puzzled. Wasn’t this the guy who’d been about to ravish her in the hallway a few hours ago?
“That’s easy for you to say,” Sofia replied, disgruntled on a number of levels. “I don’t like to lie to my parents. I’m not a teenager anymore. I just don’t think they’d believe the truth.”
“Even if they could, you wouldn’t be allowed to tell them,” Phenex said, stretching out his long legs in front of him. “This place is top secret. That’s why Justin was so pissed about you being down here. He may decide you need to have some sort of binding spell put on you by one of the magic-wielders running around. I’ll argue against it, but I’m just warning you.”
“Nobody’s putting a spell on me,” Sofia snapped, more harshly than she’d intended. She tried to keep her voice steadier as she continued. “I didn’t ask for any of this, and now I have a demon who wants to kill me because he thinks it’ll bother you, so I’m stuck in a cave. With vampires. I have to work tomorrow, Phenex! I can’t take an indefinite hiatus because of demons. The hospital is not going to be okay with that, I can guarantee it. And I have bills. A life. Stuff I have to pay for.”
“Say you’re sick. Say you have the kind of flu that makes you look like Linda Blair in The Exorcist.”
“No. I want to go to work tomorrow. Unless the hospital is in danger of a full-scale demonic invasion, that part should work. It’s almost impossible to be alone there.”
His eyes hardened. “No.”
She glared back at him. “Yes. I don’t want to stay at my apartment right now, so I won’t fight you about spending my off time down here in Creepytown. But I’m not going to just go into hiding and sacrifice everything I’ve worked for. My job is important to me, Phenex.”
“Your life should be more important.”
She huffed out an irritated breath. “There has to be a way you can keep an eye on me at work. It wouldn’t be any more boring than following me while I run errands.”
“You’re safer here. Give me a list of your bosses and I’ll send one of the vamps to thrall them.”
Sofia’s jaw tightened, and she felt the start of a nasty headache begin to pinch and pull at her temples.
“No! Damn it, Phenex, lying or screwing with people’s brains isn’t always the answer!”
She hated the way his expression went cold. This was the part of him that was Fallen, she knew. The part that was so utterly alien to her.
“You need to worry more about you than them, Sofia. They’re only—”
He stopped himself, but she knew exactly what he’d been about to say.
“Only human, right?” she asked softly. “Like me. I’m no different than they are, Phenex. No better, no worse. Just human.”
Phenex stared at her, his expression hard and inscrutable, then he rose from the chair in a blur of movement. He paced the room silently while she watched. Finally, he said, “You could be more. You should be.”
Sofia shook her head, surprised that he seemed to have given this some thought. “What else could I be?”
“If you haven’t noticed, mortality isn’t your only option. Having eternity opens up so many possibilities, so many doors.”
She was so startled by the statement that she laughed, which Sofia immediately saw was the wrong thing to have done. He looked so offended that she quickly tried to explain. “I don’t want to be a vampire, Phenex. I like being human. I love the sun. I need the light. I would never want to give that up. Don’t you understand? It seems like you would. All those flowers you’ve tried to keep…”
“They don’t mean anything,” Phenex growled, cutting her off. “They’re just some stupid plants.”
Now he was lying to her. Again. “Fine,” Sofia said, suddenly exhausted as much by the walls he put up as she had been by the demon attack that had brought her here. “Stupid plants, stupid humans, stupid sunlight…whatever, Phenex. You don’t want to like anything, fine. But there are a lot of things I like and care about, and one of them is my job. Which I’m going to tomorrow. I need to figure out a way to make this work, since even human, marginally intelligent me can figure out that killing a demon like Belial is going to take some doing and that it could be a while. There has to be some give