. How about we move on to the temple in Tunisia?”

“Literally?”

“Well, I would, but here's the thing: I already went back earlier today—and it's gone.” He spread his hands, shook his head in disbelief, and repeated, “Just, gone. There's a cliff, but no temple.”

Alice looked away from him, fought the ache again. Her gaze slipped over the sketches on the walls, the photographs.

“It is such a bother when that happens,” she said quietly.

CHAPTER 3

Alice hadn't expected her answers, such as they were, to satisfy the novice. After all, they'd never satisfied her.

But that was where the similarity between them ended. She hadn't stalked around her quarters, muttering to herself in the way Jake was now, his hands linked behind his head like a prisoner on the march. He didn't lower them, even when he stopped in front of a photo and studied a male figure painted in profile.

She'd memorized the figure's sword, his simple tunic and sandals, years before. Though there weren't any hieroglyphs to identify him, Alice was certain it was Michael.

“And this one?”

“From a temple about fifty miles west of where Abu Simbel stands now. That is a site in—”

“Southern Egypt. Constructed during the reign of Rameses the Great, and relocated in the seventies when they built the Aswan Dam. Yes, I know.”

His interruption was the first sign of irritation at her lecturing tone. He'd listened patiently through a monotonous history lesson about Mesopotamia and India, though he'd seemed to be biting his tongue. She'd pushed on, certain she'd been boring him. But he'd just been polite, letting the eccentric natter on; he'd already known all she'd told him.

“It seems you do.” She'd tired of it as well. His reaction reminded her too much of her human years, when she'd smile and nod as people lectured to her on subjects that she already knew as well—or even better—than they, and then go on about her business. “I have no idea how long this temple stood before I discovered it, and it disappeared four days later.” Her gaze skimmed the wall below the photograph. A deep gouge scarred the smooth marble surface.

No, she hadn't paced the room in her frustration—she'd taken her weapon to it. She'd gained nothing, and left a blemish on her home.

Oh, why didn't he leave?

A soft noise from the mice reminded her how he'd tricked her into inviting him in. He hadn't brought them in apology, but as a bribe. She would attempt her own if it meant he would go.

“I have photographs from Tunisia on my computer,” she said, lifting the carton of mice. Their cage hung from the ceiling, a heavy contraption with steel mesh and bars as thick as her finger. “You're welcome to take them.”

Jake joined her, tapped the laptop's touchpad. “Your battery's dead.”

“How observant you are.”

She ignored his quick grin, but appreciated his doubtful glance at the cage when she opened its door. “Don't tell me,” he said. “You feed them vampire blood, and they can gnaw through metal.”

“No.” She slid the brown mice into their nest. After vanishing the empty carton to her cache, she pulled a mangled pet-store cage out of it. “This is what Nefertari did to the previous one, so Irena made another.”

Jake looked at the gaping hole in the side, the twisted wires. Something flickered through his psychic scent—remembered terror, remembered pain. She vanished the cage again.

She'd intended him to speculate about Nefertari, not reopen a wound. She had too many scars of her own to take pleasure in that.

Reaching over her desk, Alice tugged the flash drive from the port. “I've already copied the pictures. If you would only return the—”

Jake held up a large rectangular battery, and she thought there was a slight smirk on his mouth when he looked from it to the small memory stick she offered. “Or, I can just get your computer rocking again and save them to my own.”

“Oh, but surely that can't be for the same model—”

“It is.” Without waiting for her consent, he flipped her computer over. “I requisitioned laptops, weapons, and a bunch of other shi—
stuff
—for the Guardians working at Special Investigations,” he said. “I ordered fifteen extra batteries for Drifter. But I kept five, because he never remembers to charge anything. His cell phone is a joke.” He clicked the new battery into place, set the machine down, and powered it up. “I haven't seen him use his computer since I gave it to him—which wasn't a surprise, considering he can't touch one without it locking up. But apparently there was another reason.”

Only her failure to hide how much she'd coveted the machine when Ethan had shown it to her. “Apparently,” Alice said.

Jake hefted the depleted battery in his hand. “Do you want the other four?”

She hesitated only a moment before nodding. Acceptance did not make her indebted to him. This was nothing but a service he provided many Guardians.

They appeared on her desk in a neat stack. Jake was already bending over the computer, his gaze fixed on the screen, when she said her thank-you. His response was a careless lift of his shoulders.

Uncertain whether she was perturbed or amused by his dismissal, Alice watched him scroll through the pictures. He could have easily copied the files and looked them over later, but here he was, oblivious to her presence in his eagerness to study them
now
.

She could see why he'd been called a puppy. There was no awkwardness in his tall, wiry form, nothing that suggested a lack of control. His every step revealed his confidence; indeed, his movements were almost cockily self-assured. But even when he was still, he seemed to contain a boundless energy resembling the exuberance of youth.

Yet he couldn't be so very young. They'd had the same mentor for their basic training, but she'd already moved on to her specializations by the time Jake had come to Caelum—so that must have been forty or fifty years ago. She could recall him among Hugh's students, so he hadn't significantly altered his appearance since becoming a Guardian. Perhaps his blue jeans hung a little lower, his T-shirt fit a little tighter against his leanly muscled torso—but that reflected contemporary human fashions more than a change in his body type.

Her gaze skimmed his back pockets, noting the slim outline of a wallet. Strange that he hadn't vanished it into his cache; it was more convenient. He'd likely carried it in his pocket as a human, then. Even centuries after transformation, there were actions many Guardians automatically performed: breathing, blinking, and individual habits engrained while they'd lived on Earth.

Habits, such as appreciating a superior example of male anatomy.

Alice hadn't been human for almost a hundred and twenty years, but she still hadn't broken that particular habit—and she saw no reason to do so now. Jake's fingers on the keyboard were long and nimble, his forearms strong and deeply tanned. The long plane of his back melded into a taut backside that was neither too spare nor too full.

Her gaze settled on his pockets again, and recognition slipped through her, curving her lips.

She'd sketched him once. He'd been nude, lazing about in a courtyard after participating in one of the orgies that had once been so commonplace. A Vietnamese phrase had been tattooed over that firm swell of muscle.

What had the phrase been? Alice couldn't recall, and the sketch was probably lost amid her jumble of personal papers upstairs. But she remembered that he'd seemed to possess boundless energy then, too.

And—according to the gossip she'd overheard from his fellow students—not much finesse.

“I see you've got more folders here, more pictures,” Jake said, then turned from the screen. After a glance at her face, he darted a wary look over his shoulder, then at her feet. “Do you mind if I copy those, too?”

“Of course not,” Alice said.

Eyes narrowed, Jake straightened. “What's with the smile?”

“Something amused me. Why else would I smile?”

“Maybe you've got something waiting to take a bite of me.” He studied her mouth. “Your teeth are longer now.”

So they were. Not by very much—but enough to be good practice, should she ever have to imitate a vampire. Such a need had not yet arisen, but one never knew.

“How suspicious you are, novice.”

“How creepy you are, Alice.” But Jake's own smile lifted the corners of his mouth as he focused on the computer again.

Perhaps she ought to tell him how nicely put together he was. Men so often mistook simple admiration for physical attraction. Surely, coming from her, a suggestion of interest would discomfit him so badly that he would finally go.

He'd responded contrary to her expectations on each of her previous attempts, however. Rather than retreat, he might make an advance—then she would be forced to reject him.

What an awkward scene that would be.

With a resigned sigh, Alice left him poring over a photograph she'd taken in India. The temple had punched through the surrounding jungle like a bare stone fist but had vanished before the wilderness could cast a single vine over its knuckles.

A print from its interior hung near the entrance to her quarters. Alice stopped to examine the temple's statues, then moved along the wall—searching, she imagined, for the same thing Jake was: a clue as to who had sculpted them, a hint of why and how and who.

“Mycenaean, right?” Jake suddenly spoke beside her, and her heart jumped.

Alice barely kept the rest of her body from following it. She held herself still, and wondered if she was surprised more by his sudden appearance or his correct identification.

She stole a glance at his profile, saw his concentration on the painting in front of them. “Yes. From a small island near Crete.”

“The hair's distinctive. The braids, the beads. The little beehive thing—” He made a gesture over his head, indicating the high-set roll of hair. “She's sharper, though, than in any other Mycenaean art I've seen. More angular. Egyptian influence?”

He'd recognized that, too? Excitement sparked in her chest. Passion, almost as old as she was, and rarely shared.

She laced her fingers together. “Perhaps,” Alice said. “But I wouldn't rule out Akkadian, or Sumerian.”

Jake scanned the walls and the pottery again, his expression hopeful. “Have any ziggurats appeared?”

“Unfortunately, no.” Exploring one of the Sumerian stepped pyramids might have sent her into ecstasies. “This fresco is from the oldest temple I've yet found. Radiocarbon dating placed it—”