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I didn’t know how to feel about that. For most of my life, demons had wanted to kill me. But a demon who wanted tosaveme?

I should dump her. Get rid of her. She was everything Ididn’t want to associate with demons—beautiful, helpless, innocent, protective.

I needed to hate her, not pity her. Not feel for her. Not care about her.

Or else I would begin to doubt. I would begin to stumble, when I needed to be surefooted. I would hesitate, when I needed to be focused. I would waver, when I needed to be lethal.

Doubt would only make it harder when I finally did it.

When I finally killed her.

I pushed the thought from my mind.

Absently, Lana rolled up her sleeve again and picked at the vein in the crook of her elbow, right where the skin was softest, where a heroin addict would shoot up. The sight made me oddly dismayed. As I watched her scratching, picking, her movements twitchy and compulsive, a lump settled in my throat. She was itching to draw blood.

I seized her wrist, startling her again.

“Stop it. Stop doing that to yourself.”

“I’m just scratching,” she muttered, folding her arms tightly across her chest.

“So if I save a demon’s life,” I said, steering our conversation away from emotional territory, “they’re honor-bound to protect me? So what if I just saved a bunch of demons as a strategy? Then they can’t kill me, right?”

She gave me an unamused look. “An Infernarusalwaysknows when your heart is true. Plus, Infernari’s lives are rarely in danger. It’syouthey need saving from. Therefore you’re proposing to both killandsave them, which is the most two-faced and dishonorable of treacheries... youhuman.”

“Fair point.” I nodded slowly, chewing on my lip. “So when I saved you—yesterday, I mean—my heart was... you’re saying my heart was...?”

“Yes,” she said miserably, “your heart was true.”

Chapter 11

Lana

Saving the hunterdidn’t sit well with me. It made my hair snap irately. It wasn’t that I regretted protecting his life from my own kind.

It was that Ididn’t.

And now we were driving Mother knew where, and I could practically feel the other Infernari breathing at my back.

The hunter has become the hunted.

My legs began to jiggle, and again I began to pick at the veins in my wrist, anxiously, before I remembered Asher and caught myself. I dropped my hands in my lap.

His eyes cut to me, his brooding look only deepening.

He missed nothing, that human.

Strange, cold creature. He could be cut from ice, he sat so still.

And now I needed to make a decision. A decision I didn’t want to make. It wasn’t in my nature to weigh cause and effect carefully. Just one more thing that I’d picked up from the natives.

My eyes fixated on the panel of buttons set into Asher’s car. On a whim I began pressing them, just to keep my hands and mind busy.

One made air blast from the vents in front of me, another caused the electronic display to flickerLOAD.

“Stop that,” he said, swatting my hand away.

I dropped my hand, eyeing the row of buttons as my unease grew.