My Funny Demon Valentine (Hell Bent #1)

Chapter 15

15

Speed Demo n

A smodeus—that really was his name because he really was a demon—drove her car like a bat out of hell. Oh god, he was a bat out of hell.

Eva’s head felt like it was going to burst, but she was too busy holding onto the dash and passenger door for dear life. Thelonious howled from his pet carrier in the back seat. Ash had been right—her cat really didn’t like him.

While Ash phoned his brothers and told them to meet him at their home—he hadn’t explained what happened because he said Belial would flip a lid—Eva had gotten dressed and thrown as many clothes as she could into her backpack. Thankfully, she’d had the presence of mind to pack a toothbrush and the detangling products for her hair.

Her phone and charger had been next, and she’d already fired off a text to her landlord asking for his help fixing the window, though it was far too late to expect a response now. For obvious reasons, she’d lied and said a piece of furniture had fallen through the glass instead of two battling demons. How the hell she was going to afford the repair if insurance didn’t cover it, she had no idea, but she was taking things one step at a time.

Right now, that meant surviving this death-defying car ride.

“You should’ve let me drive!”

She braced her legs against the floor as Ash flew around a corner amidst a barrage of honking. Thelonious hissed from the back. Thank god it was two o’clock in the morning because if Ash had tried driving like this during the day, he would have caused a pileup at every intersection.

“You don’t know where we’re going, and there wasn’t time to explain.” He was perfectly calm. He might as well have been reading the newspaper, not weaving in and out of traffic like they were in a high-speed car chase.

The wound in his side was still bleeding steadily, but he needed two hands to drive so his T-shirt was discarded on his lap rather than being used as a compress. He was looking a little pale, but he’d said he was fine, so she took him at his word.

“If you crash my car, you’re buying me a new one!” If he could. Did demons have money? How did they learn how to drive? How did they learn to play piano, for that matter, or any of the stuff Ash could do?

“Deal.”

God, this night could not get any worse. Or weirder. “You really are a demon.”

“Yep.”

“But... how? And why are you here?”

He shot her a look, which took his eyes off the road for longer than she would’ve liked considering he was in the process of running several red lights. “You heard my conversation with Mist. I’m here because I went rogue. And as for how... I’m not really sure how to answer that. I am what I am. I didn’t choose it any more than you chose to be a human.”

Eva shook her head, overwhelmed. In shock. Freaking the hell out and totally numb at the same time.

“I spent the last two weeks convincing myself I hallucinated what I saw at the nightclub.” She scoffed bitterly. “What was I supposed to think? It’s not every day you see guys with wings and an angel and whatever that hideous troll thing was that you murdered.”

Ash had the nerve to laugh, the asshole. “You didn’t hallucinate. Well, unless you count the angel thing. Trust me, Belial is no angel.”

“Is he even your real brother? Can demons have brothers?”

“We’re brothers. We made a blood pact.”

“What does that even mean!” She tried not to scream at him.

Ash jerked the wheel hard and went around the corner on two wheels. Her grip on the door was white-knuckled. “We formed a bond. We agreed never to betray each other. We’d seen how humans remain loyal to their families, and we decided we liked the concept and wanted to become brothers.”

“You can’t just become someone’s brother.”

He shrugged. “Brothers are brothers because they share blood, right?”

“Well, kind of, but—”

“We made a blood pact. We shared blood. Now we’re brothers.”

He said it so matter-of-factly, as if that was all there was to it. She couldn’t bring herself to burst his bubble and tell him that there was more to family than mixing up a blood cocktail, so she changed the subject. “Why did you escape Hell in the first place?”

“Because I was sick of playing meaningless games, following pointless rules, and fighting over shit that doesn’t matter. I was sick of being Lucifer’s bitch.”

He whipped the car around another corner with more force than necessary, giving her a hint of the rage behind his words. Thelonious made a god-awful howling sound from the backseat, and Eva wondered if cleaning up cat vomit was going to be the cherry on top of this horrible night.

“Lucifer as in... Satan? The devil?”

“Satan is more of a concept. The evil force in the world. Lucifer is a fallen angel who rules Hell.”

“And what are you?”

“Told you. A demon. We’re created to serve the evil force. Bringers of darkness, treachery, all that fun stuff.”

Oh, dear god. Should she start praying? Because that did not sound like the sort of creature she wanted to trust behind the wheel of her car. “So if you’re an evil demon, why would you want to escape Hell? Wouldn’t you like doing whatever it is demons do? I still don’t get it.”

Ash swerved onto the wrong side of the road to dodge a slow-moving vehicle. “I have a theory.”

“What?”

He jerked the car back into his lane. “Demons are conscious. We’re not humans, and we don’t have souls. But we’re aware. So we have some kind of conscious life force animating us.”

He didn’t have a soul? That was so messed up on so many levels, she couldn’t try to count them.

“Conscious beings evolve. That’s how the universe works. You’re born, you fuck shit up, you learn your lesson, you evolve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a human, animal, or even a plant. You evolve, grow, or you decay and dissolve. So why not demons?”

“You think demons evolve. What’s your point?”

He slowed marginally at a stop sign and then gunned it through the intersection without stopping. “I’m old. Really old. I’m so old, I don’t remember how old I am. And I’ve done a lot of really bad shit. Please don’t ask me to tell you, because I really don’t want to. But just trust me when I say it was bad.”

Great. That wasn’t making her any more inclined to trust him driving her car.

A demand for him to pull over and let her flee was on the tip of her tongue, but another part of her was dying to hear more. How could she not be? She was sitting beside a real, live demon who was now giving her some kind of theology lesson. It was morbidly fascinating.

“A few thousand years ago, I was bound by Raphael after really fucking up.”

“You were what? By who? And did you say a few thousand ?”

He ignored the questions. “It was then things started to change for me. It was a slow process, and it was only in the last few hundred years I really felt different.”

“I don’t get it. You think you evolved? How?”

Ash actually stopped at the next red light. “I don’t know. But I do know I don’t belong in Hell anymore. I can feel it. My brothers too—they’re in the same boat as me. I knew that if we stayed there any longer, we were going to get found out and probably destroyed. Bel’s powerful, but even he couldn’t save our asses if everyone turned against us. Our only choice was to escape and try to hide on Earth. I made the colossally stupid mistake of thinking we’d have more time before Mist came after us, however, and now I’m paying the price. Or rather, you’re paying the price.”

He cast her another sideways glance, hands tightening on the steering wheel. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry. I never intended for you to get involved in this.”

That was nice and all—an apology from a demon was probably a rare thing—but it didn’t change her current, unbelievably messed up predicament.

In the meantime, she had a million more questions. “Who is Mist exactly? And who is Raphael, and how did he bind you? And what did you do that made him bind you? What is a binding? And why do they want you back in Hell so bad? And did you say they would destroy you? Destroy as in, kill you? Can demons die?”

Ash dragged a hand through his hair. She hated that she was still aware of how gorgeous that hair was. “That’s a lot of questions, Eva.”

“Then you’d better get started answering them.”

“Where do I begin?”

“Start with Mist.”

“All right.” The light turned green, and he slammed on the gas. The car swung around a sharp corner, no turn signal. “Mist is Hell’s best tracker. We call him the Hunter. His senses are heightened, even on Earth where our powers are dampened, and he’s a master of stealth. I’m sure you noticed his whole dissolve-into-mist trick.”

“Is that why he’s called Mist? Because he can become... mist?”

“Yeah, and because his full name is Mishetsumephtai. Mist is a nickname. Or Mishetsu.”

“Oh.”

Ash accelerated. They were pushing seventy kilometers an hour on a residential, one-way street. God help me. “Yeah. When someone reneges on a bargain, or a demon or a soul escapes Hell, Mist gets sent after them. But only in the most severe cases.”

“What happens if you get caught?”

“We’ll get the fuck tortured out of us and potentially be executed.”

Jesus. “What happens when you execute a demon? Can you even die?”

“This is getting really complicated, Eva. Are you sure you—”

“Answer the question.”

“Fine.” He made an illegal right turn on a red light. Again, no turn signal. She was starting to wonder if he knew they existed.

“Like I said, demons aren’t like humans, since we don’t have souls. When humans die, they go to Heaven or Hell. If they’re good, they chill in Heaven for a while until they get bored, and then they reincarnate on Earth and do it all again. If they’re not good, they get sent to Hell and, well, bad shit happens. It’s supposed to make them improve, though I’ve never really seen how torturing someone will make them a better person.” He shrugged. “But that’s not my problem.”

“Wait, reincarnation is real?”

“For humans it is. For demons, not so much. When a lesser demon is destroyed, they just dissolve. Their consciousness merges with the consciousness that upholds the universe. They’re just gone. But greater demons, the more powerful demons—and this goes back to my theory—I think they start to develop some kind of soul. When they’re destroyed, I believe that ‘soul’ gets trapped in a special area of Hell, since there’s no way Heaven would take them. I don’t know where, and I have no idea what happens to them. But they still exist.” He visibly shuddered. “To me, that’s worse than dissolution. I’d rather vanish from existence than end up trapped somewhere in Hell I could never escape.”

“But you think that would happen to you if you were killed. Because you evolved.”

“Yeah.” The tightening around the edges of his mouth betrayed how much he didn’t like the sound of that.

“Who is Raphael?”

“An angel.”

Eva stared at him. “An angel . Angels are real too, then. Okay.”

“Yeah, and they’re self-righteous pricks.” He floored it through a yellow light and shot her a glance. “You’re doing great, by the way. Most people would hyperventilate the second I flashed these.” He stuck out his hand, and in the blink of an eye, those deadly claws shot out of his fingertips.

She screamed and jerked back. “What the hell!”

The claws disappeared, his hand landing back on the steering wheel just in time to whip around a corner. During another red light. “See? You’re taking this well.”

“Damn it, Ash! You’re going to give me a heart attack!”

“No, I’m not. Which proves my point.”

She glared furiously at the side of his perfect head. “Tell me about the angel.”

His mouth twisted. “It wasn’t one of my finer moments. I don’t like telling this story.”

“Tell me, damn it.”

“A few thousand years ago, I was sent to this crappy village full of shitty humans. Killing, raping each other. Bunch of assholes going straight to Hell. But there were a few decent ones. In particular, this one chick, Sarah, was pure of heart, and she was the one I was sent after. I was still the Prince of Lust back then, so naturally, my job was to tempt her, try to corrupt her, you know.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s part of the never-ending war between Heaven and Hell. We want to make more evil humans so we can claim their souls for Hell, and Heaven wants the opposite. Supposedly, there has to be opposing dark-light forces on Earth to balance everything, but then, Heaven always takes credit for everything anyway, and I’ve long since given up trying to understand.”

“So what happened to Sarah?” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh god, don’t tell me you killed her.”

“I didn’t kill her .”

Eva winced. “I still don’t like the sound of that.”

“Sarah was the most beautiful woman in the village, and she was considered even more so because of her innocence and purity.” He scoffed. “Gross, if you ask me. Innocence is not beautiful in itself. Anyway, she had suitors lining up outside her door. Seven of them—well, eight if you count me.”

“You?”

“That was my job: to go undercover in Sarah’s life and try to corrupt her. And I succeeded too. Innocent, pure Sarah took a shine to me, and we started, um... fooling around a bit. If you catch my drift.”

Eva made a face. “ That’s gross.”

He shrugged. “I was just doing my job. Poor Sarah didn’t know I had no intention of sticking around long enough to marry her, and she told the rest of her suitors she had chosen me. The entitled pricks didn’t like that in the least, especially since my fake human identity was an orphaned farmhand without a penny to his name.”

“That poor girl,” Eva thought, imagining some innocent woman falling helplessly in love with a demon who tempted her into sex before marriage. Talk about your rude wake-up calls.

As for herself, well, she absolutely refused to feel jealous of something that happened a few thousand years ago with a demon , for heaven’s sake.

“She was better off, if you ask me,” Ash continued. “She didn’t have a clue about anything when we met. She didn’t even know a woman could orgasm, which is just sad.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. So Sarah’s suitors got jealous and decided to take matters into their own hands. They rallied the town and came after me one night—you know, the classic ‘angry villagers with pitchforks and torches’ thing. I guess they suspected me of being a demon. Or maybe they just couldn’t imagine a situation where a woman would pick a poor man over their rich, fat asses. Either way, they came for violence. So...” He glanced sidelong at her. “I killed them all.”

She blinked. “Um, what?”

“I killed them all,” he repeated.

“You killed seven people?”

He winced. “Seven people... plus the rest of the villagers with them.”

She slapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh my god.” She’d expected he’d killed people—he was a demon after all, and he’d already said he’d done a lot of really bad shit. But hearing him admit to mass murder was a wake-up call as to what he really was.

“Why? Couldn’t you have just... injured them?”

He shrugged. “I got carried away, you know.”

“No, I don’t know!” She was sitting in the car with a murderer. A demon murderer. “You have wings—you could have flown away!”

“In hindsight, that would have been the better option.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“He hadn’t been born yet, thankfully.”

Eva rubbed her eyes.

“So, after that many unsanctioned human deaths, Heaven got pissed off and sent Raphael. He bound me and booted my ass back to Hell. Sarah eventually married, hopefully to a guy who knew how to give her an orgasm, but I doubt it. Those were pretty dark times.”

Eva continued rubbing her eyes.

“But my corruption worked a little too well on her. When she found out what I was, she didn’t want to admit what she’d done, so she made up a bunch of lies about how I tried to corrupt her and failed, and how she begged Raphael for his help to save her after I ruthlessly murdered her suitors. Worse, her version of events got recorded in the Book of Tobit, which is still around today, and it makes me look like an asshole.”

Dropping her hands back in her lap, Eva squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to process all that. The car swung around another corner sharp enough to make her stomach heave, and her eyes snapped open again. It was either that or puke. “What do you mean, Raphael bound you?”

“He dragged me out to the desert and put a curse on me. Demons are all about the senses. He took mine away.”

“That’s why you can’t see color?”

He nodded as he ran another stop sign. “There was one more side effect of the curse,” he said, “which is why I lost my title. Raphael made me sort of invisible.”

“You look pretty visible to me.”

“I know, it’s a miracle. I have no idea why.”

“I’m confused.”

“Part of the curse is that members of the opposite sex, or anyone who might be attracted to me as a potential sexual partner, don’t see me. I mean, I’m there. You can meet me, even have a whole conversation with me, but I come across as completely uninteresting. As attractive as plain cardboard. As dull as a rock.” His mouth twisted. “It’s the perfect torture for a lust demon.”

“Oh my god.” Eva’s thoughts raced. She remembered his brothers’ bizarre comments outside the bar. Ash’s bewilderment the first night they met, his utter confusion when she admitted she was attracted to him. Skye’s weird dismissal of him when they’d first been introduced.

But that only dredged up a thousand more questions. “But what about that crowd of women at the bar? You weren’t invisible to them.”

He glanced at her. “I don’t know what happened tonight. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before in three thousand years. I have no idea why. But the curse is back now, so maybe it doesn’t matter.”

Okay, this was confusing. “I’m not sure this curse is very effective. I mean, I saw you right from the start. I picked you out of the crowd from all the way across that nightclub during my set. And I’m not a lesbian, despite what your brother thinks.”

He smirked. “I know you’re not. And I have no idea why you can see me. You’re an anomaly, all right. You also have the Sight—you can see the supernatural without any special training. That could be part of it.”

She remembered when she’d told him about her “hallucinations” and grit her teeth. The bastard had gone along with her erroneous assumption. Then again, she could see why he’d be reluctant to tell her he was an actual demon from Hell. No way she’d have taken him home again tonight. Asshole.

“You told me I was descended from witches and was having a vision , dickface,” she spat. “I get wanting to keep the truth from me, but did you have to feed me such a crock of shit?”

“It’s not a crock of shit. Well, minus the having a vision thing. But you being a witch is a very possible explanation for why you have the Sight.”

Eva blinked. Blinked again. “Witches are real too? Oh my god. This is too much. I don’t understand any of this.” She hunched forward and put her face in her hands but dropped them quickly back into her lap because it made her feel carsick with his terrible driving.

“I’m pretty confused myself.”

She sat up straight again and glared at the side of his head. “So, that’s what this was all about, then? You finally met someone after thousands of years who was attracted to you, so you wanted to get laid.”

“Yeah.” He turned another corner, finally slowing down as they entered another neighborhood.

It surprised her how much that hurt. But he was a freaking demon, after all. What did she expect him to say?

And hold on a hot sec, was she really sad that a demon didn’t have feelings for her? She ought to be jumping for joy. The last thing she wanted was a demon that was capable of murdering an entire village because he “got carried away” declaring his undying love for her.

Were demons even capable of love? Probably not. In fact, had Ash said he did have feelings for her, he’d likely have been lying. His blunt address was probably the most honest answer he could have given. It should have comforted her that he was truthful and that she didn’t have to worry about some sort of twisted attachment on his end.

It should have. But it didn’t.

But then, he frowned. “But also, I really did like your music that night at the club. It soothed me. And I like jamming with you. And I like being around you. Your company is... enjoyable.” He looked confused about that.

Wow. She was overcome by the heartfelt sentiment. Not.

“Wait, how did you learn to play piano if you’re a demon?”

“I told you. Miguel taught me before he was killed. Demons can assimilate any human skill relatively quickly, but we can never be real artists. We can only mimic what humans can do. We have no soul, and so any expressions of creativity are equally soulless. That’s why I don’t really consider myself a musician.”

“But you said you think that demons could evolve into something with some version of a soul.”

He shrugged. “It’s still not the same as a human soul. All humans have the potential for divinity, and it comes out in their art. Demons are just... demons.”

She didn’t buy it. Lying asshole or not, as far as she was concerned, he was a damn good musician and there wasn’t a single “soulless” thing about it.

But that conversation would have to wait—Ash finally turned her car into a potholed parking lot beside a crummy apartment building. He’d driven them across town to one of the most run-down neighborhoods in the city. Laundry hung from balconies with junk piled in the corners, and she could hear the dull roar of heavy metal music coming from one of the basement units even at this ungodly hour.

“You live here? You couldn’t afford anywhere nicer?”

He cocked a brow. “I could afford nicer. But we picked this place because no one would expect us to, so it makes a good hiding spot.”

He pulled into a parking spot next to a rusted out sedan and switched off the car. “Come on, my brothers will be waiting inside.”

Wondering if she’d fallen that night at the club, hit her head and ended up in a coma, and this was all a dream, Eva climbed out of the car. Thelonious’s hiss as she pulled him and her bag out of the back suggested otherwise. In what coma-induced fantasy did one get stuck carrying around their severely pissed cat in a pet carrier? Maybe in a nightmare, she supposed. Maybe I’ve died and gone to Hell.

“Give me your bag,” Ash said, reaching for it. “You take the cat.” She handed him her backpack, and he locked her car. She followed him toward the dumpy building, noticing he appeared to be swaying on his feet. He really didn’t look good.

“Are you sure you’re okay?”

“What? Oh, yeah, fine.”

“I can take my bag if you need.”

“It’s fine.” They reached the door, which had a broken lock and was stuck ajar, and Ash held it open for her.

Was it normal for demons to hold doors for people, or was it a sign of his “evolution”? Or maybe demons were always polite and charming as a way to lure humans into their traps?

Ugh. She decided she was done with speculating for the night. It was way too late for earth-shattering revelations. No more questions until she’d had at least six hours of sleep.