Hofer’s voice, from down the bar, set her off like the squeal of rusty hinges. An image formed of her walking down, pulling her pistol, and clubbing the loudmouth to death.

“Yes! Kill!” Demon hissed as her stomach tightened.

“He’s using you,” Rocket replied in warning. “We did the smartest thing we could with Dek.”

“We just condemned the guy,” she growled. “We filled his mouth with a hot load of TriNA.”

“Our TriNA,” Rocket’s reasonable voice insisted from her shoulder.

Talina shot a slitted sidelong look at her shoulder, half expecting to see the spectral quetzal perched there. He wasn’t of course. No more than Demon was a physical entity down behind her stomach.

“You’re a clap-trapping hallucination. It’s just how my brain deals with it,” she reminded herself.

Clenching her teeth, she fought the sudden urge to scream in expression of her frustration, conflicting emotions, and overall pissed-offishness at things in general. Never, in all of her life, had she felt this sexually frustrated. She’d barely torn herself away from the guy. Ached to race back, rip his clothes off, and screw him to within an inch of his life. Just because Demon kept tinkering with her limbic system, making her pulsing lust worse, didn’t lessen the fact that she was naturally attracted to the man.

“I just won’t be your plaything, you piece of shit.”

“You will . . . in time.”

“Go suck piss out of a boot.”

Demon chittered another staccato of quetzal laughter.

Not to mention that she was disgusted with herself. She’d just played God with Derek Taglioni’s future by giving him that hot kiss. The bizarre irony was that she’d essentially impregnated the poor guy. Shot him full of genetic material as surely as if she’d ejaculated. And unlike human copulation, she didn’t need him to be ovulating for it to take. All that TriNA she had secreted through her salivary glands was circulating through his mouth, passing through the mesoderm in his cheeks and lips, and the permeable tissue beneath his tongue, integrating with his cells and bloodstream.

God damn her! As bad as what she’d done out at his claim, this was worse. She’d given him no choice. Just fucked him over. In human sex, a pregnancy could be terminated. This couldn’t. The deed was done. Dek was back at her house, lying in her bed, as that flood of genetic material was coursing through his body. No stopping it now.

I am a shit-sucking monster.

Again, she wanted to scream in frustration. Would have but for the fact that the whole bar would stop, gone suddenly quiet, as every eye in the place turned her way. Hell, as much as people feared her these days, it would probably empty the whole fricking tavern.

Inga came striding down behind the bar, a towel over her shoulder. “Tal, you need another?”

“Damn straight.”