20 Shades of Shifters: A Paranormal Romance Collection

by Demelza Carlton

  “Then you must make a choice.” Lucifer floated away from me, lifting slightly into the air. “It is a simple one, laid out with no misdirection or trickery of any sort. You can come back to Hell with me, have your memories restored and serve as my right hand, or you can return to the mortal realm with Lord Gabriel and…do whatever it is you decide.”

  I opened my mouth to say Hell but the word did not come out.

  “D…Do you not understand?” I asked, plaintively. “This scheme was awful for me. I suffered. You led me here, to Gabe, and I now I am drawn to him in a way I cannot explain. This is not fair.”

  The ghost of a smile crossed Lucifer’s lips, knowing and in control. “You did a deal with the Devil, what did you expect?”

  And then the full realisation of what had happened came to me.

  He’d set me up with Gabriel, too. As a test. As a final, true test of my loyalty. Of my willingness to do anything for him. Including leaving Gabe to his fate.

  “Choose,” said Lucifer, holding out his hand expectedly.

  A Choice Made Cannot Be Undone

  Lucifer’s Mountaintop Retreat

  Location unknown

  To live as the right hand of Hell, or to live without Gabe?

  It was such an easy choice. Such an obvious, completely simple choice. There were literally trillions of souls in Hell, all of whom would be desperate to have me; if I didn’t like any of them, there were billions of mortals on Earth, and I could have my pick of those, too. And even a few angels if I played my cards right.

  But none of them were Gabe.

  “I choose him,” I said, in a voice so softly that I wasn’t sure I said it at all.

  Lucifer nodded understandingly, his expression unchanging. “You’re not afraid of the consequences of this choice?”

  “No,” I said, with growing strength. “Not really. I know what I said. I know what I meant. I know that…this choice has consequences, because all choices have consequences, and this one means giving up being Hell’s right hand.” I smiled slightly. “Which is fine, because I didn’t even remember Hell or what my life there was like, so you can’t miss what you don’t even remember—”

  A bolt of energy leapt into my mind, so raw and powerful it might well have been light inside my eyeballs. A billion unsorted, jumbled memories burned themselves into my brain with a terrifying suddenness.

  I remembered whipping a crying man half buried in searing hot mud.

  I remembered that I was not a minor demon, but a major demon. Almost as powerful as the mariliths.

  I remembered commanding a thousand spiders to rend and tear the skin off a woman, waiting for it to regrow before repeating the whole process again from the start.

  I remembered sex. So much sex. Sex with doomed mortals, and not in ways they would have enjoyed. Sex with other demons. Sex with whips and chains and candle wax. Sex, sex, sex, sex, sex.

  I remembered meeting Lucifer. Talking through the plan with him, every detail. I remembered rushing his obsidian palace with my trident of flame, of slaying his mariliths and his balors, of cutting down his demon guards and bursting into his throne room, his audience chamber with a million witnesses.

  I remembered the searing pain of his hand touching my face, burning out my memories and casting me out of Hell.

  Just as we’d arranged.

  With a groan I slumped over on my side, overwhelmed by the powerful rush of memories and thoughts and emotions. I felt as though I’d lived a whole life all over again. It hurt. Physically hurt. I put my hands up to my temples, trying to make the pain recede.

  Eventually, and I was not sure exactly how long it took, but it did.

  I remembered everything.

  “How do you feel?” asked Lucifer. At some point he had moved back into his chair, perched in it like a thin, rakish bird.

  “Like garbage, My Lord,” I said, propping myself up into a sitting position. I felt like I wanted to hurl, like my stomach was in a washing machine and my body in another, totally separate washing machine. The ski lodge—or whatever extraplanar space this was that Lucifer had woven into the appearance of a ski lodge—seemed to be spinning, so I affixed my eyes on the horizon, trying to get my body to settle.

  “Please accept my apologies,” said Lucifer, his tone sincere. “I did not want you to feel as though you made a decision with imperfect information, or in an improper state of mind.” He reached up and touched his thin lip. “How do you feel now?”

  So much of my memories felt disjointed. Everything hadn’t settled yet, but the pieces were there. It was okay. It was fine. I felt fine. I was myself again.

  And I was still not ready to leave Gabe.

  “I’m afraid,” I said, dragging myself up to my feet even though the effort made me want to retch. “I cannot agree to your offer, My Lord. I know we agreed upon it, and it pains me to disappoint you in this manner, but…I have a connection to Lord Gabriel, and I cannot leave him. Not now.”

  Lucifer said nothing. I sensed tension rising from his body, building in his muscles, his whole body building energy.

  “As you wish,” he said, and with a sweep of his hand, an unseen force threw me out of the door of the ski lodge and back to the real world.

  Everything Changes, And Yet, Nothing Does

  Outside room 3474

  Frost Hall

  New Jersey City University

  New Jersey

  I fell through a rift, a hole in space and the planar fabric of the multiverse, and as I did, I heard three angry voices shouting all at once.

  “—old you, she was right behind me! Standing right there!”

  “—can’t believe this, explain yourself! This is all your fault!”

  “—stop shouting, we’re going to get into trouble, please!”

  I tumbled out of the doorway and crashed heavily into the corridor, whacking my head on the opposite wall. I lay there, stunned and confused, trying to get my bearings. The flight through unreality had not been kind on my already fragile stomach. The twin washing machines had been turned up to spin-dry. My head was pounding and my whole body felt as though it had been run over with sandpaper. Everything hurt.

  Asmodeus, Laila and Gabe stopped their argument instantly, all three of them turning to me with shocked, confused expressions painting on their dumb faces.

  “What the hell are you staring at?” I asked, and then I threw up all over the corridor.

  Demons didn’t eat. So where the mysterious green-orange fluid that flew out of my mouth had come from was a mystery to me and, judging from the looks of all around me, quite a mystery to them, too.

  “Woah, taxi,” said a pudgy nerd-looking guy as he stepped over my puddle of puke. “Girl, you should get yourself to the shower block.”

  I flipped him the bird, struggling to stand up which turned out to be a horrible mistake, so I just lay there in my puke pile. “Fuck off, I’m Australian,” I said, as though that justified why I was seemingly blackout drunk in the middle of a public area.

  “Okay, okay,” said the guy, backing off down the corridor, giving a sympathetic smile to Laila as he did so. “Good luck cleaning that up.”

  “Thanks Jake,” said Laila. She and Gabe grabbed my shoes and, with a firm pull, dragged me into her room and shut the door.

  Asmodeus crawled out from Laila’s bedsheets, eyes wide as saucers, like a cat who had seen their owner opening a can of tuna. “What the hell happened to you?”

  “Ugh, I don’t know,” I said, sitting up and putting my hand over my forehead. “I think—”

  Something fell out of my hand, something small and round and black. It had stuck to the inside of my palm. A lens cap. Like from a camera. A modern DSLR or something.

  “Huh.”

  Gabe pinched his nose, looking disgusted. “What the hell is that?”

  “It’s puke,” I explained, blinking. “Cut me some slack, okay? I’m so sick I threw up stomach contents I didn’t even realise I had.”

&n
bsp; “No.” His finger pointed to the lens cap. “That. It stinks. I’ve never smelled anything like it before in my life.”

  I cautiously picked it up and examined it, giving a cautious sniff. It was hard to tell what it smelled like since I’d just chundered my guts out, but it didn’t smell like anything to me. “It’s…it’s just a lens cap. Never seen it before in my life.”

  “It was in your hand,” said Gabe, peering at it curiously.

  “True,” said Laila, moving over to her desk and sitting down, looking utterly miserable—and not just because of the puke. “I didn’t say anything but I saw it too.”

  Had…Lucifer given me that? Or had he dropped it into my hoodie when he touched my head? Or…something else? Why? I turned the thing over in my fingers, examining it. It seemed to have nothing of note or significance at all, and it certainly didn’t smell of anything.

  Pain in my finger. “Ow!” I flicked it instinctively and blood came out, splattering the walls of poor Laila’s dorm room. She groaned softly, putting her head in her hands.

  Asmodeus snorted with laughter. “Did you just cut your finger on a lens cap? Fucking how?”

  I wasn’t sure. I focused on the thing, narrowing my eyes. There was…something about its shape. It looked real, but also simultaneously unreal. Like it was a painting of a thing. I only noticed when I saw it intently. It was fake. An illusion.

  I was holding a massive knife with an invisible blade.

  “Holy shit.” I nearly dropped it. “Are you guys seeing this?”

  “No?” said Gabe, concerned. “What are you seeing, Grace?”

  I slid my fingers around the hilt and held it up to the light. “Look. A knife.”

  “She hit her head,” said Gabe, comfortingly. “Look, it’s okay. You obviously have a concussion. You just lay there for a bit, I’m going to just get some wet towels, and—”

  I snatched up the end of Laila’s bedsheets and slashed through them, dragging the blade through the thin linen so the others could see it too.

  “Woah,” said Asmodeus, scrambling toward me on the bed, his tail lashing around like a whip. “Lucifer’s Teeth…that’s a glamer!”

  “No way,” said Gabe, staring intently. “A glamer is only used to conceal a weapon of great power…there are only a dozen or so of them in existence, across both Heaven and Hell, and we have most of them.”

  “Well, I think this is one of those things.” I held it up again. I could just see the blade, a faint shimmer like a heat haze extending from one side of the lens cap. I touched it experimentally and my finger went through; it was only the cutting edge that was sharp. “Fascinating.”

  “Yeah,” said Gabe, staring down at me. “Where did you get that from?”

  I winced slightly, knowing he wouldn’t like the answer. “You really wanna know?”

  Hidden Knives Cut The Deepest

  Room 3474

  Frost Hall

  New Jersey City University

  New Jersey

  They all listened to my story like enraptured children.

  “Holy shit,” said Asmodeus, for about the ten-billionth time. “You really met the big guy. The Devil. The Prince of Lies. The Light Bringer. The Son of the Dawn. The Lord of Hell. Satan himself…in the flesh.”

  “Kind of,” I said. It was true, but I was still confused. “He…wasn’t at all what I expected. I always heard he was a big guy.”

  Asmodeus clicked his tongue. “They don’t call him the Prince of Lies for nothing, you know. He misdirects. I wouldn’t be surprised if the whole ‘withered old man’ thing was just an act too.”

  It had certainly seemed that way.

  “I can’t believe you met Satan,” said Laila, her voice almost sounding like a grumpy sulk. “It’s just…wow. It’s crazy.”

  The little imp landed in my hair and, almost reverently, began stroking the top of my head. “Lucifer’s hand touched this,” he said, dreamily.

  I swatted him off in annoyance, glad a split-second after I did that the lens cap dagger was in my other hand.

  “Okay,” I said, taking hold of the weapon with both hands. “I gotta be real careful about this. It’s very easy to forget that you’re holding it since it’s so light.”

  “Magic works weirdly,” said Gabe, still holding his fingers over his nose. “Sorry. That thing just has dark energy about it that…well, it reeks.”

  I turned the weapon over in my hands again. “I think,” I said slowly, unsure of myself but growing more confident with every word, “that this blade is designed to fight nephilim. Or at the very least, can give us an advantage against them.”

  Asmodeus whistled loudly. “Hell yeah it can,” he said, his little wings beating happily. “Any weapon that’s worth glamering is basically the Hell equivalent of a machine gun that fires nukes.”

  Gabe sat down beside me and I slid my arm around his middle. “This is your gift,” he said, obviously disturbed by it, but equally obviously respectful of its power. “If you think we can use it against Juliet, I’m with you.”

  I leaned a bit up against him, closing my eyes happily. “Okay. That’s good to know.”

  Asmodeus made more puke noises.

  “I hope you guys won’t need me anymore,” said Laila. “I have a lot of, uhh, cleaning to do now, anyway…”

  It was true. Plus, we didn’t need a mortal around this fight either. It was going to be dangerous, and the last thing we needed was a mortal woman who, in all likelihood, now knew far more than she was supposed to. “It’s fine,” I said, “you get to stay here with Asmodeus.” I grinned at her. “Don’t want you running off and telling Juliet that we have this thing, after all.”

  “Hey,” she said, holding up her hands. “I’m totally okay to stay here and not get involved in a cosmic battle between…uhh, between the forces of neutral and not-neutral, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” said Asmodeus. “And I’m totally cool with not dying either.”

  “Okay. Well that settles it then. It’s Gabe and I versus the giant psychotic robot who, allegedly, enjoys butt stuff like some kind of kinky cosmic Terminator. Which is fine. Because we have a little tiny sharp magic knife that may, or may not, do something special against her.”

  Gabe snorted dismissively. “And hey, just for the record? We didn’t do butt stuff.” He paused. “Okay. We might have done a bit of butt stuff. A bit.”

  I snapped my fingers triumphantly. “I knew it!”

  “Probably best that you don’t mention that to her,” he said, firmly. “If she finds out I told you…”

  Asmodeus landed on my shoulder. “I didn’t even know nephilim had buttholes to be honest. They don’t exactly seem like the whole eat-digest-poop type.”

  “We are all made in the creator’s image,” said Gabe, which I couldn’t really dispute.

  Asmodeus groaned and obviously wanted to say more, but stopped. He was listening to a telepathic voice in his head. Someone else was communicating with him. I waited.

  “I gotta go back to the pit,” he said, taking flight and flapping up to the top of the room. Before I could protest, he vanished in a puff of flame, a sizzling pentagram left below where he’d been.

  “Hey,” I shouted to the smoky trail he left behind. “Don’t you helliport away from us right when we’re actively keeping you out of the fight, you little shit!”

  He didn’t come back, so I slumped back against Gabe, grumbling. Well, with Asmodeus’s abject cowardice out of the way we should get to business.

  “So,” I asked, “does anyone know how to find Juliet?”

  “So far she’s always seemed to find us,” said Gabe, giving me a little bit of a squeeze around the middle. “Maybe that’s the best thing we can do. Just…kind of cause a bit of a scene and wait for her to show up. Then we can stab her in the head with that dagger thing and hope that kills her.”

  “It doesn’t have to be the head,” I said, giving Gabe’s backside a playful little pinch.

  Gabe wigg
led against me, smirking. “Let’s stick with the head for now.”

  “You know I’m okay with head,” I teased. “I’m itching for another chance to drink your Slurpee.”

  Laila hacked and coughed like a cat with a hairball, sounding almost for a moment like Asmodeus did. “I think that little imp guy had the right idea with the puking thing.”

  “Okay, okay.” Bah. “So, where should we make a scene?”

  “I have an idea,” said Gabe, idly scratching his chin. “But I think I’m going to need a car.”

  All eyes fell on Laila who groaned softly, dug into her pocket, and handed over a set of keys. “Bring it back in one piece,” she said, an edge of pleading to her voice.

  “No promises,” said Gabe. He waggled a finger at Laila. “Stay.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” said Laila, pouting just a little. “I mean, I don’t even have a car, now, do I?”

  “I guess not,” I said, grinning to Gabe. “Shotgun. You’re driving.”

  Road Trip

  Interstate 476, ten minutes from Allentown

  New York State

  Gabe steered Laila’s Honda down the highway. I sat in the passenger’s seat, my hand on his knee as he wove in and out of cars, speeding just a little bit.

  Maybe more than a little bit.

  “You still haven’t told me where we’re going,” I said, trying to keep my small, but growing, amount of grumpiness in check.

  “Well,” said Gabe, “I know we need somewhere relatively free of people so that she’ll show up—especially now that we’ve beaten her twice in a fair fight. She’ll want to use as much of her power as she can, and she’s far more restricted by exposure to humans than we are because of her size. But it can’t be too private, because you know, we want to win and all.” He paused for a moment, passing a truck, pushing Laila’s poor Honda faster than it probably should have safely, reliably gone.