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human ,” she spat. “Call us by ours.”
    “Why should I?” I sat down on a low mound of minerals and laid my gun on my lap, instead removing the Taser I’d taken from my glove compartment. Whether she could heal herself with a bullet in her brain remained to be seen, but I wasn’t taking any chances. Electricity scrambled nerve impulses just as well in demons.
    Had I known my earlier pursuit would end in failure, I would have reached for it first.
    My mistakes tonight were costing me.
    She chose silence again, so I continued, “I’ve never seen a demon heal like that. You tell me how you did it, I let you live. You don’t . . .” I let the threat hang in the air, taking the moment to pick dirt out of the grooves under the slide of my gun.
    “You filthy liar. You swore that exact oath to Fidel, and you broke it.” She stepped out from behind the stalagmite, chin held high. “There. So you can look me in the eye when you lie to me, Jame Asher.”
    Like humans, demons came in all shapes and sizes. Fidel—the demon I’d tried to kill earlier—had had an ugly mug.
    This one happened to be quite the opposite.
    Tall, lean, distractingly pretty. Her long dark hair seemed to fluoresce as I panned the flashlight over her, emitting a rainbow of greens and blues.
    Just a trick of the light.
    “I get it, you guys are sensitive about the lying,” I said.
    “You have no honor, Jame Asher.”
    “Yeah, that’s what your boy out there said too. Let’s try to move past it.” I stood up, holstering my gun. “So, you some kind of healer?”
    “I can kill, too,” she said. “And I don’t need your pathetic machines to do it.”
    I shined the flashlight in her eyes, which reflected a cat-like gleam. Like other nocturnal hunters, bright lights unnerved them.
    Her eyes, I noticed, weren’t actually red. More like violet. If I hadn’t known what to look for, she might have passed for human . . . save for the stench of evil rolling off her in waves.
    Often the prettiest things were most poisonous.
    “You healed him without touching him,” I pressed. “How? How’d you do it? How far can you go? Can you do it between our realms?”
    “How does that human gesture go?” She tilted her hand, raising each finger in turn until she got to the middle one, which she extended my way. “For you, Asher, I like this gesture.”
    Trying to bait me into anger. I ignored it. “You’re powerful; how come I haven’t heard of you?”
    Her gaze flicked to the cave’s exit behind me, mind on one thing only—escape.
    But seriously, what idiot puts a portal in a cave with only one exit?
    “Answer me, demon.”
    Her glare snapped back to me with a vengeance. “If you think I’m ever going to betray my people, then you’re stupider than you are wretched. And my name is Lana.”
    “Don’t give a fuck what your name is, demon.” I angled the light right in her eyes, relishing how she shrank back. “We’re going to play a game now. I call this game, ‘Tell Asher what he wants to hear.’ The rules are simple: you have exactly five seconds to tell me how you healed your boy out there, or I start hurting you.”
    Her jaw clamped. “How about you put away that weapon,” she said, “I’ll put away mine, and we can fight hand-to-hand, like the gods intended.”
    I chuckled. “It’s called a flashlight, demon. It’s not a weapon.”
    “Oh yeah? Then see how you fight without it,” she taunted.
    I opened my mouth to respond—
    She dropped into a crouch and in a single fluid motion, swiped a stone off the floor and whipped it toward me.
    Her aim was perfect.
    The projectile knocked the flashlight from my hand, and it cracked against the wall. The bulb popped, plunging the cave in sudden, terrifying blackness.
    Shit.
    A flurry of her footsteps echoed in the darkness, impossible to trace.
    I scrambled for the spare pen light on my belt and went for my Glock out of reflex, leveling the gun over my flashlight hand.
    Once