Chapter 47
Chapter Forty-Seven
Hailey
Syke insisted on buying me ice cream because I was “so brave,” and honestly, I wasn’t going to argue. If a double scoop of cookie dough ice cream assuaged his guilt, then sign me up for extra sprinkles.
We went to an ice cream parlor in the demon district ironically called The Seven Deadly Flavors, and there was a line out the door.
They weren’t all demons either. That was how I knew this place was going to be good.
If you were going to brave the demon district, it was either to get fucked at one of the many nightclubs or eat something truly sinful.
All the flavors were named after the circles of hell in Dante’s Inferno, which was amusing. I went with level three, which was a rich, dark chocolate ice cream with chocolate fudge brownie, covered in a dark chocolate and chili shell. It was a fucking revelation.
“Holy hell,” I mumbled around the mouthful of ice cream that was basically better than any mediocre sex I’d had with a human.
“Good, right?” Syke asked, eating his level one cone, which was marshmallows and bubble gum flavored. “Though I prefer when I make you emit those noises.”
I grinned at him, but it probably wasn’t particularly attractive given the amount of chocolate in my mouth. “There’s still time.”
He groaned, leaning forward to kiss the chocolate from the corner of my mouth.
“When we are off shift, I plan to fuck you for an entire day until you are a puddle of orgasm induced endorphins.” He licked my bottom lip.
“I’m sure I could get Eric and Louis to give me a helping hand. Or two. Or four.”
My orgasm from the elevator was still on my mind, even after getting my face stitched up. “We could pretend that Verano was slow,” I suggested, not even hiding the raw lust on my face.
Syke nipped my lip and pulled back. “Come on, troublemaker. We better get back to the office before we’re fired for fraternization.”
Shit, was that a possibility?
As if he read my mind, he shook his head. “Let them try. There are no rules about being both a pack and a team. There are no rules about not fucking your teammates either, which hasn’t been super tempting until now.”
He opened the car door for me, and I caught his eyes lingering on my wound. He opened his mouth to say something then shook his head, closing the door softly behind me and walking around to the driver’s side.
“Syke, can I ask a question?”
“No, not all demons are as well-endowed as I am. We can’t all be this blessed by Satan himself,” he teased, starting the car and pulling into traffic. I noticed someone had siphoned most of the gas from the car, but at least we still had all four tires.
“Not that, though I’m fully appreciative to whoever created all this.” I waved at his body. He really was a work of art, more sinful than any ice cream. “No, I wondered how you came to work for the Creature Crisis Center.”
His face lost all traces of humor. “Oh. It isn’t a particularly interesting story. It started as a punishment. Five years at the Creature Crisis Center.”
I didn’t know a lot about demon governance, but I knew enough to understand that if you fucked up, they just sent you back to hell. They didn’t make you do community service om the Creature Crisis Center response team.”
I was silent, waiting for him to continue. “I interrupted a feeding. It wasn’t a pleasant one, and the food was in a significant amount of pain. Interrupting a feeding is considered poor form, so they decided that the center was the place for me and my newfound empathy to flourish.”
Frowning, I tried to connect all the dots, making what he said fit with what I’d learned about creature society in the last few weeks. “You interrupted a demon feeding, and they made you do community service.”
He turned to look at me, his face more solemn than I’d ever seen it.
“I didn’t interrupt a demon feeding. I interrupted an angel feeding on a human.
That’s why I got sent to the center, and that was why Mohan didn’t send me back to hell.
It was their mess, and they wanted it swept under the rug before the truth got out to humans. ”
“Angels feed on humans?” I gasped, and everything I knew about creature culture shifted.
Syke nodded. “On their light. They just don’t want humans to know because it’s bad for their image.”
I could only imagine what humans would do if they realized that the “only good creatures” thought of them as a meal. “But you continued after your punishment was over,” I said softly.
He gave me a tight smile. “It was meant to be a punishment, but they gave me a purpose instead.”
I reached over and rested my hand on his thigh. “I’m glad you stayed.”
He lifted my fingers to his lips. “Me too.”
* * *
When I made it back to the Creature Crisis Center with Syke, I was surprised to see everyone was still there, even Eric. They were all sitting at the big, round table in the common room with papers spread out in front of them.
They looked up as I arrived, and their eyes went straight to the stitches on my face and under my chin.
A deep bitterness crept into my chest. It would be the first thing they saw every time they looked at me for the foreseeable future.
That lightness and the sweet development of our relationships would always be tempered by this terrible thing.
Surprisingly, it was Ilyas who came to my rescue. “Hailey, can you help me decipher this handwriting? We’ve all tried, and it either says ‘hoof man jumps on goat’ or ‘roof man jumps on float,’ and honestly, neither works.”
“Deuce needs to work on his handwriting. His grimoire must be illegible,” Otis grumbled.
Walking over to Ilyas, I sat in the chair beside him. His wings flared out, closing around us. It was… comforting, somehow.
“It says humans jumped by goblins, and then in the margins, it says haferbock, and then oat goat?” I wasn’t sure if that actually made more or less sense really.
“Ah, haferbock are a type of goblin that came over from Germany. Haferbock approximately means oat goat. Generally they are pretty chill guys, but if you get two of them in a room with a bunch of mead, shit can get nasty.” He typed the notes into the system, and I looked at the giant stacks of paper in front of everyone.
The phone was blissfully silent. “Is this for the audit?”
Otis nodded, and even Eric was sorting paperwork. “Yes. The COC auditor will arrive tomorrow when both shifts are in the building and go over what they expect from us, the processes, that kind of thing. I am fairly meticulous about records, but Chet… is decidedly not.”
Ilyas let out an aggravated grunt. “He’d rather set fire to the case notes than file them, but I got us into this mess, so it’s my responsibility to make sure there is nothing for the audit to find.”
“Not your fault.” Syke sighed, sitting down and dragging a stack toward himself. “Your fucking backwards flight’s fault, and a little bit of Chet’s fault too. It wasn’t like we weren’t ever going to be audited.”
Louis leaned forward, ducking inside the cocoon of Ilyas’s wing, and kissed me softly. “We’ve been talking,” he started, and I raised an eyebrow.
“Uh-oh.”
“Until we figure out who attacked you, we’d all like to move in with you and Eric.
Syke is moving in anyway, and I would have once we bonded.
Ilyas is bonding you two as well, and soon enough, they will boot him from his apartment in the flight complex.
And Otis…” He looked at the big minotaur and just grinned.
“Well, he’s just there for the vibes. I know it’s faster than we expected, but I think we’d all feel a lot more comfortable if we are together as a pack, or er, a clan.
A flight? What would the word for this be? ”
“A family?” I suggested, and Ilyas let out a rattling noise, like heavy rain on a sheet metal roof.
Louis gave me a wide smile, his expression full of love that I wasn’t sure I deserved. “Yeah, a family.”