Killer (The Hunt Book 4)

by Liz Meldon

  Not that he would ever admit it aloud, of course.

  In the silence that settled between them, Malachi continued his slow, cautious exploration of Severus’s room, careful not to touch anything lest he break it. However, when he happened upon a black book, one that looked painfully similar to his brother’s old sketchbooks, he simply couldn’t resist. Severus had been an adept doodler in the past—not that Malachi had ever complimented him on it. The only one in the family who had was Cordelia, another soul utterly indifferent to societal norms, even more so than Malachi.

  Curious, he flipped it open—only to find a portrait of Moira staring right back at him. Severus had captured the haunting quality of those eyes, a little too angelic for Malachi’s taste. There were those dainty lips, the gaunt cheeks, the thin brows. Her hair fanned out around her—quite like a halo. He glanced toward the hybrid, who appeared lost in thought, and decided that Severus had done a fine job of sketching her.

  Even better was the portrait on the next page. And the next. And the next. And the next. Malachi frowned. Every page was Moira. From all angles. Smiling. Scowling. Weeping. Determined. Distant. Seductive. Severus had featured every facet of her…

  The realization hit him with such force that he suddenly felt the need to brace himself on the bathroom’s doorframe.

  “Did he…? Did my brother draw all of these?” he asked, hating how dazed he sounded. When Moira glanced up, Malachi nodded to the sketchbook. “All of them are…you.”

  She shrugged. “Yeah, I guess. He was doing about one a day for a little while there. I kept telling him to find a more interesting subject, but—”

  “He loves you.” How else could Severus put such detail into his work? Why else would he be doing—well, everything for her? Hell, Diriel, the angels—he had taken on all her enemies. It had to be love. Only love could turn someone into such a fool. Malachi tossed the sketchbook aside, ignoring the way it clunked against the edge of Severus’s dresser and fell to the floor. “Did you know that he loved you? Loves you?”

  “I…” Her cheeks speckled with bright pink splotches. “We haven’t said it to each other yet officially, but I…I kind of knew. You don’t go to Hell for just anyone, I guess.”

  Why hadn’t he seen the signs? Why had this come as such a surprise to him? Perhaps because in his very long life, Malachi had never been in love before—not in any way that mattered. Yet just because he hadn’t experienced it himself didn’t mean he was blind to the symptoms. He knew the definition. Sacrifice. Protection. Affection. Desire. A common interest—the inane ability to laugh with each other, while the rest of the world laughed at you.

  Severus loved this woman.

  “And you,” he barked, swooping in on her and her wide angel-blue eyes as brotherly protectiveness coursed through him, “do you love him? Do you return his affections? I’ll not have you break him after all he has suffered through these long centuries—”

  “Oh my god, don’t you dare project your shitty relationship onto me,” Moira snapped, sitting up on her knees suddenly, so they were at eye level. Defiance blazed in those bright blues, no longer shock or fear. She rose to the challenge, her chin lifted ever so slightly, the gesture reminding him of his mother. Moira’s jaw clenched when she poked him hard in the dead center of his chest. “If anyone should be interrogating anyone around here, it’s me with you. I ought to be questioning if you love him, if your intentions are real.”

  They held one another’s equally steely gazes for a long moment, neither moving, neither backing down, the heat crackling between them. Malachi’s inner demon half-heartedly yearned to spar with her, but she wasn’t really his type. Moira wasn’t bloodshed and carnage and destruction. She was family, he realized with a start, and he retreated across the room, not stopping until he bumped into the dresser, as she settled down on her heels, picking at her nails. Teeth gritted, he picked up Severus’s discarded sketchbook before he stepped on it, then set it atop the dresser with a sigh.

  “Of course I love him,” Moira said softly. “Do you think I’d be this irrational, this all over the place, if I didn’t? I’m losing my mind here without him, and it’s not just because he was my, my, my guru about all this supernatural bullshit.”

  Malachi stared back, unblinking, resisting the urge to ask what the fuck a guru was. While he hadn’t been to Earth in nearly a full human century, he had been a quick study of the modern era. The dialogue. The technology. The social trends. A demon with any sort of connection in Hell was usually up on the latest in the human world, depending on their interests; if human souls could writhe and shriek in agony, they could certainly talk.

  Still, he needn’t remind everyone just how behind on the times he actually was, not when he’d made such strides catching up over the last few days. While technology had changed and social taboos with it, as long as one dealt in the same old sins—sex, drugs, weapons, and gold—one could find their way just fine.

  “He thinks you want him to walk away,” he told her. “The angels took him, and he thought you didn’t—”

  “Yeah, I know. I regret every second of that stupid conversation,” she grumbled, her nails clicking as she fiddled with them. Nails. He almost snorted. More like talons. He’d thought they would become more human-like through the hell-gate, but apparently not.

  Moira’s lower lip quivered, and she hastily brushed a hand at her cheek again. The weight of this, of Severus’s absence and the circumstances around it, bore down heavily on her; any dolt could see that.

  “Don’t listen to me,” Malachi muttered, sliding his hands into his pockets and looking away when she glanced up. “I’m sure he knew that you didn’t mean it.”

  “I just wanted to keep him safe.”

  “I understand.”

  “Because I love him.” She seemed to be saying it more to herself than Malachi. He swallowed hard, his brow knitting as he ignored the inner beast, which, as if sensing this wasn’t going to devolve into a physical altercation, had gone back to clawing his insides.

  “I’ve always loved my brother,” he told her, hating the soft way he said it. Malachi cleared his throat, forcing the velvety-smooth tenor back into his voice. “Always. Ever since we were children, I loved him, but no one could know it. I was ruthless with him. I didn’t want the others to realize how I…” He pressed his lips together, shaking his head. “I couldn’t admit it to myself. I hurt him to prove I didn’t care whether he lived or…well, you can surmise the rest.”

  “All because he was an incubus? Seriously?”

  He needn’t look at her—he could feel her disgust from across the room.

  “I am aware of what I’ve done. How I’ve treated him. I really did want this trip to improve our relationship. I don’t care what he is—for he is my brother first. I knew it then, but I bowed to the pressures of my family, of our world.” Malachi scowled, heat burning inside him. “But no more. I want to find him. I will find him, discover a way out of all this, but you must give me time.”

  Time to collect his thoughts, to learn the comings and goings of the demon crime families who ran Farrow’s Hollow. Time to come up with a plan to penetrate an impenetrable angel fortress.

  With another world-weary sigh, he drifted back to the bed and sat on the edge of it. A beat passed, and suddenly Moira was sitting beside him, about a foot of space between them. Without a word, she produced that magical rectangle every human seemed to have—a cellular telephone. Malachi wanted one for himself, but only because he had heard rumors of what havoc one could wreak on the internet.

  Chaos could be digital these days.

  She handed it over to him a moment later, a photograph of her and Severus on the screen—both of them smiling, some sort of food in front of them, Severus’s demon eyes on full display.

  “Is that a, er, selfie?” he asked, hoping he’d used the terminology correctly. Moira nodded, and he ignored the surge of pride within.

  “It’s from the first day we started working t
ogether,” she told him.

  “It pleases me to see him smiling,” Malachi admitted as he handed the rectangle back. “It pleases me that you make him smile.”

  She tucked her hair behind her ear, nodding, and stared down at the image. “We have to get him back.”

  “We will.” In some odd way, knowing that she loved his little brother had endeared the hybrid to him. And he wouldn’t let any angelic fuck in this city touch one white hair on her head, not just for Severus—but for Moira in her own right. “What can I do?”

  Moira looked up at him, her surprise quickly masked by that determined look again. “Big picture—I don’t know. While we’re figuring it out, I need you to make me stronger.”

  “Stronger?”

  “Severus always has me sitting on the sidelines,” she told him, turning her telephone’s screen black with the push of a button before she tossed it toward the pillows. “And I get it. He wants to keep me safe. We had a…situation after I outed myself at the Inferno.”

  Getting herself kidnapped by that little rat Diriel—quite the situation. “Yes, rather foolish of you.”

  “I didn’t do it on purpose,” she snapped, her fire settling when he grinned. “Anyway. I want to be involved this time. I want to get my hands dirty—fully aware of what that means. I know demons are fucked. Angels seem just as bad. I don’t care anymore. I want to do something, but I need to be better. I can’t go around clapping at everyone and hoping my light works. I need to practice. I need to—”

  She yelped when Malachi took a swing at her, a second away from backhanding her if she didn’t stop him. Moira ducked just in the nick of time, his hand ghosting over the tip of her nose.

  “What are you—”

  “We’ll work on your fight-or-flight response, I think,” he mused, grinning again as she scowled up at him, propped up on her elbows, her cheeks bright red. “You lacked finesse on the battlefield.”

  “Well, duh. I’m an art history grad student. I don’t do battlefields.”

  “You do now.” He hadn’t a single idea as to how he could spark the angel light inside of her, but it suddenly seemed pertinent to try. If Moira wanted to throw herself into the fray, so be it, and being able to use her light on command would help keep the city’s demonic population at bay.

  After that, all they’d have to worry about were the angels—against which she was no match. But that was a concern for another day. Malachi stood, his mind racing through ideas, the inner demon eager to finally do something. “We’ll start training immediately. I have no problem bringing you into this, but I don’t want to have to worry about you either.”

  “Agreed,” she said, sitting back up. “And in the meantime, stop hitting on my best friend.”

  He placed a hand to his chest, wounded. “I would never dare strike Ella—”

  “You know what I mean.” Moira’s eyes narrowed as his teasing grin turned sinful.

  “No promises,” Malachi remarked, headed for the door.

  “Malachi—”

  “Be ready, bright and early, to get your ass handed to you.” That was the proper idiom, was it not? He paused in the doorway, hoping she hadn’t thought—hoping the phrase wasn’t sexual, as that had not been his intention. The only creature he intended to shower with innuendos was probably still stewing over their last interaction downstairs.

  But really. Today’s society was so absurdly sexual that he had to choose his words far more carefully than before.

  Moira said nothing to correct him, but rather flopped back on the bed and pressed her hands to her face, a muffled “can’t wait” her parting words. Malachi nodded. Good. He truly was getting the hang of this modern slang.

  Now—how to break into Seraphim Securities.

  His whole being sagged once more, and he thundered down the stairs, calling for Cordelia, hoping that his clever witch cousin might have better insight into this mess.

  Chapter Three

  Severus had to get out of here. However long he had been chained to this damn pole was too long. Hours. Days. Weeks. Months. There was no sense of time in his incandescent prison. No meals—not yet, anyway, though he had heard some sort of food cart rattling along, its stench suggesting it contained putrid gruel. He would have thought Aeneas’s little visits were daily, the angel brandishing that special flogger, the tinkling of its metal-tipped strands making his heart drop into his stomach. Severus had tried to gauge the time between each beating—estimate it, based on the rawness of his back by the first strike.

  In all accounts, he had failed. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to dictate Aeneas’s arrival, and the angel no longer had any interest in goading him. He merely appeared, at random, to inflict a storm of pain, painting the sand red with incubus blood, before marching out again, all in silence, the barred cell door slamming dramatically behind him.

  Severus had to get out of here. Away from merciless Aeneas, from a cell that wouldn’t let him sleep, from the cries and pleas of the true criminals—the demons who belonged in a place like this. He had never had a real opinion about Seraphim Securities: angels were to be feared, and the laws they upheld on Earth were for the protection of their heavenly father’s weakest creations. He had always thought if the angels took you in, you very likely deserved it.

  What had Severus done to deserve this?

  He had broken no laws. Killed no innocents. Hell, he mourned the death of his clients: good, occasionally tiring humans who had also done nothing to deserve their cruel fate. The only crime he could imagine was the crime of helping Aeneas’s Nephilim daughter. He also suspected none of the other angels knew their boss had sired a hybrid. And here Severus would rot, for six centuries, until someone either discovered the truth—or he escaped.

  For he had no reason to believe Moira could find him in here, as hard as she might try. He knew his beloved wouldn’t walk away from this: she had seen him taken—she must know where he had ended up. He could only hope that Malachi and Alaric would have enough sense and decency to keep her from doing anything foolish.

  He would find a way out of here. Severus would breach the gilded bars of this facility and walk out a free man—somehow.

  Something that almost sounded like a snort escaped him, the force of it making the wounds on his back weep. It truly was the impossible, escaping Seraphim Securities, but he would try. Perhaps none of the other fools had been doing it for the right reasons before—for love.

  And, well, for his own survival. With his strength depleted, the likelihood of a human’s touch just a distant dream, Severus wasn’t sure he’d make it through one of his six centuries.

  Teeth gritted, Severus lifted his head with great effort. While unfocused at first, his gaze eventually settled on his hands. Pale. Lifeless. He hadn’t been able to feel them for some time now—and perhaps that was for the best. His heart skipped when he realized what he would have to do to get off this blasted pole.

  His hands would have to go.

  Not literally, but…

  With a deep breath, he shifted from resting on his knees to squatting, his dry, cracked soles touching down on the gritty sand. He then propped one foot on the pole and pushed. Severus pushed with everything he had, all the while wrenching his hands down, pulling, pulling, pulling to get them through the thick cuffs around his wrist. He kept going, despite the way the wounds split down his back, blood rushing across the stinging flesh. He kept going, even when the first bones in his hand broke, his thumb and pinky touching, snapping, pain blooming down his arm.

  Now he could feel them, the bloodless things. He swallowed his screams, his cries, the inner demon rallying around his efforts; it felt good to have at least one being on his side in here.

  The chains had no real give—but his hands did. The bones gave way, shattering, splintering, cracking beneath his skin, all of them, until eventually he could wrench his limp, dead hands through the cuffs. His skin ripped open in the process, and when he was finally free, Severus tumbled down—bac
k-first into the sand.

  He hissed, feeling the grit in his wounds, and it took everything he had to roll onto his side. Panting, he lay there, his hands nothing but sacks of blood and broken bones, not a single digit responding when he tried to move them.

  But he was out.

  Off the pole.

  Out of the cuffs.

  One step closer to freedom.

  His first attempt to stand was unsuccessful. Severus tried pushing himself up, propping his body on the unbroken bones of his forearm, but he slipped in the sand and fell, his mouth full of the coarse stuff. Snarling, he tried again. And again. Over and over he tried to stand. If it wasn’t one thing giving way, it was the other. Knees buckled. Muscles failed him. His head spun and his stomach roiled. In the end, he realized he could crawl—so crawl he did.

  The iron bars were an eternity away when he first began, creeping along one painful inch at a time. Sand got in his mouth, up his nose, in his eyes. It ground into his open sores, but the pain paled in comparison to his useless hands.

  Almost there.

  He thought of Moira, of the look on her face when he returned, the triumphant, albeit battered, hero. He thought of Malachi, of the begrudging respect he’d earn from his older brother—the demon who had always been everyone else’s hero. He thought of Alaric—of hugging him as Moira had hugged Ella, for the hybrid bastard was indeed his closest, dearest friend.

  One step at a time, you old fool. First, he needed to get through those bars. Those immovable bars, unrelenting when Severus collapsed against them. His forehead pressed painfully between two, his half-crazed stare wandering the dark corridor beyond. It was difficult to see through the pain, but he did it, damn it, because he was going to be the fucking hero. He was going to survive this.

  He nudged at the bars with his elbow, saliva dribbling over his lips as he peered across the way to the cell opposite him.