He looped his thumbs behind his big brass belt buckle. “No. You were already having an effect on me. Normally, I would have torn the guy apart and not given it a second thought, but since you asked me to leave him alone, I couldn’t bring myself lay a hand on him.”
“Seriously?”
“Yeah.” He rocked back on his heels. He took in a long breath and then said quickly as he blew it back out: “But I may have ordered a couple of Caleb’s Akhs to do the job for me.”
“nice.” I threw my hands up. “Because that was so much better?”
“What was I supposed to do, Grace? He was harassing you. He looked at you like you were another notch on his belt. I saw the fear in your eyes after he came up to you. I couldn’t let him get away with it. I did it for you.”
“For me? Someone I know is dead, or undead, or whatever, and you say you did it for me. Is that supposed to make me feel better?”
“That was the old me.”
“You’re still the old you.”
“If I were, then I wouldn’t have tried to fix it. I tried to take care of the problem in the hospital, but those stupid monitors went off.”
“Hospital?” Something that had been nagging at me since yesterday resurfaced in my head. “Oh my—You were the cousin.” The nurse in Pete Bradshaw’s room had said that he’d had a cousin come visit him right before he crashed. I thought back to when I’d accidentally hugged Talbot in the hospital’s stairwell. The angle we were standing at … He hadn’t come from up the stairs, he’d come from the doorway of the ICU’s lobby. He’d been headed out of the ICU. Taking the stairs for a quick getaway, no doubt. “Pete was the thing you had to take care of?”
I took a step back. Then another two. “Did you go to the hospital to finish off Pete? Did you kill him?”
How had my life come to the point where, in less than forty-eight hours, counting my run-in with Jude, I’d have to ask two different people I knew if they’d killed someone?
I mean, seriously?
“No. I’d heard rumors around town that they’d found bite marks on Pete’s body, which made me suspect that his coma was actually an incubation period for an Akh infestation. I went to confirm my suspicions, but his oxygen levels crashed almost as soon as I entered the room and his oxygen monitor went crazy. I got out of there as fast as I could. That’s when I ran into you in the stairwell.”
“And if the monitors hadn’t gone crazy? What would you have done?”
“If I had been sure he’d been infected—which apparently he has been—I would have put a stake through his heart.”
“You’d have killed him?”
“Only so you wouldn’t have to.”
My mouth popped open, but Talbot went on before I could I respond.
“Pete isn’t Pete anymore. Think of it this way: he’s just a demon walking around wearing a Pete suit. He might look like Pete, he might sound like Pete, he’ll even have Pete’s memories, but it’s very important that you don’t forget that he isn’t Pete. Especially when he comes for you.”
“Comes for me?”
“The Akh inside of him will not only retain his memories, he’ll also take on parts of Pete’s personality. The bad parts. Only amplified. Pete had it out for you before he was infected and died—which means you’re probably one of the first people he’s going to come looking for after he’s gotten over the feeding-frenzy stage, and his memories start to come back.” Talbot let out a few more swear words. “There’s already been one killing—that nurse at the hospital. I should have suspected Pete as soon as I heard about it. I was so busy wallowing, I didn’t even think—”
“You’re saying Pete was the one who killed that nurse?” I felt a pang of guilt for even suspecting Jude.
“Yes. I think so. Akhs are born hungry. They need to feed off of both blood and psychic energy in insane amounts to survive the first few days. Which means he’ll be killing indiscriminately at first. But after that, it’s only a matter of time before he starts seeking out people from his former life.…”
“What?” I thought about Charity encountering Pete at that gas station, grateful she’d only seen him through the car window as they’d pulled away. But then I thought about Pete’s mother, Ann. Would he go home and find her once his memories came back? And where was I on Pete’s potential list of victims?
Talbot grabbed my arm and started pulling me toward his truck, which was parked behind the parish. “We’re going to have to kill Pete Bradshaw … again,” he said, sounding excited by the idea.
“Wait.”
I put my hand on top of his. He stopped pulling me toward his truck and looked down at our two hands touching.
“Come on, Grace. You and me on the demon hunt again. Just like what we trained for. Just like it was meant to be.”
I gave him a slight smile. He really was happy about the idea of our hunting together again. “How are we even going to find Pete?”
“New Akhs are predictable because of their hunger. He’ll seek out whatever place has the most psychic and sexual energy wafting off of it. He’ll be able to smell it. Somewhere like a big party. Normally, new Akhs flock to the Depot. That’s how we recruited so many of them to the Shadow Kings. But now that the Depot is no more, he’ll have to find somewhere else.” He snapped his fingers. “I know just the place.”
“Where?” I stepped closer to him.
“There’s a trance party tonight.”
“A what party?”
“Trance party. You know how Akhs can put their victims into trances by staring into their eyes? They do it to feed off a human’s psychic energy and mess with their free will.”
“Yeah.” I knew all to well. I’d almost been killed the last time it happened to me.
“Well, a trance party is kind of like a rave, except humans use Akhs to get high instead of Ecstasy.”
“You mean people go to these parties and willingly let Akhs feed off of them?”
“Pretty much. The Akhs get to feed without a hunt. The humans get high and let someone take away their free will for a night. Some people get off on that.”
“Eww.” I made a gagging face. “But aren’t people afraid the Akhs will feed too much off of them and they’ll die?”