Amber dug her fingers into her thighs as Kai careened down the spiral ramp. They were going so fast, she didn't know how he wasn't losing control of the car and scraping the wall.
"You can relax," he said. "I won't crash."
That wasn't what she was afraid of. If she died a fourth time, she'd just wake up hours later in the morgue. She knew that from experience; her third death had been in a car crash. The only thing that worried her was the hunters getting their hands on her. She'd spent her entire life afraid of them. Her mother had sung that fear into her head like a lullaby, and the fact that they always managed to find her eventually and send her running all over again only strengthened it.
She twisted to look back. The Hummer was losing ground, and the driver's side scraped the concrete wall with a shriek and a shower of sparks.
"Grunts," Kai said, apparently unconcerned. He turned his head and gave her a measured look. "Ready to tell me what they want with you?"
"Why do you call them grunts?" she asked, wincing as they sped around the corner and onto Mission. Kai let the engine roar, and the car flew along the street. Then he cut a sharp right onto 10th.
Again, she looked behind them. The Hummer was back there, not gaining, but not losing ground, either.
"Topworld grunts are humans who work for Underworlders."
"I call them hunters," she said, eying the greasy, black cloud that bobbed just behind Kai's head.
"Why?"
"Because they hunt me."
The look he shot her was glacial.
"Why?"
She shook her head. "I don't know."
Kai took a corner so fast, she was certain they were going to fly off the road and slam into the storefront. She held her breath, only releasing it when another look over her shoulder revealed that the Hummer was nowhere in sight.
That should have eased her mind. Instead, it made her edgy. "Too easy," she muttered.
"Yeah. They'll be back."
His left hand was relaxed on the wheel as they merged onto the I-80 east. His right hand rested on the knob of the gearshift. There was dried blood on his fingers. Long, strong fingers with blunt tips.
She looked away, not wanting to remember.
"Hunters…" he prodded.
She pressed her lips together. She didn't trust him. But he seemed to have a whole bucket load of information that she lacked. So she was open to a little conversation.
Suddenly, she realized that for the first time since her mother's death, she could tell someone the truth. She wasn't human. But then, Kai wasn't exactly human himself. Not anymore. And he had answers. He knew about things she'd never imagined.
"Who is Asmodeus?" she asked.
"Told you. Demon of lust."
"What does he want with me?"
Kai passed two cars, then tucked in front of a truck.
"If they're behind us, this'll offer a bit of cover," he said. Then he shrugged. "You tell me what Asmodeus wants with you. You made some deal with him or he wouldn't be hunting you. I just have to wonder what kind of deal. He's expending a shitload of manpower." He shot her an assessing look. "Has he been looking for you all this time? A lot of years to chase after someone who doesn't owe him anything, don't you think?"
"If I owe him something, I have no idea what it is." Had her mother known? Had her mother made some deal with a demon? The possibility chilled her. "He's been hunting me forever," she whispered.
"How long is forever?"
"Since the day I was born."
"Which was? You never did tell me. Never told me what day you were born. Or what year. Was anything you ever told me the truth? Or was it all lies, every word of it?"
There was a thread of pain in his words. It stunned her. And shamed her. Because she had lied to him, again and again.
"When were you born?" Kai asked.
"Over a hundred years ago," she said, giving him that, because a conversation couldn't happen with only one person doing the talking. And because it felt so good to tell the truth—even if it was just a small truth—at last.
"So when we were together…"
"I stopped aging at twenty five. Maybe even before that, but when I was twenty-five I noticed my skin hadn't changed. Not even a freckle or a faint line. Nothing."
"How do you know he's been hunting you since you were born?" Kai checked the mirrors, but didn't appear concerned by what he saw. Still, she couldn't resist the need to check for herself. The Hummer was nowhere in sight.
How much to tell? How much was too much?
"My mother told me that we moved constantly when I was small," she began, and as the words came, she found herself telling him all. About her mother. The hunters. The terror that if they caught her they would do things to her that were worse than death.
She told him about the three times she'd died, about waking up in a cold room on a cold table in the morgue after her second death, draped in a sheet, surrounded by corpses. The horror of that had never faded.
She told him not because she trusted him, but because she wanted him to trust her. To tell her what he knew.
They left San Francisco behind by the time she was done her story, and Kai never interrupted, only listened and nodded.