Dead Drop by Carolyn Jewel

Nikodemus. Call or just go right to his house. Whatever works.”
    Her phone beeped again.
    “Let Maddy know you’re going to miss the next couple of Mondays. To be safe, a month. Six weeks maybe.” He slid his phone into his pocket. “We need a week to ten days of practice, maybe a little longer, but I can’t see this going much past that. I’d fucking kill you.” He stopped and if the circumstances had been different she might have laughed. “Metaphorically speaking.”
    “Sure.” She was having trouble getting her mind around all this. It didn’t seem real that Palla was in her home. Why not one of the kin she could get along with? Why not Tau? “I’m trying to remember why I agreed to help you.”
    He snorted, but then he got serious in a way she didn’t care for. “Angel.” He sounded smug and amused. “You always do the right thing.”
    Maybe this wasn’t happening. Maybe it was all a dream. “For all you know, I cheat and lie every day.”
    “Everybody lies and cheats.” He sat and stretched out on the chair, long legs crossed at the ankles, fingers laced behind his head. Muscles bulged up and down his arms. The more powerful the demon, the more perfect the human form. Better for her not to forget that. Her stomach dived for her toes. She was no match for him, and now there was nothing she could do but pray she didn’t fall too far behind. Palla continued. “You. Me. Everyone. But I’ve never seen you lie or cheat about the things that matter. You work at a charity, for fuck’s sake.”
    “People steal from charities.”
    “Humans are worthless shit.”
    “Don’t you forget it.”
    In one smooth motion, he pulled his legs back and sat forward, forearms on his thighs again. He was way too intense, and about now she’d be happy if he was just not here. She’d made a mistake, a terrible, terrible mistake. He’d eat her alive.
    “You’d never let someone suffer. Not if you had the power to stop it.” For a nanosecond, his grief filled the room and her heart twisted up. Then he sealed the crack in his psychic state. “I don’t need in your head to know you don’t like me and that you’re afraid of me.”
    “I’m not afraid of you.” A lie, and he knew it.
    His eyes stayed on her, and he spoke with chilling calm. “You should be afraid of me. You should dislike me. I don’t like humans, and I like the magekind even less. I don’t want to be nice to your kind, and I don’t want to be friends with any of you.”
    Wallace swallowed hard. His eyes were a normal green, but she didn’t feel right. Nothing felt right. The back of her head was a block of ice, and she kept thinking that any minute he would transform himself from human to one of his monstrous forms. Palla was too much. Too everything. On top of that, she couldn’t shake the persistent and unsettling sense of him as foreign. Not of this world, and it was freaking her out. If this was what it was like to sense the demonkind, then she was glad she’d never been able to before. How did anyone react like that to someone and not flip out?
    His smirk disappeared. “I’ll say this once. Even without the oath, I’d let a mage take my heart if it meant keeping you alive.”
    Her pillow wasn’t going to survive this; she was going to crush it into nothing. “Don’t say that.”
    He glared at her, and she considered throwing the pillow at him. The corner of his mouth curled. “Truth, witch. Truth.”
    She gripped the pillow instead. “Why’d you make that oath, then? If it wasn’t necessary? If you’d die anyway.”
    “You wouldn’t have believed me otherwise.”
    She dug her fingers into the pillow. “I would have helped you without any oath.”
    “Are you listening to me?”
    “Do you practice being an asshole?”
    “With me blood-bound to protect you, where I stand is fact. There’s no debate. You humans talk everything to death, and then you don’t even get anything done.” He stood, and she had this moment