“No!” I said again, eyes filming with tears as I dropped to my knees beside them.
Dom’s eyes were squinched shut with pain, and his face was way too pale. Blood continued to pour from the wound.
“Do something!” I shouted at Adam.
He was a policeman. He had to know some rudimentary first aid! But when I took another look at the wound, I knew that rudimentary first aid wasn’t going to cut it.
“Adam!” Dom gasped, terror and pain in his voice.
“Shh,” Adam said, wrapping one of his hands around Dom’s fingers. His face looked strangely serene, no sign of grief or horror or fear. I wanted to scream at him, curse him, hit him. Make him look like he was supposed to look when his lover lay dying in his arms.
“I’ll take good care of you,” Adam said, his voice a low croon, and the bastard had the nerve to smile.
Dom’s eyes widened, as if he, too, were shocked by that smile. Then he made a pained sound. His back arched briefly; then he went limp and his eyes closed. Adam released the hand he’d been holding.
I put both my hands over my mouth to stifle the sob that was rising in my throat. Adam sighed, then turned to me and held out his hand.
“Nice to meet you,” he said, with a little grin, “though I’d have preferred to do it under better circumstances.”
I just sat there and gaped, not understanding. He lowered his hand.
“I’m Adam,” he said, and I wondered if it was possible for demons to go into shock. I’d never heard of it before, but then his lover had just died in his arms. He blinked. “I mean I’m Adam,” he said more forcefully. “My demon’s taking care of Dom at the moment.”
I shook my head, wondering if that would rattle the pieces of my brain back into place. Then I figured out what he meant and my eyes went saucer-wide.
“You mean he transferred to Dominic?” I cried, and I heard the shrillness of my own voice.
Adam nodded. “It’s only temporary. He’ll probably need about twenty-four hours to get Dominic fully healed, then he’ll come back to me.”
I stared at him, so full of questions I couldn’t even figure out which one to spit out first. “Eighty percent of demon hosts are nonfunctional when their demons leave. And you and Dom are both in the lucky twenty percent?”
“It’s not luck,” Adam said. His voice sounded the same, and obviously he looked exactly the same, but though it might have been my imagination, I could have sworn there was something visibly different about him. Maybe it was just body language.
“Most of the time when you see a host without its demon, it’s because the demon was illegal and was exorcized. Illegal demons generally don’t give a damn about their hosts, so they don’t take good care of them. That’s why the hosts are such a wreck when they’re gone.”
I remembered that we weren’t alone in the room, and I looked around. Brian had sagged down into a chair, his face green. Andy was still standing, hugging himself as if he were cold. I looked more closely at my brother while I continued to talk to Adam.
“So Andy was catatonic because Raphael abused him?”
“That would be my guess.” He smiled. “And Adam’s going to be extremely pissed off at me for telling you this. Humans aren’t supposed to know this deep, dark secret, because then they’d know that even the legal demons aren’t always so pure. He only told me so I wouldn’t worry about Dom.”
I shook my head in confusion. “Adam’s going to be pissed? Don’t you mean your demon?”
“Adam is my demon. As he informed me when he first possessed me, Adam is a very common name among male demons.”
Dominic moaned softly, but his eyes were still closed. I bit my lip. “Is he going to be okay?”
Adam brushed a stray lock of hair off Dominic’s face, an undeniably tender gesture. I wondered whether he intended it for Adam, or for Dominic.
“He’ll be fine.” His eyes swept over Dom’s body, and he actually laughed.
Like a moron, I followed his gaze and saw that even out cold, bleeding from a gaping chest wound, Dominic had a very enthusiastic boner.
“I’d say Adam’s making sure they both enjoy the healing process to its fullest.”
Adam’s strong, even without his demon, so he had no trouble picking Dom up and carrying him upstairs to the bedroom. Andy, Brian, and I hung out in the living room with Dr. Neely’s body.
“What the hell happened?” I asked no one in particular.
“The phone call I got,” Andy said. “It was from Raphael. He was ordered to take a new host so that Der Jäger could ride Dr. Neely to this meeting.”
“Why did you tell Neely you’d told me everything?”
“That’s what Raphael told me to tell him. He said Der Jäger wouldn’t give a damn, and I could use that as an excuse to ‘realize’ it wasn’t Raphael—while still letting Raphael keep his cover.”
Frighteningly enough, that made sense to me. “And how did Dominic end up getting shot?”
“When you stomped on Neely, Adam took a shot and missed. I was trying to keep Dominic and Brian out of the line of fire, but I’m still not up to full strength. Dom got in the way.”
And then Adam fired a second shot, killing Neely. I remembered how close together those two gunshots had come, and I felt a little queasy. I guess I was glad Adam was a demon, because a human might have had at least a moment or two of shock after accidentally shooting his lover, and that might have been enough to let Der Jäger recover.
We had lapsed into silence by the time Adam came back downstairs.
“How is he?” I asked.
“Resting comfortably,” Adam assured me.
I looked at Dr. Neely’s body. “And what are we going to do about him?”
“I’ll take care of him.” He looked grim. “I know where Adam hides the bodies, as it were.”
I shook my head. “Do me a favor and just call him your demon. It’s too weird to hear you talking about ‘Adam.’”
“Have you never known two people with the same name before?” he asked with a very Adam-esque grin.
I decided to let the subject drop, seeing as it wasn’t even remotely important. Of course, considering that what was of top importance right now was disposing of a dead body, I kinda wished we could stick to the unimportant stuff.
The only remotely good news was that for the moment, Der Jäger wasn’t on the Mortal Plain anymore. But I sure wished I knew how long that would last.
CHAPTER 19
Not surprisingly, the police paid us a visit before long. There’d been a rumor of gunshots in the neighborhood, but when Adam explained it had been a car backfiring, the cops believed him. After all, he was a cop himself. Convenient at times.
Adam hauled the body down into the basement while Andy and I did our best to clean up the blood on the floor. Brian was still sitting in a chair, looking sick and shell-shocked. He hadn’t looked up or even blinked—as far as I could tell—when the police had come to the door. I wished I had some idea what to say to him. All that came to mind was something like “Welcome to my world,” but I figured that probably was insensitive.
I noticed with a chill that my hands weren’t shaking and I didn’t feel an urgent need to puke. I was cleaning up blood from the floor while Adam hid the body of a man he’d just killed, and I was taking it all in stride. How scary was that? I should have been as freaked out as Brian.
For a while, there was no sound except the sloshing of water and the rub of a scrub brush against the carpet. I didn’t think the carpet was salvageable. Yeah, we could get the worst of the blood out, but there would have to be a significant stain when we were done. And calling in a professional carpet cleaner wasn’t exactly an option. I kept scrubbing anyway.
“Why aren’t we calling the police?” Brian asked eventually.
I looked up from my scrubbing and saw that some color had returned to his face, and there was a spark of intelligence in his eyes again. At the moment, I wasn’t sure that was an improvement. Brian is very much a law-abiding citizen, and I worried we’d have a battle on our hands if we wanted to keep him from blabbing to the cops.