"You've done bad things in your time, Adrian," I said softly, just loud enough for him to hear. His body tensed as he slowly turned to look at me. I smiled, allowing him to see the love in my eyes. "But you are not responsible for them. You did not ask to be cursed by a demon lord. You do not take pleasure in the acts he's forced you to do in his name. You are not an evil man, so I know that you must have had a good reason for putting the stymie on your brother."
He stared at me in disbelief for a moment, his eyes bright with astounded wonder that darkened into sadness. "You are the only person who has ever believed in me, Hasi. You are the only one who has not feared me. I swear by all the saints, if I could change the inevitable outcome of what must happen, I would. I would give the soul you have all but reclaimed for me in order to change my future, but it is not to be."
I leaned forward to kiss him, changed my angle of attack, and flicked my tongue across the tip of his nose instead. He looked startled by the gesture, just as I intended. "You know, I've never been one to buy into that whole fate thing. I've always believed that life is what you make it, and as I fully intend to spend the rest of mine with you, I'd appreciate it if you weren't quite so doom-and-gloom and 'I am the Betrayer, I must perish!' and start thinking about ways to beat your brother, because I'm not giving up on you. On us. So let's talk about Saer and what his weak spots are. I understand that he wants power, and heaven knows he certainly has that with Asmodeus's ring, but what does his Beloved have to do with it? And why wouldn't he Join with her if it would give him back his soul?"
Adrian sighed a long, put-upon sigh, one that had me smiling to myself. I knew how hard he struggled to maintain his bad-boy image, but I also knew that his Betrayer days were over. It was time he realized that he'd been dealt a bad hand, but now the deck had been reshuffled and I was dealing. "For a Dark One to Join with a Beloved means his life is bound with hers. Their souls are entwined and cannot be separated."
I ignored the pointed look he gave me and nodded.
"Thus any decisions he made would affect her, and vice versa. The type of power Saer seeks would require him to forfeit not only his soul, but that of his Beloved as well."
"And he doesn't want to damn an innocent woman that way," I said, nodding again.
Adrian shook his head. "I would like to believe that Saer could not hand over his Beloved, even without having Joined with her, but the truth is simply that only she can make the decision to submit to a demon lord. Saer, on his own, cannot force her."
"Oh." I thought about that for a few minutes as the train stopped at a station, a couple of people leaving, but more getting on. Adrian peered at each person intently, relaxing only when everyone settled into their seats. "So he hasn't Joined with her because she won't give herself up to a demon lord, and Saer needs to be able to do that to get the power he wants. Got that. But why is he trotting off to see her now?"
"He has the ring," Adrian answered grimly, glancing out the window. There wasn't any sun to be seen, it being a typical rainy English day, but the gray outside was lightening significantly. "He will Join with Belinda, then use the ring against her to force her into compliance with his plans. It is the only way he can do so."
My heart sank. Not only had I screwed up royally in failing to rescue Adrian's nephew, now my stupidity had damned an innocent woman to an eternity as a demon lord's slave? "Crap!"
"Exactly," he agreed, watching as the next station's advance warning signs flashed by. "We will get off here. I cannot risk being caught out in the full light of day."
"Do you know Saer's Beloved?" I asked, more to distract myself from wallowing in guilt than because I really wanted to know. I followed Adrian off the train and through the small suburban station.
He shot me an odd look as he pulled up the collar of his coat.
"You called her Belinda," I pointed out. "I wondered if that meant you know her."
"Yes, I know her. She is… she was… I mated with her. You will please go ask that taxi if he is free. If he is, I will join you and we will go to Belinda's pub. If we hurry, the light should not harm me."
I grabbed his arm and shoved him into a corner of the room, out of earshot of the few people trickling in and out of the station. "You mated with her?"
He frowned, just as I knew he would, but at that moment I wasn't overly concerned about his emotions. "Yes. Did you think I was a virgin?"
"No, of course not, but you don't just blurt out something like that. And especially you don't use the word mated. It sounds so… so… animalistic."
"It was animalistic," he answered, still frowning. "I thought at first she was my Beloved, but as soon as I merged with her"—I ground my teeth, pushing down hard on the need to rail at his cavalier manner of flaunting his ex-lovers at me—"I realized she was not. We engaged in sex for a few months. That's all there was to it."
"New rule," I said, releasing his arm to shake my finger at him. "No introducing lovers without warning. No using the word 'mating' in a sentence mentioning said lover. And absolutely, positively no warm remembrances of your fun time in the sack with her!"
"You are overreacting," Adrian said. "You were not a virgin, and yet I did not demand to know everything about the two men you were with before you gave yourself to me."
"How do you know it was just two men?" I asked, momentarily distracted from my diatribe.
His eyebrows rose.
"Dammit, you poked around in my brain without asking if you could look in my former-boyfriend folder!" I took a deep breath and reminded myself that wasn't the issue at hand. There were much more important things to do right now than harry him over a few poorly chosen words. "Right. Your relationships before we met are no more my business than my past relationships are to you, but I would appreciate it if we could exclude mentions of sex when referring to Belinda."
Adrian tipped his head toward the door.
"Fine. I'll go see if a taxi is free. But no more sex-with-Belinda talk! I'm serious, Adrian! There's only so much a girl can take before she goes totally and completely insane."
"You are jealous," he said, satisfaction rife in his voice.
"You bet your boots I'm jealous! And green isn't a good color on me, so stop looking so smug."
Three minutes later we were zipping through the streets of High Wycombe. It had been raining, but it looked as if the clouds were clearing as the sun started to rise. Adrian had pulled a soft wool fedora from his bag, and with that on his head and the collar of his duster turned up, he didn't seem to be suffering any undue effects.
He slid his hand along my arm until his fingers encountered the bare flesh of my wrist. Why are you staring at me so avidly, Hasi?
I'm just watching for smoke, I answered, sliding a quick assessing glance out the window. It's almost fully daylight. I don't want you to start burning up.
A warm blanket of gratitude fell softly over me. No one has ever worried about me. No one has ever cared if I suffered, but I will not have you concerned unduly, Hasi. Although I cannot help but wish you had not done it, our Joining has given me a slight tolerance of weakened sunlight. As long as I remain covered and out of the direct light, I will not be damaged.
"Good," I said as he removed his hand from my wrist. He answered the taxi driver's question about which pub we were going to, ignoring the driver's comment that the pub wouldn't be open at this time of the morning.
My curiosity got the better of me. "So… um… this Belinda. You said you thought for a little bit that she was"—I glanced in the driver's rearview mirror—"right for you, but she wasn't, she was meant for Saer. Does he know that you and she were an item at one time?"
"Yes," he answered, his face and voice grim. "We were never close, but my history with Belinda drove him into a fury of hatred that left him swearing vengeance on me. For the last ten years, he has attempted by all means possible to destroy me, hiding his true reason for wishing me dead behind the fact that I am the Betrayer."
"What a bastard," I growl
ed, thinking of a couple of particularly juicy curses mentioned in the charm book. "Just let me have five minutes alone with him, and I'll take care of him."
Adrian didn't bother to tell me the obvious—that as long as Saer had the ring, there was nothing either of us could do that would seriously harm him. "I will admit that at the time I thought he was overreacting to the situation with Belinda, but now…" He brushed a strand of hair off my face. "Now I understand the feelings that I must have stirred in him when he found me with his Beloved."
"Wait a minute," I said softly, ignoring the spurt of jealousy that rose every time I thought of Adrian with another woman. "You said you two were never close. I know you're the B-man and all, but Saer's your twin! How can you not have ever been close to him?"
Adrian's eyes were the color of underwater icebergs. "I was bound into service to Asmodeus when I was less than two years old. My father bartered me in exchange for the power to mesmerize women."
I stared at him in horror, fully aware but uncaring that my mouth hung open for a few seconds while I tried to get my stunned brain to function again. "Your father gave you to a demon lord? When you were just a baby? That's how you were cursed?"
He laid a finger across my lips, shushing me.
Your own father, the man whose loins you sprang from gave you to a demon lord? He just said, "Here, take my baby and give me the power to get laid?" Your father did that?
It is a long time in the past, Hasi. I appreciate the anger and outrage you feel on my behalf, but I assure you that I have long since accepted my fate.
Well, I haven't! I lunged across him, framing his face between my hands as I looked deep into his being, mourning for what had been ripped from him. You're not the Betrayer, Adrian, you're the betrayed. Is your father still alive?
A smile curved his lips as he moved my hands so he could kiss my palms before releasing them. "No. He ended his life many years ago when he tired of the shallow nature of his existence."
Impossible as it seemed considering the fury I felt on his behalf, that just made me angrier. "He sold you for sex, then killed himself when he wasn't getting his jollies anymore?"
"I doubt it was quite that simple."
"What about Saer? Did your father give him up, too?"
"No." Adrian's eyes would not meet mine, but I didn't need to touch him to feel the swift stab of pain that lanced through him. "Saer is the oldest son. My father did not feel he was expendable as I was."
"Like father, like son," I muttered to myself, but Adrian heard me. "Saer is a chip off the old block."
"Here you are," the cabby called back to us, pulling up before an old building done in faux half-timbering, a sign next to the door depicting a churchman in full regalia presenting his hindquarters as he looked over his shoulder at a saucy-looking woman who held a switch. "The Flogged Bishop. That'll be six pounds ten."
I stared long and hard at the sign as Adrian tossed some money at the driver, following slowly as he entered a small unmarked door at the side of the pub. "I have just one question—this is a real pub, isn't it? It's not another place like Gigli's?"
His dimples deepened as a grin flashed briefly while he knocked on a door at the top of a short flight of stairs. "You didn't mind me knowing Gigli, so why would you mind Belinda running a brothel?"
"Because Gigli said the only non-mortal beings she serves are poltergeists, which means I didn't have to worry about you having tasted forbidden pleasures there. This"—I waved at the blank wall that stood between us and the pub—"is an entirely different situation!"
The door opened before he had time to respond, the woman standing in the doorway clearly having just gotten up. I eyed her carefully, this woman who Adrian had once briefly thought was his salvation. She was pretty, much prettier than what I expected a pub owner to be, standing a few inches shorter than me, with short curly brown hair and soft brown eyes. "Adrian!" she said in blatant surprise. Her expression quickly changed to one of mingled hope and sorrow. "Have you heard anything? Have you found Damian? Saer said a demon lord has him. Is it true? Is he lost forever?"
"Damian?" I asked, at first a little surprised by her primary concern, then reminding myself that if she was Saer's Beloved, she would no doubt be worried about his son.
"Belinda is Damian's mother," Adrian explained before turning back to the woman. "Is Saer here?"
"No," she answered, stepping back and gesturing us through the door into a small apartment above the pub.
The nervous energy surrounding Adrian lessened a smidgen at her words. I heaved a mental sigh of relief as well. "Thank God he hasn't been here. We've been worried sick that you Joined with him."
The door closed with a hushed click as she turned to face us. "I'm sorry, you don't understand. Saer isn't here now, but he was earlier, and we are Joined. Saer insisted we take the final steps last night, before he left to call up his army."
"Army?" I asked weakly, groping blindly behind me for a chair. My legs gave out as the implications of Saer's actions became very clear in my mind.
"Yes," she nodded, bustling past us to a tiny kitchen. "He's gone to raise an army to defeat his enemy and rescue Damian. He's quite confident that no one will be able to withstand his force now. He's got a special ring, you see, and evidently with it, he's quite invincible. He told me that no one, not even the demon lord himself, can stand against him now." She paused, glancing from Adrian's still form to me, a cheery smile lighting her face as if she hadn't just spelled out the doom of everyone in the room. "Would you like tea or coffee?"
* * *
Chapter Fifteen
"How are you feeling now, Nell?"
I pushed the cold washcloth aside and peered up at Belinda where she hovered over me. "A bit sick to my stomach at my carelessness. Not to mention the guilt over my stupidity in not recognizing that Saer wasn't Adrian, which means you will suffer for the rest of your now unnatural life. I'm furious that your son is caught up in this. And lastly, I want to throttle Adrian's and Saer's father, but he's dead, so all I can do is think really nasty thoughts about him."
Belinda looked a bit nonplussed at my exhaustive answer. "I meant how is your head? Is the headache gone?"
I sighed and sat up, folding the washcloth neatly and handing it to her before dredging up a smile. It was pitiful, but it was a smile, and I held on to it for all I was worth. "It's much better now. Thank you for the aspirin."
"My pleasure. Do you like your coffee white or black?"
"Black, thank you."
She nodded before heading to the kitchen, not even glancing at the man who stood with his hands clasped behind his back and looking out a window with carefully angled blinds. I felt no such reticence, and stared at Adrian until he felt the touch of my gaze and turned to face me.
"It is hopeless, Hasi. He is Joined, he has the ring, and he is raising an army to defeat both Asmodeus and me."
"Mmm. I'm reserving judgment on the 'hopeless' verdict, and you don't know that the army Saer is raising is meant for you."
"I do not have the luxury of your doubt. He will come for me just as surely as he will attempt to overthrow Asmodeus. Saer is absolutely correct—with the ring, he is all but invincible. I cannot withstand an attack by him, and with Belinda Joined to him, he will have the strength he needs to overthrow Asmodeus and destroy me."
I frowned as I glanced toward the entrance to the kitchen. Belinda was humming happily as she puttered around fixing breakfast, the cheerful sounds of the radio drifting out to us. "Now I really am confused. You said that Saer would use the ring to force her to forfeit her soul on his behalf. I can see why he Joined with her once he got his grubby mitts on the ring, but not how that gives him more power, not when you yourself said that being bound to her would hold him back."
Adrian looked out the window again, his face as hard as chiseled marble. "A Beloved's soul carries much value. By its very nature it is pure, one of the purest examples of selfless love ever to exist. To those who seek and use
the dark powers, it offers an almost unlimited endowment."
"So he gains power just by virtue of being Joined with her, because her soul is so pure?"
"Something like that."
I rubbed my forehead. I was exhausted, and could feel both Adrian's hunger and fatigue. It seemed like we'd been up for days without sleep. "Where does Damian fit into all this? Surely Saer won't sacrifice him too?"
"No, he won't sacrifice him. At least… no. Not even Saer would seek power in that way." Adrian sounded as tired as I felt. His eyes were clouded with pain and defeat. It was an expression that left me wanting to simultaneously sob in despair and instigate a plan of attack. I decided the latter was the only way we were going to get out of the horrible situation.
"That's a relief, but even if Damian is safe, Saer is a monster to use Belinda as you described. We have to stop him. We can't let him sacrifice her too, not even for Damian."
Adrian ran a hand through his hair, dark smudges bruising the skin beneath his eyes. "It's too late, Hasi. Saer is invincible now."
"Maybe he can't be killed, but that was never my intention." I stood up and went to him, wrapping my arms around his waist and breathing in his wonderful scent a moment or two before pressing a little kiss to his adorable lips. "But I still have Gigli's charm book, and I'm more than happy to try a curse or two in order to give us an edge. I think a tail would look good on Saer, don't you?"
Adrian refused to be jollied out of his glum mood. "This is not a subject for levity, Nell."
"I'm in deadly earnest, loveykins." He flinched. I smiled. "Sorry, I'm still searching for the perfect love name."
"Keep trying."
I kissed his chin. "I won't give up if you won't."
A familiar frown settled on his brow. "Why do you insist on maintaining the deception that there is any way I can stop Saer? I have told you three times that so long as he holds Asmodeus's ring, it is impossible for me—or you—to gain control."
Sex, Lies, and Vampires Page 18
