his insatiable hunger for Ella. If he looked the world over, he doubted he could have found a woman who could hold a candle to her. Not only had she accepted his secrets and his failures, she’d had the courage to be faced with the horrible image of her deceased attacker and not be irrevocably damaged by it. Anyone else would have checked out of reality on a permanent basis, but not Ella. With that same fierce grit it took for her to survive Charles Rainier, she not only bounced back from facing an actual demon, she’d done her best to grab at life by seducing him with the hottest damn striptease the world had ever known.
Small wonder he’d become her number-one fan.
The moment he logged on, a video-chat window opened. “Nate? You on?”
Macbeth. Nate smiled at the image on his screen. When he’d reported what had happened the day before, the chat rooms on NeoPhilim had been abruptly abandoned in favor of video-conferencing, and it was a kick to see his online friends in person. Lynchpin Security International’s IT specialist Macbeth was pretty much as Nate had pictured him—in his mid-twenties, with a crazy buzz cut and even crazier glasses that looked like they had been made from the gears of an old-fashioned clockwork.
He tapped the touchpad and opened the program for his own built-in webcam. “Hey, Macbeth. I’m just checking in this morning to let you know Ella and I are still alive.”
As he spoke, cyber magic brought up three more video screens.
“Good to hear from you, Nate. Zeke’s still at work finishing up the graveyard shift out here in San Fran, so I’m the one who has your back at the moment.” Kendall Glynn, a feisty investigative journalist and fiancée of a descendant of an angel of death, showed up in one window, while Macbeth’s boss and product of a long-ago Seraph-human union, Sara Savitch appeared in another. The third one showed the epitome of a carefree beach bum, complete with naked chest, dark tan, a tangle of long sun-bleached, dark blond hair and a shark’s tooth necklace around his neck. Kyle.
“We’ve been waiting for you to check in, Nate.” With her dark hair pulled back in a high ponytail, Sara looked as solemn as her chat room posts had always sounded. “What’s your status?”
“So far, so good. When Ella woke last night from our little demonic encounter, I had no choice but to give up the whole story, going all the way back to the first Nephilim and the fact that we’re the modern-day remnants of those hybrids. That was bad enough, but then I had to explain that what she saw really happened, that it was a demon, and that it’s using her and the nightmare she went through two years ago to hunt me.”
Kyle’s hungry-lean face puckered in a wince. “Shit. Did she try to kill you or is she just crazy now?”
“Neither.” He couldn’t help but smile while both Kendall and Sara told Kyle in no uncertain terms to shut the hell up. “I’ve never met anyone like Ella. No matter what gets thrown at her, she struggles through it and keeps on going. I never knew that just watching someone survive no matter what happens could be so...” He searched for the right word. “Humbling. It makes me want to be stronger for her.”
“I want to meet her,” Kyle said, eyes wide. “Is she hot?”
“Good grief.” Kendall’s eye roll matched Sara’s before she began to mess with the keyboard in front of her, fingers busily clicking away. “Nate, since you checked in last night, Macbeth and I have been researching every possible demon that changes shape. While that particular ability seems pretty commonplace—going from its original form to say, a cat or a snake, for instance—melting from one human likeness to another is rare, and going from female to male is unheard of.”
Nate wasn’t sure if that was good news or bad. “I recall that your fiancé went through something similar to what Ella and I experienced,” he said, frowning at Kendall’s image as he tried to remember the details. “It was mentioned in Macbeth’s last post. Something about fighting with a demon that had the appearance of someone’s dead father?”
Kendall nodded. “Good memory. It happened shortly before Zeke and I met. He had no idea what the demon’s intentions were, but the end result was a knife-wielding crazy guy who would have taken out everyone in the vicinity if Zeke hadn’t