Chapter 51
Lionel
This time around, I definitely felt the strong currents of magic forcing us from one place to another. I didn’t have a reference point to describe it properly, but it was strong magic, the kind I felt could drag me under and devour me whole if I made so much as a wrong move.
I tightened my fist around the fabric of Lucifer’s T-shirt and pressed myself closer to him. The scent of the stuffy basement room with the disgusting drain vanished, and then I heard cicadas and smelled grass and earth and all the clean things nature had to offer.
Now I was out of the basement, reality caught up with me. Why was I pressing my face against the Devil’s chest? I straightened. I shouldn’t even be here. I should be telling Christine everything that had happened. I needed…I needed to understand everything that had happened.
I’d had a connection to the corpses from the salt marsh and even to Lily earlier. It had been brief, but it had been real. Or at least seemed real, although maybe it was simply the aftereffects of the tranquilizer. Necromancers couldn’t do what I thought I’d done.
I thought it through, willing myself to find the logical explanation that had to exist. Maybe there’d still been blood down that drain and spattered everywhere.
Fine, I’d never gotten much from blood before, not in the way it had happened tonight, but maybe me conjuring those apparitions was a possibility. Despite the wards. Somehow.
The other thing… I took a few steps back and away from Lucifer. He had brought us to the lawn by the crossroads. His eyes were impossibly shimmery, impossibly blue even in the darkness. They were full of magic, magic that also rippled around him.
“Why did you suddenly show up?” I asked.
He was really…beautiful. And maybe I shouldn’t have asked my question with that harsh undertone.
“You test me, Nelly, you really do.”
He closed the distance between us and once more gathered me into his arms as I just stared, mesmerized by that boiling, bubbling power just beneath his skin.
As he touched me, I felt that power like wind, like a small storm that died after a moment. I saw silver in the night and realized he was currently holding me wrapped in his arms and also circling me with his wings.
I gaped. They were massive. They were beautiful.
Not white, not gray, but pearlescent silver that caught whatever light the night had to offer and reflected it a thousand times.
They shimmered faintly in the darkness, glowing.
I had the immediate, desperate longing to see them in the daylight, even if I thought they might be blinding then.
Without conscious thought I reached out, but at the last moment, I pulled back. Those wings were nothing a mortal should touch. They were something more, something greater. Too perfect. My touch might ruin them, taint them.
“It’s all right, babe,” Lucifer whispered against my hair. “You can touch them.”
“No…no, it’s fine. I really didn’t mean to.”
Lucifer growled. “Touch my damn wings, you thick-headed man.”
“I don’t want to touch your wings.” Honestly, the words just came out of my mouth without my brain giving the okay. Had to be the adrenaline.
“Nelly, so help me. Just touch them already. I know you want to.”
No. No and no. He was not taking that tone with me. I’d just been abducted, chained up, about to be tortured or possibly murdered, and I did not need Lucifer’s fucking attitude just because I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to.
“I am not touching your wings, Beelzebug, so get over it.”
Laughter echoed toward us from behind that screen of perfect starlight woven into feathers and bone. Lucifer pulled his wings back, but only slightly, and he made no move at all to let me go.
“I do not see what is funny about Nelly being obstinate, Trony,” Lucifer said.
The angel stood on the lawn in a pink sweatsuit and heels.
“If you don’t see that, I really cannot help you. Tiamat called and said you were on your way. Why didn’t you chain the human to your bed to begin with?”
Here. I was right fucking here, and they were talking as if I wasn’t. The two of them could just shut right the fuck up.
I pushed myself away from Lucifer and left them standing there with his magnificent wings shimmering like something made from dreams and starlight.
“You’re not tying me up, and I’m going home now. I’ve had a night. Don’t try to stop me.”
I raised a finger at the Devil. The gesture would’ve made for a better warning if I hadn’t been trembling. From the adrenaline.
Trony turned to look at me. “Did you get hit in the head or something?”
“Enough.”
The magic Lucifer laced his voice with was exquisite.
I could sense the control behind it as well as the power, power the likes of which I had never felt…
unless I counted earlier in the night, that glimpse of whatever had happened when Crazy Motherfucker Mitch had pressed his clammy lips against mine.
My legs trembled as a result of that one word out of the Devil’s mouth, but that didn’t matter, because he strode toward me, wings out, and picked me up so I was in his arms and pressed against his chest. Again.
He looked me right in the eye as he spoke.
“No one is tying you up against your wishes. You had a night indeed, you are home, and do not ever run away from me again, or I will have to think of creative consequences.” He bumped the tip of his wing against the back of my head and smirked when I gaped at him in disbelief.
“Can I go break into his apartment and get a few clothes?” Metatron asked. “Wearing the clothes you got abducted in a second time really ruins your style.”
Lucifer waved a hand at her in a regal gesture. “Go right ahead, Trony. Feel free to throw out his mismatched pajamas. He’ll sleep naked from now on.”
He proceeded to carry me toward the house. The next chance I got to look back over his shoulder, Trony had vanished. She wouldn’t really break into my place…or would she?
“For your information, my pajamas are not mismatched, the matching pieces were just in the laundry. And I’ll sleep clothed, thank you very much.”
“No.”
I ground my teeth. Oh, the nerve of him. “Why did you show up in Crazy Motherfucker Mitch’s basement to begin with? And also, I have to give Christine a statement and I need to make sure the smith’s okay. Fuck. I didn’t even ask the guy his name.”
Lucifer growled again, then made his wings vanish in a whoosh of air as we reached the front door.
“That would be a hard no, because you are not going back to that place again. I’ll consider accompanying you to the police department in a day or so.
” He pushed the door open and carried me across the threshold like a bride in an old movie.
I eyed the doorframe. “Lionel, you are not grabbing that doorframe.”
Well, now I had to. As soon as my fingers connected, they slid right off. “What—did you enchant the doorframe to be slippery? How mature.”
Lucifer sighed. “Just do as I tell you for once. That would be very mature indeed.”
“I’m a professional necromancer and I don’t need to act maturely. Tell me why you showed up in that basement. Came to feast on Mitch’s evil vibes?”
Lucifer kicked the door closed behind us. “I came to get you back, because difficult as you are, you chose to leave my bed in the middle of the night for reasons that are beyond me. I wouldn’t have it.”
“I left because I wanted to leave, like I have been trying to ever since you started pretending I was your boyfriend. I wanted to leave before you got tired of me and kicked me to the curb in the morning.”
Had I said that last bit out loud? Oh. Oh no. That wasn’t good. Showing an immortal your weaknesses really wasn’t a smart move.
Lucifer kept on walking, but he said nothing. He walked through the fireplace room and the ballroom and up the stairs. Everything was still dark, and it was odd how familiar the interplay of shadow and light here was to me already.
Lucifer made it all the way to his room, where he finally put me down right in front of the bed. He made one of his strange Devil noises before he spoke.
“You owed me for taking in Soul. You said so when you gave her to me. It created a debt bond or whatever you care to call it. I could’ve called in the favor and forced you to repay it with the force of that bond.”
I swallowed and looked off to the side, out the glass wall. Fuck. So that was what this was about. He wanted…he wanted… I had no idea what the fuck he wanted from me.
“So, what, I’m your slave now?”
“Have you ever considered not saying the first thing that comes into your head out loud? Count to five, reevaluate, then talk. I’m just saying, it might improve your social life.”
Like the Devil was in any position to advise me on my social life. Which was nonexistent. He didn’t need to know that, though.
“Oh, fuck off.”
“Five seconds, Nelly. Just give it five seconds the next time around. In any case, I didn’t want to use what you owed me to bed you—something I have wanted to do ever since I found you by the river, getting soaked in zombie brains.”
Okay? Okay…I’d never have guessed that.
“Well, you did get to bed me, if that’s what you want to call it, so what I owe you is done and over with. And I’m happy to walk away before you feel the need to toss me aside, so just let me. Walk away.”
His eyes brightened.
“You’re right, there is nearly nothing left of the debt you owed.
You’re also wrong. This is not over and done with.
I only want you more for having had you once, and I won’t let you walk away from this, from me.
Which is why I came for you.” He narrowed his eyes and I felt his magic ripple, though I saw nothing other than his eyes in the darkness.
“Would you like to make a deal, Lionel Hawkes? The only person who gets to kick you to the curb is me, and until that happens, you let me call you my boyfriend.”
I licked my lips. I wanted this. Fuck. The aching in my belly, in my balls, told me very clearly that I wanted this. Maybe not Lucifer’s attitude or even his damn snark, but…this.
“Okay.” I completely forgot to count to five before I said it.
He raised one brow. “What? Just like that?”
I shrugged. “Yeah.” Maybe it wasn’t smart, but I’d had a night.
Lucifer’s arms came around my waist, and the fire-and-spice scent of him welcomed me like a blanket warmed by a lover’s breath. “We’ll seal the deal with a kiss, Nelly.”
I froze. “Umm…”
“What?”
“I should brush my teeth.”
“Why? I don’t mind.”
“Mitch tried to kiss me. He kissed me.”
He was silent. I tried counting to see if he was actually doing what he’d suggested I do. I got to thirteen.
“Let’s seal it, then I’ll wash you and we can go to sleep.”
If the adrenaline hadn’t been so rapidly fading, I probably would have asked about that washing part, but the sleep part of that statement distracted me. I really was tired.
“Fine.” I tilted my head up toward him.
“Come here.”
He reached up from my waist to cradle my head, pressing his lips against mine. Without really meaning to, I opened my mouth to him.
Lucifer took that as an invitation, and he soon filled me, giving me a taste of him, that wonderful fire-and-spice flavor. I shivered, not from cold or fear, but from his touch, his lips on mine, his tongue in my mouth.
Before I’d had enough, Lucifer pulled back. “That’s enough to seal it. Now, take off your clothes.”
“What?!”
He rolled his eyes. Lucifer the fucking Devil his own damn self had the nerve to roll his eyes at me. I’d had a night, damn it.
“I’m your boyfriend, and I want your clothes off.”
He said that with a good amount of glee. Gods, but he was so damn smug.
“So not part of the deal.”
“I’m not letting you sleep in them, and the smell of that place still clings to them, so Trony can make a bonfire out of them for all I care. Either you take them off or I do. Your choice.”
“You’re…you’re just…”
“Your boyfriend?” he said with a sweet, mirthful grin I wanted to kiss off his face. With my fist. Yes, I wanted to kiss that grin off his face with my fist.
“I’m taking them off because they’re dirty. Turn around.”
Lucifer crossed his arms and shook his head in exasperation but turned.
“You had my cock inside you earlier tonight,” he said as I peeled my T-shirt off.
“You asked for that. You came underneath me, and your cum is still sticking to my chest, right where you put it.” I had a hard-on, because the asshole kept narrating all of that.
What was his damn problem? “And before I spread you out underneath me and filled you up, I sealed you with the plug you selected. How curious it is that you fall back on modesty now.”
“Oh, fuck you.” I tossed my jeans and boxers to the ground.
Lucifer turned. “As I said, you will enjoy it more the other way around.”
He looked down at my erection, smirked, and peeled his shirt off. Then his pants.
Fuck, this was too much like earlier, and my cock was having a Pavlovian reaction to what Lucifer was doing, and unless I was mistaken, that was exactly what the Devil wanted.
Oh, how I hated him. Would he push me against the wall of the shower stall and shove himself deep inside me?
Nope, couldn’t think about anything like that, it was too much.
But damn, he was probably strong enough to hold me, and maybe if he brought his wings out, they would catch the droplets of water, and his feathers would stroke my skin and—
“Nelly,” he said, and I tasted the magic in his voice. He had my attention and held it with the iron force in his sapphire eyes, even as he undid his pants and took them off. “Tell me exactly what you want tonight.”
I felt his magic reach for me and wind itself around me like silk sheltering a butterfly. But it was just that, something that wrapped itself around my will without ever exerting the force I knew he could have used to make me do whatever he wanted.
I swallowed and licked my lips. Tell me, the magic whispered, making the tip of my tongue tingle. “I want…I want you to hold me. I want to see your wings under the water and feel them when you push me against the wall and fuck me.”
The Devil walked toward me, naked, beautiful like night and shadow and perfect black obsidian birthed from the earth. He cupped my chin.
“All right,” he said, and kissed me.