Sacrificed in Shadow Read Online Free

tried to cross the globe, only to smack into morning a few time zones east. That had been her first, extremely miserable taste of being exploded into a thousand incorporeal fragments. It had taken almost a week to piece herself back together. Anthony and McIntyre had laughed at her when she returned, like it was some kind of silly mistake that could happen to anyone, but they had looked worried.
    Elise didn’t fuck around with sunlight anymore.
    Her new life was three years old now. Three years since she had shared blood with Yatam, the father of all demons, and lost her human body. Elise had been remade in his image, with all of a demon’s strengths and weaknesses. But demons were a diverse class of creatures. She didn’t know what type of demon she was, or if there even was another demon like her at all, and she was still trying to learn her limitations.
    She was obviously a creature of night: pale-skinned, dark-haired, and easily cloaked in shadow. Elise looked like one of the thousands of succubi descended from Yatam’s line. If she had possessed an unusual thirst for sex, she probably would have believed herself to be a succubus. But she didn’t crave flesh. Not like that.
    Elise had seen Yatam in daylight a dozen times, too; he hadn’t been burned by the sun the way that she was. She was optimistic that her imprisonment in night was temporary. After five thousand years, there had been a lot of tricks up Yatam’s metaphoric sleeve that Elise hadn’t learned yet.
    But darting over a country swathed in night was easy. Elise simply closed her eyes on Las Vegas and opened them on a gas station thousands of miles away.
    Her ability to fast-travel was good, but her ability to find places she had never been before was not. She had no idea how to find the sheriff’s office in Grove County. All-powerful demon or not, she needed directions.
    The gas station door had an advertisement for churro nuggets plastered at eye-level. It was a temporary fixture, no more than a fancy sticker. But below that was an even more recent sign: a handwritten note on lined paper that said, “We Report Preternaturals.”
    Elise stopped cold, hand on the doorknob, and stared at that sign.
    “We Report Preternaturals” had become the battle cry of terrified humans that supported the Office of Preternatural Affairs’s policies—an oath to report non-human customers to the census for cataloging. Similar shows of support were unheard of in Las Vegas. Northern Nevada had been under military occupation since the winter of 2009. The OPA didn’t need propaganda where the citizenry already lived in fear of another demon apocalypse.
    With all of her motel-hopping, the OPA’s census personnel hadn’t located Elise for cataloging. She hadn’t gone out of her way to register, either.
    She ripped the lined paper off the door and trashed it.
    The bell over the gas station door jingled when she entered. The polished brass bell was shiny and new—the only shiny and new thing in the cramped, grimy station.
    “Can I help you?” asked the clerk. He was a squat black man with a flat nose, much like a toad. His name tag said, “Hello! My name is Brick. Please tell me what I can do to assist you!” The name was written in black permanent marker, with an angry slant to the “K.”
    “Sure,” Elise said, sauntering up the aisle. “I need to find the Grove County Sheriff’s Department.”
    Brick gave her a long look from head to toe. His mind was a mess of disorganized electrical signals, but Elise could taste the judgments streaming across his mind. Knee-high boots, hip-hugging jeans, leather jacket? Godless whore. She was confident that he would have found the truth of her nature far more terrifying.
    “Why are you looking for the GCSD?” he asked.
    She plucked a newspaper off the stand and unfolded it. The serial killings were front page, above-the-fold news. Elise flipped through to the crime section in the back, where she found a picture of the