“Are you okay?” His voice was so soft I almost didn’t hear him.
“No. I’m not okay.” I lifted my head so I could see his eyes, a part of me still worried that this was all just some cruel trick. “I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. But I’m here. I can’t always talk to you, or hold you, but I’m in here. Always watching.” He was quiet for a moment, and I could almost hear him grinding his teeth. “Look, I need to explain something.”
I knew by his tone what he was talking about, and it was the last thing I wanted to discuss now. But the guilt in his voice silenced me. If he needed to explain, I’d let him—not that it mattered. What the demon had told me about the time Jax was away didn’t sway my feelings. It’d hurt, sure, but it changed nothing.
“What Azi said was true. I did…there were other girls. It didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about—”
“Jax,” I said. “You left. You had no intention of coming back—”
“I didn’t,” he confirmed. “I wanted to. It just wasn’t safe. I believed you were better off without me.”
“Do you think I expected you to live like a priest—and no altar boy jokes, this is serious.” He snickered, but let me go on. “I get it.” It hurt like hell, but I did. I understood. I couldn’t imagine how he must have felt, being seventeen, scared of himself, of the world, of what he might do… How lonely he must have been. “It was a way to escape and feed the demon without hurting anyone.”
We could keep going like this, talking in circles. It wouldn’t change the past. He’d left Harlow, and we’d both moved on. The important thing was that we’d found our way back to each other. I had no intention of letting him go this time. “You fought your way to the surface. Back at the cabin. Keep fighting. Do it again.”
“It’s not that simple, Sammy. The few seconds I managed to steal my body back almost killed me.”
I leaned back against him, grabbing his arm and draping it across my shoulder. It felt like heaven and hell all at the same time—a tease of something I’d lost, coupled with the taunt of something I could no longer have. “Then what do we do?”
He kissed the top of my head. “We’ll think of something.”
As I closed my eyes and the darkness tugged me under, I couldn’t help feeling like he was lying—which terrified me. What could possibly be worse than what we were already dealing with?
Chapter Nine
Azirak/Jax
The moment Sam’s breathing evened and she drifted off, I felt the demon tugging to regain control. It didn’t fight hard at first, and I got the impression it was testing me to see how far I could bend before breaking. But as the minutes ticked by, the struggle became violent, and by the time it pushed me back, I felt like I’d gone twenty rounds with King Kong. My body, exhausted from the struggle, slipped into oblivion and landed us both in the white room.
“If it is any consolation, no one has ever beaten me back before,” Azirak said.
“Excuse me if I don’t dance a fucking jig. And I thought we clarified this earlier—I used to do it all the time.” I drew my knees up and let my head fall back against the wall. I felt like someone had cranked my dial to eleven and forgot to hit the off switch. I couldn’t remember ever being this…tired. Like no matter how much I rested, the buzzing twitch in my limbs, in my mind, would never fade. The demon sat across the room, mirroring my position. “Why are you here, Azi?”
“My body needs rest, I do not. There is nothing else for me to do.”
I clenched my fists and lifted my head. A blackened, smoky version of my own face stared back at me. As usual, the demon hovered near the pencil imbedded in the wall. “It’s my body, asshole.”
“Not anymore.” It almost sounded sorry.
There was finality in its voice. Something I felt deep in my gut. Something I refused to accept. “As long as I’m in here, it’s mine.”
Azi leaned forward, black gaze unwavering as the smoke cleared. “You will not be here much longer.”
Everything went numb. I’d had this horrible feeling lately. A sinking fear that something was wrong. Very wrong. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Azi drifted closer and crossed the invisible line. “You should have expired years ago. That is the way this works. But there were factors—”
I struggled to my feet and took an off-balance step forward. I had to remind myself that attacking the demon would do no good. Even though it was on my side of the room, you couldn’t make smoke bleed—especially in my condition. “The way what works?”
“By human puberty, we are strong enough to take control. The human host retains their will until then. In most cases, the demon is nothing more than a sinister whisper inside the child’s head. By the fifteenth year, they conquer the human spirit and fully possess the body.”
“And the human?”
“Gone.”