King Among the Dead (Hell Theory Book 1)

by Lauren Gilley

  His hair swung forward, as he leaned down, a curtain that sealed them in together. The immediate aggression of his kiss told her he’d been awake for a while, thinking of this, wanting it. His hips shifted, the hard line of his cock giving further evidence.

  He explored her mouth for long moments, shaping her lips with his, plunging deep with his tongue. He pulled down the strap of her tank top with his free hand, bared her breast and cupped it in sure fingers. Plucked at her nipple until it ached, and she shifted restless beneath him.

  Then he drew back and said, “Turn over.”

  A hot flare of excitement licked through her, and she rolled over, getting up on her hands and knees.

  He skimmed her shorts and panties down before she was even fully settled, exposing delicate skin to the chill of open air. She shivered – and then shivered again when he put his hands on her. Petted her thighs, and her bottom, and the small of her back. Undemanding touches that had her burning for more. He trailed a thumb down the cleft of her ass, down, until he reached her sex, already damp, already throbbing in time with her pulse as blood rushed to the place where she wanted him most.

  He teased her folds a moment, humming to himself, considering, and she could feel the wetness gathering, building. His other hand was at her hip, and slid forward, skimming over her belly, through her curls, until he found her clit. He teased it, and pressed a single finger inside her.

  That first breach, coupled with the gentle circling of one fingertip at her clit, sent a spasm of sharp pleasure through her. Her arms shook, and threatened to buckle. She sucked in a breath, and pushed back against him, seeking more.

  His next hum was satisfied, and the sheets rustled as he moved in closer. He added a second finger and began to thrust, the fingers of his other hand applying firmer pressure.

  “Oh,” she murmured, dropping her head down between weak arms. Her hips moved in helpless little thrusts, until she was rocking on his fingers, taking them all the way to the knuckles.

  She felt his breath fanning warm and humid against the small of her back, and then the damp velvet of his lips. He kissed the twin dimples there. Dropped a trail of kisses down the curve of her ass. Bit lightly; teeth scraping.

  Rose let out a sharp breath and felt herself spiraling fast and hard. He brought her to orgasm like that, with his fingers buried deep, and a thumb teasing her clit, sucking a bruise on the swell of her ass.

  Her arms did give out, then. She collapsed face-first into the pillow, the room spinning pleasantly, starbursts exploding behind her closed eyelids as she clenched, and pulsed, and shuddered.

  He worked her through it, finally withdrawing his fingers when her spasms slowed. “Oh, that was lovely,” he breathed, palms gliding over her skin, one slippery with her juices. She got so wet for him. It would have been embarrassing if he wasn’t still murmuring praise, massaging the flickering muscles of her back.

  He trailed kisses up her spine, curving his body over hers, and then she felt the press of his cock at her entrance. He slid home on one long, slow stroke, filling her, sending more sparks dancing along the nerves in every limb. She was so sensitive it nearly hurt, but the stretch was so much better than his fingers had been.

  He urged her thighs wider with his knees, pressed one hand between her shoulder blades, keeping her chest down on the mattress; gripped her hip, and started to move.

  No more teasing or drawing it out. He fucked into her with steady purpose, panting, grunting when she clenched around him. He’d pleasured her first, holding back, and now he sought his own release without hesitance or apology. He thrust into her, the sound of their joined wet, sweaty skin slapping. His hand gripped tight at her hip, blunt nails digging at her skin.

  The friction, and the knowledge that she was giving him pleasure, that her body could draw these rough sounds from his throat, sent her right back to the brink.

  They came together, and he leaned down to bite her shoulder, the sharp sting of pain adding to the pleasure until everything was sparkling and whited-out and good.

  She didn’t think she swooned, but next she knew she was on her side again, facing him, and he was pulling her in close, hand cupping the back of her head and tucking her face into his throat. He smelled of cedar, and smoke, and soap, and clean sweat. She tasted his pulse with her tongue, and he shivered.

  “Oh, my Rosie.”

  When she drifted back to sleep, she dreamed of roses…roses floating on a shifting sea of blood, Beck warm and safe against her.

  EIGHTEEN

  Beck took her to watch a drug deal.

  It was a rare, clear night, and so they’d taken extra precautions on their approach. They perched now in the gnarled branches of a tree too starved to produce more than a token number of leaves, now crisp and brown, rattling in the winter wind, but too stubborn to give up and die.

  She didn’t know how Beck had known about this particular meeting – Kay had said something offhand about wiretapping – but it had led them to a cemetery, which seemed fitting. An old one, scattered with crumbling mausoleums and slanted tombstones so weather-worn that the names had faded to shallow echoes, illegible. The tree spread its branches over a dark, acid-eaten marble mausoleum with the name KENNEDY carved into the lintel. Below, a lone figure in a trench coat waited, hands in his pockets, whistling nervously amidst a scattering of tall stones pointed like spires. A one-armed angel perched at the top of one, watching him. He glanced at it now and again, and would shudder, and bring his hands out to chafe and blow on them.

  He never noticed the two demons in the low branches at his back.

  When the crows started chattering and croaking, Rose knew the buyers had arrived. She glanced over, caught Beck’s gaze, and earned a slow nod. Steady on. He was after information on this hunt.

  Three men came around the bend in the path, walking shoulder-to-shoulder, which meant one of them had to walk along in the stunted, brown grass, dodging bits of fake hedge and a few flat grave markers. Frightened, Rose decided. They might have been afraid of the dealer they were meeting, or the rustling of the wind, or the gravestones around them. Or all three, she figured. These were nervy, big-eyed, drug-taking sorts. Young, gawky, with bad skin, and worse fashion sense.

  The dealer lifted a hand, as if to flag them down. The three paused, conferred together, and then came toward the man in the trench coat.

  One step forward when they reached him, chin kicked up, jaw set – eyes full of terror. The appointed leader. “Do you have it?” he asked, like a character out of a movie.

  The dealer chuckled. “You ain’t trying to be subtle, huh? I might. Depends on what you’re looking for.”

  The buyer – a kid, really – pressed his lips together, gaze darting across the headstones. Frustrated, freaked out, ready to flee. He’d come for his fix, though, and Rose didn’t think he’d leave without it.

  “Come on, man.” He was starting to sweat, his forehead shiny, and he wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. “Over the phone you said–”

  “Over the phone, I said there was a code word. You give me that, and we can start talking numbers.”

  The kid’s eyes widened. Then he nodded and exhaled. “The code. Right, right. It’s…” He made a face. His brows jumped. “Calypso!” He dimmed. “Right?”

  The dealer chuckled again. “Right. Come here.” He produced several small vials from the inside of his jacket, and the three buyers crowded close.

  Rose glanced toward Beck again, and found him leaning forward, gaze intent, straining to listen. She didn’t think they were going to take out the buyers as well.

  Didn’t think.

  “…heavensent.”

  She glanced back toward the action. The lead buyer held a vial up overhead, searching out the faint, ambient light from the lamps scattered across the cemetery. Rose wondered, briefly, if he would spot them in the tree, their faces pale inside the black of their hoods. But his gaze was fixed on whatever was inside the vial: heavensent, if the dealer
was being honest. And why wouldn’t he be? That was Castor’s big money maker.

  As she watched, the kid’s eyes widened, and his lips parted: he was enraptured. It was the sort of look someone would give a lover. A pale shade of the look Beck gave her when they were alone.

  “That’s two bills for ten,” the dealer said, and the kid reacted with belated shock.

  “What?” He gaped at the man. “That’s…that’s…” Made another face.

  “Twenty bucks a pill,” one of his friends supplied.

  “That’s a discount,” the dealer said. “Take it or leave it. If you argue, it’ll be four-hundred.”

  The kid swore – but dug into his pocket and came out with a grubby wad of cash. He opened his jacket, zipped the vial away in a secure inner pocket, and the three of them fled like startled rabbits.

  “Nice doing business with you,” the dealer called, smoothing and counting the bills.

  She looked at Beck, who lifted a two-fingered wave, and then leaped.

  Rose followed. She landed on the grass, in a ready crouch, hand finding her knife before she sprang upright.

  Beck landed on the dealer’s back. The dealer yelled, and flailed, but it was no use. With a few brisk movements, Beck had him flat on his back, a foot at his throat, one of his meaty hands held in a pinching, disabling grip.

  He bellowed in outrage, and reached for Beck’s ankle.

  But Rose was at his side, her knife bared. “Shut up,” she told him, and he snapped his mouth closed.

  Beck shifted his boot, smearing mud off the sole onto the man’s shirt. He titled his head, so his hood fell back a fraction. “Do you know who I am?” Rose thought the sudden burst of wind that swirled his coat around his legs added to the overall threat of the moment.

  The dealer gaped at him a moment – and then his eyes widened. “Shit. Shit, you son of a–”

  Beck pressed harder against his throat, and he cut off with a garbled croak. “If you know who I am, then you know that I don’t deal in empty threats.”

  Beck’s book shifted when the dealer swallowed. Rose could see him debating, weighing his options. It wasn’t surprising that Beck had a reputation; she knew it was well-earned, and doubtless inspired fear in low-level hangers-on like this man.

  After a moment, the dealer subsided, the tension bleeding out of his large body. “What do you want?” he asked, resigned, temples gleaming with fear sweat.

  “Castor has a new conduit.”

  The dealer’s gaze flicked toward Rose, and then back to Beck. “Are you asking me about it? ‘Cause I don’t know shit.”

  “You just sold heavensent to those kids.”

  “Yeah, and it was the real shit. Which comes from conduits. You know that.”

  Beck tightened his grip on the dealer’s hand until he hissed. “How much of it is he producing?”

  “I dunno!” Desperate, now. “Look, I don’t ask those kinds of questions. I take what they give me, and I sell it.”

  “How much heavensent are you selling?”

  “It’s most of what I sell. Castor’s making it again, and all the low-level dealers are trying to get in on it, too.”

  “Just the one conduit?”

  “I don’t–” He choked against Beck’s boot again.

  “Why would he risk working with another after what happened last time? He could make money selling anything.” A note of tension had crept into Beck’s voice; Rose knew if he wasn’t able to control it, then he was feeling even more frantic and unsettled than he let on.

  “I don’t know,” the man choked out. “Ask him yourself!”

  Beck stared at him a moment, chest heaving. Then he said, “Kill him.”

  Rose did, quick and clean, and blood spilled out onto the grass.

  They left him where he lie, a gift for the crows, and melted away into the dark.

  ~*~

  “What do you think is happening?” Rose asked, later, when they lay on their backs, staring up at the dark green bed canopy overhead and catching their breath.

  “I don’t know.” He rolled toward the nightstand, lit a cigarette, and rolled back, mouth curled down sourly as he took a drag. “There’s too many things I don’t know. How have conduits remained here after the Rift closed? How many are there? Are some abandoned? Do the angels choose other conduits? Or are they finding their way to earth even without the Rift being open?”

  Rose shifted so she lay on her side, facing him, propped on a raised fist. “What do you think they’re trying to accomplish? The conduits, I mean.”

  “I don’t know.” He made a helpless gesture with the hand holding the cigarette, smoke swirling like a ribbon. “That’s the problem: I just don’t know.” He rarely sounded so frustrated; it was unsettling, but comforting, too, in a way: Despite appearances to the contrary, Beck was only human after all. He wasn’t all-knowing, all-seeing, all-problem-solving. “When the Rift happened, the being who claimed to be Gabriel said that he was heralding a ‘purging of the evils of the earth.’”

  “Killing humans,” she said, back of her neck prickling.

  “And not just thugs and murderers,” he said. “Women, children. Innocents lost their lives. It made no matter to the conduits – to the beings inhabiting them.

  “But this. Now. This isn’t a purging.”

  “What could it be?”

  He took another drag, and didn’t answer. He didn’t know.

  NINETEEN

  Christmas arrived quietly, and without fanfare. It hadn’t been a day worth celebrating in the Bends: maybe a bit of tinsel in a window, a snatched bit of an old song, crackly through the speakers of a cheap radio. Trees, and lights, and colorful cookies were for those with disposable incomes to burn on such frivolities.

  People like Beck, she realized, when, twelve days before Christmas a massive fir with all the trimmings appeared in the comfy parlor. It was fake, of course, same as the smaller tree in the corner of the kitchen, but they were quality, and Kay produced a bevy of fir-scented candles that she kept lit all during the day.

  “Come help me with this,” Kay ordered, scowling fiercely as she attempted to unknot yards and yards of convincingly-real-looking garland. “Pain in the ass.” But when they’d swagged it all down the bannister, threaded it with lights, and studded it with glimmering ornaments, she nodded in satisfaction. And, later, when Rose asked Beck if the garland had been his idea, he’d offered a bemused smile and a headshake.

  “Don’t let her fool you: she loves Christmas.”

  Packages appeared under the tree, more each morning, wrapped in shiny, seasonal paper that was such an extravagant indulgence in times such as these that Rose felt immensely guilty – too much so to even shake the boxes.

  Beck didn’t want to go hunting, seemingly content to spend their evenings in front of the library fire, slowly sipping wine rather than whiskey. She would read aloud, and he would wind up on the floor, his head resting on her knee while she petted through his hair; until his eyelids grew heavy, his breath even and steady.

  They made gingerbread men with cinnamon candy buttons, and listened to Bing Crosby, and Kay produced three musty, inexplicable stockings that she hung from the parlor mantel. Rose looked up from the royal icing she was mixing one evening, and saw Kay’s face creased with laughter, her head thrown back, Beck smiling to himself as he candied orange peel, and realized that, odd as they were, they were a family. Her heart was full, and she wanted it to be like this always.

  She woke Christmas morning to a glowing white light coming through the drapes. A brief flash of fear gripped her – she’d spent months now paging through old books, clicking through webpages, dreaming of the Rift: a blinding white light that pulsed and swelled…and killed. But then she blinked away the last haze of sleep – felt Beck at her back, his arm around her waist – and saw that it was a soft, natural sort of glow. When she exhaled, her breath plumed as white vapor.

  She slid carefully from beneath his arm, and the covers; the col
d of the floorboards bit at her feet, and she hurried to don the robe Beck had slung over the trunk at the foot of the bed. She wrapped it tight around her, and crept to the window to look out.

  Sometime during the night, the rain had turned to snow: fat flakes that clung to the window mullions, and the sill, and the street below. It dusted the iron railings of the fence, and blanketed the cars on the curb. A woman in a huge coat with a tiny dog made their careful way down the sidewalk, leaving distinct prints. By the end of the day, the snow would be slushy, and dirty, but for now it was pristine, beautiful, and Rose stared at it, smiling to herself, until her breath had fogged the window and she could barely see.

  Beck could be silent when he wanted to be, but he let her hear his approach now – he let out a little breath as he shivered in the chill air – and it wasn’t a surprise when his arms went around her waist and he pressed up against her back. Dropped his chin to the top of her head. “A white Christmas,” he murmured. “It’s been a long time since we’ve had one of those.”

  “Mmhm.”

  They stood a long moment, watching fresh flakes sift down past the window. The heat of his bare chest seeped through the robe; they warmed each other, she thought.

  He ducked his head to kiss her cheek. “I got you something. Come here.”

  She turned when he pulled back, pulling the robe more firmly closed around her, admiring the gentle flexing of his back as he strode back to the bed. “You shouldn’t have. Really.”

  “You need spoiling,” he said, lightly, and crouched down to retrieve something from beneath the bed.

  “No, I don’t.” But excitement quickened in her belly, regardless. The last gift he’d given her had been her knives, and her thoughts now turned to the glint of metal, and sharp edges, and wicked usefulness.

  The box he held, when he stood, though, was small. No bigger than a loaf of bread.