“Come with me.”
She followed him back down the hall to a room nearly as large as his bedroom, but cozier. The walls were lined with full bookshelves, many titles in languages she couldn’t read. A desk took up one corner, a leather couch took up an entire wall. Black marble tile on the floor reflected light instead of darkening the room as she might have expected.
Eidolon pulled a leather-bound book from one of the shelves and flipped it open to a blank page. Closing his eyes, he waved his hand over the parchment. A glow sprang up under his palm, and when he removed it, a pulsing, shiny—wet—picture of bloody internal organs appeared.
“First of all, that’s nasty. Second, how did you do that?”
“It’s a medical text. I wrote it. On these two pages, I can visualize anything I’ve seen, and it’ll temporarily appear like a living photo.”
“Cool. But eew. What’s that supposed to be?”
“That’s your open abdomen.”
She recoiled. “I’m no medical expert, but that doesn’t look right. Are you sure?”
“I was up close and personal,” he said grimly. “These are your organs. They’re misshapen. Formed from a union of two different species. And no, it’s not a human birth defect.”
She wheeled away as though she could escape what he was saying. “I still can’t believe this. My mom wouldn’t have kept me. She wouldn’t have wanted me if some demon had—”
“She probably didn’t know.”
“But how—” She cut herself off, because yeah, stupid question. “An incubus.”
“That’s a likely scenario.”
The conversation they’d had at her apartment before she knocked him over the head with the pipe came back to her, along with a glimmer of hope. “Wait . . . you said incubi only have male offspring.”
“No, I said Seminus demons produce only male offspring. Other breeds of incubi can produce both males and females.”
She really was a demon, and there was no point in denying it any longer. She hated what he was saying, but none of it truly surprised her, if she was being honest with herself. Even as a child, she’d been different from the other kids. More intuitive. Her vision had been off-the-charts perfect. As she got older, her other senses had become more acute.
And her ability to empathize and sympathize with other humans had taken a dive.
“So what’s going to happen to me? Your brother said the demon DNA is taking over. Am I going to turn into some horrible beast?” She’d kill herself before she allowed that to happen.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? You don’t know?” A bitter laugh escaped her. “You’re supposed to be a doctor. A demon doctor.” She waved at the books on the shelves. “You have demon sorcery at your disposal, and you don’t know?”
“There’s something I do know. My brother was right.” He propped a hip on his desk, stretched one long leg out in front of him. “The demon DNA is aggressive. It’s trying to take over rather than merge with your human DNA. That’s why you’re having problems. There’s a question what, exactly, you’ll turn into, but you will turn. Or you’ll die.”
“Dying is better than the alternative.”
He shook his head. “There’s another option.”
“Yeah, I can eat a bullet before either of the other two happens.”
“No. With Shade’s help, I think we can integrate your human and demon DNA. Basically, it’ll give you the biology and form you should have been born with.”
“Which is what? Right. You don’t know. So if I do nothing, I either die or turn into a monster?”
The antique clock on the wall ticked away several seconds of silence. “That about sums it up.”
“Wow,” she said quietly, “my future looks pretty bleak.” Worse than bleak. The only thing she had to look forward to was her own death. Then again, she’d never had anything else to look forward to, so this was nothing new. She trailed a finger over the books on the shelves. “So I’m a ticking time bomb. Any idea when I’ll go off?”
“I don’t know,” he said, shoving his fingers through his hair in that way he did when he was frustrated.
“For a doctor, you don’t know all that much.”
The raised gold lettering on one fat tome made her pause. “Daemonica.” She drew it out, frowning. “A demon bible?”
“In essence. It’s the other side of the story.”
“So, what do the minions of darkness say happened in the beginning?”
“Do you really care?”
“Yeah.” She weighed the book in her hands, expecting it to burn her, but it just sat there, a cold weight. “It’s always good to know how the other side thinks.”