“You’d be surprised how many customers, especially untalented humans, are turned on by the prospect of dangerous magic.” Aubrey came out from behind the counter and Aisling stopped her with a touch to her wrist.

“What about these symbols?” Aisling used her finger to draw imaginary lines on the countertop.

Aubrey picked up a pen and pulled a sheet from the pad of paper. “Use this.”

Javier’s assistant stiffened when Aisling re-created the branded patterns Elena had traced in tea on the coffee table after the trip to the ghostlands.

“They’re punishment brands for someone caught using magic that’s against the law,” Aubrey said, immediately shifting away from Aisling. “Now I really need to close up and leave.”

“Do you know of anyone who wears these brands?” Aisling asked, but Aubrey was shaking her head no and opening the front door for them to leave before the words were completely out.

“SHE lied about knowing of someone with the brands,” Zurael said after they’d put some distance between themselves and the shop.

“I thought so, too. But we know more than we did.” Aisling slid her hands into the roomy pockets of her work pants to keep from curling one of them around Zurael’s arm as they walked. It worried her that in such a short time his heat and scent had come to represent security. “Tomorrow we can visit The Mission and ask about the man and woman bearing the cross brands. It doesn’t seem likely that religious zealots would frequent places like Sinners or sell something like Ghost.”

Zurael’s hand stroked down her spine and made her shudder with pleasure. “Humans have a long history of seeking enlightenment through mind-altering substances. But I agree, the man we witnessed selling Ghost at Sinners didn’t appear to be doing so with the intention of converting followers or leading them to salvation.”

Even though she didn’t believe in the Church’s vision of heaven and hell, Aisling worried for her soul. She knew too well how choices made in life followed a person in death.

“Is there such a thing as salvation?” she asked, curious what a being who most likely called one of the dark places in the spiritlands his home would say.

Zurael laughed and stopped walking. She stopped with him and both of them turned.

He cupped her face and brushed his thumb across her lips. In the fading light the liquid gold of his eyes held both amusement and desire. “I’m not the one to ask about salvation for the children of mud. Until I met you, I would have seen them all destroyed in the fiery burn of justice and retribution.”

“And now?”

Zurael leaned in, unable to stop himself from pressing a kiss to her forehead. “And now there is at least one I would argue should be spared.”

He closed his eyes and inhaled her scent. It filled his lungs and dissolved into his bloodstream, surged downward until desire pulsed through his cock in time with his heartbeat and the whispered sound of her name across his soul.

His fingers traced the delicate bones of her spine, slid over the gentle curve of her buttocks. Had the first son of The Prince felt this way about the human female he’d become obsessed with?

Zurael rubbed his cheek against Aisling’s silky hair as his father’s imagined voice issued a warning through time, drew his thoughts to the moment they stood together in the Hall of History, before the mural of Jetrel. She became his weakness, the bait used to trap him. And overlaid on the Prince’s words were those Malahel had spoken of Aisling. It’s good you already intend to kill her. She is dangerous to us and will be made even more so if she learns what’s written on the tablet.

Fierce protectiveness surged through Zurael when Aisling’s arms wound around his waist and she pressed more tightly to him. He would argue she be spared.

She’d admitted she didn’t know how to bind him and wouldn’t have summoned him if the need weren’t urgent. He’d been a shadow in her mind when they were together in the ghostlands. He could attest to the truth of her innocence when it came to the Djinn. He would offer his belief that powerful forces were at work and had ensnared her in a trap the Djinn benefited from.

His palm glided upward. The heat intensified between them. Worry for her made him ask, “How were you able to draw the brands Elena showed you?” They’d been inked in tea on the coffee table and gone within seconds, so quick they’d left little impression on him.

“I have a memory for things like that. Sometimes it feels as though I’ve seen them before, even though I know I haven’t.”

“Like an ancestral memory. You know nothing of your parents?”

“No.” Aisling’s lips brushed his earlobe and sent lust boiling through him so he ached.

His hands curled into fists at her back with the material from her shirt gathered in them. Her soft moan was echoed by his as the contours of her breasts and the hard points of her nipples became more pronounced.

It would be so easy to urge her into the shadows, to press her against the wall of an abandoned building and take her there. Or to command her to grip a windowsill as he’d commanded her to grip the counter in front of the mirror so he could mount her as he’d done then.

A shudder went through Zurael. Arousal leaked to coat his cock head in molten desire.

“We need to keep walking. It’ll be dark soon,” she said, her breath hot on his skin. It drew his thoughts to her lips. It renewed his fantasies of placing her on her knees before him so he could know the feel of her mouth and tongue on his cock.

He opened his hands, freed her shirt in favor of sliding over delicate, feminine curves to cup her hips. “Do you think I fear the dark or the creatures that roam in the nighttime, Aisling?”

“No.” She pressed a kiss to his collarbone. “But I do. And it would be better if my neighbors didn’t see me out in it and wonder why I’m not a prisoner to it as they are.”

Reluctantly Zurael set her aside. Misgiving, guilt, worry forced the lust to recede into the background. At Sinners he’d accepted Aisling’s need to approach the Ghost dealer. The task of finding its source was hers, set before her by the spirits protecting her in a land the Djinn feared. But in the occult shop he’d struggled against letting her question Aubrey and draw further attention and danger to herself.

It was only a matter of time before Aisling’s questions would ripple outward and turn the hunted into hunters. If they viewed him as no more than her lover, her companion and bodyguard, then they would underestimate how lethal he was. They wouldn’t know until the moment of their own deaths that there had never been a possibility of defeating him or harming her. But looking at her standing before him, fragile and soft, intoxicatingly feminine, he felt a soul-deep fear for her.

Zurael knelt on the ground. He swiped his hand across the loose earth, smoothed it into a dark tablet. A few sure strokes and he’d drawn a symbol representing the name of a lesser angel killed by the Djinn in some ancient battle. It was one he remembered from his childhood and the endless hours he’d spent studying the tomes kept by the House of the Serpent.

He let the symbol remain for a heartbeat then cleared it with the sweep of his hand. “Can you draw it?”

She laughed softly and his chest tightened. The ease in which she knelt and recaptured the name in quick lines across the dirt, the talent she took pride in and performed with confidence, was the very thing that would make her death necessary if she were to see the text written on the tablet he’d been sent to retrieve.

“Close your eyes,” he said, an ache forming in his chest when Aisling complied with a smile, trusted him so easily when he might bring only death to her.

This time he wrote several sentences using script and symbols many of the Djinn no longer studied or remembered. It was an account from a history text, a record of angel sightings in long-dead and forgotten cities.