Fuck.
Moving very slowly, Raini began to back up, not once looking away from that red gaze. Her heart was pounding so hard she was surprised it didn’t hurt. Maddox! Harper! Jolene!
No one answered. How could they, when she couldn’t even touch their minds?
Another rumbly growl echoed in the air, almost making her flinch. She wasn’t defenseless. She could kill whatever it was. Nothing with a brain stood a chance against psychic hellfire. But there was no saying what powers it had; no knowing if it could disable her before she had a chance to—
It crept out of the shadows, and she came to a surprised halt. A person, she realized. It was a person. A man.
She squinted. She knew that face. She knew those eyes— she’d seen them glazed with lust as the succubae allure hit him hard in the parking lot outside the Damned … only there’d been no red glow to his irises then. He’d been utterly normal. Well, he wasn’t now.
His eyes weren’t glazed with lust now either. No, there was something else there. A madness. A predatory hunger. A bestial awareness, as if the man was buried beneath whatever had taken him over. Or maybe that man was gone altogether. No, surely if the guy couldn’t come back from this messed-up state, Maddox would have destroyed him.
“Stay back,” she warned, but the demon didn’t. He kept coming, stalking her, watching her like a cobra.
Shit, she did not want to kill one of her anchor’s demons. Especially when the guy didn’t seem to be in his right mind. Something was very wrong with him.
If she hit him with a low blast of psychic hellfire, it would be a shockwave of scorching heat as opposed to a blaze of fire. As such, it would knock him out, not kill him. Probably. She’d never tried it before. She’d only been trained to keep control of the power, not to wield it in different ways.
Not moving her eyes from him, she kept backing up. He kept moving forward.
Raini thought about tossing a ball of hellfire at him, but that might merely prompt him to attack. It seemed best to stay calm, to make no sudden movements, to do nothing that could be misconstrued as a challenge.
He paused, his nostrils flaring, and then squatted on the floor. He bent over sniffing, and then—ew—licked at the ground. No, at the blood staining it. Her blood. His eyes snapped back to her, almost whirling with madness.
Her heart slammed against her ribs. “Stay. Back.”
He lunged.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
She darted out of reach and hurled an orb of hellfire at him. It struck his chest, burning through his tee and blistering the skin beneath. He didn’t even wince. He just pinned her with that cobra stare again. Raini conjured another orb. “Stay the fuck back.”
He pounced again.
She tossed the orb at his head and moved out of range, almost colliding with a statue. Slipping behind it, she shoved it hard. It fell to the ground, missing him by mere inches. He hadn’t jerked back to avoid it, as if his attention was focused so wholly on her that he saw nothing else. If he was aware of the hellfire eating at his face and scalp, he didn’t show it; didn’t exhibit any sign of being in pain.
“Snap out of it!” she yelled.
He snarled, exposing his teeth, and then charged her like a goddamn bull.
Raini backpedaled fast, slowing him down by hitting him with hellfire orb after hellfire orb and—
She tripped over something and fell back, landing hard on her butt. The fucker leapt at her. She skidded back fast on her elbows. She wasn’t fast enough. He landed between her legs and savagely sank his teeth into her thigh.
Crying out, she struck with a low blast of psychic hellfire. Power shimmered through the air like waves of heat and rushed up his nostrils and down his ears. He sat up with a gurgling sound, his eyes rolled back into his head, and he toppled to the side. She again used her elbows and heels to swiftly shuffle backwards. Breathing hard, she almost jumped out of her damn skin when Maddox appeared beside her.
He took in the scene and cursed a blue streak. Some sort of forcefield popped up around the other demon, surrounding him like a bubble.
Maddox crouched at her side. “Raini? Raini, look at me.”
Blinking hard, she gave him a cursory glance, not yet comfortable with taking her eyes off her attacker, who didn’t appear to be moving. “I’m okay.”
“No, you’re not.” Maddox put his palm flat against hers.
She winced as his power crackled through her system, heading straight to the cut on her upper arm and then down to the bite on her thigh. “Is he dead? I tried not to kill him.”
“He’s alive, just unconscious.” Maddox helped her stand. “How did you get here?”