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I should finish it this time. I should.

Burn her to ashes.

But I still didn’t understand her power. And what I didn’t understand, I wanted to study.

This one, I was going to keep.

Asher

Back on thehighway, I jammed my fingers through my hair and dragged my palm down the back of my neck, exhaling slowly through flared nostrils. Then I cursed and punched the steering wheel.

I had been hunting demons for two years, and I had survived purely because no demon had ever seen me alive... and lived to tell the tale.

Because every demon believed Jame Asher had died alongside his wife and two-year-old daughter on Friday, October 13, twenty-two months ago.

Not anymore.

My gaze slid to the photo of them taped to the dashboard.

Nicole and Joy Asher.

I should have died with them. I should have been in that fire with them. I should have suffocated and choked on ash and screamed right along with them.

But I hadn’t.

I had been cursed to live on, burdened instead with this task of eradicating the demon scourge from the earth.

For twenty-two months, I had picked them off one by one as a ghost, lived as a ghost, survived as a ghost.

Demons couldn’t attack what didn’t exist.

But now, thanks to the juvenile female chained up in the back of my Hummer, they would be coming for me with a vengeance.

Again.

My fingers turned white on the steering wheel. I pried them off and squeezed my jaw, then tugged at my shirt, fanning out the collar of heat rising around my throat. I was in such deep shit.

A white minivan emerged out of the grayish dawn and crept up behind me. I tensed, and my hand slid toward my holster.

But then the minivan flashed a turn signal and veered around me.

I let out my breath.

This paranoia was only going to get worse.

I needed to get to my safe house, ASAP. Lay low for a while. Study the female. Regroup. Then track down the next portal. Destroy it. Keep going. This didn’t change a damn thing.

Plugged into its car charger, my smartphone lay in the center tray. I kept glancing at it. Rather than grabbing it—rather than giving in—I tightened my hold on the steering wheel.

The female.

Her healing power. It unnerved me, I didn’t like surprises. I liked knowing exactly who and what I was fighting at all times. But the connection she’d formed with the other demon... it had been invisible, and distance didn’t seem to affect it.

Whoever she was, she was powerful. Probably some warlord’s daughter, knowing my luck, and by noon I’d have fifty of her brothers coming for my blood. Could I use her as leverage?

I glanced at my phone again.

No, Asher.