by Nadine Mutas
“He’s standing right behind me, isn’t he?” I whispered.
Chapter 2
The priest made the sign of the cross and muttered a prayer while I turned on my heels in slow motion, grimacing.
“How did you—” I broke off when I saw him.
Yowza.
No wonder the priest looked ready to douse himself in Holy water.
The demons’s wings were on full display, blacker than midnight but glowing with an inner fire, flames licking over the feathers. As if that wasn’t enough of a statement, though, shadows writhed around the demon’s form, like a dark visualization of his energy. His eyes glowed in the mix of infernal firelight and late-night gloom.
He looked like something straight out of a paranormal thriller. I shivered despite the heat emanating from him, my heart thundering. He hadn’t been this scary in my apartment. It was like he’d amped up his natural presence by a thousand degrees. Or maybe this was his usual appearance, and he’d actually muted it before?
Either way, this was an impressive display of power.
I swallowed. “Are you deliberately scaring the priest?”
A ghost of a smile flashed across his face, before he refocused on glaring at me with the full force of his demonic grouchiness. Someone sure was pissed. Probably had something to do with having to chase a recalcitrant bride-to-be across town...
I cringed a little. “How did you find me?”
“I followed the scent of pepper spray and desperation.”
He was so annoyingly good at deadpanning. Circumstances being different, I’d have appreciated his brand of humor.
“So you thought,” he said, “running to a priest would get you out of this?”
“Can’t blame a girl for trying.” I rubbed my earlobe. “But just to be clear—would that be an out?”
“No. You agreed to a covenant with a demon. No priestly intervention would nullify that contract, or absolve you of the consequences for breaking it.”
Crap. There went that idea.
“So hiding in a convent for the rest of my life—”
“Wouldn’t work. You’d be dead and burning in Hell before you even got there.” He glanced at the clock on the facade of the church spire. “We have an hour left to fulfill the terms of the contract. I doubt you’d make it to a convent in time. Not that being on Holy ground would do you any good, anyway.” He smirked. “That’s a nice little myth invented by humans.”
Dread settled in my stomach. “Hold up—what did you mean by ‘burning in Hell?’”
“If you fail to fulfill the contract, you die and your soul goes straight to Hell to be punished.” He paused, tilting his head as if in thought. “Of course, we don’t always burn the damned souls. That’s just one method of torture. There’s also the ice box, the shredder, the spikes and presses, feeding time for the hellhounds, the acid bath, the David Hasselhoff music marathon—”
“All right, all right, got it!” I rubbed my face with both hands.
Behind me, the priest kept murmuring prayer after prayer, his voice breaking.
“Can you at least tone down your demonic impressiveness?” I asked quietly with a nod to the poor cleric at my back.
Or better yet... I turned around and touched the priest’s arm. He jumped and gaped at me, his face a mask of terror.
“Go,” I said softly.
There was nothing he could do to help me, and he didn’t need to stay in a veritable demon’s presence any longer than necessary. He’d already been traumatized enough.
“Go,” I repeated with more insistence.
The priest startled as if waking up from a trance. One more fearful look over my shoulder, and then he turned to run.
Or rather, tried to. He stopped mid-movement, frozen in place as if someone had pressed pause on his personal movie.
“Actually,” the demon’s dark voice came from behind me, “he can do the honors of being witness.”
I whirled around and glared at him. “You’re really into forcing people to do stuff for you, huh?”
He cut me a withering look. “You forced me into this contract. And we need a witness.”
“You can’t make a priest officiate this—” I gestured wildly between us “—for a demon. That’s cruel!”
“First of all, he doesn’t need to officiate. He just needs to witness our vows. Second—you’re pleading with a demon not to be cruel?”
Ugh.
“We need a witness,” the demon went on, “and he’s conveniently here right now. He’ll stand witness for our wedding, end of discussion.”
Delayed emotional reactions are a weird thing. I’d been arguing with this jerkface the entire time, but it was this instance of the word wedding that triggered the reality of what was happening to break over me like a tidal wave. I swayed under the impact, grasped the church door to steady myself.
Wedding.
To a demon.
To live in Hell.
Fuck me.
I’d never wanted to get married—well, not entirely true. Pre-thirteen-year-old me had held hopes for a romantic, grand wedding to the man of my dreams, a notion I had later come to despise as naive and foolhardy. Marriage was nothing but a sham built on lies and betrayal.
It had been eleven years, but the wound still burned as raw as the day I’d sat on those stairs, listening to my mother’s screams, my dad’s increasingly frustrated shouts…watching him drive off, eventually, to live with his other family.
So yeah, the concept of marriage? Something I’d sneered at for the past decade, so sure I’d never make that mistake.
Turned out I’d already made it when I was thirteen and got this whole covenant thing rolling.
Why, oh why couldn’t I have simply played with a standard-issue ouija board, like any respectable teen?
But no, instead I’d dabbled in the kind of real dark shit that made me end up stuck between a rock and a hard place. No matter what I did, I’d end up in Hell. Either as a bride to a cranky demon, or as a damned soul. And if Hell was anything like the mythological descriptions of it... I shuddered.
“Priest,” the demon called out, snapping his fingers.
The miserable cleric moved closer, stiffly and with halting steps, as if—forced to walk against his will.
I felt sick to my stomach.
“Don’t do this to him,” I bit out.
The demon ignored me, instructing the priest how to witness our union.
“Please find someone else.” There, I’d even used the pretty P word.
It was like he didn’t even hear me. I might as well have been talking to a bush.
Well, if this was a taste of the rest of our marriage, it got me fuming already. If there was one thing to which I responded with irrational pettiness, it was being ignored.
“You’re acting like this is a done deal,” I said loudly and crossed my arms.
The demon paused in verbally wrangling the priest into submission and turned to me. “Don’t be silly.” His tone was so condescending that heat rolled through my body in a searing wave of indignation. “The choice is clear. Pretending to still waver is laughable at best. We both know you don’t want to suffer the consequences of breaking the covenant.”
I pursed my lips. “Oh, I don’t know. Seems to me breaking the contract would result in consequences for you too, since you’re the other party to the agreement and all. What’s the punishment for you? Will you be tortured as well?”
He narrowed his eyes.
“Maybe you’ll be demoted?” I continued, my anger about being ignored fueling my probably suicidal poking of Mr. Tall, Dark, and smokingly Handsome. “Will they make you scrub demon toilets for the next thousand years? Or maybe they’ll strip you of your powers and take your wings?”
The heat emanating from him flared up like a bonfire liberally sprinkled with gasoline.
Bingo. I smiled. “That’s it, huh? No more convenient demon magic and flaming wings for you. So,” I said, idly regarding
my nails, “if I were petty—because, say, a certain groom-to-be has been a dismissive jerk with no respect for my opinion—I could totally decide to break the covenant and make you suffer along with me.”
The demon bared his teeth. “You wouldn’t.”
“You underestimate my level of petty,” I snapped. “If I’m going to be miserable in Hell either way, I might as well share my pain with His Demonic Haughtiness.”
“Stop being dramatic,” he growled. “You cannot seriously compare being married to me with being tortured as a damned soul.”
“Why not? You’re doing a bang-up job of making me see the similarities.”
His wings vibrated. The thrumming power in the air increased, pressing onto every inch of my skin. I had trouble breathing against the thickness of his energy, like I’d just walked into a hot house with enough humidity to constrict my airways.
The priest whimpered.
Gritting my teeth, I steeled my fluttering nerves. “Tone. It. Down.”
The demon snarled at me. Not the kind of figurative snarl of humans when they’re cranky, no. The sound coming from his throat was that of a canine warning you not to be stupid. It was the bone-chilling, rumbling growl that humans had instinctively learned to fear—and heed. The hairs on my arms and neck stood up, and I had the insistent urge to back away slowly.
Fuck. That.
I would marry this ass because I truly didn’t have a choice, but I would rather burn in Hell than enter this marriage cowering in fear. So he would either have to start playing nice or I would throw all reason to the wind and break this fucking covenant.
“If you want me to agree to this wedding,” I said, surprised my voice came out steady past the lump of dread in my throat, “then you need to adjust your attitude. You’ve been condescending, scornful, and dismissive. I asked you not to force the priest to witness, and you ignored me. Let him go, treat me with respect, and I’ll consent to the marriage.”
“Respect,” he gritted out, “goes both ways. You attacked me with pepper spray—” he held up one finger “—you lied to me—” he held up a second finger “—and you ran away from me trying to sneak out of a contract you initiated.” He added a third finger. “Don’t lecture me on respect when you’ve been untruthful, evasive, and insulting all night.”
Oh, that self-righteous bastard.
“Excuse me for freaking out that a real-life demon showed up unannounced in my living room!”
“It wouldn’t have been unannounced if you hadn’t forgotten you summoned me!”
Gah, we already sounded like an old married couple.
“Fine, so we both made mistakes!” I threw my hands up. “But if you think I’m bluffing and will cave and marry you anyway, you’ve got another think coming. You want something from me, and you’re going to be nice about it or you’ll end up without your powers. And we both know you can’t force me to marry you.”
Granted, I was gambling. I didn’t know that for sure, but I had a hunch the contract—the pertinent parts of which still eluded me—might have a provision like that. Just like it probably had one that specified he couldn’t kill me to get out of it—because if it didn’t, I was certain I’d be dead already.
His eye twitched.
Right on the mark. I made a mental fist pump. “You can’t use force or coercion, which means you will actually have to be nice to me if you want to keep your demon powers. I’m asking you to let the priest go and find someone else—without using your infernal powers of intimidation. We just need a witness, right? So let’s go grab a semi-drunk from a bar and tell them to listen to our vows. They’ll probably think it’s cute. Boom, done! No one got forced or traumatized.”
The demon stared at me for such a long moment, I had to resist the urge to start humming the Jeopardy melody.
I shifted my weight from one foot to another, but kept eye contact with him. I had a feeling this was a decisive moment, that looking away or lowering my gaze would send the wrong message. Like that one time I won the stare down against the bully cat of the neighborhood, after which that cantankerous feline would finally let me pass its favorite hedge without swiping at my legs.
The demon uttered a sound between a sigh and a snarl and rolled his eyes heavenward. “You’re insufferable.”
Me, insufferable? That was rich coming from the dude who’d been a pain in my ass all night. I relaxed a little, though, relieved I didn’t have to hold his gaze any longer. The contact had been so intense that I’d wanted to squirm. Beautiful his eyes might be, they were far too perceptive for my liking.
Some people you meet, when they look at you, their gaze seems to bounce off you, like sure, they notice you’re there, but it’s surface level. Mostly, that suits me just fine.
But then there are those whose perception of you catches you off-guard. When they look at you, their attention arrests you, their gaze cuts deeper, and suddenly you feel exposed, naked in a way you’re not used to. Like they can read every minute detail of your expression, your voice, the way you breathe.
It has nothing to do with sexual attraction or gender—I’ve met people from all kinds of identities who had that effect on me.
But when it is coupled with a simmering sexual attraction—unbidden and annoying as it might be—it makes the intensity of that contact even worse.
Anytime I had to hold the demon’s gaze longer than three seconds, I felt layers of myself unwrap themselves that I sure as fuck wanted to keep as tightly folded as the silly love notes I used to pass in class to my crush in second grade. Those were origami-style intricate.
The demon had meanwhile turned to the priest and released the poor guy from whatever spell he’d been under. The priest shuddered, shook himself, and threw an anxious glance at me. I nodded at him to leave. There was nothing he could do for me.
The next moment he’d run toward the parking lot, likely to get his car and get the fuck out. I sighed wistfully. Getting the fuck out sure sounded great.
Alas, I was still sort of betrothed to an overbearing jerk of a demon—who just in that moment snapped his fingers in front of my face.
I turned slowly toward the bane of my existence, fully intending to skewer him with a furious look, only to be brought up short by his magnetic appearance.
He’d toned down the dark vibe and retracted the wings, leaving only a trace of his energy, which unfairly came across as sexy smolder.
He should not be smoldering at me, goddammit.
And yet he looked like something out of a sensual fever dream, all dark hair and piercing eyes, his attention on me causing the perfect mix of thrill and danger.
Awareness raced over my skin in tiny, delicious shivers. If this were a dream, I’d climb him like a tree.
“Get moving,” he said, effectively dousing the flames of my irrational desire. “We’ve lost enough time with your capricious demands.”
“Watch,” I gritted out, holding up a finger, “your tone. I can still decide to damn it all to hell—literally—and break this covenant if you keep being insulting.”
The muscles in his face contracted, turning him into a vision of suppressed rage. He probably wasn’t used to someone standing up to him. His Grouchiness was likely a high-ranking demon in Hell, with underlings and subordinates who withered at his glower. Must be nice to have others waiting on you and jumping to fulfill orders. It would also explain a lot of his behavior, not that it made me more forgiving toward his assholishness.
“Find a bar,” he growled, “so we can secure an inebriated individual for the ceremony.”
I whipped out my phone and looked up the nearest establishment that promised to have at least one poor drunk who would play along. Turned out the bar was just a block away, open late, and seemed popular for cocktails among the younger crowd. Perfect.
“This way.” I indicated the direction with a nod and started walking.
My own personal demon trailed me like a brooding shadow. He didn’t speak a word, and I was just fine
with that, considering anytime he’d opened his mouth earlier only made me want to strangle him.
Which was a novelty for me. I usually didn’t harbor violent thoughts toward others, even when they annoyed the crap out of me. But with this guy, I had the clear vision of putting my hands around his throat and squeezing hard. Of course, given I was puny compared to him, as well as his supernatural ability to not even blink when exposed to pepper spray, all I would accomplish by trying to strangle him would be to dangle off his neck like a grotesque human piece of jewelry.
We’d arrived at the bar, which had a few outside tables clustered around heaters on the sidewalk in front of the entrance. One of them was occupied by three women my age who looked to be deep into their cocktails, judging by their slurred speech and high-pitched giggles.
I turned toward the demon to tell him to let me do the talking. The thought of His Menacing Surliness attempting to persuade three humans to “witness our vows” gave me the heebie jeebies. One look at his broody face, and they’d run for cover.
Before I could even get the words out, he’d stepped past me to the table, one hand in his pants pocket, the other on his heart, and made a small bow. “Good evening, ladies,” he crooned in a voice that made sensual heat slick over my nerve endings, centering between my legs. “Forgive the intrusion, but I was hoping you’d be so kind to help me and my fiancée out.”
All three women stared at him, spellbound.
“This might sound silly,” he continued, his tone soothing and invigorating at the same time. His voice was mesmerizing, making me inch closer. “But we’re getting married tomorrow, rather spontaneously, and we’d love to do a run-through of the ceremony in front of someone else.”
The women had leaned toward him as he spoke, enraptured.
My mouth hung open.
“You see, we eloped.” The demon gave them a smile that made my heart stumble. “And we don’t have any friends or family here to practice with. We’d be ever so grateful if you lovely ladies listened to our impromptu vows.”
The women sighed and giggled, one of them twisting a strand of her hair while giving him the most obvious bedroom eyes I’d ever seen someone sport.
