Free Darkness Descending by Devyn Quinn

pressed against hers.
    Forcing herself to calm down, Jesse lifted a hand to silence him. “Just forget it, okay? We were both groggy and stressed, and things just got out of hand.”
    Maddox silently, infuriatingly stared at her with an unreadable expression. “Is that all it was?” he asked quietly. “Or was there something more?”
    Jesse felt a trickle of sweat work its way down her spine. The closed apartment was suddenly unbearably stuffy, and she was burning up. Her skin felt tight, as though she were suffocating.
    Shaking her head, she scooted toward the edge of the bed. “It was nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”
    Too bad she didn’t believe her own words. Put on your big-girl panties and suck it up , she warned herself.
    “Didn’t feel like nothing to me,” he mumbled through clenched teeth.
    She eyed the length of his gorgeous body. “You were the one who pulled back.”
    His brows furrowed with frustration. “I’d never live it down, sleeping with you.”
    She speared his vanishing erection with a sarcastic glare. “As if you were supposed to run and tell all your killer buddies you’d just knocked off a piece of tail. Ever thought about keeping whom you screw to yourself?”
    Pushing himself into a sitting position, Maddox sighed in exasperation. The final remnant of his desire had disappeared. “It’s not like that.”
    “Then what is it?”
    “Take my word for it when I say it was the booze.” He rose, more than a little unsteady on his feet. “I had too damn much to drink last night, that’s all.” Skirting the nearby table, he strode toward the bathroom. The door slammed behind him.
    A few minutes later she heard the sound of water running. Jesse shook her head. Despite her attraction to Maddox, she felt it would be a mistake to get emotionally tangled up with him. At any given moment he might change his mind about helping her, especially if the rest of his crew lashed out against her presence.
    That he could just as easily take her life as preserve it was a warning she should heed. I should leave now , she told herself. New Orleans was a big city, with a lot of places to hide. It would be easy to keep low and stay out of sight. But it wouldn’t be easy to continue her quest to take down the ravenous cult.
    One of the reasons Jesse had returned was to find the bitch who’d damned both her and her twin to death. She was tired of running. Tired of hiding. Tired of being afraid. The limbo of being trapped between human and demon was beginning to wear away at her spirit. She’d decided death would be preferable to continuing on. At one point she’d even considered taking her own life—she had even lain on a stretch of lonely railroad tracks, waiting for the train to perform a gruesome beheading.
    But when the fast-moving locomotive had begun to bear down, she’d lost her nerve. Heart thudding a mile a minute, she’d scampered off the tracks. Landing in a nearby trench of trash, weeds, and stagnant water, she’d sobbed like a child.
    Alone. Forsaken. Forgotten.
    It was then she’d discovered her purpose.
    It would be better to die fighting, to take as many of the creatures out as she could before she inevitably perished herself. Maybe then she could earn back her pride—and her twin’s forgiveness.
    Truth be told, she needed Maddox—needed his connections, his arsenal, and his backup. She needed to learn everything he had to teach; what these things were, their vulnerabilities, and where they nested.
    Everything she thought she knew had been wrong. The Telave were nothing like vampires of lore and legend.
    They were demons, empowered with the darkest evil emanating from the pits of hell itself; body thieves who fed on flesh and blood; the legion of the devil himself. If allowed to continue to spread—and who really knew what their true numbers might be?—they would take mankind to the brink of extinction.

    Storming into the bathroom and slamming the door behind him