Demon Marked by Anna J. Evans Read Free Book Online

out for tonight. He couldn’t call Yasmin or Hannah again—they’d been over last week, and he didn’t like to issue invitations two weeks in a row—but most of his other go-to girls were out of town. But ... it was Wednesday. The sex addicts support group met on the Upper East Side tonight. If things at the office were quiet, he could make it up to the meeting by six o’clock. The group leader frowned on addicts facilitating each other’s dependency, but what Amir didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
    And what did he really expect? That he’d get a bunch of sex addicts together in a room talking about their driving urge to screw and not have them hooking up as soon as they hit the streets? It was ridiculous. He expected far too much of people who would do just about anything to get laid.
    â€œPlease. Don’t go. I don’t know who else ... I don’t have anyone else,” Emma said, tightening her grip on his hand. For the first time, he noticed the flecks of gold in her deep brown eyes and the insanely thick lashes that framed them. She really did have a lot of potential.
    But not that kind of potential.
    Andre took a deep breath and eased back into his seat, pulling his hand from Emma’s. She was a kid and family and possibly a murderer; he shouldn’t be considering her potential for anything—aside from landing herself and the Contis in a huge mess of trouble.
    â€œOkay.” Andre leaned close and whispered his next words. “But how do you ‘think’ you killed someone? Either you killed him or you didn’t.”
    â€œMaybe in your world,” she said, the tension in her expression enough to make Andre’s jaw ache. “But for some of us, life is a little more complicated.”
    â€œFor some of who?”
    â€œFor people ...” She swallowed, clearly not thrilled to be saying whatever she was preparing to say. “For people who have been marked by aura demons. Sometimes we’re different. Things aren’t so black and white.”
    Andre dropped his face into his hands, sending up a silent prayer for patience.
    Great. She was going there , to the crazy head space where she and Sam had dragged half the men in his uncle’s operation. Conti Bounty now employed a dozen hunters who believed in invisible demons. They swore they’d been attacked by aura demons the night they’d helped save Sam and Jace at the museum last spring and couldn’t be convinced that there was any other explanation for what they’d experienced.
    Andre suspected some sort of nerve gas, but no one seemed interested in his realistic, plausible theories. Even Uncle Francis—a man who didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t see, including God and germs—had taken to wearing a demon-protection pendant from the New Age store beneath his white dress shirts.
    It was ridiculous. There was no such thing as invisible demons, especially invisible demons that could turn grown men into monsters or make a blind girl see. Uncle Francis swore he’d seen Sam and Emma’s big brother, Stephen, transform into some kind of demon-man hybrid, and Jace insisted that Sam’s eyes changed colors and she was able to see people on the verge of major change in their lives, but Andre had a hell of a time believing the stories. Any rational person would.
    Demons were animals hunted for money or killed for the mind-melting effects of their various parts. They were flesh and bone, not myth and shadow. And they weren’t one-fifth as dangerous as the human monsters roaming New York. People killed thousands of other people in the city each year. The demons took down maybe a couple hundred, even in the years when harsh winters killed off many of the smaller demons the larger depended upon for food. Demons weren’t anything to be afraid of, as long as you stayed smart and sober and out of their territory.
    People, on the other hand