HE SOARED UPWARD, THE DEMON wrapped tight against him. She didn’t fight him this time, which made things more difficult. He was better off fighting her. He could feel her head tucked against his shoulder, feel her warm, moist breath against his skin. If she struggled he could drop her, forget about her, and who knew where and when she would surface? But surface she would. Killing a demon wasn’t that easy, even for him.

It hadn’t taken long to find her—in truth, he’d always been aware of her, ready for the day when he could finish what he’d started. Letting her live was unacceptable.

He still didn’t know why he’d changed his mind, gone back for her a year and a half ago. Maybe it was the simple fact that Sarah would have hated what he’d done. Even so long after her death, her gentle influence fought against his more bloody-minded instincts.

And bloody-minded was the term. The Lilith could bleed—he remembered that. Remembered the torn flesh of her wrists and ankles, which he’d healed after he pulled her out of there. He could make her bleed again, and this time no misguided charity would stop him. He wouldn’t have thought there was a charitable bone in his body.

He would take her to the Dark City and, if it came to that, hand her over to the Truth Breakers to find out all her secrets. He would have no choice but to expose himself to her temptation, and he would prove to himself that he could resist her. He would mourn Sarah forever. She was the wife of his eternal banishment. The Lilith was a murderous whore.

No matter what she believed, he couldn’t afford to let himself forget that essential truth.

CHAPTER SIX

I OPENED MY EYES, BLINKED, THEN closed them tightly again. There was something wrong with my vision. Something wrong with my mind as well. My heart raced with remembered fear, and I took deep, slow breaths, willing calm back. I was lying on a bed, and déjà vu swept over me. This had all happened before. Where was Azazel?

I opened my eyes again, slowly, then sat up and looked around me. I was in a bedroom, large, luxurious, with a high ceiling, heavy old furniture, and what looked like a marble floor. I couldn’t be sure, because the room was leached of color. Everything was a strange sepia tone, like an ancient photograph. I looked down at my body, and breathed a sigh of relief. I was in full color, my jeans the same faded indigo as when I’d put them on, my sneakers a dirty white, my arms their normal lightly tanned skin color. Some odd memory made me reach up to my hair. It was the same, long and thick, and I pulled a strand into sight. The same red I’d become accustomed to.

I stroked the coverlet beneath me. It was thick and velvety, despite its gray-brown appearance. Someone must have a really strange decorating sense, to have chosen everything in these colorless shades. Even the marble. I slid off the high bed, and the floor was hard beneath my feet. Was there such a thing as brown marble, or had they painted it?

But I knew paint was too easy an answer. I knew what I’d find when I opened the door, when I pushed the heavy beige curtains away from the tall windows, beige curtains that something told me ought to be pure white.

I turned the knob, hoping for some Wizard of Oz effect of the bright colors of Munchkinland beyond the door. Instead it was another sepia-toned room. No sign of Azazel, and I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. There were the same tall windows covered with heavy curtains, and I didn’t want to go look. But I was made of tougher stuff than that, and if I was here I might as well know what I was facing. I crossed the room and pushed the curtains aside, then stood there, frozen, staring out into the city.

I had no idea where I was—it looked like a cross between New York in the 1930s and London in the 1890s, mixed with some early German filmmaker’s notions of a dystopian future. And it was all the same monochromatic chiaroscuro. A sort of grayish brown, like an old movie. I held my arm out in front of the cityscape. Still normal, a shock of color against the dark, shadowy lines of the strange place. I let the curtain drop, turning away, and then let out a little shriek. Azazel stood there, watching me.

At least he was in color, or as much color as he had in him. He was dressed in black as always, black jeans and a black shirt, and his long, ink-black hair framed a pale face, his dark blue eyes and high cheekbones uncomfortably familiar. But even his pale skin held a healthier color than the room, and his mouth had color. I stared at it, not sure I wanted to examine my own thoughts, and that mouth twisted into an unpleasant smile.

“So what kind of hell have you brought me to?” I managed to sound no more than casually interested. “Is this purgatory?”

“Purgatory is a mythical construction. This is the Dark City.”

“You could have fooled me.” I looked around me. “So why are we here?”

He didn’t answer, his unsettling eyes moving over me with what I knew was cool contempt. I still couldn’t figure out what I’d done to merit this, why he was so certain I was some kind of demon, but I wasn’t going to ask him. I already knew that he wouldn’t tell me anything.

“Are you hungry?” he said instead, which surprised me. So far he hadn’t shown any particular interest in my well-being.

And I realized I was starving. “Yes.”

He nodded, turning toward the door, and I stared at him speculatively. He was tall, maybe six two, and lean, with wiry strength that was oddly elegant. He wasn’t quite as gaunt as he had been the last time I’d seen him—clearly he’d gotten a meal or two in the interim, though he still could have used a few more pounds. I couldn’t rid myself of the peculiar sense that there was something missing when he turned his back on me. It was a strong back, broad shoulders, and muscled arms. But there should have been something else there.

He glanced back. “What are you looking at?” He sounded wary, irritated. The irritation was nothing new, the wariness a small triumph for me when I was feeling weaponless.

“Nothing,” I said. “We going someplace?”

“You said you were hungry, and I’m certainly not about to cook for you. I know a restaurant.”

“We’re eating in a restaurant like normal people?” I scoffed. “Don’t tell me—we’re on our first date.”

“We are not people, demon. Neither of us. You know that, whether you wish to face it or not.”

“You’re not people,” I shot back. “If anyone’s a demon, it’s you. You swoop down and carry me off to impossible places, places that make no sense. So far I’ve seen nothing to prove I’m anything more than a normal human being who’s attracted a supernatural stalker.”

“Not even when you look in the mirror?”

I’d forgotten about that. The red hair, the warm brown eyes, the secretive set of my mouth, my determined jaw. It still felt strange, even after well over a year, yet oddly familiar. But I wasn’t about to give up without a fight. “I figure that’s you clouding my mind.”

“ ‘Clouding your mind?’” he echoed. “If only it were that simple. Are you coming?” He was holding the door open, and I could see a hallway beyond it.

Maybe he’d be more forthcoming when we were eating. I’d been mocking him about the date, but in fact people tended to relax when they were eating. With luck, he’d start answering at least a few harmless questions.

Though he hadn’t done so in that diner in the bush, I remembered suddenly. He’d simply made sure I couldn’t talk and proceeded to eat, giving me no choice but to follow suit.

We were on the second floor. I followed him into the formal hallway of what looked like a movie set, down the stairs, through the heavy front door, into the street. Gray cars and trucks drove by; gray-faced people filled the streets, with their gray clothes and their gray souls. Azazel seemed like an absolute rainbow as he walked among them in his stark black, but none of the inhabitants seemed to notice that both of us were different.