Chapter 14 #3
“Oh, you know.” Daphne gave an effortless shrug and set the empty glass down on the floor. “Threw myself off the top of the Delian Temple of Apollo.”
Sam sucked in a sharp breath. “You—threw yourself? Off the top of the temple?”
Daphne turned and finally looked at Sam. Her eyes were grave, her smile a touch wry. “Dramatic, I’ll admit. But I was young and stupid and in love and I couldn’t fathom a life without Calliope.”
Okay—“But— the top ?”
Daphne snorted. “If you’re asking whether I lived?
” She shook her head and Sam’s stomach kept finding new depths to which to sink.
“No, I didn’t. But I did survive.” A grimace graced her face, lips twisting, brow, too.
“As I lay dying on the rocks, Lucifer appeared, not to save me, no. But to make me another offer. This is what he did, he told me. He made deals with humans in exchange for their souls, and if I pledged myself to him, if I agreed to do as he bade, upon the thousandth soul I collected for him, he would return me mine. So, on the brink of death, with blood on my lips and spite in my heart, I signed my second deal with the devil.”
One thousand. Sam’s stomach hardened. “How many have you collected so far?”
“A lot.”
Sam swallowed. “That’s not a number.”
Daphne was quiet, staring down at her claw-tipped fingers like they were still novel to her. “You know, after all this time, I still don’t know exactly what a soul does. I mean, I don’t have one, so by all accounts, you’d think I couldn’t feel guilt, right?”
Daphne balled one hand into a fist until blood seeped through her fingers and dripped down her wrist, scarlet splattering onto the parquet floor. Sam’s heart rose into her throat.
“What are you doing?” She snatched Daphne’s hand. “ Stop. ”
One by one, she unfurled Daphne’s fingers.
Four halfmoon cuts where Daphne’s claws had pierced her palm disappeared before her eyes, the flesh knitting itself together.
Bloodied but no longer oozing blood, scabs not even forming where the wounds had been.
Just perfect, unblemished skin. If it wasn’t for the blood, Sam would’ve never known Daphne had hurt herself.
“It’s desperation, you know,” Daphne said, looking away from the palm Sam was still cradling, and straight at her.
“How we find our … marks. We don’t just go around making deals with anyone and everyone.
That would be ill- advised. We sense desperation.
I sensed it for the first time in a girl who was sick.
She was nineteen and she desperately didn’t want to die before she’d lived a full life.
And I … afterward, I was racked with guilt.
I couldn’t do it, be the instrument of someone’s eternal damnation.
So I tried other means of escaping my contract.
Increasingly creative means.” With the tip of her finger, Daphne traced just below the crease of her palm where her claws had rent her skin.
“But I learned no fall, no matter from how great a height; no bullet, no matter how well aimed; no fire was hot enough to kill me. I. Can’t. Die.”
Maybe she was in shock, body incapable of churning up an appropriate reaction, but of all the things Sam had learned, this surprised her the least. It barely fazed her. Daphne was a demon; dying seemed so … so human .
Daphne took her hand back. She plucked the glass off the floor and stood. Carefully sidestepping the small puddle of blood, she crossed the room to the bar.
“When my many, varied attempts to blot out my sorry, immortal existence proved fruitless, it was back to the old grindstone. After a few deals, it got easier. You can only see the worst in people for so long before you stop caring. And I mean, the worst .” She uncapped the bottle of bourbon and poured several fingers into the glass.
“ I just want to be rich. I just want to be CEO. I just want him to want me. Everyone claims to want just this one thing.” She scoffed.
“Two millennia, Sam. Two millennia I brokered deals and collected souls, and in all that time not one person abstained from making all six wishes. Six self-seeking wishes. After five hundred years, I stopped thinking of myself as an instrument of damnation and instead started to think of it all as … divine retribution. You said it.”
Daphne rested the glass against her cheek. “When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Everyone gets six wishes, six opportunities to exercise temperance, and not one has.”
“That’s … disheartening.”
Daphne laughed as she swirled the whisky in the glass. “People suck, it’s true.” She pinned Sam with a hard stare. “And you … you were supposed to be like everyone else. Suck like everyone else.”
Sam’s pulse fluttered in her throat.
“You were desperate, and you wanted a girl. Do you know how many times I’ve heard that before?
” Daphne rolled her eyes. “If I had a nickel. But you …” She scoffed.
“Damn you, Samantha Cooper, you had to go and be decent .” Her lips curled, teeth still sharp.
“It didn’t even occur to you to make the most obvious wish, did it?
I wish Hannah was madly in love with me.
” She slammed her glass down on the bar.
“Why not , Sam? Why didn’t you just wish for that? ”
“I don’t know.” Sam shook her head a little. “I don’t—”
“Come off it, Sam.” Daphne stalked toward her with a keen, predatory look in her eye. “You’re not stupid. You know .”
“Okay. Fine. I thought about it. Is that what you want to hear? I did. I thought about it, but …” She stared down at her hands and picked at the ragged edge of one of her cuticles.
She shrugged. “It wouldn’t have been right.
Taking someone’s choice away like that. It wouldn’t have been real, and I … I wanted it to be real.”
Daphne sank down onto the chaise lounge beside Sam with one leg tucked beneath her, close enough that their knees touched and that the dark, rich vanilla scent that clung to her teased Sam’s nose. “You wanted to know how many souls I had collected? Nine hundred and ninety-nine, Sam.”
Nine hundred and ninety—Her breath hitched in the back of her throat. “That makes me—”
“Lucky number one thousand, yes. You were supposed to be.” Her lips flattened into a line, her eyes solemn as she stared. “I was going to collect your soul, and I would be free.” She shook her head sadly. “Whatever that even means for someone like me.”
Were supposed to be. Was going to. Would be. Sam’s brain snagged on the words. “You’re talking like I won’t still be.”
She made a soft noise that if Sam didn’t know any better, sounded pained. “Sam—”
“You said everyone uses all six wishes. I still have one wish left.”
“And you and I both know you’re not going to use it.” Daphne’s eyes flashed defiantly, blue eclipsed by black. “Even if you tried, I wouldn’t let you. I won’t grant another wish for you, Sam.” Her shoulders rose and fell in a helpless shrug. “I can’t .”
Sam’s heart pounded painfully inside her throat. “Why not?”
Daphne’s eyes dropped to her mouth, then rose again to meet her eyes, and slowly, giving Sam plenty of time to back away, she leaned in. Sam didn’t move, she barely breathed, held herself so still she nearly shook, her muscles all but quivering, a tense string just waiting, begging to be plucked.
Stopping right at the last second, a hairsbreadth from Sam’s lips, so close she could taste the bite of bourbon on her breath, Daphne sighed sweetly.
“Call it a crisis of conscience, I guess,” she whispered, erasing the distance between them and capturing Sam’s lips.
She let herself get lost in it, the feeling of Daphne’s soft, plush mouth moving against hers.
It was sweet, sweeter than she had expected, maybe even the sweetest kiss she’d ever had.
Sweet, until with an enviably steady hand, Daphne cupped her jaw, claw-tipped fingers twining in her hair, what remained of Sam’s breath vanishing when Daphne’s tongue swept against the seam of her lips, forked .
Everything south of Sam’s belly button went molten and—it was pure impulse.
Without breaking the kiss, she rose onto her knees and threw one leg over Daphne’s, straddling her thigh.
She gripped her shoulders, digging blunt human nails into Daphne’s neck, and crushed herself closer. It wasn’t close enough.
Daphne broke away with a gasp, the opposite of what she wanted. “We shouldn’t.”
“Why not?” Her lips burned with the ghost of Daphne’s kiss. “Don’t you want—”
“ Shut up. ” Daphne’s hand tightened in Sam’s hair, drawing a gasp from her lips. The nails— claws of her other hand pricked at the skin of Sam’s thigh through her pants. She glowered up at her with black eyes. “You’re grieving and I am trying to be nice.”
Grieving? Sam had spent the better part of her relationship grieving the relationship. She was so sick of mourning, so tired of feeling sad.
“What if I don’t want you to be nice?” Sam’s cheeks prickled with heat as she held Daphne’s stare and made a point of rocking her hips forward. “What if I want—”
Daphne dragged her down, muffling the words with a brief, biting kiss that stole her breath and made her shiver.
Her heart pounded, blood pumping a potent cocktail of fear and arousal through her when Daphne dragged a razorsharp claw up the front of Sam’s throat all the way from the notch at the top of her breastbone to her chin, tipping Sam’s head back so she could lay a trail of kisses from the corner of her mouth to her jaw.
The hand on Sam’s thigh slid higher and the heat between her legs grew hotter, insistent. Fingers slipped under Sam’s jacket and down the waist of her pants, gripping her ass, pulling their bodies flush, encouraging her to grind harder against Daphne’s thigh.