Blaspheme threw her hands up in defeat. “I give up. I have to go to work. Don’t leave the hospital, and please try to stay in the room.” The last thing Blas needed was her mother wandering around the clinic and causing trouble. “I’ll be back later.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know,” Blas admitted. Gods, she hated the wait-and-see approach, which was funny, since that was what ninety percent of being a doctor was about. Wait and see how a patient would respond to treatment. Wait and see if surgery was a success. Wait and see if your patient died because you couldn’t do enough for them.

“I think I should go crash with friends, and you should stay here. I can’t be here, Blas. This place is too… sterile. And smelly. And it’s full of annoying sick people. How can you stand it?”

Maybe her mother staying with friends wasn’t such a bad idea. “Look, Mom,” she said as she shrugged into her lab coat, “we’ll talk about it later. I have to go.”

She snatched up her stethoscope, cell phone, pager, and purse and darted into the hall, closing the door firmly behind her. She really could take only so much of her mother. A little Deva went a long, long way.

Taking a deep, relaxing breath, she started toward the clinic’s Harrowgate. Since she had almost an hour before her shift started, she wanted to do some research into the information Eidolon had given her yesterday. UG’s library was extensive and eclectic, filled with not only medical texts, but also mystical texts and nonfiction books related to the demon realm. Eidolon especially liked to collect books specific to individual demon breeds and species. The smallest detail could mean the difference between life and death during an emergency.

Her pager beeped again, and she nearly fumbled it as she juggled her stethoscope and the little device. When she saw the screen, she stopped dead in her tracks.

Revenant is here. Again. He wouldn’t wait and we couldn’t stop him. He’s loose in the clinic.

Loose. Like a wild animal. Only far worse.

“Blaspheme!”

Her heart skipped a beat at the too-familiar voice from behind her. Dread and excitement dueled within her as she turned around to see him at the far end of the hall, dressed from head to toe in black leather. Goth boots with thick soles added another couple of inches to his already towering form, and the weapons strapped to his body sent a message that if you weren’t intimidated enough already, it was time to roll over.

His lustrous ebony hair flared out behind him as he walked, and she self-consciously reached back to her own heavy, wet rope hanging down her back.

Her heart thumped harder with every step closer he came. How could she be happy to see him but at the same time be nervous as hell? As for him, she had no idea what he was thinking. His expression could have been carved from stone, and the wraparound sunglasses hid his eyes behind a shield of black.

Clearing her throat, she prepared to say hi, but just as she opened her mouth, a door down the hall opened and her mother stepped out. A thousand scenarios played out in her head in an instant.

Not one of them ended well.

Almost as if in slow motion, Deva looked left at Revenant. Then right at Blaspheme. There was a smile when Deva saw her. And then her brain caught up with her eyes and she whipped her head back around to Revenant.

Suddenly, Deva stumbled over her own feet as she wheeled toward Blaspheme.

“Run,” she mouthed.

Before Blaspheme could stop her, Deva bolted toward the clinic’s tube station exit.

“Wait!” Blas yelled. She started off after her, but as she and Revenant met at the junction in the hallway, her mom disappeared around a corner.

“What was up with that?” Revenant asked.

Blas could only stand there like an idiot. Showing too much interest would arouse suspicion. “I guess she wanted to go home.”

“It was that fallen angel I saw before.” His luscious lips dipped in a deep frown. “She looked familiar. What’s her name?”

Her mother had changed her name every few years, but if she truly looked familiar to Revenant, Blaspheme didn’t want to offer up any of her names.

“I can’t tell you that. Doctor-patient confidentiality,” she said, happy to invoke human standards of care when the situation called for it. “But I don’t know why she’d look familiar to you. Maybe it’s part of your memory thing?”

“Maybe.” He didn’t look convinced. “Maybe I banged her before.”

Oh, Christ. Blaspheme so did not want to go there. The idea that she and her mother had screwed the same guy was too disgusting to entertain.

“Gosh, I can’t wait until you start talking about me like that. Some nameless chick you banged.”

His head whipped around, and although she couldn’t see his eyes, she felt their intensity as he stared at her. “I would never speak of you like that,” he vowed darkly. “And I will never forget your name.”

Okay, then. Talk about knocking someone breathless. Blaspheme struggled to inhale without sounding like she’d run a marathon. No male had ever spoken to her like that before, as if she mattered. False Angels were what most demons considered a “great to date but not to mate” species, so males were rarely in it for the long run. Unless, of course, they’d been seduced and enchanted. When that happened, all their pretty words meant nothing.

She got the feeling that what Revenant had just said meant the world.

“Good to know,” she said with a casualness she didn’t feel. Needing to do something – anything – other than stand awkwardly in the hallway, she started toward her office. Hopefully her mother would call soon to let Blas know she was all right. “Why are you here, anyway?”