Binding Fire: Paranormal Romance (Bad Boys of the Underworld Book 3) (2 page)

At least, now that Angie was leaving, there was only Muriel and one cook left for the night. Even if they wanted to close on time, the boss would flip a lid when he found out they had kicked out customers before they were ready.

“Let me walk you to the door.” She followed Angie out, careful to keep herself between her friend and the demons. She didn’t look at them as she walked past, but felt their eyes boring into her back.

Angie got into her car, and Muriel didn’t take her eyes away from the old Ford until it had turned out of the parking lot and the lights were no longer visible.

The demons’ presence made her nervous, but, in all truth, she wasn’t upset. Them showing up was a stroke of good luck. She had waited patiently for her vengeance for five years. Physically being able to corner Kier in a somewhat safe location was the complicated part.

Even with the three other demons around, she was sure she could trap him if she could just get him alone for a few minutes.

Nerves caused her heart to beat fast within her chest, reminding her once again of her mortality. She approached the table, doing her best to hide her uneasiness, though she knew they could hear her heartbeat. Demons existed to take advantage of mortals, and they could read all the signs of weakness.

She ignored the three leeches and focused her gaze on Kier, scowling at his beauty. He sat up straight at her approach, and if she didn’t know better, she would have thought her presence made him tense.

“I need to see you outside.”
As if it was completely normal for fallen angels to order demons around.

Expecting laughter or protest, she was surprised when he stood. This brought him within inches of her and she instinctively stepped back. One side of his mouth curled, and she grimaced at her own jumpiness.

“Where to?”

“Out back.” She started to lead him out of the restaurant. He motioned to the leeches to stay at the table, and Muriel sent up a quick prayer, thanking God for her good luck. The demon walked behind her and she fought the urge to look over her shoulder.

Opening the door, she braced herself against the cool Arkansas spring air. At least Kier had a warm-looking leather jacket to protect himself from the wind. All Muriel had was her shorts and t-shirt. He looked at her expectantly.

“I need you to undo it,” she said.

He raised an eyebrow. “Undo what?”

“Whatever your blood did to me. I need this black mark on my soul gone so I can get back into Heaven.”

He had the nerve to smile. “You know that there is no way to take back what my blood did. We both just have to live with it.”

Muriel scoffed. “No. We both don’t have to live with it. I’m the one who has to live with it and die with it.”

She reached inside her apron pockets, as if trying to keep her hands warm. Her fingers wrapped around the cold steel that was her only weapon.

“There has to be some way that we can reverse this. Some connection you have that you could at least ask.” She even added a pleading note to her voice.

She had no illusions. She knew that, as a demon, Kier was inherently selfish, and ruining her had probably been the best career move of his life. There was no reason for him to help her, but she figured that before she ruined him, she would give him one last chance to redeem himself.

As expected, he laughed in her face. He stepped closer and leaned in until his face was inches away. She wanted to move away but needed to be close to him for her plan to work.

His breath caressed her cheek and a shiver snaked down her spine. “I would have thought that after five years of humanity eating away at you, you would be used to your orders being ignored,” he whispered before he took a step back.

Muriel grabbed his wrist, much like he had done to her just hours before. His gaze jerked down at the contact as he took in a deep breath. His eyes remained fixed on the spot where her hand touched his skin. She didn’t overanalyze his reaction. She needed to get him to raise his eyes.

“Please,” she begged. “I haven’t seen any angels in five years and I don’t know who I could even ask. You owe me this.”

“Lady, I destroyed your soul for shits and giggles. Why would I ever help you?” he asked, obviously starting to be less amused and more annoyed.

The small distraction was all she needed as her right hand slipped unnoticed out of her apron and the loud click of the handcuff locking around his wrist filled the silence of the night.

Kier’s wrist was unnaturally cold once Muriel removed her hand. At the sight of the silver, he grimaced in annoyance. “What game are you playing, angel?”

She had snapped a pair of handcuffs on him. Well, half a pair. The other cuff was attached to her own wrist.

His ears filled with the sound of her heart beating frantically, muffling her muttered, “Oh shit.”

He didn’t have time to humor her anymore. He looked to a spot ten feet away and focused on transporting himself, sans handcuffs.

To his frustration, he stayed exactly where he was.
What the hell?
The last time he had failed at a transport had been centuries ago, and ten feet was easy enough for a juvenile demon to perform. “What did you do to me?”

Muriel leaned away but didn’t step back. She couldn’t as long as she was cuffed to him. “Nothing you don’t deserve.” She sounded braver than she looked.

Anger filled Kier. He was not about to be trapped by some mortal. He stormed off to the side of the restaurant, dragging her along behind him. As he reached the brick corner of the building, he slammed the chain links connecting the cuffs against the brick corner with all of his considerable demon strength.

Pain shot through his wrist as Muriel gasped at the sting that must be traveling up her own arm. Undaunted, he slammed the metal to stone three more times, only succeeding in causing huge chunks of bricks to fly everywhere. The chain links that connected the cuffs didn’t even have a scratch on them.

“It’s no use,” taunted Muriel through clenched teeth.

Kier had to stop his attempts to break the cuffs due to the increasing pain in his own wrist. He glared at the offending steel. He normally was not this affected by pain.

He turned his glacial gaze to Muriel, who at least had the grace to look intimidated. “They won’t break,” she said. “They’re enchanted. Only the key can release you.”

Now he was truly pissed off. His free hand wrapped around her slender throat as he pushed her against the side of the building and slammed her shoulders into the brick. A sudden throbbing sensation shot through his own back and a sickening realization filled him.

Testing a theory, his hand squeezed brutally around her throat, and Muriel’s face turned a shade of reddish-purple. Within seconds, debilitating pain possessed his throat. He tried to gasp for air, but his throat was being held closed by some invisible force.

He immediately released Muriel and caught his breath. Her knees must have given out because she started to sink to the ground, gasping for air. Her free hand gently rubbed her throat where he had mercilessly squeezed.

”You bitch,” he shouted, voice still hoarse. “What did you do to me?”

Her eyes held unveiled hatred. “Simple revenge,” she answered. “You destroyed my soul and now I’m destroying yours.”

“How are magical handcuffs supposed to do that?” He shouldn’t have asked. He already knew the answer.

“You might have tainted my soul, but I’m still pretty pure, especially compared to you. You are stuck with me until your soul is just as pretty as mine,” she threatened.

Muriel could see that Kier’s brain furiously searched for a way out of this mess, but she had worked hard to ensure that there wasn’t. The one way out of the cuffs was a key that only she knew the location to. Any pain she felt he would experience just as bad, if not worse, so he had no way to torture the information out of her.

“You will release me, or, so help me, I will cut everyone you care about limb from limb while you are still attached to me.”

“Really? Well, the joke is on you because there’s no one I care about here. Not sure if you know this, but it’s tough to make mortal friends when you have spent over ten centuries as an angel. Makes it hard to open up to coworkers and neighbors.” She was partially lying. She didn’t have any close friends, but she was fond of her neighbors and had a special spot in her heart for Angie.

Even if she liked them, she couldn’t allow herself to grow close to anyone. For the first year of her mortality, every day had been a struggle to fit in with human society without any steady income or support.

Samuel would have been more than willing to help her adjust, but he had his own problems to worry about. It was his destiny to stop the apocalypse, and Muriel had given up her powers to see that he fulfilled that destiny. She was not about to let her problems stop him.

She had no other mortal friends from her angel days who she could call on to help. She wandered from city to city at first, even stealing food when she had to.

It was only dumb luck that she had happened to run into another lost mortal. Tina had been a recent high school dropout who was determined to leave her family and take a waitressing position at her uncle’s restaurant in a middle-of-nowhere town in Arkansas.

Muriel and Tina had some good conversations, and when it was time for Tina to hop on the bus to Rock Springs, Muriel had joined her. It wasn’t as though she had anywhere better to be.

The pay wasn’t amazing and the outfits were a bit skimpy for Muriel’s taste, but the under-the-table pay was more than Muriel had been making. She and Tina rented half of a ramshackle duplex, with Tina taking the bedroom and Muriel sleeping on the couch.

Tina taught Muriel how to get by on little and was always patient with Muriel when she had a hard time grasping simple human concepts. Seriously, though, Muriel still didn’t see the problem with nudity in one’s own home. Wasn’t that half the point of becoming a property owner?

About a year into their friendship and two years into Muriel’s mortality, Tina went back home to finish school, leaving Muriel alone again. Her loneliness after Tina left had been the catalyst that motivated Muriel to seek her vengeance.

The most obvious vengeance was to make him pay in blood. If she was careful and thought everything through, she could probably kill Kier, but that would be too easy and too hard at the same time.

Killing a demon was difficult, even for angels. As a mortal, Muriel was at a serious disadvantage. On the other hand, death seemed much too lenient of a penalty. He needed to suffer.

She knew she wanted to destroy his soul, but corrupting a soul was much easier than purifying one. For a year and a half after Tina left, Muriel spent all her days off, and any spare cash, researching ways to hurt a demon’s soul. Everything she found led her to the same answer: proximity to an angel.

“Where is the key, you vindictive little bitch?” he bit out.

“If I were you, I would worry about more pressing matters,” she said. “How exactly are you going to tell your little fan club that you were tricked by an angel?”

She didn’t think it was possible for him to get more furious, but she was wrong. He approached her, towering over her and uncomfortably close. Flames burned brightly behind his eyes. Refusing to be cowed, Muriel held her ground. “Fallen angel,” he spat out. He brought both hands, and by default her attached arm, to the high neckline of her shirt and ripped the material in a quick jerking motion.

Muriel gasped and reached to hold the gaping edges, but realized that the tear was closer to the shoulder and no indecent skin was showing. Her brows furrowed in confusion as, in a rapid blur of motion, Kier’s head shot to her shoulder as his teeth pierced her shoulder.

Muriel managed to hold back her scream, but she couldn’t stop the small exclamation of pain, and she heard a pained moan come from Kier as well. She knew that he had to be hurting just as much as she was.

In seconds, he jerked his head away and Muriel lifted her hand to apply pressure to the bloody bite wound. Kier swatted it away before it reached the injury. “Let it bleed,” he commanded.

She cast him a wary glance. She knew the blood loss wouldn’t be life threatening, but she couldn’t figure out why he’d done it. Demons didn’t get sustenance from blood like vampires. They had fangs, but they were more ornamental than functional.

She would’ve loved it if her soul could contaminate his through blood transfer, but that little gem only worked one way—demons to angels.

Kier shifted out of his leather jacket and Muriel couldn’t help but be transfixed by the movement. The raw masculinity of the large muscles playing beneath the tight gray t-shirt had her second-guessing this whole plan.

Magical handcuffs be damned, how had she ever convinced herself that she could contain this beast? He could crush her throat with a flick of his wrist, not to mention the multitude of dangers that went along with his demonic powers.

Once he had shrugged off his jacket, he slid it down his captive arm and arranged it carefully to hide the handcuffs.

Without a word, he walked back toward the restaurant, dragging her along behind him.

Tripping on the first few steps, Muriel quickly caught her balance and followed. Kier confidently walked straight past his leeches. “I have a date with the fallen angel,” he casually told them over his shoulder.

Their interest was piqued, and, at the sight of her blood, their nostrils flared as they tried to detect what had happened.

Muriel flushed with embarrassment as she realized that he was implying that they were running off to have sex.
So that was how he planned to get out of this without losing credibility among his peers.
Instead of admitting that he had been tricked, he would just let them think he seduced her.

Before Muriel could even think of a denial, he pulled her out the front door and back into the cool night air. Once they were in the front parking lot, he abruptly stopped. “Take me to your house,” he ordered.

Muriel noticed that he had a bad habit of ordering her around. He would soon learn he wasn’t the one in control here, but she would rather have that conversation in the privacy of her own house and not in public where an innocent mortal could be harmed.

She had a hard time finding her voice. Her brave façade faded now that her plans were coming together. “Um, I live two miles west,” she muttered.

She had faced down plenty of demons in her years on the Earth realm, but she had been armed and prepared for the fights. This was a long-term mental war that she was about to wage with a ruthless adversary.

Kier looked around the parking lot. “Which one is yours?”

Muriel bit her lip nervously as she looked down. “Um, none.”

The demon let out an exasperated sigh. “You don’t even own a car?”

“I own a car. It just doesn’t have legal plates or registration. I only drive when I need to. Believe it or not, this job doesn’t pay a lot and funding vengeance takes cash,” she pointed out.

She could see that he didn’t appreciate her hard work or effort to save money. With an angry huff, he turned and walked west. He took long and fast strides, leaving Muriel to do a mixture of walking and jogging to keep up with him.

The night air chilled her and the bite on her shoulder stung, but Muriel decided to keep her mouth shut. She had a feeling any protests would fall on deaf ears.

They walked in silence for a mile until he snapped, “You seriously walk to work?”

“It’s good exercise,” she said. “Besides, you’re a demon. A little physical exertion should be no problem for you.”

“It should be no problem because I
should
be able to transport myself there with the blink of an eye!”

Muriel couldn’t help the small smile that formed in response to his frustration. “You know, I understand better than most how hard it can be to suddenly lose your abilities.”

He shot her a scathing look. “You really are enjoying this.”

She didn’t deny it. The entire point was to make his life miserable, and so far she was succeeding. What about this wouldn’t make her ecstatic?

He huffed again and walked even faster. Muriel tried to steal subtle glances at him, but she was too focused on not tripping over her quickly moving feet.

She knew she shouldn’t like anything about him, but she couldn’t help but be mesmerized by his beauty. It really wasn’t her fault. He was designed to lure women with his looks. She’d be crazy not to be attracted to him.

This didn’t make her feel better about the traitorous direction of her thoughts. She had to remember that he was the enemy.

A siren jerked her out of her thoughts as an ambulance passed by a few blocks over. “Your neighborhood sucks,” he grumbled.

She wanted to defend her home of the past four years, but there wasn’t much to say. Her street was drug infested and routinely patrolled by whatever gang was currently in control. The small homes were spaced out nicely, but all needed major repairs and none had what could be called “curb appeal.”

The small town of Rock Springs just didn’t make any money. The plant had closed a few years ago, and most residents moved out. The homes that were left slowly fell into a state of disrepair as piles of junk and rotting cars collected in the abandoned yards. The diner she worked at only made money on travelers and truck drivers passing through on their way to somewhere else.

Even her own small house could use a good landscaper and fresh coat of paint. She and Tina had done a good job decorating the inside to make the house a home, but they had never had the time or finances to work on the outside. After Tina left, Muriel didn’t bother trying because it was a rental anyway. Besides, what was the point of being the only well-kept house in a two-mile radius?