“No, you don’t have the power itself,” he said, now examining his stomach.
“Aieee!” I screamed at the blood that soaked the lower half of his shirt. “Oh my god! Lie down! No, don’t move! I’ll get a . . . a . . .” I spun around, searching for something I could use to stanch the flow of blood. “Good lord, what sort of place is this that they don’t have a first aid kit?”
“I’m all right. The bleeding has stopped.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said, coming to a swift decision. I took him by the arm and gently but firmly guided him over to the nearest butt-height rock. “You were skewered clean through. Those sorts of wounds simply do not stop bleeding. Now, you sit here, and I’ll go find someone to help you. Try not to move around.”
He dug in his heels midway to the rock, his expression alternating between incredulity and annoyance. “You don’t want to listen to me, do you?”
“It’s not that I don’t want to,” I said, tugging on him as gently as I could. “You’re in shock. You don’t know what you’re saying. I’m simply doing what’s best for you.”
A little ripple of surprise claimed him. You’re . . . tending me?
If you want to call it that.
No one has ever done that. No one has cared.
Well, sheesh, you’re hurt, badly hurt, and although I may not want to have sex with you again—
You do, though. I can feel your interest in me just as you can feel mine in you.
—although I may not want to have sex with you again, I’m not so callous that I’ll let you die here. Or come close to dying again.
Why not? You think I’m a murderer and abuser of women.
“I never said you abused a woman. I just said you killed one.”
“One day we will discuss why you had a vision of my past, but for now, allow me to relieve your anxiety by showing you this.” He pulled open his shirt.
Instinctively I flinched at the blood on his belly, but then I realized that, rather than looking at a great big gaping hole, I was seeing blood and nothing more.
“You . . . I saw the sword. What . . . ?” I touched the spot on his stomach where the sword had pierced him. There was an ugly red line there, hot to the touch, with dried blood flaking off around it, but no open wound.
“Dark Ones have regenerative powers.”
I spread my fingers out over the wound, noticing that his eyes lightened a little in color from a dark forest green to jade. “You’re hungry again.”
“I lost blood. That happens.”
“You should feed—”
“No. You’ve given me too much blood already.”
“I feel fine now,” I said, waving my arms around in the air as if that proved my point.
Querida, as you found out, to a Dark One, the act of feeding can be highly arousing. Do you really wish for me to bury myself in your body again?
The words, spoken with such intimacy, caused my body to go up in flames. For a few seconds, I was about to tell him to go ahead; then the good part of my brain, the smart part, shoved the inner devil aside and took over. “I’m happy to give you more blood if you need it, but there will be no more sex, Alec. That was an aberration, nothing more.”
He said nothing, but I could feel him thinking plenty. He just didn’t let me see what it was he was thinking.
I walked along beside him as he rebuttoned his shirt, heading once again to the north. “So, about this Tool thing. I don’t like being evil. How do I make it stop?”
“You’re not evil; you’re simply a conduit to Bael’s strength. That’s all the Tools are—they have no abilities of their own; they simply allow others to tap into his power.”
“So you used me to access the English dude’s power to destroy his own demon?”
Alec’s expression was bleak, surprisingly so, considering that he had just defeated someone who I assumed was going to make mincemeat of us both. “Yes.”
“Why aren’t you happy about this?” I asked, nudging him in the side. He wrapped an arm around me, pulling me up next to him. I ignored, for the moment, the fact that I felt extremely secure snuggled against him. “This is a good thing, isn’t it? I’m not evil. You got rid of that mean chick, although why she wanted to hurt me is totally beyond me. Assuming she wanted to hurt me. Maybe she wanted to take me out of the Akasha?”
“She’s Bael’s right hand. I can assure you that for whatever reason Bael desires your presence—and I assume it’s because he put two and two together, and realizes what happened to the Tools—it is not going to be something you want to experience.”
I shivered at the dark images in his head. “That doesn’t explain why you’re not happy about taking down his evil henchman.”
Alec sighed again. He seemed to be doing a lot of that.
“I can’t help it. My life has suddenly become fraught with things to sigh over,” he said, his grip around my waist tightening. “I’m not happy because if you are now effectively the Occio di Lucifer, it means every being with half a brain is going to want you.”
I stopped and glared at him. “Just because we had sex half an hour after I first saw you doesn’t mean I’m a raving nymphomaniac!”
“Want you to use you, Cora,” he interrupted, pulling me back up against him. “Or, more properly, to use Bael’s power.”
Horror skittered along my flesh as I understood what it was he meant. I had a vision of evil being after evil being lining up to use me as some sort of a demonic power source, blasting the world with innumerable cruelties. “Oh, shit.”
“And lucky me,” he added, his voice as grim as his expression. “It appears you have chosen me to protect you from them all.”
Chapter Six
“You know, this doesn’t look like hell.”
“That’s because it’s not Abaddon. It’s the Akasha.” Alec strolled beside me as we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing slightly along the smooth walls and stone floor.
“Yeah, but that greeter person told Diamond and me that this was a place of perpetual torment, and that sounds like hell to me. However, this”—I waved a hand around at our surroundings—“this just looks like any old office building. I don’t see anything tormentish about it.”
“Try opening one of the doors,” he said, nodding to one as we passed it.
I paused. “Why? Is something ghoulish going on in there? Are people being dismembered? Tortured? Eaten by fire ants?”
He crossed his arms and nodded toward the nearest door. “Open it and see.”
“All right, but if it’s something gross, I’m aiming at you when I barf up my breakfast.” I opened the door and looked in, braced for the worst.
A group of a half-dozen people sat around a long table, papers scattered across its surface, which was also littered with half-empty bottles of water, and a rainbow of highlighters. Crumpled paper spilled off the table onto the floor, leading in a trail to a whiteboard covered in several different styles of handwriting.
“We are agreed, then, are we not,” said a man in a business suit at the head of the table, “that examining the cost savings that will accrue from our cutback on the performance-related functions will make good any and all productivity shortfalls we experience this quarter ? ”
A woman shook her head and tapped at the table with one of the highlighters. “I believe that if we realign our organizational aims to better benefit the enterprise, we can absolve our office of the clearly unsustainable redundancy of not only the expense claims, but of the external consultants, which I think we all agree will lead to the downfall of this and other management teams within the venture.”
“No, no, no!” a third man said, hoisting his pants up over his beer belly as he rose to his feet. “If we form a task force to investigate the benefits of a mentor program—”
“Good god,” I said softly, closing the door. “It’s worse than I thought.”
Alec nodded. “Middle-management committees. Still think this isn’t a bad place?�
�
I shuddered. “We have to get out of here.”
He slid me a look as he took my hand, making me hurry to keep up with his long-legged stride. “I’m glad you’re including me in your escape plans, although I regret to inform you that there is no way to get out of the Akasha short of being summoned out.”
“Then we’ll just have to arrange for that,” I said, feeling a bit mulish. I didn’t plan on spending the rest of my life dodging committee meetings.
“And just how do you expect to pull that off when we’re stuck in here with no way to communicate to the outside? ”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure as shooting not going to sit around here waiting for people to use me for who knows what bad—Diamond!”
A familiar face turned as I called out her name. She was standing with two other people, but smiled when I almost dragged Alec up to her, her eyes moving from me to him, widening when she took in all his manly glory.
You are making far too much of my appearance, querida.
Oh, don’t tell me you don’t like it, because I can feel just how much you enjoy overhearing my inadvertently and wholly insincere smutty thoughts about you. I bet you just love it when women go gaga over you, pandering to your insatiable ego, inflating your head until it’s approximately the size of Montana . I’m equally sure you love it when women look at you like Diamond is looking at you, which honestly I have to say is way out of line, considering she has a husband she claims she loves, not to mention the fact that she stole him from me.
I thought you no longer wanted him?
I don’t, but no woman likes to have a man stolen out from under her nose, and if Diamond thinks she’s going to pull that again with you, she’s going to be in a whole world of hurt.
Now who’s jealous?
I transferred my glare from Diamond to Alec. “I really don’t like you,” I told him.
“And just when I was beginning to think otherwise of you,” he almost purred into my ear.
A shiver of the purest pleasure rippled down my back.
“Cora! You missed a fascinating breakfast. There were some lovely speakers talking about the sorts of things that are available for us to pass the time here in the Akasha. But tell me, who is your friend?” Her gaze flickered from where my fingers were twined through his to his face.
“This is Alec Darwin. He’s a vampire. He killed a woman several hundred years ago.” I bit back the words that my inner devil was trying to force out, hiding them deep in my psyche so Alec wouldn’t overhear them: And he’s not available.
“Hello, Alec,” Diamond said with a cheery smile.
He responded politely, then peered at her for a few seconds. She’s glowing.
She is? I glanced at her, my eyes widening. Oh, no, she is! Was she affected by me becoming the eyeball of Sauron?
Occio di Lucifer, and no, I don’t think it works that way. I could feel him turning the facts over in his mind. Did you say that Ulfur glowed, as well?
Yes.
And that he had stolen something from Bael?
Something gold, yes. It looked like a flattened disk when he showed it to me.
Before or after you were cast into the Akasha?
After.
Sins of the saints . . . Ulfur must have stolen all three Tools.
You think he’s an Occio, too?
No, it sounds like he’s the Anima di Lucifer. That used to be a dragon-shaped aquamanile. Which means that this woman must have been holding the third Tool.
“And you just met? ” Diamond interrupted my thoughts with a pointed look at where I still held Alec’s hand.
“Yes.” I pushed away the spike of jealousy, focusing on what was important. “Diamond, when we were at the house and you were in the basement, what were you doing? ”
“Taking pictures. You know that.”
“No, I mean right at the moment when suddenly we were zapped here.”
“Oh.” She looked thoughtful. “I was examining a very pretty goblet I found that had rolled beneath the stairs. It looked valuable, and I was going to bring it up to show you, when poof!”
“Goblet?” I asked Alec.
He nodded. “The Voce di Lucifer. All three of you were holding a Tool when Bael banished Ulfur.”
“Bael?” Diamond froze. “The demon lord Bael?”
“Yes.” Alec looked at her with speculation that was mirrored in my mind. “Do you know him?”
“Me? Merciful sovereign, no! But I know of him, of course. Everyone does,” she explained, her hands fluttering in the air as she spoke. “Are you saying Bael sent us here?”
“That’s what we think,” I said slowly. “Diamond, how come you know about the demon lord guy? Why didn’t you see him at the house? Why aren’t you freaking out about being here? And why were you so happy to go off to a breakfast of the damned without so much as wigging out one tiny little bit?”
“What is there to wig out about?” she asked with a bright smile shared between us. “It’s the Akasha, not Abaddon, Cora. I’ve never seen a demon lord before, so I didn’t know he was at the house, although it did feel as if there was a very old entrance to Abaddon somewhere on the premises. As for being here, well, I’ve always wanted to see the Akasha, and here we are! It’s so very fascinating, don’t you think? And the people here are so nice. Almost desperately pleased to have someone to talk to, if you know what I mean. Margaretta told me there were some informational meetings I could sit in on if I liked to see how things were done here, which sounds super fun, don’t you think?”
She’s deranged, I told Alec, staring at her in astonishment.
It’s tempting to agree, but I don’t think she is. I think she’s . . . hmm.
She’s what?
I’m not quite sure. She appears human, but that could be just a glamour. Whatever she is, I don’t believe she’s mundane.
Mundane?
Mortal.
I pinched his fingers. Are you saying I’m mundane, buster?
You are mortal, yes, he said with a mental leer. But you’re anything but mundane in every other sense of the word.
Warmth washed through me, which I strove to keep him from feeling, but I knew by the smug smile in his mind that he felt it nonetheless.
I seriously needed to get out of here and away from this man before I lost all my wits and ended up like Jas. “I think that this is just about the worst place I’ve ever been in, Diamond. I’ve asked Alec to help us get out of here, in fact, and I think maybe you should help us think of a way out.”
“Oh, that’s no problem,” she said, waving away something so minor as permanent occupation in the Akasha. “My great-grandmother is very resourceful. I’m sure she’ll figure out something to get us out of here.”
Mentally, I shook my head at that comment, but so long as she wasn’t worried about being stuck here, I wasn’t going to push the point.
“In the meantime,” she continued happily, “I intend on enjoying myself. I think I’ll sit in on one of those meetings Margaretta told me about. Why don’t you and Alec come with me, and we can brainstorm if it will make you feel better?”
“Pass,” I told her, smiling to myself at Alec’s mental shudder. “We’ll just work on getting out of here. I’ll give you a yell if we find a way.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, giving Alec another once-over that had me shifting closer to him, which just made my inner devil giggle. “Then again, perhaps you are doing exactly that. Ta-ta!”
“Don’t say it,” I told Alec as he was about to make a comment that I knew would make me blush. Don’t even think it.
He laughed, and my stomach did a happy little quiver at the sound of it. Dammit, he had a wonderful laugh, warm and deep and filled with genuine amusement. “I won’t, but only because I’m doomed to disappoint you by not finding a magic solution to the problem of you being here.”
“All of us being here,” I said, allowing him to lead me out to a courtyard. It was the same shade of dusty brown
as everything else, the building an anachronism of modernity in an otherwise blighted landscape. “You’ll have to come with us when we leave.”
“I can’t. I’ve been banished here by the Moravian Council. If I was to manage to find a way out, they’d simply send me back.”
I eyed him, leaning against yet another sharp, pointy rock. “What exactly did you do to piss off all the other vamps? ”
His gaze skittered away as he gently, but firmly, closed his mind. “Seduced my best friend’s Beloved, tried to have them both destroyed, and betrayed Dark Ones to those who would see us exterminated.”
His face was a mask of indifference, but his eyes, oh, those lovely eyes, they revealed the emotions he kept from me. Pain was in them, both self-loathing and pain caused by others. His words confirmed what I believed about vampires—that their characters were reprehensible and unworthy of my concern—but just as I knew that not every vampire was created equal, so I knew that Alec wasn’t truly any of those things.
“When you killed that woman, what were you thinking?” I couldn’t stop myself from asking.
It took him a minute to respond. I had the feeling he was far away in his thoughts. “The one who killed my Beloved? ”
I nodded.
His eyes closed for a few seconds as he struggled with the gut-searing agony that memory brought him. “I didn’t think. I saw the corpse burned and mangled, and knew the reaper had deliberately killed her. I struck out of instinct. It wasn’t until recently that I found out it had been an accident all along, and that the reaper hadn’t specifically targeted my Beloved.” He gave a short, bitter laugh. “All those centuries I spent convinced revenge would lessen the pain, all that wasted time . . .”
“I don’t believe you,” I told him, my emotions tangled up with one another, but his honor, at least, was something I didn’t doubt.
His expression hardened. “That doesn’t surprise me. No one else believes me; why should you?”
“I meant”—I slid my hand under his jacket, spreading my fingers out over where his heart beat true and strong—“I don’t believe what you said about betraying your own people. You didn’t.”
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