Cursed [Book 1] ✔

Chapter 23.2: You're Bad, You're Good, You're Bad Again...

Since the girls were awake and able to comprehend most of what was going on, I decided against rushing them to the ER in Flash-Gordon style. They may have been able to rationalize away my inhuman speed and strength in the alley, but there would have been no mistaking the superhero-like power of my speed later on. With me as their walking stick, the girls limped along until a good Samaritan pulled his car over to the side of the street to see if we needed help. While the girls were busy telling their story, I slipped away before they involved me. They didn't need me anymore, and I had another matter to attend to: investigating the recent strangeness of Tristan.

He managed to elude me for the rest of the day. Wherever I followed his scent to, he was already gone. Technically, I was stalking him, but technically, he had bailed on me for no reason.

I had to find Tristan the old-fashioned way, by looking. On my feet, all day long.

Then again, there had to be a reason why he had left without a word. There also had to be a reason why he didn't want to be found. All of the possible reasons I could think of amounted to no good. Tristan and I had been seeing each other for over a month, and we had been comfortably attached at the hip for most of that time. By "attached at the hip," I mean, well, you know, attached at the hip. Our relationship wasn't complex, but I did feel it was meaningful. At times. He made me laugh, he was smart, and it was nice to be able to be myself around another person.

"Person" was the wrong word because Tristan was not a person. Nor was I, not fully. Still, my gap between freak and humanity was a lot smaller than his, and it was that gulf of space that I always felt between us when we weren't bumping hips or exchanging jokes with each other.

Being apart from Tristan for a whole day stretched that gulf even larger in my mind. He wasn't human. He wasn't trustworthy. He was a Djinn. Before we had helped those two women in the ally, I had seen a glimmer of something in his eyes that I hadn't liked. The silver sheen of his demon heritage was always there, and a reminder of what he really was to me, true, but what I had seen was a different kind of something. It had been fascination, or pleasure, or an emotion in that same family tree of perversion when it came to women being tortured. Perhaps his reaction had been a hiccup, like a reflex. It could be that even Tristan was horrified at his response and had left the ally in shame, not wanting to face me just yet.

Armed with justifications for a demon I felt deserved it, I went to the one place that reeked of his scent, his apartment. Under the standard welcome mat was a key he had left there for me. I used it to open the door and let myself inside. I would wait for Tristan so that we could talk.

As it was, Tristan was already at home. Or else, some wild animal was running around in his bedroom. The noises I heard from behind the closed door of his room weren't normal. There was slapping, grunting, screaming, and—oh.

Did he? Was there...another....

* * * * *

"Imogen!"

Tristan's naked body was a sight I was well used to by now. However, his body wasn't wet from the shower or sweaty from exertion, seeing as demons didn't sweat.

He had come out from his room a second before I had been about to open the door. With dizzying Djinn speed, he closed the door behind him before I could get a look inside.

"What are you doing here? Thought you'd be out hunting."

"Funny. I thought you'd be out as well, especially since I haven't seen or heard from you for over twenty-four hours."

Tristan's easy laugh didn't fill me with tingles as it usually did. "We aren't married, love. I had a life before you came into town, and I still do."