Chapter 23
Mason
Necrichor dripped over the back of my hand like black sludge, slicking my skin with its obsidian shards. My own life blood, blackened. Corrupted. I jammed the knife farther into the demon’s neck, watching him struggle against the feeling of starfire searing his veins.
He was stronger than a typical demon, because of the golden ichor he’d drained from the blood of the Aiglen angel laying at my feet, but not a match for my blade or my strength. The red glow faded from his irises while I watched, then I threw him on the ground, my nose full of the smell of death.
I’d been too late to save the angel.
He was lifeless on the cold ground, golden blood spilled around his broken body, black wings mangled beneath him. He’d clearly fought for his life. But Aiglens were far less powerful on Earth than they were in Heaven because of the lack of neon here, and he’d been severely outnumbered.
I had no idea why he chose to fall in the first place, but I pitied him for it, in a way.
In Heaven, he would’ve hated me. Hated my reckless and volatile nature, my inability to control my own power.
But on Earth, he needed me. For all the same reasons he might’ve hated me in the past, he needed me now.
His decision to fall, to turn his wings black, to try and survive with such a low neon content in the air, put him in an immense danger that I was mostly immune to.
I wished I knew why any Aiglen ever chose to fall. There had to be reasons, desperate reasons, maybe. Because they were demon-bait here. The ultimate, golden prize.
They had the highest concentration of ichor in their blood out of the three angelic aspects, and that was what demons on Earth hungered for. A taste of that gold-limned power, poured into us by the stars through neon-rich breaths.
Most of my job was hunting down demons as they hunted down Aiglens, desperate to drain their ichor and infuse themselves with it. Despite the fact that ichor degraded into necrichor once it entered a demon’s bloodstream, it still carried many of the same strength-enhancing effects.
I took one last look at the angel’s face, the gold smudged on his split lip, then I lit his body on fire.
Brilliant crimson flames licked over his skin, burning away the neon as it left him.
It must’ve been terrifying to get weaker as your neon levels dropped, to become less and less capable of fighting back as a demon slowly suffocated you while simultaneously draining your blood. They had methods for doing it, contraptions designed to restrict angels once they’d captured them.
Sometimes they kept the angels alive for weeks, slowly depriving them of neon, draining their ichor, letting it replenish before doing it again.
And again and again, if things went according to their plan.
But a Thrausian usually found and killed the demons before they could repeat the process too many times.
It was times like this, where it was quick and messy and sloppy, that were more difficult to find and stop before the angel died.
But it was over now.
I left the building, my mind consumed by one thought only.
Dakota.
I was done giving her space to breathe without me there. She was mine, willingly or unwillingly.
I’d been busy with demon shit the past few days, so hopefully she’d appreciated her last taste of freedom. It was all I was ever going to give her.
I could admit that I’d been pissed at her on the beach the last time I’d seen her. Pissed she was always trying to push me away, to hide from me, to put distance between us that wasn’t supposed to be there. Maybe I shouldn’t have let her leave. Maybe I should’ve forced her to stay with me.
But that hadn’t ended well for me in the past. It was one of the reasons he left me in the end, among many others.
I pulled out my phone to text her.
Me : Where are you?
It was the middle of the night, so I hoped she was safe and sound in her bed, sleeping peacefully. I knew what her bedroom looked like now, and I liked that. She had her journal on her nightstand, her locket draped over the surface, along with a little jar of shark teeth next to it.
There were other things, too. Random shit. Her black boots. Hair ties everywhere. Extra blankets piled on the bed. It was a small room, but I liked thinking about her in there.
I wasn’t sure she understood just how infatuated I was with her, or how thinking about another person touching her made my control splinter—almost fracture.
I’d kill anyone who touched her. Fuck. My blood was heating at the thought of it.
Hands on her waist, her ass, between her legs, on her fucking throat.
I’m the only one allowed to do that to her.
I flexed my fingers, then clenched them into fists. It was almost a fantasy, thinking about how I’d murder the person touching Dakota in my mind. Brutally, violently. God help the human male who thought he stood a chance against me.
But she wouldn’t do that, would she? Let someone else touch her like that? Hurt her like that?
No. I didn’t think so.
I saw in her eyes how much she hated it, all the things she let me do to her.
Yet, I could see how much she loved it at the same time.
My dick twitched, remembering her little body fighting me in the ocean, below the waves.
Torn between trying to get away from me, trying to hurt me, and letting me make her feel a high she couldn’t get anywhere else.
No drugs. No alcohol. Just raw fear.
That’d get you more fucked up than anything.
Lungs burning, vision going dark, head swimming, body losing strength, heart beating so fast you thought it’d give out. Nothing else felt like that.
I wondered how far she’d let me go, how far she wanted me to go.
How bad would you let me hurt you?
Could you come like that? With me shoving your head under the water?
She’d told me she wanted me to hurt her, to force her, and I wanted her to clarify exactly what that meant. In the ocean, I hadn’t waited for her to explain shit to me; I’d just dragged her down and made her think I was about to drown her. But now I wanted to know.
I wanted to know exactly what she thought about with her hand between her thighs, what fucked up things filled her beautiful head.
All her secrets, all her bad thoughts. I want to know everything about you, own every truth you hide from everyone else.
I wanted to own everything.
Her pain, her pleasure, her mind, her body, her goddamn soul.
I thought about her in the ocean again, all the precious air leaving her lungs and floating up to the surface far above our heads in a flurry of bubbles. The way she’d fought me. Nails scratching, body thrashing, chest spasming. Like she was fighting for her life.
Perfect and exposed and helpless. Trapped in a void with me alone.
My phone vibrated, snapping me out of my violent fantasies.
Dakota : I’m nowhere
Me : Can I pick you up?
Dakota : No
Me : Pack a bag. I’m stealing you for the rest of the night
Dakota : I said no, Mason. You never fucking listen to me
I understood what she was saying, I just didn’t care.
My dick was hard and I missed her—I needed her.
She could keep me from the edge that would eventually destroy me.
She didn’t know how rare that was. Only one other person had ever been able to bring me back from fracturing, and he did it with his own angelic powers.
She just was.
She was enough. Completely on her own.
Just the thought of her.
Mine.
It was something about that mysterious little tie her soul had on mine.
I flipped my keys around my finger, then unlocked my car and hopped in.
I kept the windows down while I drove towards the area she lived, cool air blowing through the car and soothing my skin.
My torso was bare again, because of my wings.
They were incompatible with shirts; if I wore one, it’d just get shredded when my wings came out.
Pulling off the main road and into the lot, I flicked my headlights off. Dakota lived a little ways down the road, and I parked my car just next to her trailer. The porch light was still off.
I got out of the car and shut the door quietly, then headed up the wooden steps to her front door, raising my knuckles to knock a couple times. After a minute of silence on her side, I got my phone out.
Me : Answer the door or I’m picking the lock
I gave her three minutes. Three minutes, and one additional courtesy knock.
And then I went back to my car, grabbed the lock pick from the glovebox, and shoved the metal into the lock on her front door.
Less than sixty seconds later, the deadbolt slid free and I quietly pushed her door open, then shut it behind me.
It was pitch black inside the trailer, but my eyes were good enough that I could see her blurry form just as she ran at me from the living room, knife glinting in her hand.
She slashed the blade through the air and I caught it with my hand, the sharp metal slicing my palm. I flung it out of her grip, tackling her to the ground, the thin carpet providing zero padding for our landing.
Dakota cried out with the impact, body writhing below mine.
It felt so good to touch her again. So right.
I was grateful for the darkness, so she couldn’t see all the ichor in my blood all over my hand right now.
“You’re insane,” she hissed. “You are fucking sick in the head.”
“You just tried to stab me.” I wiped my hand on my stomach, pinning her chest with my forearm.
“Yeah, because you broke into my house!”
“I warned you I was going to do it. If you didn’t want me to pick the lock you should’ve opened the door.”
“What about if I didn’t want you to come in at all, huh?” Her green eyes were wide, flashing angrily through the darkness. Her hair was like silk around her head, making a little halo on the floor. It was almost ironic that I was the angel out of the two of us. She was so much better than me.
“Then that’s too bad.” I leaned closer to her, feeling her shallow breathing on my lips.
“Fuck you,” she bit out, but her body was softening. Her breathing grew strained, choppy, like she was about to cry, but she was trying to brave. She didn’t want me to see it.
“Fuck me? I missed you, baby.”
“You can’t just keep saying that. You can’t say you miss me when it’s not even true.”
“Is that what you think? It’s not true?” I leaned into her, eliminating all space between us. “You’re wrong. All I do is think about you.”
There was a moment of quietness between us, and Dakota shut her eyes.
I shifted my position to cradle the side of her face with my palm. Her eyelashes were fluttering slightly, brushing her cheeks, her brows furrowed. Every tiny shift in her expression dug her deeper into my chest. It looked like she might’ve been crying earlier and I hated it.
“Mason,” she whimpered. “Don’t do this to me.”
“I have to. I have to do it.” I moved my head lower, running my lips over hers. You can’t leave me. She was so soft, like flower petals. “You’re mine.”
“I’m nobody’s.”
I sank my teeth into her plush lower lip, biting like I was trying to draw blood.
Maybe I wanted to. Maybe I wanted to fucking destroy her, mess her up so bad she’d never be able to get away from me.
We’d be tangled; viciously, painfully intertwined.
She’d probably hate me then, but as long as she was here, I didn’t care.
Dakota whined when I finally released her lip from between my teeth.
“You know that’s not true.” I put my palm on the front of her throat, curling my fingers around her neck. Her pulse was so quick. Do I make you nervous? Do you like it? “Did you pack a bag?”
“Why do you want me to pack a bag?” she asked, her tongue darting out onto her pink lower lip to soothe the sting of my bite.
“Because I’m bringing you to my apartment for tonight.”
She was shaking her head before I’d even finished speaking. My fingers squeezed on her throat, pressing against her delicate skin.
“I’m a mess,” she whispered, almost like she was scared to admit it. Her voice tripped a little on the words.
“I like messy,” I whispered back, feeling her heartbeat thrumming under the pad of my thumb, like a butterfly’s wings. “You know I’d do anything for you?”
“Even let me go?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Not that. Go pack a bag.”
“I hate you,” she said through her teeth, her sadness paving the way for her anger. “You want to ruin me, to take over my whole life, and you don’t seem to care what I want. You just take.”
“I’m sorry.” I wasn’t, but it felt like the right thing to say.
“Get off of me.”
“Will you pack?” I shifted my thumb to press on her jaw, to angle her head towards mine.
Even in the darkness, I could see the glisten of vulnerability in her eyes. She wanted to hide it, to toughen herself against me, but I knew it was a lie. Some part of her, some deeply buried and broken part, wanted this. Needed this.
Does it feel good, being held down and forced to take it?
She finally nodded.
I rolled off her and she sprung up to her feet, darting down the hall to her bedroom and slamming the door shut behind her. Rustling sounds were coming through the thin walls after a minute, and I assumed that was her gathering clothes or something. Good girl.
Flicking on the overhead light in her kitchen, I surveyed the damage she’d done to me with the knife.
The gash on my palm and fingers was deep, but already healing. Golden-streaked blood had dripped all up my forearm, and was smeared on my abs from when I’d wiped my hand off. I spotted the knife on the floor, noticing the golden glint there too.
If she kept using that knife on me, she’d eventually figure it out.
I turned the knob for the kitchen sink, rinsing my hand and wrist before grabbing a paper towel to wipe off my stomach. I washed the knife too, then flipped it shut and slipped it in my pocket.