A Devil Named Desire (11 page)

“Yes, Most High,” Tesla assured him, then immediately countered with “No, Most High . . . I—I am honored by the Prince’s friendship, but I would never presume . . .” The creature lifted long-fingered, gray hands to plead his case, opened his mouth, then shut it. Giving Cain a somewhat agonized glance, he shrugged, then said simply, “I’m not worth a beating.”

“This isn’t Tesla’s fault,” Cain insisted. “Leave him alone.”

Samael the Black didn’t take orders well from anyone, much less a nine-year-old hellion. In a flash, he grabbed the imp’s arm, wrenching the creature from Nyx’s grasp.

“No, Father, don’t!” Cain threw himself between them, shielding the petrified imp with his body. “I’m sorry I defied you! I’m sorry I went into your treasure room . . . I’m sorry! I’ll do whatever you want as long as you don’t hurt Tesla!”

Surprised by the boy’s passion, Sammy hesitated. The imp made himself as small as possible, peeping fearfully over Cain’s shoulder. The two of them—one fair-haired and blue-eyed, the other blackened with soot—were studies in light and dark, direct contradictions.

“As my son and heir, it isn’t fitting that hands be laid upon you in anger,” Sammy said quietly. “This creature will take your punishment on your behalf, while you watch. If you are tempted to defy me again, perhaps you will remember his pain, and do the opposite.”

Cain shook his head, appalled. “But he’s my friend!”

“If he’s truly your friend”—Sammy eyed the imp grimly—“then he’ll be more than happy to take a beating for you.”

“Father, please . . .” This time Cain spoke softly, laying a hand upon his arm. “The punishment is mine. Let Tesla go.”

It maddened him that his son—this beautiful, fair-haired child, heir to the Kingdom of the Damned—would lower himself to plead on this filthy creature’s behalf. He’d obviously failed in his duty, showing the child only his better half in the short time they’d been reunited. It was time for the boy to learn who his father
truly
was.

“Cain,” he said, hardening his gaze. “Don’t you realize how far below you this creature is? The imps are vicious, and untrustworthy—he nourishes no tender feelings of friendship for you, for he is incapable of them! He would throw you into the fire at a moment’s notice should I order him to. Tesla, like all his brothers, is my servant. He’s
not
your friend.”

Cain’s expression didn’t waver. “Yes, he is.”

Eyes narrowed with anger, His Satanic Majesty directed his next question to the imp. “Choose, imp. Shall I punish you, or shall I punish Cain?” He was confident he knew the answer, merely wanting to make his point.

Tesla swallowed, eyes bulging. Slowly, very slowly, one long-fingered gray hand came up to rest on Cain’s shoulder, still placed between him and his master. “Punish me, O Son of Morning,” the imp quavered. “Punish me.”

Astounded, Sammy straightened. A low growl came from Nyx, as though he sensed a threat, though what threat there could be from two such small beings was unclear.

Cain, small though he was, stood straighter, acknowledging Tesla’s hand, and his support. Suddenly, despite his dirty clothes and worn tennis shoes, he looked every inch a young princeling. He was clever enough to keep his mouth shut, however, merely looking his father in the eye, and awaiting his verdict.

Chapter Eleven

G
abriel watched Hope from the corner of his eye as she swept glass from the floor. She hadn’t wanted to stay in the apartment with the window broken, but he’d insisted. He had, however, closed the curtains, effectively shutting out the night and whatever watchers it held.

So far she’d been subdued and cooperative, seemingly too frightened to do anything else, but he was uneasy. She might very well be a pawn in one of Sammy’s twisted games, but her willingness to invoke the Darkness meant that she was on the opposite side, and he needed to remember that.

“Samael tells me that you made a bargain with him,” Gabe stated bluntly. He righted a lamp that had been knocked over during the fight. “Is that true?”

Hope straightened, looking puzzled. “Samael?” She’d obviously never heard the name.

“Samael the Black, the Great Deceiver, Father of Lies,” returned Gabe, despising the titles his onetime brother had accumulated through the years. “The Devil in disguise, also known as Sammy Divine.”

Her skin turned the color of parchment. “You
talked
to him?” Her eyes darted fearfully around the room. “Was he here? What did he tell you?”

Gabriel, noting her terror at the mere mention of Sammy’s name, simply shrugged, pushing the couch into place. “Only that you came to him.”

“I didn’t—” she started to deny it, then stopped. “I didn’t mean to,” she murmured, turning back to her sweeping.

“Didn’t
mean
to? How could something like that be an accident?” She did, after all, have the Key in her possession. “I know all about the bargain,” he told her flatly.

Her cheeks, so pale a moment before, flooded with color.

“Nothing to say for yourself?” He wasn’t quite sure why he was pushing her so hard, but it seemed important to lay everything on the table.

She drew herself up, gripping the broom, and looked at him, a hint of defiance in her green eyes. “What do you expect me to say?”

“I expect you to start telling me the truth,” Gabriel returned. “All of it. So I can help you.”

He could almost see her mind working, measuring whether to trust him. It irritated him that she’d even have to think about it; didn’t she see that he was her only hope?

“Tell me why you made a deal with him.” His anger at Samael burned hot, yet he found himself angry at Hope, too. This pale slip of a girl had dabbled where she shouldn’t. She was too young, too beautiful, and too smart to have made the mistake of seeking the Darkness, whatever the reason.

Hope looked away and sighed, staring toward the closed curtains. Her eyes held the sheen of tears, but she blinked them back, as though knowing they were useless.

She looked so bleak, so vulnerable . . . Gabe felt something shift in the region of his heart. The warrior in him rejected the feeling, clamping down on it immediately. Weakness was not a weapon he would use to win this war, so he had no use for it.

To her credit, Hope chose not to wield that particular weapon, either. She squeezed her eyes shut, rubbed her eyes, and made a valiant effort to compose herself. After a moment, she swiped at her cheeks, leaving them damp.

“I did it because of my sister,” she said, and he knew that she was finally telling him the truth. “She disappeared from a Vegas casino two years ago, and I’ve been searching for her ever since.” Her face was expressionless, but Gabe could tell there was turmoil behind the mask. “Two weeks ago, I got a call from the cops, saying they’d found her purse in a ravine. I thought she was dead.” Her voice cracked on the last word, just a little. “I was really depressed. One night I threw myself a pity party, had a little bit too much wine, and did something really, really stupid.” She lifted an arm, shirtsleeve slipping to reveal the gauze around her wrist.

He moved to sit on the edge of the couch, saying nothing, hoping his silence would allow her to go on. The silence stretched and grew; by the time she spoke again, he felt as though they were in a confessional; she the sinner, he the confessor.

“It’s funny,” she mused quietly, looking down at the broken glass at her feet, “I’m usually so cautious, never impulsive, but I couldn’t seem to get the idea of suicide out of my mind. I did the research on the least painful ways to kill yourself. I didn’t have any sleeping pills, but it turns out you don’t need them. All you need is a razor blade and a warm bath. A few sharp stings, and I could just go to sleep . . . it seemed a good choice, particularly when it came to cleanup.”

Her words were so unemotional, so far removed from the turmoil she must’ve felt at the time.

“I didn’t know what would be waiting on the other side.”

This, Gabriel understood. The other side of the veil, the other side of the fine line that led to Heaven or Hell. What he didn’t know, what he didn’t understand, was why Hope had found Darkness waiting for her instead of Light.

“I was lying there, in the bathtub, all but gone, and there was this
thing
. . . this presence, hovering over my shoulder.” Her look turned inward for a moment as she remembered, but what she saw clearly frightened her, for she hurried on. “It wanted to take me somewhere, but suddenly
he
was there, and he said no.”

“A soul eater.” A growing sense of outrage caused Gabe to clench his fists. Suicide was a gray area. When a person full of sadness or insanity threw away his life, his soul could be misled, but he was usually given a choice.

He found it hard to believe that Hope would have chosen the Darkness.

“Tell me,” he said to her softly, “did you seek him out?”

She gave him a troubled look. “I suppose I did, in a way. I blamed God for taking my sister away, and for lots of other things.” Things she clearly didn’t want to talk about. “I didn’t believe that there would be anything waiting for me on the other side but blackness.” Her slender throat moved as she swallowed. “And I guess that’s what I got.”

“Not true,” Gabriel said, moved despite himself at the set of those fragile shoulders, slumped with guilt. “You also got me.”

For just an instant, he saw a faint glimmer of hope in her eyes, but she blinked and looked away. “Lucky you,” she murmured sardonically.

“And the Key?” He looked dispassionately at the book, now sitting on the coffee table. “Why do you have it?”

“He . . .” She hesitated, shooting him a guilty look. “He gave it to me. He wants me to transcribe it, put it on the Internet. I was scared; I thought maybe I could use it against him. I thought maybe that if I could control the demons he’d threatened to send after me, I’d be the one with the upper hand, not him.”

He wanted to believe her, but her eyes, so green, so clear, still held secrets.

“I was so stupid.” She looked toward the curtains, suppressing a shudder. “I don’t know what I would’ve done if you hadn’t shown up to drive that thing away.”

“I don’t know, either,” he agreed, remembering the satisfying crack of his fist against the demon’s blackened, leathery chin. That particular Dronai was going to have a hard time chewing for the next few days; his only regret was that he hadn’t ripped the foul creature’s head off.

He rose from the couch, restless and unsettled. “Go to bed,” he told her abruptly. “I’ll keep watch.”

She shook her head, opening her mouth to argue, but he cut her off. “You’re safe with me, Hope, safer than you’d ever be with a book of spells you don’t know how to use.” He took the broom from her, gesturing toward the hallway that led to her room. “You’re exhausted. Go now, and we’ll talk more in the morning.”

She had to crane her neck to look up at him, and he was reminded of how small she was, how delicate the bones of her shoulders, how fragile the line of her jaw. “Why are you doing this?” she asked him softly. “I was awful to you, accused you of”—her voice broke, and she swallowed—“of doing something terrible.”

Gabriel hardened his heart. “Yes, you did.” He could tell her his own truth, which was that she was a pawn in a game of Satan’s choosing, and that he’d taken up the gauntlet before knowing of her Devil’s bargain. He could’ve told her everything, including his history with Samael, his onetime brother. Instead he merely said, “I’m sworn to defend humankind against the Darkness. It’s what I do.”

“Oh.” She sounded slightly disappointed. “So you’d do this for anybody.”

“Not anybody,” he answered, and left it at that.

She turned and left the room. A moment later he heard her bedroom door close, and breathed an unconscious sigh of relief. He had a long night ahead of him, and just being near her left him on edge. How much of her story was truth, and how much fiction? How steeped in Darkness was she, and at this point, why did he even care?

Pacing the living room, scooping up the remainders of broken glass, he told himself it was because he didn’t want Sammy to win this one. Because he was duty bound not to be responsible for a single soul being consigned to Hell, whether it be from his onetime brother’s spite or his own arrogance. He’d taunted Sammy into proving him wrong about temptation, and Hope was the tool Sammy was using to prove it.

It wasn’t her fault.

Or was it?

It was thoughts like this that led him, hours later, to pad softly down the hall to check on her.

The light from the hallway fell upon her sleeping face as he silently opened the door. On a pillow beside her, the gray cat lifted its head, eyes glowing golden. It, too, kept watch, and the sight comforted him.

Hardly knowing what he did, he stepped into the room, coming closer to the bed. She slept on, one hand palm up on the pillow, the other atop the covers. Her arms were bare save for the gauze around her wrists. Whatever she wore to sleep in had slender straps, white against her shoulders. He wanted to wake her up, to rail at her for being so foolish as to have dealings with the Devil, but he could only stare, like a lovesick boy, at the creamy curve of her cheek, and the lashes that lay like dark feathers upon it.

Then, to his surprise, her eyes opened.

“You’re so beautiful,” she murmured, still half asleep. “So beautiful.”

Gabe’s heart rate accelerated.

She
was the one who was beautiful, the expression on her face just as he’d imagined a woman in love would have, when the man she loved came to her bed. Languorous, yet knowing. Open, yet willing to be opened further, a bud needing only the slightest encouragement to bloom.

He could never be that man, yet he couldn’t seem to stop himself from bending over her, touching his hand to her hair. “Shhh . . .” he whispered, “go back to sleep.”

Her eyes drifted shut, but at the same time, her hand came up to encircle his neck. He froze at the sensation, fascinated by the unique experience of her touch, like liquid heat, as she drew him down.

And then she kissed him, and Gabe’s universe expanded to include the sensation of soft lips on his own, the exchange of warm breath, and a throb in his lower belly that was near pleasure/pain. He had no idea why he let her do it, except that she seemed so precious and fragile, so vulnerable, as though she offered him her loneliness and her sorrows along with her body.

Heaven help him, he could not help but drink them in.

Closer she moved, and closer still, until her breasts were against his chest, and it was this that broke the spell; the desire to put his arms around her and drag her even closer came over him like a wave, and with it came the knowledge that if he let it, he would drown.

Abruptly he jerked his head back, ending the kiss. “Stop,” he whispered, looking into her eyes, now wide with shock. “You must stop.”

The look on her face confused him: hurt, surprise, and something else, something he was afraid to acknowledge, for he felt it, too; heat, tension, a sensation that simmered in the air between them like magic.

She swallowed, eyes wide in the dimness. “We don’t have to stop,” she whispered, keeping her hand in place.

To his shame, Gabriel found he didn’t want to. He wanted to kiss her again, and again, until the urges of his earthly body had been sated with the softness of her flesh, the moist heat of her mouth.
Just once—no one would know.
He heard the words inside his head, knowing they were a lie, but understanding, perhaps for the first time, why humans lied to themselves so easily.

“You’re not yourself,” he told her, speaking for the both of them. He pulled back, stepping away.

In his heart, he knew it was best. He was an angel, and she was human. Neither desire nor temptation was his master.

Until now . . . until
this
human, she of the green eyes and the bandaged wrists, made further mockery of his resolve by sitting up, lifting her filmy top over her head in a simple yet elegantly complex motion of her arms, and sat before him in nothing but her own glory. Her breasts were revealed: tender, rounded drops of feminine flesh, tipped with pale strawberries.

Gabriel’s mouth went dry as his body betrayed him, the most basic male part of him stirring, rousing, clamoring its hunger for he knew not what.

“Cover yourself,” he said hoarsely, unable to look away.

Hope shook her head, voice shaking. “No.”