Hellishly Ever After (Infernal Covenant Book 1)

by Nadine Mutas

  The image of my mouth on his cock filled my mind—all the more damnably erotic because I hadn’t gone there yet. With all the various times we’d tangled in the sheets—and on a ladder—I had somehow yet to pleasure him orally.

  And now I couldn’t think of anything else.

  How it was possible to feel acute arousal without a body, I had no idea, but somehow my soul managed to hum with desire.

  “Keep that up,” he muttered, his grip tightening on me, “and we won’t make it to your friend.”

  “You started it,” I shot back. “Besides, would we even be able to...with me like this?”

  His gaze of searing lightning met mine. “Never tried it.” The smile sneaking onto his mouth was positively naughty. “Wanna be my first?”

  I choked back a sound somewhere between a laugh and an eager groan. Hell, the idea of being the first sexual anything for him was deliciously tempting. Considering his age, there likely weren’t many firsts left.

  “We don’t have the time,” I said, regret pinching me at the words. Seeing as this was my first visit to Earth, I needed to make the most of it. “Rain check?” I added with a flutter of my lashes.

  “Tease,” he murmured and focused on the city below us, but the corners of his mouth kicked up.

  He angled his wings to swoop down toward the apartment building I recognized from pics Taylor had sent me.

  “That’s her balcony,” I said, pointing out the balustraded platform with a table and a set of chairs as well as a sad-looking palm which Taylor swore was determined to die on her despite her loving care. She’d sent me photos complaining about the traitorous plant. “You can land there and...wait, how do we get inside?”

  “I thought we’d crash through the windows like some giant, confused bird and cover the floor in a shower of glass.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  He raised a brow. “Watch me.”

  “No.” I glanced at the rapidly nearing building. “No!”

  He wasn’t slowing down. The balcony and its glass door rushed closer at breakneck speed.

  “Azazel!”

  He snapped his wings half-closed, like a falcon in a killing swoop. We sped up even more. Only a few feet now until we hit the glass square on.

  I shrieked.

  The door swung open at the last second. Azazel flared and flapped his wings in a skilled slowing maneuver and hopped into the living room through the wide open balcony door. The sound of susurration filled the room as he shook his wings and then retracted them.

  Trembling, I slid down his front and rounded on him. “You jerk!”

  Laughing quietly, he adjusted the sleeves of his tunic. “You wouldn’t have been hurt even if I did crash through the window. In your soul form, you can walk through walls.” He winked at me.

  Ugh.

  His face turned serious. “Remember I said you could choose to show yourself?”

  I nodded.

  “Don’t.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, but he cut me off.

  “If you care about the mental health of your friends and family, you need to stay invisible. Like I said earlier, you’d have no way to explain your sudden reappearance, or the fact that you’ll need to vanish again in just a little while. As much as you long to talk with them and reconnect, seeing them from the safety of your own invisibility is the only viable option. It’ll have to do.” His gaze bore into me. “And if you try to tell them the truth, they’ll go mad.”

  “Not Taylor.” I shook my head. “She already knows. Remember the séance?”

  His features darkened. “I’m not the one who ever forgot it,” was his dangerously silken reply.

  Right. I grimaced. “She was there with me. She’d have made her own pact—deal—whatever—” I waved a hand “—but she got scared when the lights flickered after I went first, and she bailed.”

  His face was a mask of unforgiving hardness.

  Touchy subject still, that whole séance contract thing.

  “Anyway,” I said, rushing on past that particular self-destruct button. “The night you came to pick me up, I called her and told her about you.”

  He narrowed his eyes. Dark power writhed around him like phantom shadows.

  “What I mean to say,” I continued with just a touch of panic, “is that I won’t break her mind if I reveal myself to her. She already knows. She’s the only one who knows.” My voice brittle, I added, “The only one I can actually meet and talk to.”

  The harshness in his features softened by a fraction, a minuscule crack in the hard mask of his anger. He stared at me for a long moment, then gave a single nod. “Fine. I’ll wait outside.” He jerked his head at the balcony. “You have an hour.”

  “Thank you,” I whispered and watched him park himself in one of the chairs, eyeing the sad palm with a touch of pity.

  Taking a bracing breath—I kept forgetting I didn’t need to breathe in this form—I turned toward the closed door in the opposite wall, leading most likely to Tay’s bedroom. She was an early riser, but glancing at the digital clock showed it was barely past six in the morning...a bit early even for Tay, especially on the weekend. Chances were she was still sleeping, and I just hoped she didn’t have company over.

  Grimacing, I approached the door and tried the handle. My hand slipped right through it.

  Dammit. Blasted ghost form.

  You can walk through walls. Azazel’s earlier comment echoed in my mind.

  Well, then. Let’s try that.

  Closing my eyes, I stepped forward, right through the door. When I opened my eyes again, I stood indeed on the other side, a small, darkened bedroom greeting me.

  Taylor was sprawled on her bed, wearing some sort of rainbow-dotted pajamas, the sheets half-tangled around her. Thankfully, she was alone. This whole thing would be a lot more complicated if she’d had someone over.

  I bit my ghostly lip—not feeling it, which was another drop of weird in a sea of strangeness—and pondered how to do this. I didn’t want to give her a heart attack.

  Maybe I could move something to wake her? Azazel said I could touch things if I focused, right?

  I concentrated on a pillow lying on the floor and leaned down to pick it up, trying hard to imagine my fingers actually touching the material instead of slipping through. It took me eleven attempts, but I finally managed to gingerly scoop up the pillow and sort of levitate it in front of me with my ghost hands. I still didn’t feel it, which made for an interesting experience balancing the pillow and keeping it afloat.

  No wonder a lot of ghost stories featured objects clattering around in often uncontrolled fashion—if this was the only way how ghosts could move things, it made sense those movements would appear clumsy.

  Okay. This was going to be...a bit cliche.

  I focused and slapped the pillow down on Taylor’s face.

  She shot upright as if hit with an electric shock. Eyes huge and rounded, she whipped her head around to scan the room, her hand groping for the switch to her bedside lamp. Light spilled from the small lamp, and Tay frowned at the empty room.

  Right, she couldn’t see me yet.

  Focus, focus…

  I knew the precise moment I became visible. Taylor’s shriek shook the walls.

  “It’s okay, it’s okay!” I held my hands out in a placating gesture. “It’s me! I’m real, I’m not a ghost—well, not really, I mean, in terms of appearance and walking through walls and such, okay, yes, I’m like a ghost, but I swear I’m not dead!”

  “Zoe?” Tay clapped both hands over her mouth, her face white as chalk, her strawberry blond hair coming undone from her messy bun.

  “Yes.” I nodded and took a slow step closer, as if approaching a skittish cat. “I’m here. For a visit.”

  Taylor closed her eyes. “Wake up,” she murmured. “Wake up, wake up, wake up…”

  “You’re not dreaming. I’m really here. Look at me. Please.”

  She opened one eye and peered a
t me.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” I said, “but I don’t have much time. I want to visit my mom next, and I can only stay so long here on Earth before the connection to my body in Hell gets severed and my soul becomes a ghost doomed to roam around here until I turn into a poltergeist and start smashing things and hurting people and I really don’t want to hurt people and—”

  “All right, all right!” Tay held up a hand. “I believe you. No way I could come up with that much creative rambling in a dream.”

  I grinned. “I miss you so much.”

  Taylor took a trembling breath. “It’s really you. You’re...back. Oh, God.”

  She threw the blanket off and jumped out of the bed, and the next second her arms closed around me.

  Or...would have closed around me, had I been solid.

  Instead, Taylor sort of ended up hugging herself. I stepped back just as she realized, her face crumpling.

  “Yeah, about that,” I whispered.

  She swallowed, shaking her head. “How?”

  “Maybe you should sit down again.”

  Dazedly, she nodded and plopped down on the edge of the bed.

  I briefly explained about my body being bound to Hell and all that, her eyes growing wider the more I talked.

  “My hands,” she said, curling and uncurling her fingers, “they’re in dire need of a full popcorn bowl to hold.”

  I huffed a laugh. “So, anyway, he said I’ve got an hour, and—” I glanced at the digital clock on her nightstand “—we still have about forty minutes left.” My initial attempts to move the damn pillow had eaten up more time than I’d like.

  “He.” Taylor raised a brow. “Your demon. Wait, excuse me—your demon husband.” She gave me the biggest I’m-going-to-need-you-to-elaborate-on-that look I’d ever seen.

  “Yeah…” The word came out as a five-second-long syllable.

  “Okay.” She held up a hand again. Taylor was very fond of handsy talking. “Okay. The last time we spoke, you were running from him and you sounded scared as hell.” She paused, considered. “Is that a bad pun to use?” Shaking her head, she went on, “And then you sent me this text—” she pointed a shaky hand at her phone on the nightstand “—this horrible goodbye text which I totally did not re-read every damn day like some weepy masochist, and I’ve been here, ever since, worrying about you and unable to talk to anyone about it because everyone else thinks you either just ran away or got human-trafficked or some shit, and I’m the only one who knows you actually got dragged to Hell by some lunatic demon who can’t take a joke—”

  “That’s what I said!”

  She glared at me.

  “Right. Sorry. Go on.”

  “—and I’ve been going crazy over here, Z, like straight-up certifiable and ready-to-be-committed mad with all these whacky ideas of what you might be going through and—” She squeezed her eyes closed, her lips quivering.

  Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no. Taylor barely ever cried. She was the tough-as-nails one in our friendship. The one not afflicted by the angry-cry curse. I could count the number of times I’d seen her in tears on one hand.

  “Tay?” I asked gently. “Tay, please don’t.”

  She sniffed.

  It felt like a cold knife to my heart.

  “Don’t cry,” I whispered.

  “I thought you were—you were—” Her voice was so broken, I couldn’t stand it. “But you’re okay. You’re—wait, are you? Okay?”

  I nodded vigorously. “I’m fine, Tay. Really. This form is just weird, that’s all.”

  She was quiet for a moment. “Has he hurt you?”

  “No,” I said gently.

  “But he’s a demon. Who dragged you to Hell.”

  “He didn’t actually drag me so much as carried me, and I kind of went willingly, considering the alternative would have been to burn in Hell as a damned soul.”

  She blinked.

  “Neither of us had a choice,” I explained. “We’re both bound by that contract I made back then. And he’s been...um…” I rubbed my nose, realizing—once again—that I couldn’t feel it.

  “What?”

  “I mean, we had a bit of a rocky start, but now we’re...uh...on good…” I waved my hands. “...marital...terms.”

  Her eyes rounded. “Oh, my God. Zoe Elizabeth Williams! You’re having sex with a demon?”

  “Shhh!” I made calm-down gestures and threw a glance over my shoulder. “Why don’t you yell louder so the whole building hears you? He’s right there on your balcony!”

  “HE’S HERE?”

  “Tay!”

  “I can’t believe you’re screwing a demon,” she stage-whispered. “A demon!”

  “I know it sounds bad—”

  “Wait—what does he look like?”

  And there was the Tay I knew and loved. “Okay, so you know the demons from Constantine?”

  “The movie with Keanu Reeves?”

  “Yes.”

  She grimaced.

  “He’s nothing like that,” I hurried to say. “I mean, there are ugly demon species down there, don’t get me wrong, but Azazel and his kind...they’re descended from fallen angels, and they all look the part. All of them.”

  She narrowed her eyes and pursed her lips. “So on a scale of one to Tom Ellis as Lucifer…”

  “He’s off the charts. Like, not even on there.” I made a pew sound and mimicked a rocket taking off. “Through the roof.”

  “And he’s a literal demon in the sack?”

  “Tay!” I laughed.

  “Just making sure I get the details right.” She wiggled her brows, then her face turned serious. “Okay, I’m gonna need you to walk me through it. The whole thing. Start with what happened after we hung up that night. I wanna know everything.”

  If I’d been in physical form, my eyes would have filled with tears, for the sheer relief of having someone to talk to about this. And not just someone...but my best friend, who understood and loved me unconditionally.

  The words tumbled from me, each sentence a cathartic release, lifting a weight I hadn’t known I’d carried. Taylor listened, nodded, asked questions, made appropriate noises of disbelief or appreciation, and I wanted to hug her so badly for it.

  “Thank you,” I said at last.

  “For what?”

  “Listening to my fantastical ramblings, being there for me.” I lowered my eyes. “I don’t have anyone else to tell this to. My mom...even when I go see her now, I can’t even show myself, let alone talk to her. She’ll never know what really happened.”

  “I’m so sorry, Z. I can’t even imagine.” Her fingers flexed, and she curled them to a fist, as if resisting the urge to reach out and squeeze my hand. “I mean, it’s a blessing in disguise that you get along with that demon, but...losing your family like that…” She shook her head. “And here I was thinking that moving to Australia was hard, that I’d have to see if being that far away from my folks would work out in the long run. I can’t imagine never speaking to my mom or dad again, hugging my sister, or hanging out with old friends.”

  I pressed my lips together. “I thought I’d come to terms with it,” I whispered. “But I’m not sure I ever will.”

  “I get that.” She nodded slowly. “But hey—I’m here. You’ve got me. Anytime you need to talk, you just come right over, okay? No matter what, I’ll drop everything.”

  “I want to tackle-hug you so hard.”

  “Well, you can settle for another pillow slap if it makes you feel better.”

  My smile was fragile. “Kinky.”

  She shrugged, the hint of a grin on her face. “You know me.” Squinting at me, she added, “Speaking of kinky...you said your demon was here?”

  “He’s waiting on your balcony holding a wake for your dying palm tree.”

  “I want to see him.”

  “Um…” I grimaced. “I’m not sure that’s a good idea…” I trailed off at the expression on Tay’s face. Crap. I knew that look. The
re was no reasoning with her.

  She jumped up from the bed, marched over to her closet, pulled out a robe and put it on. Casting me a try-to-stop-me glance, she stomped over to the door, yanked it open...and stopped short, her gaze on the balcony.

  “Didn’t you say he’s here?”

  “Yeah, but he’s invisible,” I whispered behind her.

  She fixed me with a stare over her shoulder. “Is this a case of ‘I totally have a hot boyfriend, but he lives in Canada’?”

  I covered my face with my hand. “Tayyyyy…”

  She advanced on the balcony, and I hurried after her in a near panic. I could see Azazel lounge in his chair still, his head tilted toward the commotion in the living room, but judging by Taylor’s roaming gaze as she stepped toward the door, he hadn’t made himself visible yet.

  This was going to be a disaster.

  “Wait,” I hissed, and tried to hold her back, but of course my hands slipped right through her. Ugh.

  Tay stood in the open door to the balcony, peering outside.

  I saw the precise moment Azazel locked on to her. His gaze flicked to mine over her shoulder.

  “Really?” He raised a brow.

  “Is he still here?” Taylor whispered at me.

  I gestured wildly in all directions instead of speaking.

  “This is exactly why you shouldn’t show yourself,” Azazel said.

  “Why isn’t he showing himself?” Taylor asked.

  Lord help me.

  “I’m not a party trick.” His voice was a low snarl.

  “He doesn’t want to,” I said to her under my breath, hoping my tone conveyed enough warning.

  Of course, Taylor being Taylor, she totally ignored that warning. “Why not?” Her eyes sparkled. “Is he afraid?”

  Oh, no. She didn’t.

  Lightning flashed in Azazel’s eyes. He rose from the chair in one fluid, lethally graceful motion, his gaze fixed on Taylor, who still didn’t see him, given her lack of reaction.

  I jumped right in front of her, my arms outstretched toward Azazel. “Don’t!”

  Dark power pulsed from him as he closed the distance, his eyes glowing with an inner fire beyond the swirling quicksilver I’d come to know. Grasping me around the waist, he lifted me with effortless strength and deposited me behind him before I could so much as squeak.