“Come on, witch,” Ivy said gently, her black, owl-feather voice in stark contrast to her painful grip on my shoulder. “I taught you better. You’re not even trying.”

“I don’t want to hurt you,” I panted, one arm clutched around my middle.

She held me to the wall under the shadow of a long gone cross. The blood from her lip made a red jewel caught at the corner of her mouth. “You can’t,” she whispered.

Heart pounding, I jerked to get away, failing. “Let me go, Ivy,” I panted. “You don’t want to do this.” A cloying scent of incense pulled the memory of her pinning me to her chair last spring. “If you do this,” I said frantically, “I’ll leave. You’ll be alone.”

She leaned close, putting the flat of her free forearm against the wall by my head. “If I do this, you won’t leave.” A heated smile curved over her—showing a hint of teeth—and she pressed closer. “But you could get away if you really wanted to. What do you think I’ve been teaching you the last three months? Do you want to get away—Rachel?”

Panic lanced deep into me. My heart beat wildly, and Ivy sucked her breath in as if I had slapped her. Fear was an aphrodisiac, and I’d just given her a jolt. Lost in the blackness of instinct and need, her muscles went tension-wire tight. “Do you want to get away, little witch?” she murmured, her breath against my demon scar sending a surge of tingling through me.

My intake of breath went to my core, seeming to turn my blood to liquid metal as it conducted a pulse through me. “Get off,” I panted, the delicious feeling coursing from my neck to fill me. It was my scar. She was playing on my demon scar as Piscary had done.

She licked her lips. “Make me.” She hesitated, the hard hunger shifting to something more playful and insidious. “Tell me it doesn’t feel good when I do this.” Breath easing from her in a sigh, she watched my eyes as her finger ran a trail from my ear, across my neck, and down my collarbone.

I almost buckled at the sensation of her nail finding the faint bumps of scar tissue, stimulating the scar back into full play. My eyes closed as I remembered that the demon had taken Ivy’s face when it ripped out my throat, filling the wound with a dangerous cocktail of neurotransmitters to make pain into pleasure. “Yes,” I breathed, almost moaning. “God help me. It does. Please … stop.”

Her body shifted against mine. “I know how it feels,” she said. “The hunger racing from it to fill your body, the need it stirs, until the only thought burning in you is to touch the craving to fulfill it.”

“Ivy?” I whimpered. “Stop. I can’t. I don’t want to.”

My eyes flashed open at her silence. The drop of blood at the corner of her mouth was gone. I could feel the blood pounding through me. I knew my reactions were tied to the demon scar, that she was sending out pheromones to restimulate the pseudovamp saliva that remained in me to make pain into pleasure. I knew it was one of the survival adaptations vamps relied upon to bind people to them, ensuring that they had a willing supply of blood. I knew all of this, but it was getting harder to remember. Harder to care. It wasn’t sexual. It was need. Hunger. Heat.