Drowning In The Dark - Pippa DaCosta Page 0,22
the same as I had Stefan. I liked Jerry. He’d helped me out of some tight spots. But I didn’t trust him. There wasn’t anyone left in my life I could trust. Not even myself.
“I wanted to ask you about P-C-Thirty-Four.” It was near dusk, and I’d spent enough time lounging around. I’d tried to leave twice already, but Jerry wasn’t having any of it. Now though, I shrugged my jacket back on, making it clear I was leaving, no matter what he said.
“Do you want some?”
“What? No.” I zipped up my jacket. “Wait, you have some?”
“Sure.” He strode across the room and opened up a Seventies style cabinet to reveal an array of vials and a box of jet injectors. I couldn’t miss the entwined scorpion motif of the Institute.
He shrugged a massive shoulder, muscles rippling. “When the Institute went down, Thirty-Four turned up on the demon black-market. Most of the militia use it if they can get close enough to demons to use the injectors.”
“The militia?” I’d heard rumors of people taking matters into their own hands, and I couldn’t say I blamed them given the Institute’s ineptitude.
“The public who think they know better than the Institute.”
“What do you use it for?” Just the fact the drug had been in the same room as me gave me the chills.
“I’m running tests, mostly. It’s potent stuff. It’ll drop a lesser demon in seconds. You already know what it does to half bloods.” He straightened and gave me an all-over assessment. “Speaking of which, I wanted to ask you about that.”
“Sure, hit me with it. It’s the least I can do after you keep patching me up.”
“What happens to your human body when your demon takes over?”
“In this realm, she envelopes me, clothes and all. In the netherworld, we sorta combine, blur…” I didn’t really understand it. I wasn’t sure anyone did. Maybe Adam knew all the details, but he wasn’t about to share that sort of information with me.
“When she rides you on this side of the veil, she’s obviously still an integral part of who you are. Inside and out?”
“Yeah.” Whether she was me or I was her? Well, that was for a well-paid psychiatrist to figure out.
He nodded and pulled at his earlobe. “Have you ever used drugs? Alcohol?”
“Why?” I’d gone off the rails and tried pretty much anything and everything at one time. Akil hadn’t exactly been the best of role models, and I’d had what some might call a troubled upbringing. As for the alcohol…that was an ongoing problem.
“What I’m getting at is: can you become inebriated in demon form? Do drugs work on your demon?”
What a terrifying thought. A wasted Mother of Destruction. “No, when I go demon, she burns the toxins out of me. The whole fire as blood thing kinda trumps the alcohol, although I might burn blue for a few seconds.”
He smiled over a laugh. “That’s what I thought. P-C-Thirty-Four is just a drug. It’s not netherworldly. You should be able to burn it out of your system like you would pain-killers or alcohol.”
“Nope. I can’t summon my demon once P-C-Thirty-Four is in me. No demon, no fire.”
“That’s not strictly true, is it?”
A denial stalled on my lips. After I’d had the drug in me for six months, I’d started getting headaches, nosebleeds, and my demon had broken through on several occasions. It hadn’t been pleasant, and I didn’t have any control over her, but she had spilled through the effects of PC34. “You think I can work around it somehow?”
“I think that’s what was happening before. Maybe only fire elementals can do it. Given enough time or enough stimuli, I think your demon could burn it out of you. Fire cleanses.”
“Could?”
“It’s all speculation.”
“What about Akil?”
Jerry immediately stilled while a devastating frown cut into his mask of tattoos. “Why?”
Crap. “Well, y’know, should he ever happened to accidently—somehow manage to get P-C-Thirty-Four in him, could he, hypothetically speaking, burn it out?”
“You’re talking about a Prince of Hell. An immortal chaos demon. Not a lesser demon, not a run-of-the-mill average no-name demon, not a half-blood, but the pinnacle of elemental demons, the top of the netherworld food chain.”
“Yeah, that’s him.”
He eyed me like I was trying to con him out of the family fortune. “If, hypothetically, a Prince of Hell succumbed to P-C-Thirty-Four, I’d recommend running for the nearest bunker and waiting for the fallout to settle. If Ahkeel was injected? He’s different.”
“How is he different?” I hadn’t missed how Jerry had pronounced