“I am safer with you. If anyone has the power to protect me, it’s you, Asmodeus.”
“Or Apollyon. He would be the better choice. He is always the better choice.” The darkness in his voice turned to bitterness that she could feel lacing his power and she held on to him.
“How do you know he’s the better choice for me? Isn’t it my choice?” She glared at him now and then it faded away when she caught the tiny almost imperceptible grain of fear hidden beneath his other emotions.
Fear that he would fail her?
Or fear that he would end up doing as his dark master commanded and would hurt her?
He thrived on seeing others hurt and their suffering. He was afraid that the Devil would make him harm her and that he would end up enjoying it. She had thought the Devil would be sick and twisted, but this was taking sick and twisted to a whole new level.
“Asmodeus,” she whispered and he looked at her, his beautiful golden eyes void of any warmth. She wished she could touch his cheek and reassure him somehow, but she didn’t want to loosen her grip on him when they were so high above the city. “You will not fail me.”
He looked away again and uncertainty filled his eyes for a brief few seconds before they cleared again.
“Apollyon will not fail you. I am only a shadow of that male.”
It struck her that he was having one serious existential crisis and she was in part to blame for it. Her careless words when they had first met had dealt blows and wounded him, and now he couldn’t shake the doubts that she had placed in his head. She wished she had the ability to turn back time and relive that moment all over again with the knowledge she had now, but even she wasn’t that powerful.
All she could do was try to smooth things out and heal the wounds she had unwittingly inflicted with her words.
“You’re not a shadow… not any more than I’m a shadow of my cousin. She’s so damn good and caring, and I’m reckless and wild, and liable to go off demon hunting without telling anyone, and I’m forever getting into scrapes. Everyone tells me I should be more like her… but I’m not her. We share blood but we’re not the same person. We couldn’t be more different.” Liora leaned in and pressed a kiss to his cheek, lingering with her lips against his cool flesh.
He paused, beating his wings to keep them steady in the night air high above the glittering lights of Paris.
“You won’t fail me, Asmodeus. I’m choosing you,” she whispered against his skin and then settled her head on his shoulder, waiting for him to rebuff her.
He didn’t.
She looked down at the quiet world below them.
“Do you like the view?” she said to fill the silence.
“It seems alien to me… bright and colourful… strange… unsettling.” He didn’t sound as if he liked it. “Hell is a black cavernous ceiling above a forbidding harsh landscape. Rivers of molten lava and lakes of fire provide the only natural light. It is… different to this world. You would think it bleak, desolate and dangerous.”
Everything Apollyon had told her it was.
She frowned and looked at Asmodeus. “Then you’ve never seen the stars?”
His golden gaze drew away from the world below them and rose to meet hers. “No.”
“Will you take me somewhere?”
He nodded. “Where?”
Liora bravely took one hand away from his neck and Asmodeus’s grip on her increased, drawing her closer to him, filling her with a sense of safety that felt strange considering he was apparently made of pure evil. She didn’t think a male with nothing but evil in his heart would care much about whether she fell to her death or not. A male who was only evil and nothing good would have laughed as she fell and ensured he was close enough to get a good view when she splatted against the pavement.
She pointed to the distance, to the darkness beyond the city boundaries. “Take me out there. Take me to the stars.”
He held her against him and beat his broad black wings, carrying them over the city to the outskirts and then into the countryside. The air grew colder as they flew and she moved as close to Asmodeus as she could get, seeking his warmth. His skin heated hers but it didn’t chase the chill from deep within her.
The Devil wanted her and Asmodeus wanted to protect her.
She didn’t want to think about the reasons why his master might want her or what would happen to Asmodeus because he had disobeyed him, but it ran around her head, taunting her, mingling in with her thoughts about the man holding her.
He hadn’t been lying when he had told her that he took pleasure from terrible things, and her initial reaction had been the one he had probably sought to evoke with his words. He had wanted her to feel she shouldn’t be around him and that whatever this was that was happening between them would never have a happy ending. She had felt that for a split-second before she had rallied and had seen beyond his harsh words and hard expression to the trace of fear in his heart.
She had grown up in a world filled with love and light.
Asmodeus had grown up in a world made of darkness and death. A savage realm where horror and bloodshed were a part of daily life. What was normal there was terrible in her eyes but it was all he had ever known.
He had no friends to speak of and no sense of home.
Apollyon had called him evil, but Liora could see the good in him, buried deep.
Hidden.
“Is there good in you, Asmodeus?” she whispered and looked at him. It was getting too dark to see him clearly now that they were beyond the city lights.
“No.” The bluntness of his reply didn’t surprise her.
“Are you lying to me, Asmodeus?” Liora shifted her right hand to his cheek and tried to make him look at her but he tensed, making it impossible. Refusing her.
She sighed and frowned at him, trying to make him out in the darkness, wanting to see whether he was lying to her or not. If she couldn’t get him to confess there was a seed of good in him, then perhaps she could get him to admit that he viewed it as a weakness. She suspected that was the reason he denied its existence.
“What do they do to good people in Hell?” She tried to say it in a light and conversational tone so he would answer her but wasn’t sure she had succeeded when silence greeted her for almost a full minute.
“You do not want to know.” He beat his black wings and swooped lower, carrying her over fields towards a low hill in the distance.
“I do want to know.”
He glanced at her. “We make them realise that it is a flaw. We… remove it for them.”
That sounded like a polite and coded way of saying that they tortured the good out of people.
“In the same way that the Devil removed the good from Apollyon… torturing him until he lost his mind and held only evil in his heart?” Her voice shook and then she shrieked as Asmodeus dropped her and she hit the grass a few feet below, the impact jarring her spine.
Asmodeus growled and his eyes glowed in the darkness, as bright as the pools of lava in Hell that he had mentioned. He landed and stalked towards her, until he towered over her, his power increasing and pressing down on her. Her own rose in response, coming to protect her from his wrath.
“Yes,” he barked and grabbed her by the front of her crimson short-sleeved gypsy top and hauled her onto her feet. “I torture the good from fools who think that side of themselves makes them strong. I show them how weak it makes them… and I relish it.”
He shoved her away from him and stalked down the slope, a dangerous immense shadow in the darkness.
“Would the Devil torture the good from you if he knew there was some inside you?” she said without a trace of fear in her voice even though her hands were shaking. “Would he punish you, Asmodeus?”
“There is no good in me. You only believe there is. You want to see it, and so you do.” He turned back to face her, his golden eyes verging on scarlet.
“So you’re telling me you’re all bad… and nothing good?”
&n
bsp; “To be good or bad you must believe the mortal concept of right and wrong… there is no right or wrong in Hell, Liora, not in the way you think of it. It is a human belief.” He took a step up the incline towards her and clenched his fists at his sides. “In Hell, there is only strength… and that strength is measured by the blood we have spilled, the bones we have crushed, and the pain we have dealt and endured. It is not measured by the good we do. It is measured by what you mortals believe is bad. In Hell… bad is good… and I am second only to the Devil.”
Liora collapsed to her backside on the grass and stared down at him, her heart aching for him. He denied the seed of good in him and now she understood why.
The Devil had conditioned him to resort to violence without a moment’s pause if he felt threatened, to eradicate any shred of positive emotions in himself and in others, to torture and maim, and destroy, because in Hell that was what made you strong.
His master had probably beaten it into him from the moment he had been born into that dark world, moulding him into the powerful male before her, one worthy of being the Devil’s right hand man.
One capable of doing the Devil’s dirty work and strong enough to command the respect of every demon and Hell’s angel in that realm.
A king of demons.
He had to be strong or face losing his standing, and the gods only knew what would happen to him if that happened. What use would the Devil have for a right hand man who had a sliver of good in his heart and knew compassion and caring, affection?
The Devil would kill him.
Asmodeus was something he had created and he would likely view the tiny seed of good in him as a fatal flaw that made him a failure. If a manufacturer found a fundamental problem in one of their products, they simply scrapped it and began again, working harder to ensure the next one didn’t fail.
Asmodeus didn’t want to die so he denied the good in his heart.
Liora held her hand out to him. “I don’t want to argue with you about right and wrong, or good and evil, Asmodeus. If you say there is no good in you, then I accept that. Come, look at the stars with me.”
He heaved a sigh, stalked up the hill, and set himself down beside her on the grass, spreading his black wings. One stretched out behind her, shielding her from the cold breeze washing over the brow of the hill, and the other rested on the grass to his left. His hands settled behind him, propping him up, and he tipped his head back and looked at the dark sky.
She wasn’t sure what to say to him. She’d had a head full of colliding thoughts before she had learned more about him and now she had a whole new bunch of thoughts knocking around in her skull. Apollyon needed a better word than ‘complicated’ for his apparently evil twin.
Liora looked across at him and held her sigh inside.
He had said that Paris seemed alien to him but she had the feeling that it was more than the city that had him constantly on edge. It was everything, from his surroundings, to her, and to the things that she had said to him, that had him questioning himself and all he knew.
This entire world was alien to him.
She worried that it was too alien and he would find a way to leave her whether she wanted that or not.
Liora set her hands behind her to prop herself up and intentionally laid her left hand over his right one. He tensed beneath her.
She tipped her head back, stared at the stars scattered across the black velvet, and said a silent prayer to the gods of nature that Asmodeus would stay because she thought she needed him, and not only because her survival potentially depended upon him.
The gods had never answered her before.
She hoped they would this time.
They owed her for taking her parents.
CHAPTER 5
Asmodeus’s head was tied in more knots than ever and every inch of him felt tense, and he couldn’t convince his body to relax, not while he was drowning under the tidal pull of his thoughts. He wanted to get them straight and figure everything out, and come to understand this world and Liora, but the more he spoke to her and the more he saw of this realm, the more on edge and overwhelmed he became.
He hadn’t meant to lose his temper with her, and he regretted dropping her from even a short height and shouting at her. Another first for him. He couldn’t remember ever regretting anything before. He couldn’t remember experiencing guilt before he had met Liora.
Her hand covered his, warm and slight, her light weight pressing it into the grass. She had fallen quiet and he wished that she hadn’t. He liked the sound of her voice and the sharp note it had at times, a tone that told him she wasn’t going to just back down and let him have his way.
He had felt powerless to leave her and had wanted to convince her to leave him, because he feared that the Devil would force him to obey his command to bring her to him. He had tried to draw a line between them, hoping to force her into seeing that he didn’t subscribe to her mortal concepts of right and wrong, and that there was no good in him as she would view it. Rather what she viewed as bad, he saw as good.
She had been afraid at one point, he felt sure of it, but had rallied and refused to leave him, instead telling him that she knew he could protect her and she was safest with him.
Asmodeus didn’t believe that, so he wasn’t sure how she could. He had done nothing to prove himself worthy of her belief and she barely knew him. She probably knew Apollyon well, and together with Serenity and perhaps their friends, that male would be better able to protect her from the Devil.
He stared up at the stars, trying to ignore the creeping fear at the back of his mind. He refused to feel that emotion. He had feared the Devil in the past, scores of centuries ago, when he had been young and weak, and unsure of himself. With every decade that had passed, every victory on the battlefield and captive that had cracked from his torture alone, he had grown stronger and more confident, becoming fitting of the title the Devil had given him.
King of Demons.
A title he had to live up to or risk losing.
The Devil would strip him of it if he discovered that he had already met the female and was refusing to bring her to him.
He had to return to his master and learn more about why he wanted her, but he didn’t think Liora would allow him to leave without a fight. She wanted him to stay.
Why?
His heart supplied that perhaps she desired to kiss him again.
He wished.
Asmodeus tried to focus on the stars and failed when his thoughts turned to Liora and when she had kissed him. He could still taste her. The kiss had made him feel strange, fuzzy and unfocused, and he wanted to do it again.
He wanted the petite female sitting beside him with her beautiful eyes on the stars and her hand covering his, even though she was full of light and purity.
For the first time in his life, he wished there was more good in him in the human sense of the word, not less. He wanted to be worthy of her and right now he wasn’t. A beautiful, noble, and caring female like Liora deserved a male of equal character.
She would never truly desire someone only capable of violence, cruelty, and darkness. Everything she viewed as bad.
His gaze slid to her against his will and traced the outline of her profile. Starlight bathed her skin in pale tones that his eyes could see. They were accustomed to the dark and marked another difference between them.
She was mortal.
He was immortal.
She glanced across at him and he averted his gaze to his wings. The wind played in his black feathers. It had felt good to fly with her in his arms, held close against his chest, and to feel her hands on his skin.
Asmodeus slipped his right hand from beneath hers, leaned to his left and brought his wing forwards, between them. She frowned and a flicker of hurt crossed her face. He hadn’t meant it as a barrier or an act of pushing her away.
He nimbly preened his ruffled feathers and she relaxed again, and went back to gazing at the stars. Asmodeus focused on tending to
his wings. Some of the feathers were out of place from flying and he needed something other than Liora to concentrate on so he could free up his mind. Working on a task that was second nature to him often allowed him to clear his head and caused his thoughts to fall into better order. He hoped it was the case today.
Cleaning his weapons normally produced the same effect.
One of his swords did need cleaning, but he didn’t think that Liora would appreciate him tending to the blade. It would remind her of what he had done, and that the Devil wanted her, and it would spoil this quiet moment of calm.
“Do you not like the stars?” she whispered, her gaze returning to him.
Asmodeus paused at his work and looked over his wing to her. He did like the stars and he liked her too, and he thought she was infinitely more beautiful than they were. What would she say if he told her that?
He shoved that thought away and nodded. “I do, but my feathers are misaligned. They irritate me.”
“Can you put your wings away?” Her hazel eyes lowered to his wing and, before he could answer that he could if he desired it, she had reached over, laid her palm on the curve of his wing, and was running her hand down it.
Holy Hell, that felt good.
A shiver bolted through him, hot and fierce, reigniting his blood and making it burn for more. He wanted her to stroke his wing again, to caress it and tease him, driving him wild with need for her.
His fangs lengthened and he sensed the moment his irises brightened and began to verge on crimson. Her eyes widened and her fingers paused against his feathers.
She sounded breathless when she uttered, “You like me touching them?”
Asmodeus told himself not to nod and not to let on that her touching his wings had him hurtling towards the edge of bliss and had him rock hard in his loincloth.
He tried.
Failed.
He nodded and swallowed hard when she resumed her stroking, sending hot little shivers tripping over his flesh, stoking his hunger up degree after degree until he couldn’t take any more.
Her Angel: Eternal Warriors Complete Series Box Set Page 79