“Is there a way for you and I to talk without Aquila in my head? Or should I just kill him so it isn’t an issue?”
He sighed. “Future negotiations on your behalf will be easier if you allow him to stay in one piece. You can’t kill him with your weapons, but you have the ability to put him out of commission a while. However, I’d respectfully ask that you put your staff away and step close enough to me so I can put us in a circle. They’ll hear our words but not your thoughts.”
I couldn’t afford a pity party in my head right now. It was a bad situation, but my choice was to at least pretend to get along with Xaephan for the time being, or to piss even my would-be rescuers off. If Xaephan was telling the truth and I couldn’t return to the human realm yet, I should probably cooperate.
I absorbed the light back into me and stepped to him, and breathed in relief when the circle went around us.
“Fuck, why do I feel better? I’m two feet from a demon, this is crazy.”
“What did you want to say?”
“Is it possible for someone I know to come just inside a gateway? Or for you to hold a gateway open so I can talk to someone through it?”
“I can’t give promises without checking in with your friends, but I might be able to negotiate the former.”
Mordecai had told me deals and bargains are a tangible thing here, so I said, “I’ll agree to come with you peacefully if you’ll give me your word you’ll do your best to get me home as quickly as possible, and long before the energy of this place affects me so much I’ll have trouble going home. If I think you’re stalling and you haven’t let me talk to someone who assures me I can trust you, I’ll stop being peaceful.”
“You were my enemy when last we spoke. Even though you didn’t agree to a bargain with me, you’ve been true to your word. You’re no longer my enemy, Miss O’Shea. I’ll ask a few things of you while you’re with me, but I’ll also do my best to get you home.”
“As soon as possible,” I added.
“If it doesn’t happen in a few days it might not happen at all, so that part goes without saying.”
“I’d be happier if Aquila was dead.”
“I know, but someone else will be assigned to turn you if he dies. Killing him won’t stop their attempts.”
“I’ll come with you. How soon do you think you can get me a conversation with Abbott or… one of the other people who’ve been helping me?”
“It’s hard to say. Time doesn’t flow evenly between the two realms.”
“Okay, let’s get away from these guys.”
“If we’re touching when the circle breaks you won’t feel the backlash. You’ll probably be more comfortable touching me than having me touch you.”
“You’re being nice.”
“I am.”
I shook my head and decided further conversation should wait. I rested my fingers on the back of his outstretched hand, and I heard the soft pop of the circle breaking, but didn’t feel it.
“Thanks.”
He motioned for me to walk with him, away from the Celrau. I turned my back on the vampires who’d wanted to make me one of them, and trusted Xaephan’s people to keep me safe as I sang Do-Re-Mi in my head once again.
Chapter 6
We walked about a quarter mile before Xaephan stopped and said, “We need to get closer than you’re probably comfortable with, but in order for me to teleport with you, I must carry you. Your feet can’t touch the ground — I have to fully support you.”
“Can I ride your back?”
He shook his head. “I have to hold you. With your permission, I’ll lift you, and I need you to wrap your legs around me. I’m tall enough so you’ll be against my stomach and not my groin, with your arms around my neck.”
I glared at him, and for the first time I saw the demon smile.
I’d imagined him as evil when he’d possessed Jerry’s body in order to talk to me. Now, he didn’t seem so bad.
Was it a trick? Demons are evil, right?
“Where are you taking me?”
“I can’t take you to my palace, as it’s in the inner circle and the energy there would affect you too much to allow you to go home. One of my underlings lives in the outer ring, and we’ll be staying in his home. His maid is cleaning it for our arrival, putting fresh sheets on the bed and such. It isn’t fancy but it’s easy to defend. Will you trust me to teleport us there?”
I held my arms out to the side to make it easier for him to lift me, and I wrapped my legs around his abdomen when he pulled me to him. My arms went around his neck, and my head rested on his shoulder.
His wings seemed to be connected from just above each shoulder blade to just below them, so my legs didn’t get hung up in them. I could feel his back muscles move in an odd way though, as his wings moved, but it seemed sexy instead of creepy.
“I’ll make it fast. I need you to hold your breath — it’s very important you don’t try to breathe. We’ll be less than ten seconds.”
I took a breath and nodded, and the area around us was suddenly… static. Like when a television with an antenna isn’t on a station — the sound, the way it looked. We were in a nothing that was something. And yet, nothing.
And then we were in what was clearly a living room hewn out of a cave. There was a sofa, two chairs, and a couple of tables. A fire was just outside, flickering in a window of sorts and lighting the interior.
Xaephan put me down and I looked through a rounded doorway into a kitchen, and saw someone had brought a small fire inside, with an iron structure woven around it so you could use it as a stove.
“Can we talk freely?”
He nodded as he told me, “Mordecai contacted me and made a deal with me to rescue you and get you safely home. However, that was before we knew you’d been contaminated with Celrau blood, and now we’ll have to come up with a different plan. Tell me how they got their blood into you.”
I told him the story and I got another grin. Aquila’s smile had creeped me the fuck out, but Xaephan was downright gorgeous when he smiled.
If he were human, I’d have no idea of his race. Multiracial, perhaps. His hair was braided in strands all over his head, but they weren’t corn rows. It was a chaotic mess, but it worked. Some strands were a little smaller around than my pinkie finger, some were as big around as my thumb, and a whole lot were of varying widths between. Some came to his shoulders, some hung halfway down his back. Nothing was uniform and it should’ve looked like a mess, but it didn’t.
His eyes were black. Not dark brown – black. But the whites of his eyes were normal and it didn’t look creepy.
And his mouth… damn. I wanted to feel his kiss, and wondered what those lips would feel like on my—
I interrupted my own thoughts as I turned my back to him and asked, “What are you doing to me?”
“I’ve tried to dial it back, but one of my powers is bringing out lust in people. You didn’t get the effect when I was in the human’s body, but you’ll get it now.”
As much as I knew intellectually that I shouldn’t have sex with a demon, every cell in my body wanted him inside me, wanted his mouth on me, his fingers….
“Will having sex with you keep me from going home?”
“Quite the opposite. There are a number of ways we can get the Celrau’s blood out of your glands and tissues, and one of those ways involves giving you orgasms until you’re practically out of your mind from them.”
“What are the other ways?” I still had my back to him. It was easier to think straight when I wasn’t looking at him.
“I can beat it out of you, or you can exercise to help move things along. No matter what, I can explain how you can use the light you have stored inside you to move some of it. I’d like to use a combination of several methods, as I think we’ll get the fastest results by mixing it up.”
Fuck me, but he’d just made me even hornier when I hadn’t thought it possible. I rubbed my own arms, trying to smooth out the goose bumps, bu
t only succeeded in stimulating my nipples even more. “I’m not opposed to being beaten by someone who knows how to make it good.”
His growly chuckle went straight to my clit. “Now you’re just fucking with me, Chère.”
“What should I call you?”
“Names are a powerful thing in this realm. I haven’t used your full name, and won’t tell anyone what it is, though I learned it when I researched you after I found it out you were killing my people.”
“Is your name really Xaephan?”
“Yes, though it isn’t my full name.”
I crossed my arms over my chest, shuddered despite the heat in this place, let my arms drop, and walked to the sofa. I sat and looked at him, determined to keep my libido in check.
“Computers in our world use ones and zeros to create little virtual worlds. We sometimes display them as positive and negative, though neither is good or bad — it’s just a whole bunch of little switches in groups of eight. Our world is all about duality. Sometimes wet is good, other times dry is good, but neither wet nor dry are inherently good or bad.”
“You want to know if demons are evil, or just the counterpoint to good?”
I nodded.
“You’ve already figured out this isn’t the biblical Hell. Souls don’t come here when they die. We bring people here from Earth to be sold as slaves, and sometimes humans figure out how to get here, but you won’t end up here after death, no matter what you do in life.”
I nodded.
“We’re the counterpoint to good, but I’m not sure that makes us any less evil. Killing someone in this realm without good reason can get you a hundred years of constant torture, but robbing their house, or cutting their legs off, or torturing them just for fun and giggles isn’t frowned upon. It’s survival of the fittest here. If a slave can rise above their owner, they’re more than welcome to do so — though the consequences can be brutal if they try and don’t succeed.”
He sat in a chair and looked at me a few seconds, as if making a decision.
“I’ve brought my most trusted guard unit with me, but you’re a tasty morsel and I’m not sure I should entrust them to keep you safe in my absence. However, I must leave you a few minutes to contact our mutual acquaintance and let him know of our complication. I can either lock you in a cage so they can’t get to you, or I can trust you to defend yourself without killing them.”
“But I can cut a limb off, right? Without killing them?”
He smiled. “Legs and arms, yes. Some can survive beheading but others can’t, and until you know which, you need to refrain from removing heads.”
“How long will you be gone?”
“It might seem like an hour to you. I’ll only be gone a few minutes, but time is wonky between the realms.”
“I’m exhausted,” I admitted. “Can you guarantee my safety in your cage?”
He nodded. “You’ll be in a circle, inside a jail cell.”
“I either trust you or I don’t, right? As long as I can lay down and sleep, let’s go with that option.”
“There are three people in this realm who can break one of my circles, but I don’t anticipate them venturing to the outer ring of Hell. If someone breaks it, though, stall and negotiate, don’t fight them. If they take you, I’ll get you back.”
“This suddenly isn’t sounding like a sure thing.”
“You’ll be fine. Come on, Chère.”
His touch on my back, through my shirt, may as well have been a warm tongue teasing my clit, and I groaned as he guided me through another doorway.
“We’ll discuss what you want to do about that when I return. I’d love to play sexy games with you, but per the deal I made with our mutual acquaintance, it needs to be your decision.”
* * *
I jerked out of a deep sleep as the pop of the circle reverberated painfully through me, and then stifled a scream when I saw a strange demon towering over me.
Or, I was assuming the huge black wings meant demon down here.
“Calm down, pet. I just came to see what little bird my friend had managed to get in his cage.”
“And you are?”
He shook his head. “You’ll have to give me something in exchange for knowing my name, pet.”
What demeaning name could I call this man? He was clean shaven, with cropped brown hair and too-thick brown eyebrows. He looked like a twenty-ish year old underwear model, and I could confidently say this because he was wearing what amounted to a fancy loincloth and nothing else. He was larger than Xaephan, just as muscled, and… Demeaning, I reminded myself. He was calling me pet… what could I call him to show I saw him as less-than, as well?
“What do you want with me, sweet cheeks?”
He grinned, amused at my poor attempt at name-calling, and I rolled my eyes and told him, “You broke into the cell, and you broke the circle I was in — and all that after you ventured all this way to the outer ring. You spent a lot of energy to get to me. What’s next?”
“Well, aren’t you intriguing?”
Answering a question with a question. Uggg. I could play this game too, though. “Am I? What makes me intriguing?”
“You smell of Celrau, and yet you aren’t one of them. Xaephan has marked you, and he rarely does so unless the human is one of his slaves, but you clearly were not purchased to be a slave. What purpose could he have for you?”
Aquila stepped into the room behind the demon, leaned against the door to the cell, and said, “She’s mine, Your Majesty. Xaephan stole her from me, but he left her alone and my claim is still on her.”
The demon sniffed again and said, “Yes, I smell the blood of one of your children in her. It’s a valid claim. Tell me about her.”
“I intend to make her one of us and I’m running short on time to get it done during this new moon. I don’t suppose we could cut this short?”
I walked around the demon and took the half-dozen steps to Aquila, stopping just outside of his reach. I stretched my arm towards him as I created a three-foot long blade with a rapier handle, and it formed in the space inside his body. I swiped left and right to slice through his rib cage at the level of his heart, and the top half of his body fell to the side. His bottom half stood for a good five seconds before the knees buckled and collapsed onto the floor. Deep red blood pooled around the body, and I stepped away from it as I turned back to the demon with the sword at my side.
He lifted one of his thick but perfectly manicured eyebrows and said, “You can’t be here.”
I dissipated the sword back into my body and asked, “So are you going to clean the Celrau blood out of me and send me back to the human realm?”
He crossed his arms and snapped, “I don’t know what you’re playing at, but with those abilities I have to send you to Olimbus.”
“Where?”
The demon’s head tilted as if he were trying to figure me out. Finally, he asked, “Does Xaephan know what you can do?”
“What will you give me for the information?” I countered. If he wasn’t going to answer questions, neither was I.
The single eyebrow lifted again. “You have no idea who I am, do you, little pet?”
“No sweet cheeks, you wouldn’t tell me.”
The eyebrow lifted yet again. “Sweet cheeks?”
I lifted both my brows. I can’t do just one. “Pet?”
He chuckled. “Touché.”
He looked at Aquila and I said, “He isn’t dead.”
“No, he isn’t. It’s good to know you didn’t mean to kill him, though.”
“He called you Your Majesty.”
“He did.”
I opened my mouth to speak and he shook his head. “No more questions, pet. I’m beginning to see you were put in the cell and circle to protect the others from you, and not the other way around. If I put you back, you can break my circle with your weapon, yes?”
“I don’t know for sure.”
“Well then, let’s see.”
Suddenly, I was in a circle with him, and he said, “Break it, pet.”
Again, I instinctively knew I shouldn’t show off, so I made a small knife and poked the circle. The backlash was harsh, and I dissipated the knife and grabbed my head all in the same motion.
“Go back to the center of the cell and I’ll put you in again. No one, not even Xaephan, will be able to break it.”
“Is there a way to keep it from hurting so much when I break it?”
“Yes.”
I looked at him a few seconds before I realized he’d answered my question and didn’t intend to keep speaking.
“I don’t suppose you’ll tell me?”
“I don’t know what the Lord of Lust is up to, but I think I want no part of it until I have a chance to speak with him. Do you know where he is?”
“No.”
He crossed his arms and tilted his head. “True… but not completely true.”
“I have no idea where he is. I know what task he left to accomplish.”
He waved his arm and I was inside another circle.
“I won’t lock the door, but you’re safe. When Xaephan returns, tell him I said you can’t stay here.”
“Sure thing, sweet cheeks.”
He grinned at me as he vanished into thin air.
He’d called Xaephan the Lord of Lust. Somewhere along the way I’d learned Xaephan was one of the most powerful three or four beings in Hell, and now I knew he wasn’t just a demon, but a Demon Lord. Great.
I shook my head and sat on the stone floor, wondering if I dared go back to sleep.
I didn’t, and the flames around me made me remember my exercises with Mordecai, and the fact I was supposed to work on creating a flame at my fingertip five minutes a day. With nothing else to do, I held my finger up and imagined a flame at the end of it.
And was shocked when it formed. I blew it out, tried it again, and this time let the energy absorb back inside me — I didn’t need to be blowing it away in this place.
I repeated it once more and stopped, and was going over the conversation with the demon I’d called sweet cheeks when Xaephan returned. He took note of the open door and frowned as he approached me.
An Unhuman Journey Page 5
