Unholy Proposal (Unholy Inc Book 1)

by Misty Dietz

  So sexy.

  Her fingertips glided over his cheekbones, the black wings of his eyelashes so rich in contrast against the uncharacteristic paleness of his skin. How long would he need to sleep? It was a deep slumber. Like he’d sunk worlds away. Would he hear if she called to him?

  Perhaps she’d been selfish with all her questions, but—

  No.

  She deserved to know what was going on.

  Still, if he’d only told her he needed her.

  Needed her.

  Even if it was just her body for his healing…

  She would have relented emphatically.

  Instantly.

  Her throat ached. She missed him already. An unfamiliar cocktail grenade of emotions under pressure, waiting for the right blend of circumstances to detonate inside her. What the hell was happening anyway? Nate had said this wasn’t the end of the world, but she’d seen the ruins of downtown Minneapolis as the clubbers had taken their leave. She’d stood trembling by the door, fighting off her need to tell them to be good.

  Make good choices. Otherwise the evil would find them.

  They thought it was only an earthquake.

  She should call the dynamic pastor she’d met tailgating at the last Gophers home game. Maybe Nate would let him in on what had happened and together they could plan an epic Jesus-loves-you convention or something. Get the club cleaned up and hold the meetings here. Anything to keep people on the straight and narrow. Anything to keep them from being possessed.

  Jessie pressed her lips to Nate’s, but he didn’t even move. She wouldn’t leave his side until he woke. Then she’d give him a power boost he’d never forget.

  She kissed Nate’s neck, and it felt so good she eased down to caress, then kiss, his chest. His belly with the dark line of hair arrowing down into his pants that made her go all tight and gooey at the same time. She should stop touching him, let him power up in peace, but…could he really be hers? This wasn’t as simple as he seemed to think. She was a human while he was supposedly immortal.

  That sucked. Especially for him. Unless he’d find his next soul mate when she died.

  The thought painted jagged black and blue streaks across a picturesque postcard of her future.

  She leaned away from Nate, coming up on her knees. She needed to get some emotional distance from all this. She was a logical thinker. Her mother had fallen headlong in and out of love so many times the rumor rags could have put her on the cover every other week.

  Another side of her wanted to stay with him. Get on with this bonding thing, whatever that entailed, while the monsters crouched in back alley shadows, waiting for daylight to fade. She had one foot on the floor, her blouse clutched to her breasts when Nate’s eyes sprang open and two of the candles in the room extinguished in a rush of air. Her lips parted, but her mouth was too dry for words.

  He sat up slowly and stretched a hand to her. “I felt you leaving.”

  The purple smudges under his eyes hadn’t abated. She forced herself to stand when all she wanted to do was melt down into the warmth of him. “I…you need your rest, and I was disturbing you.”

  He scooted to the edge of the bed and grasped her about the waist, pulling her forward until his chin pressed in the valley between her breasts. “Stay with me. Give me solace with your body.”

  The need was stamped on his features. It pulled at her. Strings deep inside her, out of tune until the moment his fingertips played the right chords. She placed her hands on his cheeks and bent to kiss him, long, hungry, slow. Her tongue swept into his mouth, seeking his flavor, his heat and spice. Her fingers fisted in his hair, her heart rate soared. An energy swirled about him, tugging at the bindings of her inner restraint until they gave way.

  She shoved him back on the bed, undid his slacks and slipped them from his body. She shivered. He watched her strip off her skirt and thong with a gaze that marked her.

  “I assume you have protection?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I cannot get you pregnant, nor do Guardians carry human disease.”

  He sat up when she placed one knee on the bed beside his hip, opening her legs to straddle his lap. He grasped her ass, fitting their groins together. The heat, the texture—the rightness of it—softened her muscles in a wave of yielding. She arched her neck toward his hot mouth. She slid along his thick length, shaking, sweating, panting.

  His fingers dug into her ass, lifting her, tilting her pelvis to accept him. His pause, a question he hadn’t needed to ask, but the fact that he had…

  Empowering.

  His dark wild scent like an old forest after a storm filled her nostrils as she pressed her face into his neck. “Please, yes.”

  He lowered her, sheathing himself deep in her body. His mouth opened, his head tilting back on a guttural groan. She stared at the stubbled expanse of his neck, driving herself up and down, willing him to make more of those exquisite sounds. Sounds that quenched her soul and fed her brazenness.

  Small quavers shook her frame, a million minute eruptions. She wrapped her arms around his neck for anchor. Her moan slipped out, followed by another, and the look he leveled on her was the hottest, most erotic thing she’d ever seen.

  “Bond with me.” His voice rumbled between them, an octave lower than usual.

  He covered her mouth when she gasped. She felt a tickling at the base of her skull. A coercion?

  Had to be. The man had superpowers. But did it matter if he was messing with her? If he could make her feel like this…

  No.

  But she was falling for him. Epically. Why deny what they both wanted?

  Sweat rolled down the center of her spine and between her breasts. She closed her eyes. Pressed her forehead against his. He tilted his chin to fuse their lips. She opened to him, tears at the corners of her eyes.

  She had to say no right now to the bonding. She couldn’t make a sound decision when she was about to come undone.

  “Say yes,” he ground out.

  “No.” It came out on a husky moan. The wet slide and fervid vocalizations of their sultry joining was impossibly carnal. She couldn’t think anymore. The whats didn’t matter. Nor the whys. She felt him. Felt him in every corner of every dark place inside her.

  “Look at me, Jess.”

  You already know everything. Her gaze locked with his. Here lie dragons. The thought would have made her lips curve had they not been open, sighing, gasping.

  He stood fluidly, grasping her firmly under the ass and backed her against the wall. She grasped his flexing biceps, secure in his hold, her cheeks hot, her skin gliding gloriously against his.

  “You. Are. Mine.” Each word punctuated with slow, deliberate thrusts.

  On the last, she shattered.

  At her wild cry, he stiffened, his muscles locking down, perfectly, beautifully chiseled beneath her fingertips. The back of her head shifted against the wall, tangling her hair, his breath hot and choppy against her neck as his orgasm fired through him. She opened her eyes when he lifted his head.

  His gaze seared her. And the purple smudges beneath his eyes were gone.

  Thank Heavens. Who knew what would happen after this little reprieve of theirs. They had a mega mess to clean up, not only downstairs but beyond these walls. The thought of demons loose on the Earth filled her with dread.

  But she had Nate, and she trusted him like no other.

  “You should rest now,” she murmured, running her fingers through his dark-as-cocoa hair pressed wetly against his temples.

  He feathered a kiss to the corner of her lips, then carried her to the bed. “No, Angel. We’re just getting started.”

  Chapter 26

  Nate paused at the doorway to Fever, the small room at the north end of the club, his lips tilting to see Dorian passed out with two gorgeous black women sprawled across his lap. Might as well let the younger Guardian sleep. He’d need to rejuvenate more frequently and for longer stretches of time until he was at least half a centur
y old. Nate moved on and headed downstairs. Thanks to Jessie, he’d never felt stronger in mind and body.

  Or more heavy in heart.

  What kind of existence was he bringing her into? She was all that was kind, warm, and loyal. She wouldn’t stand a chance against the lowest order of demons, much less an archdemon he wasn’t even sure he could defeat.

  He’d have to find a way.

  After sharing some leftovers from the club’s kitchen with her—thankfully the emergency generator kept the refrigerator running—he’d put her out with enough oomph to keep her asleep for hours. Enough time to hopefully figure out how he was going to put down the devil who’d dared to mess with this city on such a massive scale.

  Jawahar fell into step with him on his way to the front door. “You sleep at all, Jaws? You look like hell.” Alexios’s head of security gave Nate the finger without looking at him. When they reached the door, Nate paused. “I don’t need backup, mate.”

  “Almost twilight. They’ll be coming out in droves. I feel it.” Jawahar was human, but a sensitive—more in touch with what people called intuition. Working with Alexios for the last five years had also finely honed his demon senses.

  “I can handle it. I’m only scouting. I want you here watching over Jessie until I return.”

  Jaws scowled. “Alexios didn’t send me here to babysit.” His energy sizzled like a lit bundle of TNT. Nate didn’t blame him. He was more than ready to strike back at the evil bastards, too.

  “You’ll be fighting soon enough. If I haven’t returned by the time Dorian wakes, you’re welcome to come out and join me.” He slapped Jaws on his massive shoulders. “Damn. Alexios feeding you something illegal?”

  Jaws smiled cryptically, but didn’t reply. Nate smirked back and slipped outside into the eventide. The setting sun’s rays didn’t penetrate in spears of light, but rather, cast a hazy pall through the low-slung, ashen clouds. Rubble littered the streets, chunks of concrete, metal, and cables from ravaged skyscrapers creating an obstacle course that would become a life and death gauntlet as soon as the sun set. And dark it would certainly be without power in the city. He’d have to restrict power usage at the club because the emergency generator only had enough juice for a few days.

  Nate’s boots splashed in puddles created by broken water lines as he continued down Nicollet Mall toward Tenth Street. In a normal situation, this type of devastation would unleash emergency responders in droves. But the streets in every direction were eerily quiet, the only sound an occasional crash or crumble of debris as it rained down as a structure settled. It had taken Alexios, Nate, Spencer, and Dorian working in unison to push out a compulsion strong enough to encompass all humans in the metro area. Their compulsion ordered people to hole up at home, but he would’ve imagined there’d be at least a dozen stragglers—psychics or human sensitives like Jawahar—who were immune to Guardian coercion.

  There weren’t even any cries for help. Surely there were trapped survivors they’d missed on their first sweep? But hearing nothing of the sort, Nate continued down Tenth Street. At the corner of Hennepin Avenue, the hairs on the back of his neck raised. The sky darkened unnaturally fast, and the bells of The Basilica of Saint Mary began to chime six blocks away.

  A summons.

  Nate streamed to the massive, beaux-arts structure. Surprisingly, the campus was largely left unscathed with the exception of the collapsed parking lot across the street under the freeway, wedging cars and trucks in fearsome layers of broken cement. The bells stopped ringing when he stepped foot on the grass on the west side of the church yard.

  Archdemon Asmodeus sat on a quaint bench under the canopy of trees, one leg crossed over the other, and waved his fingers at Nate like they were molly-coddled prep school comrades or something.

  “Guardian! How kind of you to answer my call.” The archdemon could have stepped off the cover of GQ with his good looks, custom silk suit, slim tie, and excessively groomed hair and nails.

  “Get out of my city and go back to Hell. I’ll give you a proper send off if you like.” Nate probed his Earth senses into the ground to discern the tree root placement around them. Lower order demons—evil spirits from Hell who required a human host to carry out their malevolent activities while on Earth—were fairly easy to dispense with. Their black eyes meant the humans they’d possessed were beyond hope of exorcism. They’d lost the battle, and the evil spirits were now wearing their human meat suits.

  Power demons like the Rephaim and Nephilim, fallen angels who took their own forms and therefore didn’t require a host, and archdemons—Satan’s offspring—were a different story. They were much more difficult to dispatch back to Hell.

  However, if Nate could bind the archdemon using his Earth element long enough to move closer and sever his head with the Xiphos Michael had forged for him, he could take the head back to the sanctorum and burn it with a saint’s ashes. As long as he didn’t bungle the perdition incantation, that should send the pretty-faced archdemon back to Gehenna.

  According to Alexios anyway.

  Asmodeus straightened from the bench, smoothing his suit coat as he stood.

  Now or never. Nate mobilized twenty tons of elm and maple roots to rocket above ground, gunning for the archdemon. The ground trembled with the force of exploding organic material. Nate reached for his sword. Asmodeus held out his hand toward the trees, and they erupted from the Earth, the trunks launching skyward more than a hundred yards as their limbs shattered and splintered like crude spears.

  Nate streamed from sidewalk to street at light speed, dodging wood, hefty stones, and chunks of earth and freeway rubble as gravity reasserted itself and biomass rained down like hammers in a giant whack-a-mole. When it stopped raining Earth, the previously serene, untouched west-side lawn of the Basilica looked like his ravaged East End London neighborhood after the German Blitz.

  Unbelievably, the Basilica remained untouched.

  He’d have to check into the why of that after he figured out where the motherfucking archdemon had gone. He gritted his teeth and fingered the Xiphos at his hip. He scanned the now darkened streets. Asmodeus sauntered down the grand stairway in front of the church, his gleaming teeth a dentist’s wet dream. “Please stop before you further embarrass yourself. Really, I thought you Guardians had more potency behind your superpowers.”

  It seemed as though something had protected the Basilica from harm—archangels?—yet the archdemon didn’t seem to be troubled standing so close to a holy house. That was worrisome. All demons—including the Rephaim and the Nephilim—generally stayed as far away from churches as possible.

  Nate crossed the street to the sidewalk in front of the church stairs, his hands clenching and unclenching at his sides. Looking up at the demon, he realized the disadvantage of his position. “You’ll never get what you want.”

  One side of Asmodeus’s mouth tilted up. “You presume to know what I desire?”

  Nate frowned. Why was he even talking to this devil? Asmodeus was only going to continue baiting him. He needed to go back to the club, check on Jessie, powwow with Alexios, reinforce the wards—would they even work against this one?—and figure out how he could put the stopper on this bottle of bad medicine.

  There was a dragging noise behind him. Glancing back, he spied two black-eyed demons pulling a body by the feet. A dead priest, his features stamped with the horror of his final moments. Nate sprang forward, beheading the demon on the left with his Xiphos. The other demon dropped the priest’s legs with screams that pealed off metallic structures, shattering windows. Nate shook his head, trying to block out the piercing sound. Something about this cry was different. Was it because of the archdemon’s presence?

  Nate grunted, caving forward when the demon punched his solar plexus, then sliced into his neck with a gleaming blade. Behind Nate, Asmodeus laughed on the stairs.

  Nate ducked the demon’s next knife thrust, his palm gripping the Xiphos. He called upon the tree beside the Basilica’s gra
nd staircase. It obeyed, releasing a deluge of leaves while he skewered the demon with his sword, backing the evil creature into the trunk. Icy fingers of unease scraped down Nate’s spine as he spiked the demon to the tree, wrapping it in layers of branches to immobilize it. Soft cries filtered through his mind as though coming from worlds away—

  Save me! Please, God, help me.

  Demon tricks. Had to be! Nate gritted his teeth and yanked the Xiphos from the demon’s bleeding chest. This demon had exhibited nothing but the soulless black eyes of a human beyond hope. But as Nate’s blade sliced through the creature’s carotid, its eyes flickered a rich, human green as the head cleaved from the body.

  “No! No, no, no!” Nate yelled, staggering backwards.

  He thought the demon had been fully-fledged, but the human male had still been battling the invading spirit.

  Too late. The demon’s mist form seeped from the human host’s eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The tree dropped more leaves where the body collapsed on the ground, smothering the horrific cries and hiding the grisly scene as the mist fused to both pieces of the corpse and burned the entire body to ash.

  Nate hung his head, wanting to weep at the tree’s agonized whispers as it absorbed, then neutralized, the evil.

  Then, clapping. Asmodeus.

  Nate exhaled quietly, his shoulders re-tensing. He was here to guard human life and the relic entrusted to him. When Guardians killed the possessed—identifiable by their human colored irises—instead of exorcising them, they were taking the life of their human hosts, too. That was something Nate tried not to dwell on. He hated the killing. Purifier Guardians like Katherine and Ari were different. They could exorcise with their touch. Katherine thought it was as much a curse as an advantage. Nate thought the downsides—exhaustion, temporary vulnerability, and psychic absorption—might be worth it.

  “Well, that was entertaining.” Asmodeus descended to the sidewalk, his broad smile and twinkling eyes raising the hairs on Nate’s arms. “Did you hear the human host screaming for mercy as you raised your blade and killed him in cold blood?”