Chapter 4

Spoken like a true fanatic. He had no idea. I don’t know why, but it made me sad. 

He was inching closer again. If he kept it up I was gonna show him just how evil I could be. 

“That’s right.” Again, my answer seemed to surprise him. “I am. I kill. I screw indiscriminately. Is that what you want to hear?”

His mouth contorted with disgust, as if hearing me say it only confirmed I was the monster he thought I was. “I should kill you.”

Out of nowhere, a knife materialized in his hand. It hovered inches from my neck.

I pressed my neck into the tip of the blade. The cold steel dug into my flesh and made me tremble. “Then do it now or stop wasting my time.” I looked up at him, and the movement caused the sharp blade to nick me. It was a shallow cut, nothing dangerous, but it did make me bleed. A thin ribbon of crimson pooled on the silver.

He looked at it, and I could see the tension in the rigidity of his shoulders, the small tic under his right eye. He wanted to do it. So what was stopping him?

I was taking a very calculated risk here. Did I really want to die? In the past, maybe… but not anymore. I knew who I was. Was secure in myself. My pulse hammered violently in my neck. I didn’t know him, but I also didn’t think he’d do it.

It was a flicker in his eye. The way his body was so tense, so angry. Like he wanted to but just couldn’t. Over the years I’d developed a few tricks—one was that I could read people, and not just based off body language. It was almost like feeling someone’s thoughts. Tasting their moods. Anger was spicy, lust decadent, fear greasy. Billy tasted like a chili pepper dipped in dark chocolate. 

Very interesting. I licked my lips.

Seconds seemed like hours. I stared at him, watching the lines of his muscle twitch from the strain of holding himself back. The minute was nearly up, and with each passing second I knew not only wouldn’t he, but he couldn’t.

Priest could have done it when I was outside with my back turned. 

No, he wanted me alive. Of that I was sure. Why? I had no idea. But I was going to find out.

He growled, threw the knife away, and walked off. The knife clattered when it hit the kitchen floor. I released the pent-up breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. I wasn’t a gambler, but right now I felt like I’d just won the jackpot.

He was at the door when I asked, “Where are my boots?”

The cat was out of the bag—he knew who I was, and I knew why he’d taken my shoes off. Every Neph was born with the mark, either on their left or right ankle. Not all marks were similar. Mine was in the shape of a shredded moth’s wing on the inside of my right ankle. 

He’d taken my shoes off to make certain I was Neph.

Stopping midstride, already halfway out the door, he turned toward me and his lip curled. “See you around, Neph.” 

There was an unspoken promise in that sentence. This would only be the beginning of more. His eyes roamed my face, and I licked my lips at the quiet intensity in that gaze. I’m not sure what happened between us. I couldn’t understand how a Pontifex Mortus, trained to kill Nephs at any and all costs, would choose to walk away from a sacrifice that had looked willing. 

But something had happened, and whatever it was would forever alter the tenuous balance between good and evil.

~*~

I was rubbing wrists grown raw from the abrasive scrape of rope when the door opened. I half expected it to be Billy returned with a change of heart and a bigger knife, but instead it was Luc.

He looked at my wrists, my face, then at my shoulder, which was caked with blood. Luc moved as only a demon could. It wasn’t a walk, but a thought. He wanted to be near me, and from one second to the next, he was. 

Kneeling, he drew my wrists into his warm hands and turned them over to expose the angry red abrasions marring the milky white of my skin. His shoulders grew tense and his breathing heavy. “Who did this?” 

I licked my lips. 

Luc watched me like a wolf stalking its prey. He’d turned down his glamour, sensitive to the fact that changing would have been too painful for me right now. He sniffed the air, then a rumble similar to the guttural growl of a panther readying itself to strike vibrated through his chest. His eyes narrowed. He pushed the hair away from my face none too gently and jerked me by the chin so that I faced light. 

“Who did this to you, Ya-el?” A flicker of apprehension skated down my spine like black ice as I watched his eyes turn from blue to molten lavender. Thankfully, he wasn’t in the mood for sex. Turning now would have hurt like a mother.

“Pontifex Mortus,” I whispered. 

He vanished in a plume of black smoke, leaving in his wake the faint scent of sulfur.

My head, my shoulders, wrists, ankles… it all hurt. It was beginning to ache so bad now that it was making me sick. My head swam from the blood loss, but I had to clean myself up. I still smelled that vampire all over me. I stood, and for a second the world swayed. 

There was no way I could even walk the short distance to my bathroom without emptying the contents of my stomach. Swallowing down the bile, I pushed through the pain and dematerialized.

Typically dematerializing feels like fading into a cold, wet mist. It’s painless, seamless. Like slipping into the velvet warm heat of bathwater. Every part of your body breaking down into its basic form, free-floating atoms made up of excited protons, electrons, neutrons and a pulsating nucleus. Energy in its purest form and multiplied by about a trillion. 

But tonight it was neither painless nor seamless. The second I misted I knew I shouldn’t have. I’d have screamed if I had lungs and a mouth to do it with. 

It took me longer than normal to reform. If I didn’t do it right, if I didn’t grab every part of me that had misted, I’d forever be less than. Not a shade and not fully corporeal. Just… less than.

Taking deep breaths, I focused around the nauseating pain throbbing at my temple until I’d gathered the last bit of myself. The final atom slid into me with the happy warmth of a devoted puppy.

I gripped the sink with knuckles turning white from the strain of trying to hold myself upright. Sweat beaded across my brows. Black hollows added shadows to my eyes. My skin, already porcelain fair, was now so pale that I could make out the small blue and green veins in my cheeks. Saying I looked bad was probably the understatement of the year.

“Friggin’ death priests,” I grumbled beneath my breath.

Quickly I turned on the faucet. Warm tendrils of steam fogged the bottom half of the mirror. 

I wet a rag and cleaned myself up the best I could. The water was scalding, and I hissed when the heat touched my wound. Standing was making everything worse. The headache was awful, like someone had taken a cleaver to my skull. I blinked, seeing stars swim before my eyes. The walls bulged, then sank in. The floor rocked beneath my feet, and I groaned, feeling as if I was trapped in a house of horrors. 

My stomach revolted, and it was all I could do to throw myself upon the toilet before I upchucked everything I’d eaten today—which hadn’t been much, a hamburger with all the fixings. It’d been tasty going down, not so pretty coming up. The sight of it only made me gag the harder. I hugged the porcelain like my life depended on it, staying put until there was nothing left but the dry heaving. I flushed the toilet but couldn’t seem to get my body to move.

I groaned and squeezed my eyes shut, trying to block out the sights and smells.

Clearly I had a concussion, maybe even some bleeding in the brain. Sitting still had helped, but moving was awful. Contrary to popular belief, demons could get hurt. And since I was only half demon, well, that meant I could get hurt even worse.

Short of being decapitated, we could heal all wounds. Even dismembered limbs. A fast or slow healing depended entirely upon the type of demon that possessed you. For Bubba, that meant being able to get to a food source—animal or otherwise. Vyxyn, needed to take something someone else wanted. Didn’t matter what. So long as she got it first. For me, well… I’m sure you get the picture. 

After a few seconds, I was finally able to stand, feeling somewhat better now that my stomach was empty. 

I washed my face again, gingerly applying the rag to the large purple bruise spreading across my temple. I brushed my teeth twice and then gargled with mouthwash for good measure. 

I sensed his presence the second before he materialized. 

“Ya-el.” 

Luc wrapped me in his arms. He smelled so good, like pine and aftershave. He was so warm, so safe. I leaned against him, letting him take the full weight of my body. 

“You need to rest.”

I closed my eyes, exhausted and upset. I said the first thing that popped into my head. “You know I hate that name. Don’t ever call me that.” 

If he heard me, he didn’t acknowledge it. He swept me up in his arms, one hand at my shoulder, the other beneath my legs. I groaned and buried my face in the curve of his neck.

He was trembling as he walked toward my bedroom.

I laid my fingers against his whiskered cheek. 

He turned his face into my hand and laid a kiss against the tips of my fingers. I shuddered, and it wasn’t from pain. 

The lavender was gone, the blue of his eyes filled with unspoken words. I knew what he was thinking. He’d let me down. I’d nearly died while he’d been caught up in Lust’s grip. 

And again, this was all part and parcel of the complicated relationship we shared. Luc had hurt me before, but age and time had softened him. He’d become responsible, not the reckless and wild thing I remembered from our youth. Now he almost seemed to carry the weight of the world on his shoulders. Always thinking somehow everything was his fault, especially as it pertained to me or any other Neph under his care. I’d often teased him about being a martyr, but there had always been some truth in the teasing. If he had been possessed by a second demon, I didn’t know it and he wouldn’t share it. I feared that one day his sense of justice would lead him to do something stupid… like get himself killed. 

I wanted to kiss that torture from him.

His fingers dug into my back. He squeezed me in a tight hug, as if he never meant to let me go. 

Pain and pleasure became one. My body was broken, but my hunger grew.

“Share my body, Dora,” he said in a voice grown soft and unsure. He’d made the offer before, and I’d turned him down. Was he worried I’d do the same again? 

It wasn’t often I saw Luc like this, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. He was everything a true Neph should be. I’d always been the freak, the outsider. The one talking about things like love and hope. He’d always been the one to correct me, warn me away from thinking like that. Love and hope didn’t exist in our world. It was a weakness we couldn’t afford. 

He frowned, and I could see some of that legendary control of his slipping. What was wrong with him? 

He closed his eyes, turned his face to the side as if he didn’t want me to see something. He was shielding himself, and I didn’t like that. 

I ran my fingers through the softness of his hair, tugging on it enough to force him to look at me. “Do not hide yourself from me. I would have truth between us.”

The look in his face was so raw it was almost too painful to look upon. He shuddered, buried his face in my hair, and inhaled my scent. “Let me take away this pain.”

I wrapped my arms around his neck and let him see how much he meant to me. How much I wanted him, needed him. This had nothing to do with Lust. What I felt for Luc in that moment transcended something so carnal. 

He kneeled on the bed with me still cradled in his arms. My body hurt, but it also tingled with the rising awareness that I was about to get the drug I needed. I might curse Lust, wish her dead, but she had her useful moments. Tit for tat. Give her sex, and I’d be whole again. 

Luc moved back, standing at the side of the bed as he started undressing. His fingers found the buttons of his shirt. He took his time with it, undoing one at a time, letting his hand linger before moving on. His gaze, hot with need, never swerved from my face. 

After so many years together, he knew what I liked, how I liked it. Sometimes watching a man undress was almost more exciting than the sex itself. 

Lust stirred, like a lazy cat smelling something tasty in the air.

Buttons undone, he rolled the shirt over his shoulders, letting it spill behind him to the carpet. Heat crashed between my thighs. He was so beautiful. Long and lean. Every sinewy muscle in his chest and abdomen flexed as he reached for the zipper of his jeans. Again, he was excruciatingly slow, every movement a deliberate seduction that made me whimper with desire.

Once he’d unzipped, I could see he’d gone commando tonight.

That golden, sun-kissed skin of his seemed to glow in the flickering flames of candlelight. His little brown nipples were hard. I wanted to draw them into my mouth and bite them, twist them, rake my nails across them until they flushed a bright pink. 

His eyes were twin pools of liquid amethyst; his demon was fully awake and very aroused. So was Luc, judging by the hard bulge in his jeans.

A sound, very much like a purr, fell from my lips.

He pushed the jeans down, then kicked them to the side and stood before me in all his nude glory. I couldn’t have looked away if I’d wanted to. Clothed, we’re gorgeous. Nude… we’re breathtaking.

Luc crawled onto the bed on all fours, and my pulse sped. He touched me, and my back arched. My fingers bunched at the sheets, and a cry, both of pain and unbearable desire, spilled from me.

He found the zipper at the side of my corset.

“Hurry,” I gasped, frantic with the need to feel him touch me, bare skin to bare skin.

My nipples pebbled the second they touched cool air. I shifted, helping him to take the corset off. He threw the thing over his shoulder and groaned, and his irises dilated with a hunger so intense it made my mouth water.

He dropped down, taking one nipple into his mouth, and pulled hard. The velvet heat of his mouth made me cry out. I drew his head down harder, my nails scraping his scalp, and he mumbled things I couldn’t quite understand.

One last, long lick and then he turned to my other nipple, giving it the same tender care. 

“Luc, please…”

“Please what?” His voice was a guttural growl. His eyes were cold, calculating. “What do you want, Pandora?”

I moaned, squeezed my eyes shut against the delicious torture. “You. I want you.”

“Look at me,” he demanded.

I looked.

“I want to watch every look, every shadow that crosses your face. When you come, I want to see your eyes grow soft for me. I want you to scream my name.” His hands moved between us, and he hooked his thumb under the band of my skirt. He yanked hard, and it tore with a loud rip.