Chapter 7 #2
Julian looked stricken.
“You’ve got to get the hell out of there,” Alex said. “You can come here. You know that, right? Daniel, too.”
“I know,” Nicolas said. He couldn’t now, though, could he?
There were kidnapped kids to find. He needed to go back behind the wall and see if he could find out where they were being held.
“I’d like to send Daniel. I want him out of there.
” Whether Daniel would actually go and leave him there alone, he didn’t know. But he had to try.
“And you?” Nathan asked, looking resigned, like he already knew what Nicolas would say.
“I need to stay and find the kids, don’t I?”
“No.” It came from Ashmedai.
Nicolas blinked at him. “I have to.”
“No.” Gripping Nicolas’s sleeve, he forced him to turn, backing him up against the table and looming over him. “No! Not you. Not safe.”
“It’s okay!” He pushed at Ashmedai, who was as immovable as stone. “Ashmedai, stop, I’ll be okay!”
“No! Mine. Mine.” He shook Nicolas hard, his claws tearing the fabric of his shirt.
Nicolas’s hands shot up, slipping into the darkness of the hood and cradling Ashmedai’s face.
His roars trailed off, becoming growly whimpers, and he let himself be pulled forward until all Nicolas saw was darkness and the bright of his eyes.
Their foreheads touched, and the orange disappeared. His eyes had closed.
“I’ll be okay,” he swore.
“No,” Ashmedai rumbled. “Can’t know that. Hurt you once. Hurt you again.”
“I can handle it.”
Ashmedai growled again, his hands tightening on Nicolas’s waist.
“It’s temporary,” he promised. “I find out where the kids are being held, and then I’m out of there for good.
” He’d known his time with the guild was limited after meeting Ashmedai, and if he sent Daniel to the Sentinels, they would both demand he leave the guild as soon as he could.
He’d never been good at telling his little brother no, and he had a feeling it would be the same with Ashmedai.
Ashmedai opened his eyes and backed away slightly, letting Nicolas see the rest of the room again. “How long?”
“Nic, you don’t have to do this,” Julian said softly. “Surely we can find another way.”
“This is the best way,” Nicolas said, turning around. They were all watching him, and he tried to ignore the way his face heated with embarrassment. “You don’t have any other allies inside, do you?”
The group exchanged glances. “Not really,” Nathan admitted. “Daniel—”
“A great big hell no,” Nicolas interjected.
Nathan smiled faintly. “—and maybe Cyrus, but I haven’t spoken to him in months. I have no idea what side he falls on now. At one time, he disagreed with Sloan’s decisions. After the whippings, though, who knows how he might’ve changed.”
“On the surface, nothing’s changed with him,” Nicolas said.
He didn’t spend much time with Cyrus—Cyrus didn’t spend time with anyone, really.
He kept to himself, didn’t even hunt with a squad up until recently.
Sloan had added him to one of his favored squads, probably in the hope of guiding Cyrus down the ‘right’ path.
“Truthfully, we all mostly keep to ourselves these days. It’s too dangerous to be overheard saying the wrong thing.
Most of us just try to keep our mouths shut altogether. ”
“Charming,” Talon drawled.
Ashmedai tugged at his ripped sleeve. “Leave. Leave.”
He couldn’t stand to hear the desperation in his raspy voice.
“I will,” he promised without second thought.
He’d been indecisive for so long, the sudden conviction in his own voice surprised him.
“I swear I will. Let me try to help those kids first, okay? And then I’ll leave.
Daniel and I will disappear from the guild as soon as the kids are free. ”
A mournful note left Ashmedai, and Nicolas felt like he was being torn in two. He knew Ashmedai didn’t like it, but he’d just have to have a little faith in Nicolas. Even though they barely knew each other.
“Maybe we should shift gears for a moment and help shed some light on what’s happening between you two,” Nathan suggested.
Nicolas flushed. He didn’t want to talk about what was happening between him and Ashmedai. It felt too intimate to share with anyone else. “I don’t know…”
“He called you his,” Nathan said. “I take it that wasn’t the first time, since you didn’t react to it.”
Heat blazed on Nicolas’s face. He couldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “No, it wasn’t.”
“Ashmedai, do you understand why?”
“No. Just know. Mine.”
“Our best guess,” Talon said, rolling his eyes at whatever he was about to say next, “is that it’s some kind of divine intervention.”
Nicolas’s thoughts screeched to a halt. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t that. “What?”
“This has happened far too many times to be coincidence,” Nathan added. “Each one of the demons here felt the same way about us as Ashmedai feels about you.”
“Which is what exactly? How do they feel?” Nicolas asked, needing more of an explanation than Ashmedai could easily give him right now.
“It’s all-consuming,” the one with the long blond hair said, looking fondly at Ira. “All we can think about, all the time. Wanting them, wanting to be with them.”
Jesus, that was… a lot. He just met this demon two nights ago. Sex was one thing, but belonging to someone else freaked him out a little bit.
To Ashmedai, Shadrach said, “You want to touch him, taste him, fuck him, protect him, bite him, hear his laugh and make him scream and make him smell like you so every demon for miles around knows who he belongs to, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Ashmedai rasped. His gaze caressed Nicolas’s profile, heat blazing across his skin.
“Welcome to the club,” Storm said. “It’s very exclusive.”
“You’re saying God is bringing us all together,” Nicolas blurted. He couldn’t wrap his head around it. It was one thing to know Ashmedai thought of him as his, but divine intervention? That was something else entirely. Did they have no say in this?
“I had visions about all of this for months before it happened,” Ira said. “I knew I would meet Wolf before I did. I knew Alex would wind up with Talon. I don’t know everything, but I’ve seen enough, I think, to map out the trajectory.”
“Which is what?” Nicolas asked.
Ira smiled.
“He won’t say,” Talon said lightly. “We’ve all asked. Multiple times. In multiple ways.”
Ira cast Talon an exasperated smile, then told Nicolas, “There are some things I don’t feel comfortable sharing. The future feels tenuous.”
“You always say you’ve never had a vision that didn’t come to pass,” Talon argued, and Nicolas got the feeling this was an argument they’d had many times, “so it’s not so tenuous at all, is it?”
“I don’t want to risk anything,” Ira said firmly. “That future-you doesn’t know what’s going to happen until it happens. Which means I can’t tell you now.”
Talon’s head fell back with a frustrated sigh.
“So, you’re telling me Ashmedai and I were…
fated to be together?” Ashmedai’s orange eyes softened.
Nicolas couldn’t explain how he could tell.
It was in the minute dip of his hooded head, the curve of his neck, the wideness of his eyes.
There were certainly worse people to be fated to, even if the idea of being fated to anyone gave him the willies.
They were supposed to have free will, weren’t they?
He didn’t really know anything about the sin eater—except that he wanted him. Felt safe with him.
“As far as we can tell, yes,” Julian said. “You can feel it, too, right? I could. Something about Valac set me at ease right away. It barely occurred to me that he was a demon I might not ought to trust.”
Valac beamed at that.
“Trying to deny that connection is awful,” Alex said. “I had horrible nightmares when I tried.”
“Being away from each other is hell,” Shadrach agreed, tugging Isaac closer.
Nicolas scrubbed his hands over his face.
He couldn’t think about all of this right now.
Everything they said sounded right, deep down, but it didn’t matter.
He had to focus on finding the Alvarez siblings, and that meant he needed to put this budding thing between him and Ashmedai on the back burner for a little while.
Besides, he needed a little time to come to terms with all of this. It was too much.
“I can’t—okay, I need to go back to HQ today,” he said, and Julian shot him a sympathetic smile, like he knew Nicolas was really changing the subject because he was too overwhelmed to hear any more.
“Take one of our burner phones,” Talon said. “Program all of our numbers into it. Leave it at home when you go into HQ so there’s no risk of them finding it, and contact us the minute you find anything.”
Nicolas nodded distractedly. “Any chance you have an extra one I could give my brother? He needs allies, too.”
“Of course,” Nathan said earnestly.
“Speaking of stuff,” Shadrach said, “Ashmedai, there’s a box in your apartment for you. I know you like the whole ‘evil monster’ look you’ve got going on, but you might want to modernize a bit.”
Nicolas glanced between them, unable to hide his curiosity.
Ashmedai had an apartment? And they’d ordered him modern clothing?
He could scarcely imagine it. Did that mean he would have to take the hood off?
What did he really look like under there?
A brief shot of jealousy hit him at the thought of the other guys here getting to see his face. Was Nicolas the only one he hid from?
Ashmedai huffed noncommittally.
Nathan fetched two brand new prepaid phones, still in the packages, and wrote down everyone’s phone numbers for him to plug into the contacts list later. Nicolas had already saved Julian’s new number in his phone under ‘Tony’s Pizza.’
He didn’t realize they’d all gone quiet until he looked up from the plastic packaging and found them all staring at him.
“How are you going to find the kids?” Julian asked.
Nicolas had an idea. He’d have to get closer to Sloan, make himself trustworthy. It would take some time, some groveling, and a lot of humiliation. But hopefully it would be worth it in the long run.
“I’d rather not say,” he said reluctantly. “The less you know, the better.”
Julian sighed. “Fine. Take care of yourself, okay? And just so you know, Ashmedai has agreed to stop killing paladins for a little while. We’re going to make it look like we’ve hunted him down and killed him like Sloan wanted.
Hopefully once he sees the killings have stopped, he’ll release the kids, and then you can just get the hell out of there. ”
Nicolas smiled wanly. He didn’t have much room in his life for hope these days.