Demon by Kristina Douglas Page B

charitable bone in his body.
    He would take her to the Dark City and, if it came to that, hand her over to the Truth Breakers to find out all her secrets. He would have no choice but to expose himself to her temptation,and he would prove to himself that he could resist her. He would mourn Sarah forever. She was the wife of his eternal banishment. The Lilith was a murderous whore.
    No matter what she believed, he couldn’t afford to let himself forget that essential truth.

C HAPTER S IX
     
    I OPENED MY EYES, BLINKED, THEN closed them tightly again. There was something wrong with my vision. Something wrong with my mind as well. My heart raced with remembered fear, and I took deep, slow breaths, willing calm back. I was lying on a bed, and déjà vu swept over me. This had all happened before. Where was Azazel?
    I opened my eyes again, slowly, then sat up and looked around me. I was in a bedroom, large, luxurious, with a high ceiling, heavy old furniture, and what looked like a marble floor. I couldn’t be sure, because the room was leached of color. Everything was a strange sepia tone, like an ancient photograph. I looked down at my body, and breathed a sigh of relief. I was in full color, my jeans the same faded indigoas when I’d put them on, my sneakers a dirty white, my arms their normal lightly tanned skin color. Some odd memory made me reach up to my hair. It was the same, long and thick, and I pulled a strand into sight. The same red I’d become accustomed to.
    I stroked the coverlet beneath me. It was thick and velvety, despite its gray-brown appearance. Someone must have a really strange decorating sense, to have chosen everything in these colorless shades. Even the marble. I slid off the high bed, and the floor was hard beneath my feet. Was there such a thing as brown marble, or had they painted it?
    But I knew paint was too easy an answer. I knew what I’d find when I opened the door, when I pushed the heavy beige curtains away from the tall windows, beige curtains that something told me ought to be pure white.
    I turned the knob, hoping for some Wizard of Oz effect of the bright colors of Munchkinland beyond the door. Instead it was another sepia-toned room. No sign of Azazel, and I breathed an involuntary sigh of relief. There were the same tall windows covered with heavy curtains, and I didn’t want to go look. But I was made of tougher stuff than that, and if I was here I might as well know what I was facing. I crossed the room and pushedthe curtains aside, then stood there, frozen, staring out into the city.
    I had no idea where I was—it looked like a cross between New York in the 1930s and London in the 1890s, mixed with some early German filmmaker’s notions of a dystopian future. And it was all the same monochromatic chiaroscuro. A sort of grayish brown, like an old movie. I held my arm out in front of the cityscape. Still normal, a shock of color against the dark, shadowy lines of the strange place. I let the curtain drop, turning away, and then let out a little shriek. Azazel stood there, watching me.
    At least he was in color, or as much color as he had in him. He was dressed in black as always, black jeans and a black shirt, and his long, ink-black hair framed a pale face, his dark blue eyes and high cheekbones uncomfortably familiar. But even his pale skin held a healthier color than the room, and his mouth had color. I stared at it, not sure I wanted to examine my own thoughts, and that mouth twisted into an unpleasant smile.
    “So what kind of hell have you brought me to?” I managed to sound no more than casually interested. “Is this purgatory?”
    “Purgatory is a mythical construction. This is the Dark City.”
    “You could have fooled me.” I looked around me. “So why are we here?”
    He didn’t answer, his unsettling eyes moving over me with what I knew was cool contempt. I still couldn’t figure out what I’d done to merit this, why he was so certain I was some kind of