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prepared to flee.
    “Don’t put up these shields. Don’t bury your head in the fucking sand. Don’t pretend you’re in the world of the real. You’re not.”
    Her entire body shook.
    “Ask me for help.”
    “Why? Who the hell are you to me?”
    “You’re in way over your head.” He sat forward. “And you’ve been out of the game for far too long. You need me. And you need to clue the fuck in. Now. Before it’s too late.”
    “What is going on, Dr. Ramirez?”
    His gaze captured hers again—hard. “You used to call me Bal.”
    She struggled to breathe around the invisible hand closing around her windpipe. “Who the fuck are you?”
    “Remember me, Paige.”
    Something pushed against her mind. “I don’t—” His two eyes swam and became four. The room shifted around her.
    “What was the last conversation we had, Peanut?”
    “ . . . Peanut.”
    “I’ll be fine. Leah’ll be fine. Grandma’s watching her. No one can get through her.”
    “Just because you can fight them with ease doesn’t mean that she can.”
    “I think you underestimate my grandmother. You have met the woman, right?”
    She wrapped her fingers around her head and closed her eyes. “What are you doing?”
    “We were talking about the war. Remember.”
    “War? I don’t under—” Paige stood, dizzy. She had to get out of there.
    He was in front of her as if he’d teleported, his hands around her wrists with an iron force. “Demons.”
    She’d seen his eyes shift earlier. Hadn’t she? Didn’t that make him a demon, too?
    “There’s an uprising. The key is important. Find it. Do not let them open it.”
    Don’t let them open the key or what it opens? “What is it for?”
    “It opens the Gate.”
    “The gate to what?”
    “Get the key and then get the hell out of Louisiana as quick as you can until you get your memories back.”
    “Why does that matter?”
    “Remember, Peanut,” leaning forward to whisper his words in her ear. “You were never normal.”
    She tried to pull away.
    “If you stay, you will die. If you die, you’ll let them in.”
    “The demons?”
    “Yes.”
    She tried to jerk her arm out of his grasp. “You’re insane.”
    “You’re wounded and you’re broken.” He let go of her and turned back to the papers on his desk. “You can’t win this battle. Not like this.”
    Paige stepped away from him, walking backward to the door so he couldn’t grab at her in the last minute.
    “I thought you were stronger than this, Peanut.” He refused to look at her. “I thought you were better.”
    Paige fled back into the waiting darkness.

“T HANKS FOR UNDERSTANDING .” Dexx opened the door to Paige’s room, supper in a bag in his teeth, his left arm full of folders.
    Brian followed him into the room carrying an over-filled case box. “To be honest, the fewer people who know how many rules I’m breaking right now, the better.”
    “Right.” Dexx dumped the folders on the small table and stashed supper in a chair. He pulled the round table closer to the center of the room, then wiggled the crocheted Brian doily out from under the paperwork, setting it on the bureau. He took the bottle of sedatives out of his jacket pocket before draping it over the back of a floral canvased chair.
    “How’s she doing?”
    Dexx sat on the edge of the bed and checked her pulse. Not that he counted her heartbeats like someone who actually knew what the hell he was doing. Half of him checked to make sure it was still beating in the first place. The other saw to the sigil on her arm. Black ink, just the way he’d left her. Good. He popped the top off the orange drug bottle and poured two little blue diazepam pills into his palm.
    “Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”
    “Sure.” Dexx shoved the two pills down her throat, feeling her tongue work as she fought to swallow and throw up at the same time. “Hand me that water bottle?”
    Brian touched the bottle to Dexx’s shoulder. “Tell me again