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Not to mention, as a half demon, I lived in a perfect in between where I escaped the traditional killing methods of both human and demon alike. Or so we thought. Honestly, don't ask me how it all worked. It just did. I didn't question it because it hadn't failed me yet.
The minute the powder disappeared into the expired demon’s flesh, that was my cue to flee the crime scene. Sadly, unlike in the movies, demons didn't disappear after death in a poof of ash or go back to whence they came. Their host bodies stayed, still very much like how they'd been killed.
So, if I was found at the scene of the crime, I'd be instantly charged with first-degree murder. Being locked up meant having to break out of the big house and go through the tiresome process of obtaining a new identity. Tiresome because I didn't have time to be tied up with all the shit that came with running from the feds. My life was complicated enough already without any of that.
Also, unlike my pureblood counterparts, I couldn't teleport or move through spaces like some kind of fucking phantom. Don't ask me how they did that while somehow staying solid after death, because fuck if I knew. While they could spirit away like they'd never been there, I was stuck with old-school escape methods.
Must be the human side of me.
Alright, so maybe not entirely old school. I did run faster than any human could, and I had super strength with a deadly punch. Really, no human person stood a chance against me, and it was more for sport that I went after them.
I was probably immortal, though I couldn't be certain at this stage. I was nearly thirty but looked just out of high school. Still, it wasn't enough evidence to suggest immortality. I'd seen plenty of celebrities who retained their youthful looks, so not until I was eighty and looking twenty would I maybe question immortality again.
It was difficult to explain how I knew anything about what sort of beast I was without telling the first part of my story, about how I discovered I wasn't just your average human. About how I knew I was something different, something quite possibly evil. How I came to find out I was half demon.
Back up thirteen years and I was your average everyday teen, hellbent on escaping my eleventh foster home in the sixteen years I'd been alive. I'd been saddled with a particularly volatile couple who made me work for my keep. The "father" had sticky fingers and a loose mouth, not to mention a penchant for alcohol and drugs, and he thought I'd do what he wanted because I didn't have a choice.
But I wouldn't stick around to suffer.
I'd gotten my affairs in order to ditch that shitty place one full-moon night, and "Daddy," as he so grossly referred to himself, caught me before I could high-tail it out of the second-floor window. There was a struggle. He'd gotten me under him on the carpet, and I was confident even if I screamed my foster mother would be too drunk to notice.
It wasn't a new thing for me, being assaulted, being touched against my will—being under the thumb of some dude who thought he could do whatever he wanted to me because he was twice my size and proclaimed dominion over my body.
But for some reason, that night ended differently.
I'd felt it before, the sensation I could only attribute to high emotion, and I didn't expect anything to come of it. I'd come to terms with another night of being locked inside my head, detached from my body the way I had to be so many times before. It was the only way I made it through with my sanity intact, if that was what one could call my thoughts these days.
But as soon as his gross fingers clawed at my clothes, the putrid stench of the whiskey he drank by the bottle wafting heavily over my face, the earlier sensation exploded from inside my belly. It came in hot waves, and without understanding how it happened, my foster father was suddenly beneath me, beaten and practically torn apart by the limbs. Blood saturated the carpet and expanded out from beneath him the longer I sat there and stared.
His face wasn't recognizable anymore. Swelling distorted his features, and it was evident upon closer inspection his head had been beaten in. His neck was bent at a weird angle, and I knew in that moment I'd killed him. I didn't know how, but I didn't question it. Instead, I fled the house that night and never looked back.
Over the next few weeks, I noticed something was different. Something had changed. I could scale walls, break brick, leap across distances no human could, and none of it made sense. But again, I didn't question it. Not really. For years, I simply survived and stayed under the radar. My abilities had perks that meant I lived without struggling like I had in foster care. I counted myself lucky to do the things I did, and I didn't really care to know the reason I could.
Until I metthem...
"Probably don't want to be here when the cops arrive," a heavily accented baritone said from the shadows, and I gripped my bat in alarm. "Would be a pity to do all that and then get caught."
I didn't have to look to know whoever spoke was someone of the demon persuasion. And if his presence was anything to go by, the bastard was powerful. I hadn't sensed him before he spoke. Most I sensed. So that information alone was bothersome because it took a special kind of evil to catch me by surprise.
Usually the super old and formidable ones.
Looking up from the bastard I'd killed to the brand-new bastard I'd need to kill next, I leveled eyes on a man in a smart suit with the most piercing emerald eyes I'd seen yet. His pearly white smile greeted my raised eyebrow before sirens howled in the distance and I looked over my shoulder. When I looked back, he was gone.
Amateur move, Lady,I thought in self-loathing.
Fair enough to say I'd never find the asshole now. Not if he came and went without setting off any of my internal alarms. But maybe it was better to let this one go. Still, something about the demon burrowed deep into my thoughts as I scaled the nearby building and fled to the roof. Then I leapt from one structure to the next.
Who was he? And why hadn't he attacked me?
2
A Demon’s Request
“I’VE TOLD YOU NOT TO linger after you're done,” came the chiding voice of a man I'd known since I was twenty. "You linger. There are witnesses. We have more paperwork to do."
"Yeah, yeah," I grumbled, lofting one of my stilettos into a small cardboard box. "I got distracted. Won't happen again."
"Cheeky. I'd prefer if you didn't go out alone."
