Darkness Hunts (DA 4) by Keri Arthur

“I’m here if you need anything else.”
    I gave her a smile and headed down the street to my SUV. The Toyota wasn’t my preferred mode of transport—that honor went to the silver Ducati I’d bought when RYT’s, the café I co-owned and ran with Ilianna and Tao, had made its first profit. Unfortunately, the Ducati and I had a serious parting of ways thanks to a pack of demons, and she was still in the shop getting repaired. She was an old bike, and her parts were hard to get, so I was going to be without her for a while. Which was why I was seriously considering buying another one. I preferred the feel and freedom of a bike as opposed to the sedate safety of a vehicle like the SUV. Even Tao’s Ferrari couldn’t give the high of the bike—not on Melbourne streets, anyway.
    A breeze stirred the air, cooling the early-morning heat but doing little to ease the furnace-like intensity of the man who walked close behind me. Part of me wished I could ignore him, that we could just go back to the time when the attraction was muted and he was more antagonistic. More distant. But there was no way on earth to put that particular genie back in the bottle.
    After a moment, I asked, “What did you mean before, when you said I had no idea of the risk we were running?”
    “Just that. This attraction breaks all the rules—”
    “Your rules, not mine.”
    “Yes.” He paused. “I thought we had agreed that we should—”
    “No,” I snapped back. “ You decided we should attempt to ignore this. I had no choice.”
    “Because of the danger—”
    “To whom?” I swung around and stabbed a finger into his chest. It felt like I was hitting steel. “Not to me, buddy boy, and don’t pretend otherwise. You’re protecting your ass here, not mine.”
    “True.” His expression was as enigmatic as ever, and yet there was an undercurrent in the air that was both frustration and anger. At himself, at me, at the situation. “But you have no idea of the dangers I face.”
    “No, because you won’t fucking explain them to me.” I glared at him for a moment, then shook my head and walked on. “You know what? Forget it. It’s not important.”
    “If it wasn’t important, you would not be this angry.”
    I snorted softly and just kept moving. He was silent until we got to the SUV, then appeared in the passenger seat.
    “As I said before,” he commented, as I pulled out into the traffic, “the longer I remain in flesh form, the more I take on certain human characteristics.”
    “So? It’s not like a little human emotion is going to destroy you or anything, is it?”
    “ That ,” he said, his voice holding an edge that suggested he was barely holding on to his patience, “is where you are very wrong.”
    I glanced at him sharply. “How the fuck is that even possible? I mean, emotion isn’t a physical force. Being emotional can’t destroy you.” I paused, then remembered Jak, the man I’d thought I would marry one day, and all the heartbreak he’d caused me. “Although sometimes it does feel like it can.”
    “While gaining the emotions that come with flesh form is, of itself, not dangerous to us, the fact that you and I are connected at a chi level makes it so.”
    I slowed down as the lights ahead went to red, then said, “Why?”
    He hesitated. “A chi connection is a connection of life forces—”
    “I’m well aware what a chi connection is,” I snapped. “Just tell me why you believe it’s so damn dangerous.”
    He released a breath that was more a hiss. “It’s dangerous because it can lead to assimilation.”
    I blinked. “Assimilation?”
    “It happens when a reaper becomes so attuned to a particular human that their life forces merge, and they become as one.”
    “No—”
    “Yes,” he spat back. His expression was as grim as I’d ever seen it. “If that happens, my reaper powers will become muted, and I will never again be able to function as a soul bearer.”
    “But you can still be a