Free No Angel by Vivi Andrews Page A

him in the face.
    In the same move, she drew a gleaming silver gun and pointed it straight at his chest. “Better?”
    Out of the frying pan. The poker would have hurt like the devil, but he could have shaken it off. He could have asked her to shoot the manacles off before—he knew she was a crack shot—but he hadn’t wanted that gun pointed anywhere near him.
    A bullet from a human gun was unlikely to kill him, but the swirling etched into the barrel meant she was holding an angel’s sword. She could do some serious damage even if she just tried to wing him. Angel swords—whatever form they chose to take—were created to destroy demons.
    Did she know that? Did she know if she squeezed the trigger she could end him? Just what mission had the angels assigned her that she needed a Demon Killer?
    “Sasha…” he began cautiously, but couldn’t find the words to continue. Getting her to trust him again seemed too big a task for a collection of verbs and nouns.
    Her expression was fierce. “You said you could explain. Start talking.”
    It wasn’t the threat of the gun that spurred his tongue, so much as the wounded flicker in her eyes. The betrayed ache he was solely responsible for putting there.
    “I’m only half demon. My father was human. An anthropologist working at USC. My mother…” There really was no way of painting his mother in a positive light without outright lying and he refused to lie to Sasha any more. “My mother is an ambitious demoness who thought having a hybrid child would enhance her standing in the demonic court.” And she hadn’t been wrong. “But I never wanted to spend my life as a pawn in an endless string of intrigues. I didn’t know what I wanted…”
    “You better not say until you met me. My bullshit tolerance is low right now, Jay.”
    At least she was calling him Jay again. It was a definite improvement over the way she’d spat demon at him like an epithet. “I went to the mortal realm looking for… I don’t know. Guidance. Answers. Some kind of direction. I thought if I could find my father’s family, find where the human half of me came from, I would understand why I never felt complete in Hell.”
    “I will shoot you if you say ‘you complete me.’”
    Jay suppressed a smile. The demonic part of his nature was unspeakably turned on by her rage. She had no idea how enthralling she was right now. “I found out my father was an orphan with no known relatives, but by then I already knew I wanted to stay on the mortal plane. Everything was so alive. Humans seemed to feel things so much more strongly because their lives were so much shorter they had to pack their experiences in tightly. I couldn’t go back to the chess game of the demon realm, where manipulations and intrigues can take a thousand years to develop. Not after I experienced the rush of human existence. I knew I had to find a way to stay…and that’s when I met you.”
    The gun’s muzzle lowered a few inches. Sasha’s eyes were still wary, but there was a hopeful crack in her angry mask that hadn’t been there moments ago.
    “I thought you could help me be less demonic. I wanted to be good. For you. You made me feel like I was human and normal, sometimes too normal for you, but I couldn’t tell you the truth and have you look at me like—like you’re looking at me now.”
    “How am I looking at you?” she asked softly.
    “Like you’ll never trust me again.” Jay thought he saw a shadow shift out of the corner of his eye. A soft skittering sound rustled through the darkness. Minions. “And I’ve run out of time to convince you to.”
    ***
    He moved quickly—almost faster than she could see—and in a blink his hand was on the gun, shoving the barrel away. She tried to jerk it up and out of his grasp, but her arm tangled in the chain linking his wrists as he locked one arm around her waist. He spun her in his arms so her back was pressed to his front and both of his hands covered hers on the