A Darker Past (The Darker Agency #2)(15)
Then I saw what he saw. On the floor in front of the mirror, the broken shards of glass were convulsing, tiny tufts of deep purple smoke rising from them. The shard in Lukas’s hand began to smoke as well.
He dropped the glass and grabbed my arm, pulling back hard as a tuft of the smoke curled around my ankle. “Just a mirror?” He stepped in front of me. “A mirror that wouldn’t happen to have belonged to a Darker?”
The mirror had been next to the table, but it’d never occurred to me that it had belonged to us. I gave a nervous laugh and tensed, ready for anything. “It’s purple smoke. Purple smoke never hurt anyone. In fact, it’s pretty. Kind of like a music video or stage show. That reminds me. I should totally teach you to dance.”
Lukas wasn’t convinced—or interested in dance lessons—and I couldn’t blame him. The smoke was getting thicker, curling upward and taking shape.
The shape of a man.
Chapter Six
When the smoke cleared, a man with dark hair and an angular jaw stood before us. He had a bow mouth and Roman nose and looked to be somewhere in his early twenties, wearing a simple linen tunic and matching pants. Yep. Totally normal—if he hadn’t materialized from smoke coming out of broken glass.
“What is this place?” His voice was deep, and there was the slightest hint of an accent, though I couldn’t place it.
I cringed as the glass crunched under his bare feet. Didn’t he feel that? I’d be screaming my head off. He took a step toward us and stopped to study Lukas, who was standing protectively in front of me.
The man sniffed the air, then froze. The way he looked at me, sort of like a recovering addict presented with a fix, gave me chills. Lips slightly parted, eyes narrow and fixated. There was only one word that came to mind to describe that expression. Obsessed. “A Darker and her demon,” he remarked. His lips curled into a poisonous smile. “My, my, this is my lucky day.”
And that’s when the demon shit hit the fan.
The man, though it was probably safe to say he wasn’t a man, roared. A horrific sound that rattled the tables and sent things tipping sideways throughout the room.
I swallowed down a lump of worry. If this thing didn’t kill us, I was in so much trouble. “This is sort of my fault,” I admitted, taking Lukas’s hand and backing us away.
“Sort of your—”
A large object flew at us. Lukas shoved me to the left and threw his weight hard to the right. Electricity crackled in the air.
“Of course it’s your fault. You provoked Elaine.”
I dodged a bolt of lightning. It flew past and smacked into the wall behind me. An Elemental demon. Hadn’t seen one of those in a long while. “Is it my fault all your exes are prone to temper tantrums?”
“You dare speak in my presence?” the newcomer boomed. “You who are nothing more than insects?”
“Insects?” I gasped and clutched my chest. “That’s so insulting.”
Lukas nodded. There was a wicked grin on his face. The guy might come from a time of stuffy civility and a lack of Ho Hos, but he loved a good fight. “Very insulting,” he agreed. “I think my feelings are wounded.”
I pulled a small vial of fairy dust—what Mom and I had dubbed quartz powder—from my right front pocket, then fumbled in the left for the lighter. We’d been going a different route with the dust lately. By adding a special component made for us from a local alchemist, we could bypass the lighter fluid and move straight to the fireworks. Way less laundry issues that way. I never remembered to take the bottles out of my pockets before tossing my jeans in the wash.
Vial and lighter ready, I shadowed behind the bastard and dumped the entire bottle at his feet, then flicked the lighter and dropped it like it was hot.
The demon watched as the flames roared to life, licking at the edges of his pants and nipping at his exposed toes. The look on his face was classic. I wished to God I’d remembered my cell. I didn’t know who he was, or why he’d been trapped in the mirror, but his goose was cooked now.
The flames rose, engulfing the demon in a cloud of smoke and fire. The subtle sounds of crackling, along with the smell of burning hair and flesh.
“A Darker with demonic abilities,” he said with a chuckle. With a deafening crack of lightning, the fire smothered instantly, leaving nothing more than thick tufts of thick black smoke and a wicked singe mark on the tile all around him. “That is an interesting twist.”
Speechless. For once, I had nothing to say. No witty retort to cover up the building sense of dread in my belly. No snarky quip to mask the mounting fear. All I could do was stare.
He laughed again, this time throwing his head back with hearty enthusiasm. “What’s wrong, little demon? Did you really think to destroy a lieutenant of the Shadow Realm with mineral powder and flame?”
“Jessie,” Lukas yelled. He was on the other side of the room. I saw him start forward, but he was too slow.
The demon grabbed me around the neck with its right hand and threw my body up against the wall, pinning me there. Lukas charged blindly, letting out a scream that tore through the room, but he never stood a chance. This demon was serious news—which, in hindsight, should have been plainly obvious.
One of my relatives had trapped him in a mirror. Not quartzed his ass, but trapped. That should have been a neon yellow flag if ever there was one. Whatever his deal was, he was obviously too powerful for a simple takedown. Mom kept telling me I acted first and thought second. She was dead on. The sad part? I never seemed to learn from my mistakes.