Chapter Twenty-Five
Blood on the Dotted Line
Mana
Mortals are fucking ridiculous.
I twirl the blackened blade forged of demon wrath between my fingers like it’s a toy when its sheer presence burns my skin. This body is conditioned not to react to the sensation, no more than Lethe did when I pressed the hell-spawned metal to his throat.
Not that I would have hesitated to spill the Fallen’s blood had it not been for the anguish in her eyes that shone through beyond the madness of her possession.
Kaleb took the proverbial cake with his display of twisted filial piety earlier that ruined everything we built together. Unfair, perhaps, but I’m not in a giving mood. Who would have thought the half-spawn had that much corruption in him? I’m surprised he can lift his mortal head, but perhaps he’s a little closer to the caste he was birthed from than I expect. I won’t underestimate him again.
My delusion comes hot on the heels of his knuckles flying at my face as Kaleb looses his rage on me, backing me into the crypt of some long-dusted human bones at the extremity of the graveyard beyond Adreana’s house. I can feel the unsettled souls ekeing their way through the tainted soil. From the way Lethe twitches and Kaleb rages, I’m not alone in my assessment of this place.
Sinner’s End is aptly named.
On any other day I might be interested in the history of the house, but right now I’m more worried about keeping my face intact, having been on the receiving end of Kaleb’s fury more than once in the last hour since Addi stalked away in her kittenesque rage.
“Are you scared she won’t let you back into her house to play mommies and daddies?” I taunt him when his fists drop, relieved as my thigh aches from ducking blows that crash over my head and into the solid stone of the crypt wall beyond. “You did such a fabulous job the first time round,” I drawl, just to dig the coffin nail deeper.
“We lost her because you can’t tell a straight truth and keep your twisted dicks to yourself,” Kaleb snarls back.
I raise an eyebrow, sucking in a slow breath to disguise how winded he’s left me. Insufferable mortal form . “The little boy wants to play.”
“I’ll show you little —”
He stalks forward, and I prepare my thighs for another round of demon whack-a-mole.
“You’ll never earn her back like this.” Lethe’s quiet voice saves me a beating as my thighs choose this moment to quiver and give out.
I sink against the stone wall at my back, trying to ignore the souls singing out to me for their eternal salvation—or damnation, whichever comes first—through its cracks, and raise a hand. “What do you mean, earn?”
Kaleb throws me a disgusted look. “Of course, you have no idea what it means to work for something,” he spits at me.
A flash of red lances across his liquid-brown eyes before his fist lifts a second time. Something cracks in my ear. I duck belatedly, a second behind his action, to find his flesh planted in the stone beside my head.
“Bet that’s worth it.” I nod at his hand, relieved my noggin is still intact. Reinflating my head might be a touch more difficult than the rest of me under the Chemist’s watch.
He grimaces. “Pity I have morals, or you’d be pureed demon.” He shakes his hand out.
I stare at his unmarked flesh, then the deep rent in the stone. A coldness seeps through, tendrils of dead things reaching for me. A shiver wracks my frame as I push away from the wall and stumble forward under his watchful eye.
“Stop smirking. Once they taste your power, they’ll be after you next,” I mutter.
Kaleb examines his fist, testing the flex of his knuckles. “And if I put my hand through your head?”
I snort. “You’ll be the first asshole I haunt. Earn?” I fix Lethe with a hard stare, motioning them out of the crypt.
Where the ancient site beyond Sinner’s End drains me, it seems to give Kaleb power. An unsettling sensation leaks into my gut. There’s a limit of sires in hell who attract the dead, and imbibe their souls like power. I doubt the fledgling hellspawn before me has any idea he’s feeding from the crypt’s cohort, but I have no intention of letting him absorb more of what he needs when I’m so weakened.
The angel watches us both with a brooding air more suited to the other Fallen whose significant absence does not escape me.
“Come on,” he murmurs, offering his arm to me like a suitor of a bygone era.
I blink at him. “They say chivalry died a hideous death sometime around the sixties.” Taking his arm, I limp out of the mausoleum.
“Is that how that quote goes?” Kaleb literally yanks at his hair until it stands on end at my side. The power charge takes its toll on him, overextending his capacity.
“A different flavor from Harken, isn’t it?” I mutter for his ears alone, answering his question with a question, knowing the angel beneath my shoulder misses nothing.
“What?” Kaleb snaps irritably.
I shake my head, torn between the amusement of seeing him high on demon lust for the first time, and worried for the toll it will exact on us all before the sun rises anew. “Should we adjourn to a safer haven?”
I offer my services and my home, as per fucking usual. I might as well open the asylum up to every stray who crosses my path, seeing as no one else seems to have one.
“We stay here,” Lethe says simply as we breach fresh air.
I suck it in like life-giving brimstone while Kaleb deflates visibly at my side. Lethe says nothing, observing us with a fixed stare. Apparently, we both acquired a broader understanding of our unintended kin in the last hour. But my learning curve is far from over.
While Kaleb sags against a tombstone that refuses to speak to him, its residual soul long sucked dry by some preternatural creature, I find a patch of grass in the motherfucking sunshine.
“I’ll be hugging a tree next.” Lethe raises an eyebrow in a magnificent imitation of myself, and I concede a laugh. “Talk to me about Addi. What do we need to do to help her?”
His faint smile burgeons something warm within my chest cavity. “That’s a fine start, demon,” he murmurs, naming me for the first time.
The heat I crave extinguishes in an instant. I wince. “Did you have to do that?”
“Always good to remind us of our origins.”
“But not of our current state,” I counter.
I’m unsure why I’m hosting a college level philosophy debate in a graveyard that’s better suited to a frat house conversation that lacks the required copious amounts of alcohol for such a venture. Next, he’ll be quoting The Screwtape Letters to me.
I shake my head. “Back on point,” I encourage gently.
Kaleb glares at me and puts his fist through the dirt, rather than cracking headstones this time.
“I thought zombies came up from underneath.” Lethe watches the interaction with interest, then clears his throat when I drum my fingers lightly on my knee. “Addi needs to see that she is the most important part of your lives. Mine also,” he clarifies when Kaleb’s glare intensifies.
“And we do this how?” he grouses, ripping up lawn in a perfectly round circle.
“We do what she asks, of course.”
I study Lethe for a moment, running back through the accusations Addi leveled at us. What confounded me in the moment slams into me now a breath of clarity. If I were a praying man, I might offer gratitude. If I were a man.
That contemplation pushed aside, I focus on the task at hand—convincing our girl we need her for our survival. The longer I watch Lethe, the more obvious his faded glow becomes. Kaleb’s anger roils pathetically beneath his flesh, and me … I’m a bomb of malicious intent waiting to explode. Our absent number, however, worries me the most. I wonder if Lethe has picked up on that little morsel, but decide to keep the thought to myself for the time being.
“We need to date her?” I ask delicately. “She said no sex.” I keep my mouth in a straight line by pure determination alone.
“What I was trying to do when you busted in and fucked up my plans,” Kaleb butts in.
“But there was sex involved,” the Fallen drones, stealing the life out of the word.
“I had it handled.”
“No, you didn’t.” Lethe fixes him with a stare. “Neither of you did. And I trespassed on her private territory, took from her when she wasn’t even aware of my presence.” He meets my eyes, his face flushed with guilt and a heady amount of arousal at the memory that surfaces all too fast.
My instinct to feed from him rises. I shove the unheeded desire back with a mammoth effort that deserves the sort of medal to win my girl back.
She’s not a trophy.
But I fucking well deserve one.
“I’m impressed,” I mutter under my breath at Lethe whose gaze shifts to mine.
The faintest hint of a smile tilts his lips before the emotion is wiped from his face. “Not the point,” he berates me firmly.
My lips twitch, but I school my expression. “So, dates?”
He shakes his head. “No. It needs to be something more.”
Kaleb glares between us, dark circles appearing beneath his eyes. I need to get him back to Harken before there’s nothing left of him to return. “What, then, if not romance?”
I stare at the patterns he’s torn into the earth beneath his hands. A mimicry of angel language and hellspeak, the two tongues mingled in a blasphemy that appeals to my mutilated sense of existence right now.
“How well can you grovel, Kaleb?” Lethe whispers coyly.
I swear my dick hardens on the spot. So much for no sex.
My gaze raises to meet his in challenge. “An obsession.”
For the first time in over an hour, his hands still their destructive tendencies. Even Lethe perks up a bit from his odd version of eunni.
I mull over the term, tossing it around. It’s not what she would choose for us, but then, Addi’s preferences were tossed out the moment she rejected our love. No, this path suits us as a group.
Obsession will do.