She’d have been irritated by his blatant dismissal if not for the fact that the warg she needed to die was being treated by her brother, who didn’t know she existed. Christ, only she could get herself into this kind of mess.
This had never happened before—a victim of hers surviving even minutes after being infected by her touch—and a horrifying thought stabbed at her brain; what if he’d infected someone else? While her heart had turned to brimstone decades ago, and for the most part she couldn’t care less about the lives and deaths of people she didn’t even know, she didn’t kill for fun. When she killed, it was deliberate and quick. Controlled. Killing was the only thing she had any command over, the only aspect of her life that wasn’t chaotic, and she couldn’t stand the thought that she might be responsible for deaths she couldn’t prevent or make happen the way they should.
She paced, hanging back near the Harrowgate where the Umber wouldn’t notice her but she could keep an eye on the room. It was weird, being in the hospital her brothers had built. She hadn’t known what to expect, but disarray and unprofessionalism wasn’t it. The staff was grumpy, and when a patient came in with a spear impaled in his gut, two doctors spent so much time fighting over who got to treat the guy that he collapsed while the doctors screamed at each other.
She’d seen more order in a bar brawl.
“What the hell is going on?” Eidolon stepped out of the warg’s room, his gold-glowing eyes fixed on the guy bleeding out on the floor. His fury seemed to knock some sense into the arguing doctors, but as Eidolon rushed toward the patient, his expression told Sin that those physicians were soon going to wish their parents had practiced birth control.
But hey, the commotion made for a great distraction, and Sin could turn any situation into one that benefited her.
While all attention was on the skewered-guy drama, Sin peeked into the warg’s room. Relief flooded her at the sight of a sheet draped over a body. Now, if she could just gather her proof of death and get out of there so she could find Lore…
Of course, she couldn’t very well get proof while the body was lying in the middle of the emergency department. She’d have to wait until they took him to the morgue. In the meantime, she needed privacy.
Making sure no one was watching, she slipped down one of the halls and into a room full of medical equipment, wicked-looking, odd restraints, and even odder homey touches, like a wooden dresser and shelves stocked with towels and slippers in various sizes and shapes.
Sin removed her jacket, sat on the edge of the bed, and waited. She didn’t have to wait long. A vibration started deep in her body, growing steadily until it concentrated in her right arm. Her dermoire writhed, tightened, and finally, the skin between two symbols split, and a deep gash appeared in her biceps.
Even clenching her teeth so tightly her jaw popped, she couldn’t contain a cry of pain. Blood spurted, but she didn’t bother to stop it. No, this was a cleansing of sorts, something that happened after every kill, as though her body was purging itself of the guilt she couldn’t allow herself to feel.
“What the fuck?” Eidolon rushed into the room, grabbed her wrist, and slapped his hand over the gash.
“Don’t touch me!” She wheeled away from him, but he moved like Lore, with incredible speed and grace, and in a heartbeat he had her back on the bed, arm stretched out, with one palm putting pressure on her biceps.
His dermoire lit up. She kneed him in the junk, and with an “oof!” he doubled over, his grip loosening enough to allow her to leap away, scoop up her jacket, and dart toward the door.
He tackled her before she made it.
She smacked the floor hard, her breath exploding from her lungs. Eidolon rolled her, straddled her, and pinned her wrists together on her chest. Then he stared down at her with that furious, golden-eyed glare Lore had perfected.
“You want to explain those?” His gaze cut to the markings on her right arm. “And how you got around the Haven spell?”
“Haven spell? Get the fuck off me and I’ll leave you alone.”
He kept her wrists pinned with one hand and used the other to tear away her tank top’s shoulder strap, revealing her dermoire all the way to her neck. “You had this applied. How? Magic?” He rubbed his thumb over one of the symbols. “Permanent ink? Tattoo?”
“Fuck you.” Pain streaked up her arm from the tear in her biceps, which was gaping open from the awkward grip he had her arm in, and blood was pooling on the floor next to her.
She wriggled, but he held her tighter, squeezed her more firmly between his thighs even as he slapped his palm over the laceration and applied pressure. “The top symbol is my father’s. Were you mated to him? To Khane?”
Mated? To a Seminus demon? Eew. Still, she put on her best honest expression. “Yes. Love those hot, sexalicious Seminus males.”
He narrowed his eyes at her. “You’re lying. Wrong arm for mate marks.”