"You're—you are crazy!"

"Am I?"

Hanging above the emptiness below, a strange, voluminous sort of blackness filtered through my thoughts and settled across my vision. Rage blossomed in my chest and swelled, alive and as virulent as any destructive weed. My nails dug into her wrist until I could feel the slick, even heat of her blood staining my palms. A faint line appeared between Amoroth's manicured brows as an angry, alien snarl ripped through me, and I felt my lip curl. The wind brought strains of Amoroth's clean, citrusy perfume—and puzzling whiffs of burning wheat.

Amoroth's sneer faded. Her eyes widened. Thought trickled through her steady gaze, her free hand tracing the line of my right eye. "You're...."

A growl of frustration wiped away the deeper emotion I could see working through her mind. Amoroth suddenly flung me away, her arm swinging and retracting with the speed of a cracked whip. I gasped as my grip on the Sin of Lust was broken with a mere thought of effort. Then I was falling.

I didn't fall for very long or very far. I must have only dropped about ten feet before something slammed into me and I started ascending again—rapidly ascending, crashing into the Sin of Lust. Amoroth yelped as she was shoved off the guardrail and into the side of what I could only guess was an industrial A/C unit. I inhaled and sucked down a lungful of smoke and ocean scented air.

Darius had me tucked under one arm, taking the brunt of our impact into one of the low concrete walls. My ear smacked into his leg with enough force to scatter my thoughts, and when Darius set me on my feet I immediately collapsed into the wall. My frantic hands patted the hot surface beneath me, checking its solidity. I didn't fall. Darius caught me, thank God...but how did he know where to find me?

Amoroth was extracting herself from the crumpled A/C unit, cursing softly as she brushed dust and bits of concrete from her ruined suit. There was a shard of serrated metal the equivalent size of a butcher's knife shoved through her gut. Noticing it, Amoroth pried the metal loose and dropped it with little regard. "By the Seven, that hurts!"

Darius was on her in an instant, shoving the Sin of Lust into the metal unit again, pinning her by the arms. "Filth," he raged, shaking her hard enough to break a normal person's bones. "What do you think you're doing?!"

Her movement was blurred by the sun and the buzz of adrenaline in my head—but I heard an audible crack above the keening wind. Suddenly Darius was hunched over with his hands cupping a broken nose and Amoroth was straightening her disheveled attire, sneering at the other Sin. The wound in her stomach was gone but blood still flowed from the wrist I had scoured, lacing intricate patterns over her hand and fingers.

"What am I doing? What are you doing?" Amoroth swung at him, but Darius dodged and fell against a thick metallic duct, spitting blood on the concrete. "You must think I'm an idiot. I'll see you back in the Pit for this, Darius. I won't tolerate it!"

"You're right." He straightened and thrust out his palms, sending Amoroth sailing into the now smoking A/C unit. "I do think you're an idiot."

I scrambled to my feet, gripping my throbbing side. "She threw me off the building!" I cried, unsure if I was still in shock or just stunned by disbelief. "She grabbed me from my desk at work and tossed me off the side of this godforsaken tower!"

Darius glared as Amoroth kicked a vent, splitting it in two as she rose again from the twisted metal. "It's not as if you died," she drawled, dabbing at a fresh laceration on her scalp. It healed over in an instant, darkening her livid eyes. "Not for my lack of trying, however."

"What is your problem?!"

"You and your pitiful excuse of a Sin!"

"If you children are finished," Darius interjected as he stepped between us. She was on the opposing side of the A/C unit now, out of Darius' easy reach—but I knew the woman could be at my throat again in an instant. I balked at the 'children' comment, but to a man like Darius who was as old as time itself, I was a child. But what about Amoroth? Was she not Original like Darius? How old was she? From what Darius had told me, Sins who weren't Original had once been human. Amoroth had been human? "What prompted this exasperating idiocy, Amoroth?"

"I told you not to play dumb with me, Darius." The savage look on the woman's face was a startling contrast to her sophisticated—if now dusty—attire. "Killing my employees to fuck with my contract is against the bloody rules!" She jabbed a finger in his direction, ignoring the steady drip of red falling from the hand. "The Baal will hear of this. He will have you back in the fire for another thirty years!"

"Before the Baal hears of this, I would like to hear about this absolute shit you're spewing." Darius' voice was calm, but his shoulders were stiff and his hands were balled into waiting fists. "I haven't killed any of your employees. I could care less about you or your contract. I wouldn't be here at all but for you throwing my host off your roof!"

Amoroth clipped out a word in a language I didn't understand. It didn't sound complimentary. In her ire, the woman's tone had subtly shifted to adopt the barest sibilance of a West Country accent. "Employees murdered, blackmailed, quitting without notice, leaving half of my departments crippled and limping along untended at half-capacity!" She yelled into the wind, voicing her mounting frustration. "Someone's going to answer for this!"

"And you think it was me? Blackmail's not quite my mode of operation, is it?" Darius smiled, baring his white, sharp teeth in an ugly display. No, blackmail didn't strike me as a tool Darius wielded well. It required finesse and Darius...Darius hadn't shown much finesse in our dealings thus far. He was a person who would light candles with a flamethrower, and would gladly rip out someone's tongue before attempting to buy their silence with blackmail.

Amoroth thought Darius was the Klau Killer. Interesting. I had suspected it was her.

The Sin of Lust straightened her cuffs in a decidedly masculine manner before pushing out her chest and swatting aside her loose hair. The look she gave Darius was perilous, but calculating. "Not you, you say?"

Exasperated, Darius ran a hand through his hair and tugged at the short strands as he spat on the concrete. "No. Why, by the King's dying breath, would I even care?"

Amoroth kept dusting off her ruined attire, her attention wavering over Darius, eyes alighting upon me for the barest of seconds. She patted the front pocket of her jacket, checking for something. "Let's say I believe you, for the moment," she told Darius, her first step in his direction wobbling off-balance, the heel of one of her stilettos ripped off. Disgusted, Amoroth kicked the shoes away and stood in her bare feet, still managing to be poised and elegant. "I'm going to need a certain...insurance policy, hmm? A way to keep you on your very best behavior, Darius."

"What are you talking about—?"

She was already gone, absorbed by the lingering Realm. I held my breath and waited. Darius' eyes narrowed in thought—then flew open as he jerked to the side, facing me. "Sara!"

His warning came too late. Just as he opened his mouth to call my name, I felt heat explode at my back in an ash-laden downdraft and fingers clamped around my forearm. Suddenly I fell into the darkness of the Realm for a second time today, unable to draw a breath in preparation for the crushing sensation. Pain erupted from my side and I howled soundlessly into the mire of red and black nothingness. Amoroth's grip tightened as she towed me in her wake, but my entire being sank beneath the mounting pressure—and I took the Sin of Lust with me.

We were flung out of the Realm like two ships thrown from a tempest. I heard Amoroth grunt as she collapsed next to me on the chilled marble beneath us. I caught her eyes as the woman shoved her hair out of her face, spitting out a mouthful of it. "That is not supposed to happen," she muttered before turning her attention to the rest of the room.

With a thrill, I realized I knew where Amoroth had dropped us. I recognized the uncomfortable black leather furniture and the ugly—but undoubtedly expensive—piece of modern art hung on the wall. It depicted the impressionistic image of gangly, half-formed people raising cups of red wine to a green sun. I thought it was one of the ugliest paintings I had ever laid eyes on, but I nonetheless recognized it. We were in Gregor Eoul's office.

IMOR's CEO was behind his desk, sputtering and wide-eyed with his work forgotten. He fumbled for the desk phone as Amoroth righted herself, but before he could relearn how to press the button for the intercom, the Sin dipped her hand into her jacket's pocket and tossed whatever it held at Eoul. "Catch."

Acting on reflex, the man did just that. His fist formed around a roughly cut, shimmering blue crystal and his shocked expression dissolved to nothing. The crystal was from the chandelier hanging in Klau's lobby, the thin connecting chain trailing limp and broken from the top bracket. Eoul held his posture, arm still raised to his face where he had caught the crystal before it could smack him in the head.

"W-why are we here?" I asked from my spot on Eoul's buffed floor, slumped over my aching side. Amoroth stalked closer to the man's cluttered desk, chuckling softly as the air cooled and her eyes once more filled with color and energy. I stared at the gently glowing crystal. "What is that?"

"That, girl, is but a tawdry bauble—one of the many very expensive tawdry baubles I had to bribe and coerce from an enchantress, at great risk to myself, mind you." She placed her dusty, bloody hands on the desk's edge as she bent to smirk in Eoul's slack face. "Being in the vicinity of one opens a mortal's mind to the suggestions of a Sin's will, but direct contact with the skin...." She drew a finger along Eoul's paunchy cheek, her chipped nail creating a red scratch. Eoul remained passive with his gaze unfocused. "Direct contact breaks his resistances and makes his mind and his will completely mine until I take the crystal away." She flipped her hair aside to look at me. "I had planned to use this one on you, but I decided Darius is unhinged enough to probably take my head if I did so." She sighed, patting Eoul's cheek. "But this is just as good."

Speaking of.... "Where is Darius?" I asked as I levered myself upright long enough to fall into one of the modern lounges in Eoul's meeting area. The backing was hard and I winced in discomfort.

The Sin of Lust waved a hand, unconcerned. "Probably breaking something of mine like a petulant, sulky teenager. Who knows?"

Now that the woman wasn't trying to heave me off the side of a skyscraper, I wasn't afraid—though the ten feet or so between us was beneficial. Blood seeped into my blouse and I cupped my hand over the offending spot, hiding it from sight. "What are you going to do to him?"

"Nothing much," Amoroth said, leaning into her fellow CEO. The office grew steadily cooler as Amoroth mustered the energy to fuel the power of her will. "Gregor Eoul," she muttered, and his blank eyes rolled in her direction. "You are going to dismiss your company receptionist, Sara Gaspard, without prior notice."

I gawked. "What?!"

"You are not going to pay her severance. In fact, you happen to know that Gaspard found a new paying position as a receptionist at Klau across the street."

"What are you doing?!" I demanded as I rose to my unsteady feet. Amoroth continued to ignore me.

"You can't quite remember when you fired her, and if someone asks where your receptionist went, all you will recall is that she found new employment at Klau and that, at some point prior, you fired her. You will alter employee records to reflect that fact."

"Amoroth!" I grabbed her elbow, but the Sin slipped from my grasp with little effort.

"When I remove the crystal from your hand, you won't remember any of the past five minutes no matter how you may try to. You're going to rest your head on your desk, and you won't hear or see anything for the next five minutes as well. When I remove the crystal, you will forget you were coerced. You will forget I or Sara Gaspard were ever here, and you will not remember anything about my nature."

Before I could object further—despite the utter uselessness of doing so—Amoroth pried the dimmed crystal from Eoul's fingers and the balding CEO slumped onto the desktop face first, a gusting snore emanating from his smooshed nose.

I stared at the back of Eoul's head, my stomach sick with what I had just witnessed. Amoroth trembled, not with fear or excitement, but with sheer exhaustion. Her eyes were fully black, her skin clammy with perspiration and sallow in color. She dropped the spent crystal into her jacket pocket once more and heaved a lingering sigh. Whenever I had seen Darius use the Tongue of the Realm, he did so in curt, rapid commands. Amoroth's intricately laid compulsion had been far more taxing on her.

"What have you done?" I demanded as I stepped away. The demon's reptilian eyes swiveled in my direction again.

"Just a small change in the roster, girl," she said, smiling. Her white teeth were the same as ever, but her face was savage. She held out a hand, palm up, and I took another involuntary step away. She wagged her fingers, expectant. "Come. Unless you'd like to be here when he wakes up and demands to know what happened?"

No. Being here would only confuse Eoul further and lead to difficult questions I would not be able to answer. I did not know where Darius was or why he wasn't coming for me, but I did know I had to get out of that office, and I wasn't about to walk by Patty, Eoul's secretary. Tentative, I lowered my hand into the Sin's, and her fingers closed around my own.

"Splendid."