Playing with Fire (3 page)

The blonde spitfire blazed into the study and hissed in a whisper, "You don't have permission to enter this home!"

I set down the marble globe I'd been studying with care and turned to lean against the ancient mahogany desk that might have been around for centuries. "I'm not a vampire, vixen. I can enter any dwelling I choose."

"Generally a person waits to be invited in if he means to be in the least nice."

"Never confessed to being a nice guy, either."

"You're an ass."

"And you should be nicer, seeing you've got some big favor you want to ask of me. Yes?"

Fists chugging at her sides, she blew out a breath of frustration instead of another argument. I had guessed correctly. And I immediately felt awful about it. Someone had taken the wind out of her sails, and that someone had been me.

I shouldn't feel bad. She was a thief. But standing here in her father's home, with him upstairs--dying--would never put me in the running for sainthood.

Defeated and quiet now, Parish pulled the Retriever from her pocket and held it before her on a shaky palm. "Please, help me. I need the code to make it work."

"Tell me how your mortal father lost his soul?"

"I don't have time for this, demon."

I winced because I preferred her to use my name and not the label that suddenly made me feel dirty and lesser around her brightness.

"Do you even care?" she continued. "He's dying. He's so close..." She tilted her head down and I looked away before I could see the teardrop. Too late. I smelled the salty sadness. My chest squeezed oddly. "Fine. Papa sold his soul for me."

"For you? But what...?"

"I didn't want to tell you this, but apparently you've not a clue."

"A clue about what?"

"About what I really am, or rather, what I once was, and how I believe we were destined to meet."

Now she'd lost me. She was vampire, who I assumed had once been mortal due to the mortal father. Destined to meet? I bought into that crap about as much as I believed in fate and soul mates. Life was what you made it; it was not foretold before you set foot on this earth. Unless...

"Cinder, I was born with a sigil on my forearm." She displayed her forearm, but where she stroked it the skin appeared paler, thinner.

A sigil? That was an angel thing. And as she spoke, I started to shake my head, not in disbelief, but in utter awe.

"I was born a muse," she said. "A female who would attract a fallen one to mate with me and give birth to a monstrous nephilim. My father learned what the sigil meant when I was eight. And believing if it wasn't there, it wouldn't lure an angel, to have it removed...Papa sold his soul to the dark prince."

Not one to ever be taken by surprise, that detail stunned me. I dropped my jaw open.

"Himself flayed it off right then and there. Without anesthesia. I've never felt so much pain. Ever."

I clasped a hand over my heart.
Why had it begun to hurt inside my chest as if wounded?
Himself was the great tempter, and that little bargain didn't surprise me at all. But to know Parish had been a muse--or rather, still was--took me aback. Removing the sigil couldn't change what she had been born to, could it?

You're thinking in terms of destiny, demon. Stop it.

And yet, I
had
felt compelled to her all this time. Hadn't been able to keep my head on straight and go right for the stolen device. Had allowed her to seduce me because I'd wanted her more than I'd ever wanted a woman in my life. And I'd allowed her to escape, because seriously? I could have wrangled her outside the storage facility if I'd wanted to.

Oh, bloody dark demons. Maybe this destiny stuff had some merit.

"What was your sigil?" I asked quickly, and touched the choker at my throat. "The shape of it. Do you remember?"

Heaving out a big sigh that wavered through my skin, Parish collapsed on the big leather easy chair beside the window overlooking the canal. I empathized with her heartache. "Why do you want to know? Is it because you now suspect the same thing I suspect?"

Her big gray eyes flashed up at me and I felt the flash in my heart, hard and forceful, yet it tendered away some of the ache, and a bright flame ignited there and knew it hadn't been started with anger.

"Labatiel," I offered.

"What?"

"That was my angel name. Labatiel, the Flaming One. I'm no longer angel, Parish. You've nothing to fear from me should your sigil match..."

I couldn't say it. The fallen ones bore a sigil to match that of their muses. I didn't have one on my body since I'd been changed to demon, but I knew what it had once been, because I'd been haunted by the shape all my life. In fact, I loved the shape.

"A circle," she said. "Just a simple circle."

I fell to my knees before her.

The demon on his knees before me was enough to stall my heart, and not because it was some great romantic gesture that should win my heart.

Without a spoken word, I knew his sigil was a circle. The fallen one had found his muse.

I had believed when the sigil was removed--as had my father--I was no longer a beacon to the fallen one. I had further believed, after becoming vampire, I'd left that horrible nightmare of someday becoming a nephilim baby mama behind.

Yet here he knelt, the one man on this entire planet who could fulfill that horrible destiny.

Unless it was truth that when Cinder had been changed to demon he'd lost all angelic qualities. He seemed to think so. Could I hope for that?

"Show me yours," I said quietly.

"I don't have a sigil now. It was once here." He turned his head, revealing his neck where I'd bitten him. He stroked a finger right there, where the vein pulsed temptingly. No sign of any skin having been removed or even the faintest circle. The leather choker brandished a brilliant silver circle. All this time. And neither of us had been the wiser.

I could scent his blood. It tempted like perfume to my soul.

"You've no need to fear me, Parish. I will not harm you. Nor can I make you pregnant with a monster."

Smoothing a palm over my belly, I now regretted the sex without a condom. But he couldn't know everything. "What if you're wrong? What if some innate angelic part of you remains?"

"Look into my eyes, tiny vixen. You know what an angel's eyes should look like?"

They were supposed to be all colors, kaleidoscopic and ever changing. Cinder's gaze was dark brown, pinpointed with spots of white. No depth, and yet, unimaginably fathomless.

Swallowing, I stroked aside the hair that hung over his left eye. "We were once destined for one another. How weird is that?"

"I'd say it's off the scale. But you're not frightened of me? Please don't be. I want to help your father, Parish. I swear it to you."

"But if you used the
ritrovatore d'anime
-- Don't you want your soul?"

"I have decided to have a soul would be most favorable. Yet it would render me mortal. Not sure I'm up for that. Mortality is so...final. You were once mortal. A muse, yet mortal. How did you become vampire?"

Not the most upstanding moment in the history of Parish Marazetti's great life adventures. But since Cinder had been so open with me, I owed him.

"I decided to move to New York after I'd graduated because I had an independent streak a mile wide. Much to my father's protests, I took off with stars in my eyes. The night I arrived in New York City I went to a club and I had a drink that made me tipsy too quickly. I think something was in it--no, I know there was something in it." I sighed and hung my head. "I hooked up with a man that night and woke up in his coffin the next morning."

"A coffin?"

"I know, right? So old school. I also had a bite on my neck, and the vampire wanted me to become his eternal lover. I never ran so fast. Never saw the creep again. But what I didn't expect is that I'd transform to vampire weeks later. I couldn't tell Papa. I didn't want him to know I'd become a monster, probably an even worse monster than the one he'd sold his soul to prevent. Everything he had sacrificed for me had been lost. I couldn't afford New York for long, so I moved back to Venice where I was inducted into tribe Lilith. They have become my family. Yet I tell my father I'm taking night classes to cover for my need to hunt for blood."

"You think lying to him is the way to show your love?"

I looked up abruptly and sniffed back a tear. "It's the only way. As if you would even know, demon who doesn't believe in love. If Papa knew I had become vampire it would have killed him on the spot. He'd thought he'd saved me from one horrible fate, and then I walked right into another."

And this was getting too complicated. Me, empathizing? I don't think so. I had only to grab the Retriever and smoke back to the Council storage facility.

Or, I could--for one moment--give the woman what she needed. Compassion. I wasn't sure how to do that, but I suspected listening, offering her quiet reassurance, might be the thing.

I nodded. "I'm sorry. I have no insight into mortal matters of the heart."

She stroked my cheek and it surprised me she could find such tenderness when it was her heart that was obviously breaking. "You've the capacity to feel, Cinder. I know that about you, and I've only met you. Please. Will you help me to give my papa back his soul before he dies?"

I stared at the device she held on her palm. It would work once a century, Certainly had explained, and would give back a mortal or paranormal their soul.

Even mine.

I didn't need a soul. Did I?

You want a soul if it can allow you to love
. Because I thought I was falling--again--only this time it was for the vampiress who had once been a muse and probably still was. And she was
my
muse. At one time I would have walked this world seeking only her, and would have walked for millennia until finally she was born and I could claim her.

And it would have been an evil compulsion, born of my rebellion to fall.

I was suddenly thankful for my demonic nature. It had changed me. Made me less a monster than I had been when an angel, if anyone could believe that.

Love Parish? It felt too precious, too much of a long shot. But if a soul could grant that emotion...

"I'll see what I can do." I accepted the disk from her. "Perhaps my mathematics knowledge can unlock the means to operate this device."

Parish plunged into my arms and I held her close, feeding off her vibrant energy. She felt right in my arms, and I wasn't sure if that was a good thing or something that would have me unlocking the device for my own use.

Hell, I already knew the answer to that one.

It was difficult standing back and letting Cinder handle the soul retrieval device. Yet if anyone could break the code, he could, thanks to his skills.

I wandered into father's quiet room where he slept, and I didn't have the desire to wake him. It seemed a peaceful rest, and I prayed when he did go it would be in his sleep and not painful--and with a soul.

I owed Papa that much for what he had done for me.

Stopping in the hallway that looked out over the tiled foyer before the open study door, I stroked a finger along my forearm where Himself had flayed off the mark. Foolish of me now to accept that simply removing the mark would actually change my destiny. I'd been born a muse. I would remain so.

And yet, I hadn't been born vampire. Nor had Cinder been born demon. We were both something different now. Change wasn't always good, but maybe in Cinder's case it was.

Closing my eyes, I could feel his presence.
Another man in my life without a soul
. Suddenly it occurred to me how unfeeling I had been.

I had asked Cinder to crack a code that would give my father back his soul, without even considering that perhaps the demon would like his soul as well. Sure, he'd implied he could do without, but he was the sort of proud demon to put up a front.

How could I be so callous? Cinder had years, centuries, hell, probably millennia ahead of him. A man who lived so long without a soul couldn't be much of a man. And yet, he was. Perhaps because humanity still clung to him?

But he'd not been a part of humanity until recently. He was an angel by origin, a demon by creation. Mortality, as he'd said, was so final. A creature who had lived for so long must think it the ultimate punishment.

I wondered what he could do with a soul, and suspected it would be great, fathomless, wondrous. He held knowledge of millennia within him. And I suspected he wouldn't use it for evil, as I'd yet to see an evil move on his part.

I glanced up the stairs to Papa's room. He had a few days at most, perhaps only hours or minutes. A soul would ensure his passage to heaven, or as the paranormal nation termed it, Above. Or would it? I felt sure Papa had lived an upstanding life, but I didn't know much about him from when before I was born. Mama had never spoken of their lives, or probably, I had never asked. Parents don't talk about stuff like that, it seemed.

Could
ritrovatore d'anime
give back two souls? It was doubtful since the thing only worked once a century.

Oh, my heart. What to do? I wanted to save my father, and yet, how could I overlook the man I had begun to care about?

Stepping bravely forward, I entered the study and found Cinder sitting facing the window where sunlight glinted sharply in a crack that demarcated the glass. He held the disk upon his chest, his eyes closed, though I sensed he was not asleep, just concentrating, going deep.

A thin white crease glowed around two edges of
ritrovatore d'anime
. He had accomplished something? Was it ready to open?

"Cinder?"

He held up a finger, prompting my silence. I pressed my back to the wall to keep from rushing to grab the thing from him. As much as I had little means to do so, I truly did trust him. He'd given me all those head starts. Talk about sweet nothings. And I could still revisit the taste of his blood on my tongue, and that was enough to quiet my anxiety.

He sighed and looked to me. "Sorry. That one didn't work." The disk went dark. "Wish there was a written spell for this thing. I'm nearing the end of ideas."

I wandered over and sat on the arm of the easy chair next to him, and tapped the dark metal disk. "I imagine millennia ago this thing came with instructions carved on a tablet, eh?"

He chuckled, and pulled me onto his lap in a casual move. I curled up my legs and snuggled against his warmth.

"I'm sure at one time there was a written manual, or spell," I continued, "But you know modern times. Nothing comes with instructions anymore. I can never figure out a new cell phone. A person usually ends up going online to find the manual."

"That's it." Cinder's body tensed but he didn't move to push me from his comfortable lap. "Why didn't I think of that? Everything is online."

"You think? I don't know about that. This is ancient magic."

"But if it was ever written down, there is the slightest chance... Hell, the Council archives are vast, and all computerized, thanks to me. Do you have a laptop?"

"No, but I've an iPad in the desk drawer." I retrieved the tablet computer and returned to Cinder's lap.

As we waited for it to power up, he stroked a finger along my chin and tilted my head to look at him. "How is he?"

"Still alive. Peaceful, it seems."

"That is good."

"You don't really care about him. You just want to get this done so you can bring the disk back to where it belongs. Will they be upset it's been used?"

"The archivist implied I could bring it back used. And you're wrong about me not caring. It surprises me to say this, but I am concerned for anyone who means something to you."

"Did you just confess to having feelings for me, demon?"

"Yes, maybe. I do have feelings, but I hadn't thought to embrace the gentler, more empathetic ones. Hell, I think I could cherish you. Perhaps I already do. Perhaps I have for millennia."

The meaning in that statement held us in silence for long moments.

"I was sitting here concentrating on the disk," he softly said, "but at the same time I was dialed into your every step through this house. I wanted to know where you were, how you moved, what your emotions were. I could feel your sadness, and your vacillation to confusion. What confuses you, tiny vixen?"

I was no longer confused. I couldn't imagine not giving this man the opportunity he didn't know he wanted. As for Papa? I prayed he could accept the choice I had made.

"I want you to use this," I said, placing the disk in his palm and holding my hand over it. "You've more use for a soul than my father. He treads Death's threshold. You, on the other hand, have thousands of years to enjoy a soul."

Instead of protesting, he clasped the Retriever and nodded. My throat went dry as I wondered if I'd made the correct choice. But then Cinder shook his head. "A mortal man's soul is worth a thousand demon souls, surely." He placed it in my hand then kissed my cheek, my nose, my eyelids.

I didn't want the sweet connection to stop, so I pushed away thought to protest his refusal, clutching the disk to my chest, and tilting my head to kiss his mouth.

Demon sweet heat claimed me with his intense kiss. I moved into him as his hand slid along my side and coaxed me closer. Easily we joined and easily we accepted. Perhaps we were both weary and bonded by a strange quest when neither should be helping the other. Didn't matter. I admired Cinder and I wanted him desperately.

He stopped the kiss and stared into my eyes until I whimpered softly because I couldn't speak or make my hunger known without biting him. And I wanted to bite him and drink his dark blood, be damned the urgency to save my father's soul.

"After this is all done, when we've unlocked the Retriever and made your father safe," he said, and my heart fluttered in anticipation. "Would you consider me as...?"

"A lover?" I kissed him deeply, lingering in the heat of him, the impossible sweetness. "My boyfriend?" Another kiss and I straddled his lap. "Someone I could fall in love with?"

"Parish, I can't love."

"You could if you had a soul."

"I won't take what belongs to your father."

"It doesn't belong to him. I stole
ritrovatore d'anime
. It's any man's soul to claim."

"And if I took the soul this device could give me, you'd forever wonder about your father. Where he is? If he is in eternal unrest? Be honest. You would."

He was harshing my sensual vibes, pulling me down to reality when all I wanted to do was avoid the truth and soar on bliss. And rightfully so. This demon did care. And that made me love him.

"I'll give the soul to my father," I said, "but I want you no matter what happens. As a lover, a boyfriend, the man I think I can love."

"You could accept a demon?"

"You could accept a vampiress who craves your dark blood?"

"Your bite does things to me that nothing else can do, sweet one. Do you think that is the reason you can bite me and not be offended by the taste of my blood? Because you are my muse?"

"It's weird, but possible." I stroked my forearm. "You like circles, don't you?"

He tapped the leather choker joined with a silver circle. "I do. I've been haunted by them all my life. It's the only reason I know that was my sigil."

"I think that's why I was able to trap you in the ward, too. Can you forgive me for doing what I had to do to help my father?"

"Forgiveness isn't necessary." He turned the Retriever around between us. "Let's take care of this and then deal with what our hearts desire."

"Deal." I grabbed the iPad, and turned on his lap so the both of us could search the internet together.