Demon Marked by Meljean Brook Page A

the same one. The demon pressed “seek” again. “The two times we stopped for gas, you paid in cash. There’s really no reason for that except you don’t want the Guardian finding us. But if someone wanted to, they could track you through your phone.”
    Not so easily. He’d also used cash to buy a prepaid mobile, and only Cooper had the number. The Guardians would find him, eventually. No doubt of that. He just had to stay ahead of them, and so he’d taken steps to slow them down: renting the SUV under a false identification, and using yet another name to reserve a hotel suite in Duluth.
    He wouldn’t tell the demon that. “So you have no memory, you’ve only been out of Nightingale for a month, yet you know about tracking phones?”
    â€œI watched a lot of television there. Cop shows.”
    â€œViolent television in a mental hospital. Brilliant.”
    â€œIt’s what I wanted to watch. The nurses let me alone to do it.”
    Yeah, Nicholas bet they’d let her alone. A demon was low maintenance. No need to sleep, eat, bathe—or piss. Jesus, he hoped they came across a gas station soon.
    As for the phone . . . Hell. Nicholas wanted Madelyn to find them. He didn’t want the Guardians getting there first—and there was nothing that Cooper could tell him now that couldn’t wait. He pulled out his mobile, powered it down.
    â€œThank you,” she said, surprising him. “I don’t look forward to being killed on sight.”
    By the Guardians. Would Madelyn kill her, too? Nicholas didn’t think so. Madelyn wouldn’t have left the demon at Nightingale House unless she had some use for her. Considering the demon’s resemblance to Rachel, that use probably involved some scheme to tear Nicholas’s heart out.
    If this demon didn’t slay him through song first. She jabbed the radio button again, and the dial scanned through the frequencies before coming back to the same station. It must have been pissing her off. Her gaze actually left the road long enough for her to cast a deadly stare at the console.
    Hell, any more force in those jabs, and she might stab her finger through it. “You don’t like country?”
    Rachel had. She’d often joked that she was the only woman in England who had Martina McBride sitting next to Marilyn Manson in her music collection.
    â€œLike? That doesn’t matter. Only ‘familiar’ does—and I don’t know this song.”
    â€œYou knew the others that have been playing?”
    â€œYes. Most of them. And when I didn’t, I could find another station playing something else that I knew.” Her eyes began to glow faintly red. “I can’t find anything now.”
    â€œBut you remember the music.”
    â€œAs soon as I hear it, yes. I didn’t know it before that—or didn’t know that I knew it. But as soon as the song starts, I remember the lyrics, the singer. And I don’t forget again.” She pressed “seek” again, this time with less force. “But sometimes, it’s more than just knowing the words. Some songs, it’s like there’s more there, some other memory attached, and I can almost . . . touch it.”
    All right. Nicholas understood that. He couldn’t hear the Rolling Stones without remembering his mother dancing in the kitchen. Not Madelyn, but his mother. After the demon had wormed her way into their family, it had been all classical, all the time—to soothe his father’s nerves, she’d said. Now, Nicholas recognized a thousand changes that she’d wrought when she’d taken his mother’s place, claiming that everything she’d done had been to help his father. The demon bitch.
    The Stones sure as hell couldn’t tell him where his mother’s body lay now. “You’ve spent the whole night listening for familiar songs?”
    The crimson faded from her eyes.