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I tapped my speedometer. Could have sworn it was broken and we were really crawling around fifteen miles per hour rather than the seventy it read out.

“I feel sick,” Lana moaned from next to me, clutching her stomach in the passenger seat.

I glanced over at her, at the pigsty that was her side of the car—food wrappers everywhere, half-eaten Hostess cupcakes discarded in the cupholders, crumbs mashed into the seats. My nose wrinkled.

“How old are you?” I asked, beginning to doubt my earlier assessment of early twenties.Please tell me she’s not a teenager.

“Twenty-three. Did you poison me? I think I’m going to puke.”

“Swallow it. What is that in human years? Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Twenty-three,” she corrected, sitting up. “Humans and Infernari age at the same rate. Do I look like a twelve-year-old?”

“No, but you’re acting like one.”

“How old areyou, Asher?”

“Clean up your mess, and I’ll talk to you.”

She opened the glove compartment to get to the napkins, and her gaze froze on the Glock. I didn’t have to be worried. She wouldn’t know how to operate a firearm. Even if she did, she wouldn’t try to kill with it.

She reached around the weapon, careful not to touch it.

“Pick it up,” I said.

Her eyes flicked to mine, fearful.

“The gun. Pick it up,” I ordered.

Because that’s the smart thing to do, eh, Asher?Make the moody demon girl handle your gun.

“I’m not going to touch that vile thing,” she said.

I took my focus off the road long enough to look her straight in the eye. “And that’s why humans will always kill demons. You fear what you don’t understand. Pick it up.”

With a defiant look, she lifted the gun out, holding it like a dirty sock.

But just to be sure, I swiped the weapon out of her hands, ejected the magazine, and racked the slide to empty the bullet out of the chamber, swerving a little. The metallic click made her flinch. “There. No bullets.” I plopped the one that had been in the chamber in the ashtray. “You know how a gun works? Every time you pull the trigger, there’s an explosion that propels the bullet—”

She took the gun back from me and, closing one eye, peered down the barrel.

“Jesus...” I yanked her hand away from her face, swerving again. “Neverlook down the barrel of a gun.”

“But you took out the bullets. Is that bad luck?” Those big doe eyes again.

I sighed and rubbed my jaw. So many things wrong with this girl’s survival instincts. “First of all, I’m ahuman. You’re a demon. I want to kill you. That means you should never trust anything I say. Second of all, I could have made a mistake. If there was still a bullet in the chamber and the weapon fired...” I trailed off, seeing her blank look. “Never mind.”

“You’re Jame Asher. I thought you never made mistakes.”

“Yeah, well, I do. I’ve made about a hundred mistakes since I captured you.”

“Like showing me your gun?” She climbed onto her knees and pressed the barrel to my temple. “It must be so soulless to kill with the press of a button.”

I grabbed the gun and wrenched it away from her. “Arlright, you’re done. Sit back down and clean up your goddamned mess... and put your seatbelt on.” When she didn’t budge, I grabbed a wad of napkins and dumped them on her lap. “Here. Clean.”

She didn’t clean.

Instead, she pulled a crumpled packet out of the glove compartment—my application for a concealed weapons permit in West Virginia, which I still hadn’t submitted.