by Larissa Ione
“What the hell.” Blaspheme jerked her hand out of his, her horrified gaze glued to the dead guy. “Where are we?”
“Squeamish? I wouldn’t have expected that of you.”
She rounded on him with a snarl, and bless her little False Angel heart, she was pissed. “I’m a doctor for a reason.” She threw her arm out in the dead male’s direction. “That is not cool.”
She started toward the stiff, no doubt to check his vitals, but Rev stopped her with a hand on her shoulder. “Trust me, he’s long dead.”
He released her before she shrugged away from his touch; for some reason, the thought of her rejecting him again made his chest ache.
Idiot.
“Take me back to the clinic,” she snapped, but that wasn’t going to happen. He needed Lucifer to die, and he couldn’t do it himself.
He was spared the ugliness of having to refuse her request when a solid gold door at the other end of the room opened with an ominous creak, and a very pregnant female entered, her tattered white gown stained with blood and who-knew-what-else. Her stringy hair fell in matted clumps around her thin shoulders, and the dark circles raccooning her eyes made her pale face appear almost ghostlike.
“Oh, my,” Blaspheme whispered.
“I’m assuming this is my new obstetrician?” Gethel smiled, but even though he suspected her smile was genuine, her thin, chapped lips and sharp, blackened teeth only made it come off as creepy.
And Revenant had an extremely high threshold for what he considered to be creepy.
“I’m not an obstetrician,” Blaspheme said, sounding impressively authoritative and shit, “but I’ll do what I can to help you.” She started toward Gethel. “What’s your name?”
Gethel sank down on the chaise. “Revenant didn’t tell you?” She gave him a look of mild consternation, which he blew off. “I’m Gethel. And you are?”
“I’m Blaspheme.” She slowed as she approached the chaise. “Gethel… that sounds familiar.”
Crap. This wasn’t going to be good. Revenant helped Gethel ease back on the pillows, not because he gave a crap about her comfort, but because he needed Blas to not feel threatened. And if she realized who Gethel was and who the baby she was carrying would grow up to be… yeah, he needed to play this off as no big deal for a while.
“Of course it sounds familiar, you pathetic fool,” Gethel snapped. She glared at Revenant. “You brought me a quack with no understanding of the earth-shattering momentousness of this situation?”
Blaspheme dropped the duffel with a thud. “Quack? I’ll have you know that I’ve been working at Underworld General Hospital for over five decades now, and I’ve worked my way up from paramedic to medical doctor in charge of UG’s new London clinic. As far as the rest, I’m sure the earth-shattering momentousness of your pregnancy is important to you, just as it is with every mother, and I’ll treat you and your child with equal care.”
“Bitch,” Gethel hissed. “You will treat me —” Revenant clamped his hand around her throat and cut her off cold.
“You will speak to Blaspheme with respect,” he growled.
“Revenant!” Blaspheme grabbed his wrist and yanked it away. “How about we set some ground rules.” She jammed a finger at Gethel. “You. Call me a bitch again, and you can find a doctor elsewhere. And you” – she stabbed Rev in the chest with the same finger – “try to strangle a pregnant female again, and I’ll take a scalpel to your balls. Got it?”
He grinned. Damn, her fire was awesome. Usually False Angels were more timid. He wondered if she’d be less aggressive outside of work. More pliable. Easier to get naked.
Gethel jackknifed into a sit. “You still have no idea to whom you’re speaking, do you?”
“No,” Blas said, “and I don’t give a hellrat’s ass. I’m here to do a job, so why don’t you quit being a diva and tell me what’s going on with this pregnancy.”
Revenant really, really needed to get Blaspheme into bed.
Gethel looked to him for help, but he just shrugged. Satan had given him orders to bring a doctor to Gethel, and he’d done that. If Gethel screwed things up, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.
With a snarl, Gethel flopped back down on the chaise and placed her hand on her belly. “Everything was proceeding normally,” she said. “I was feeding off infants to nourish the spawn, and his power grew within me every day.”
There was a heartbeat of dead silence. “You were eating babies?”
Gethel sneered. “Of course. My son is a reincarnated fallen angel. It’s required.”
Blaspheme gave Rev a you-are-so-going-to-pay-for-this look. Excellent. He’d happily take anything she wanted to dish out.
Hopefully she wanted to dish out sex. False Angels were notorious for getting revenge through drawn-out, torturous sex.
Imagining the possibilities, he propped himself against a pillar and watched Blaspheme unhook her stethoscope from around her neck.
“I’m going to check your heartbeats, but first, finish telling me what’s going on. How many months along are you?”
Gethel rubbed her belly almost affectionately, but Rev had a hard time believing she actually cared about the hellspawn inside her. “Approximately six months.”
Blaspheme’s eyes shot wide. “You’re, ah… very large for only being six months along. Have you confirmed that there’s only one fetus?”
“The Dark Lord confirmed it. You can talk to him if you doubt me.”
“The… Dark Lord?” Blaspheme paled. “I’ll take your word for it.” She shot Revenant another angry glance before looking over at the dead shifter and shuddering.
Revenant did a mental flick of the wrist, and the poor dead dude disappeared, leaving the rack as clean as if it were brand-new.
“You owe me another plaything,” Gethel said, sounding genuinely sad. “That was one of Limos’s servants. I could have enjoyed looking at him for a few more weeks.”
Blaspheme froze with her hand on the stethoscope’s bell. “Limos? As in, third Horseman of the Apocalypse, Limos?”
“Who else?” Gethel waved her hand dismissively. “Next I want one of Thanatos’s vampire servants.”
For a long moment, Blaspheme stood there, her face going paler by the second. “You’re… Gethel.” She took a step backward. “You… you tried to usher in the Apocalypse by killing Thanatos’s newborn son.”
“Duh.”
Blaspheme looked over at Revenant, and he knew she was having second thoughts. Not acceptable. He had a plan, and he needed Team Good, or, at least, Team Neutral, to pull it off.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “The Horsemen are tight with Underworld General’s staff. They’re friends. I can’t be treating the fallen angel who betrayed them and tried to slaughter an innocent baby —”
Gethel’s barking laugh made Blaspheme back up even more, but Rev kept access to his power dancing at his fingertips, ready to blast the shit out of Gethel if she so much as thought about harming Blaspheme.
“No baby is innocent, you fool. They’re reincarnated souls, all of them. They could have been serial killers in their past lives.” She patted her belly. “Do you really think this child is in any way pure?”
Blaspheme swallowed. “The child is emim, yes? The offspring of two fallen angels. It doesn’t have to be evil if —”
“Oh, it’s evil,” Rev drawled. “You kind of can’t get more evil.”
And technically, since Gethel had been a fully haloed angel at the time she conceived, he didn’t think Lucifer would be considered emim, either. He’d be… vyrm. The only one under Satan’s protection.
“I don’t understand. I mean, unless the child is the spawn of Satan…” She trailed off as realization dawned. “It is, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” Gethel said, her voice as dark and smoky as the Mephisto char pits. “But it gets even better. The beast growing in me is the reincarnated soul of Lucifer himself.” She grinned. “And the day he’s born is the day Heaven a
nd all of those asshole angels get what’s coming to them.”
Five
Blaspheme wanted to throw up. On the best of days hospital food didn’t sit well with her, but today… she had a feeling she’d be losing that bologna and salami submarine sandwich. Too bad about the fries, though, because they had been pretty tasty.
“Revenant,” she rasped. “Could I speak with you for a moment?” She glanced over at Gethel, who was still staring at her with crazed-out eyes. “Privately?”
“I’ve been looking for an excuse to get you someplace private,” he said with a raunchy smile, because naturally, he had to turn everything she said into something flirty, crude, or sexual.
“Please,” she ground out, hating that she had to resort to begging. “I need to talk to you.”
Abruptly, he went taut, his head came up, and he went into deadly serious mode. As he stalked toward her, eyes drilling into her, she braced herself for… for what, she didn’t know. Violence was the first word that came to mind, though.
To her surprise, he drew her aside and angled his big body so she couldn’t see Gethel. “You have my ear,” he said.
Holy… damn. That’s all it took to get him to talk? He needed a please? She’d have to remember that.
“Um… okay.” She blew out a long breath. “Look, I don’t know why you care about that… that… monster on the chaise, but —”
“I don’t care about her,” he interrupted. “If I had my way, I’d slay her where she stands. Or sits. She broke a million rules when she was Watcher for the Horsemen and that can’t go unpunished. But I have my orders.”
“Orders from…?”
She had a feeling she knew, so when he said, “The Dark Lord himself,” she just closed her eyes, as if doing so would block out the reality that she’d just waded, chin-deep, into the worst situation imaginable.
“I’m sorry, Revenant, but you’re going to have to find someone else to treat her. I can’t.”
“I want you.”
Gods, he was stubborn. “Even if she wasn’t the mortal enemy of pretty much everyone I work with, I can’t, in good conscience, treat her.”
“Didn’t you have to take some sort of oath to help everyone in need or some crap when you became a doctor?”
“That’s a human thing, not a demon one. And trust me, even human doctors would agree with me on this.”
He looked down at her, cold calculation in his eyes, and she wondered how far he’d go to convince her to treat Gethel.
“You don’t have to help her,” he said. “Just… give her an examination. Take some blood samples.” Leaning in, so close that his warm breath fanned her ear, he lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Wouldn’t the information you gather from an exam be useful to your colleagues?”
She inhaled sharply. Was he actually suggesting that she hand over test results to people who wanted Gethel dead? Who wouldn’t hesitate to use anything she told them to either locate Gethel or lethally sabotage her care? Hell, the stem cells she planned to harvest from Lucifer’s amniotic fluid could potentially be manipulated into powerful weapons as well.
Revenant’s suggestion was a good one, but she was pretty sure he was as evil as they came, so why would he say something like that? Maybe he was setting her up. But for what?
“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I should discuss this with Eidolon.”
Revenant hissed. “I don’t like him.”
“I get the impression that you don’t like anyone.”
He ignored the jab. “I don’t want anyone else involved. Do what you have to do once we return to your clinic, but for now, it’s just you.”
Dammit. Craning her neck, she peeked around Revenant’s towering form. Gethel had gotten to her feet and was pacing around while she waited, and she appeared to be talking to herself. She was definitely one clown short of a circus. Or a massacre.
“Fine,” she growled. “I’ll do it.” But only so she could gather information. And stem cells.
Figuring she’d probably just made the biggest mistake of her life, she brushed past Revenant and ordered Gethel to sit. The fallen angel was surprisingly compliant, even leaning back against the cushions quietly as Blas kneeled on the floor and listened to her heart. Everything sounded normal, but the thing in her belly was a different story.
Little Lucifer’s heartbeat sounded like a growl. Blaspheme’s ears throbbed with pain as the sound reverberated through the stethoscope, and the longer she listened, the more painful it got. A warm trickle of blood dripped down her cheeks, but for some reason, she couldn’t move. Warm, stinging liquid filled her eyes, too, and then her mouth went dry as she opened her mouth to scream —
“Blaspheme!” A voice broke through her agony, and she felt herself being shaken as she sat on the cold tiles. Her stethoscope lay next to her, covered in blood, and then Revenant’s stern face filled her vision.
“What,” she croaked, “what happened?”
“Your ears were bleeding and you were crying. Are you okay?”
“I… I’m not sure.” Even now, her ears ached and the room spun a little, but at least she no longer felt like her head was a giant pressure cooker. “I won’t be doing that again.”
“My Lucifer wants to devour you,” Gethel said, the glee in her singsongy voice sending a chill down Blas’s spine. “As soon as he’s able, he wants to fuck you dead. He wants to rip you in two and —”
Suddenly, the fires in all of the hearths whooshed out and Revenant was on Gethel, tearing her out of the chaise and slamming her against a pillar with such force that the thing cracked around the middle like a spiral bone fracture. All around them the building shook, and as swarms of demon guards rushed inside the room, they exploded. Simply snuffed out of existence in poofs of red mist.
Gods, the power Revenant wielded… she’d never seen anything like it. Didn’t want to see it again.
“If I were to kill you and your wretched vyrm offspring,” he snarled, “I would suffer at Satan’s hands like no one ever has. But it would be worth it. I’m not afraid of suffering, Gethel. Remember that.”
Blaspheme shuddered, unsure if Revenant or Gethel and her unholy spawn frightened her more.
And wait… vyrm? Gethel must not have been fallen when she’d taken a roll in the hay with Satan. Would stem cells taken from a vyrm’s amniotic fluid or cord blood be as helpful to her mother as emim stem cells?
Gethel made a futile effort to dislodge Revenant, but he might as well have been made of stone for all he budged. Finally, he released his hold and let her drop to the floor. Then, in a gesture that shocked the shit out of her after just watching him go as cold and deadly as a shark, he held out his hand to Blaspheme.
Blas hesitated, and a flicker of what she could only describe as hurt sparked in his eyes before freezing into a shard of ice. For some reason, the idea that she’d hurt him – hell, that he could be hurt at all – assailed her with guilt.
She could hear her mother’s voice now. “You’re too sensitive. Compassion will get you killed. Why couldn’t you have taken after me instead of your father? His angel goodness is bringing you down. You need to purge that weakness if you want to survive in Sheoul.”
Yeah, yeah, so she had a heart. When you were in the medical profession, having a heart was a good thing. Sensitivity helped you to relate to patients.
It also made you get too close and take things too hard when the worst happened.
Still, she wouldn’t trade away her ability to sympathize with her patients for anything. It made her a damned good doctor, and it kept her going to work every day instead of sitting at home waiting for Eradicators to find her.
Just as she started to reach for Revenant’s hand, he pivoted away to go park himself against the pillar again. He wasn’t much for offering a grace period, was he? She had a feeling he wasn’t generous with second chances, either.
Sighing, she pushed up onto her knees and gestured for Gethel to return to the sofa. The
female shuffled over, shooting glares at Revenant, but she kept her mouth shut. Good, because everything that came out of it was unpleasant. Even when she wasn’t being crude and downright scary, she sounded like she wanted to be. Like she was mentally inserting things like, “in your blood,” and “while you scream,” into each sentence.
Once Gethel was seated, all prim and proper in that filthy, stinking gown, Blas rummaged through the jump bag for a blood draw kit, cursing when she realized she’d left the portable ultrasound machine at the clinic. Without it to show the position of the fetus, she couldn’t collect stem cells.
Unless her damned X-ray vision decided to finally come back online.
She gave it a try, her body buzzing and her eyes throbbing as she focused, but aside from a high-def flicker of Gethel’s subcutaneous blood vessels, nothing happened. Not visually, anyway. The scar on Blaspheme’s wrist burned as she strained, as if it were an overheating hard drive.
Dammit! Didn’t it figure that the gift she used most in her profession would be one of the first to fail?
“I’m going to get some blood samples,” she said, giving up before someone wondered why she was sitting there staring blankly at Gethel’s belly. “While I’m doing that, why don’t you finish telling me what’s going on with this pregnancy.”
Gethel shot a glance at Revenant, as if seeking permission to speak. At his stiff nod, she said, “Satan hired a sorcerer to cast a spell to grow Lucifer quickly. That’s why he’s so large now, but his growth has stopped. He was supposed to be born fully grown.”
Blaspheme froze as she tied the rubber tourniquet around Gethel’s biceps. “That… that would kill you.”
“Worth it,” she said dreamily. “But then the archangels fucked it all up. They tried to swap the child in Limos’s womb with the child in mine. Limos would have been the one torn apart by Lucifer’s birth, but they would have been able to slaughter him the moment he burst from her body. The only upside to that would have been that I would give birth to Limos’s child.” She grinned, flashing nasty sharp teeth. “It would have tasted… lovely.”
