His shoulder blades itched, his wings pushing for freedom.
Nevar snarled and buried his claws deeper into the bar top, clinging to it as he fought the change, refusing to give into it. It would pass. He just had to breathe.
What he really needed to do was let this hippy shit go and rip the heads off everyone who was now staring at him as if he was a one man freak show.
Including her.
He fixed his gaze on her.
Not including her.
Calm came over him like a cooling balm as his eyes met hers, washing through him and chasing back the darkness enough for him to get a grip on it and shove it back in its place, under his control. He breathed slowly and steadily, willing to try the hippy shit again because he had to admit it did work most of the time, and mentally apologising to Liora for doubting her methods, and everyone in the bar for wanting to tear their heads off and drink from their gushing necks.
The woman stood studying him still, her head canted to one side, a curious edge to her gaze.
“You have a sickness,” she said.
He nodded. “I brought it upon myself… and so I must conquer it myself too.”
She hopped back up onto her stool. “Why do you deny what will make you better?”
She held the glass out to him and he shot backwards, hit the stool, lost his balance and toppled over it. To add injury to insult, he landed hard on his knees and cracked his chin on the seat, and a few people nearby snickered at him, including Villandry.
Nevar shot Villandry a glare filled with intent that he knew the vampire would clearly read. One more laugh out of him and Nevar would make him intimately acquainted with something wooden and pointy.
“I’m sorry.” The woman drew the glass back to her, clutching it to her chest between her breasts.
He grimaced, clawed his way back onto his feet, and huffed as he sat down. “Blood only makes it worse. Vicious cycle.”
She drank the rest of the glass in one go, set it on the bar and pushed it behind her, where he couldn’t see it. He appreciated that. It was better than shoving it in his face and taunting him with it as she had a minute ago. She toyed with the belt of her robe, an awkward edge to her body language, and Nevar surmised that he wasn’t the only one having trouble not making an idiot of himself tonight.
Her head jerked up, her eyes leaping to his, and she blurted, “What are you?”
Nevar leaned back, caught off guard by her question and unsure how to respond. “I was wondering the same thing about you.”
Her smile bewitched him. There was a touch of innocence in it. Purity that he found alluring, as if she could cleanse him and make him good again. Impossible. The only way he could be good again was to die and be reborn as an angel of Heaven, and he had no intention of letting that happen. Heaven had tampered with his memories, controlling his actions. They had taken his free will from him. He would never return to that place and that life, under their control and unaware of how they played their angels like pawns, erasing memories when it suited them, keeping them in order.
“I don’t know what I am. Perhaps I am like you,” she said, luring him back to her, and he frowned at what she had said.
He shook his head. “Impossible. I was an angel, and now I am a demon, and not by choice.”
She played with the belt of the robe again, her black eyebrows dipping low and darkening her hazel eyes. “If you had a choice, would you still be an angel?”
He pondered that. “I would want to be an angel again to extinguish the evil inside me, but I have no desire to serve Heaven again. I want to serve no master.”
She stared at her knees, her gaze distant and her fingers paused against the material. She was still for so long that he grew concerned and leaned towards her without thinking, reaching one hand out.
She spoke before he could lay it over hers, her tone solemn and edged with pain, and he froze.
“I despise angels.”
He sat back and settled his hand on his bare knee instead. “Why?”
She frowned and he expected her to bite out something, and then her expression turned troubled and he sensed the panic rising within her. Her eyes slowly widened, her eyebrows creeping upwards, and she shook her head.
“I cannot remember.” Her gaze leaped to his and her breathing quickened. “I cannot remember.”
He could sympathise. He had been there himself, unable to recall events that people told him had happened and he had been involved in. He reached out and touched the robe covering her shoulder, his focus on the wound beneath.
“Did angels do this?”
She snarled and smacked his hand away, and shot to her bare feet. She shoved him in the chest and backed off, her eyes wild, filled with fear that flowed over him together with her power. It rose, growing stronger and pressing down on him. The colourful lights in the club flickered.
“I don’t remember,” she whispered on repeat and clawed at her hair, drawing the long black strands back from her face, tugging at them. “I want to remember.”
A light above the bar shattered, raining blue glass down on the black top.
Everyone stopped to look at her and she shook her head, curling into a ball.
Nevar did the only thing he could to get their eyes off her.
He caught her right wrist, pulled her between his thighs and wrapped his arms around her. He cupped her head with his left hand and rubbed the small of her back with his right.
“Breathe,” he murmured into her hair, closing his eyes as he felt her trembling. She smelled like dew, fresh and clean and earthy. Pure. The scent of a cool summer morning.
She sucked down one breath and then another.
“Slower.” He stroked her back, cursing himself for enjoying the feel of her pressing against him. “In through your nose and out through your mouth. Breathe like you’re filling your lungs up from the bottom. Nice and slow.”
He couldn’t quite believe he was spouting Liora’s hippy shit to his beautiful stranger.
She seemed to be embracing it though, and it seemed to work for her just as it did for him. Each slow breath she took had her power falling, the weight of it lifting from his shoulders. She released her head and pressed her palms to his breastplate, and a foolish part of him wished he wasn’t wearing his armour so he could feel her delicate hands on his flesh. Her breath skated across his arm.
“I know a little about forgetting things,” he said in a low voice destined for her ears only and kept stroking her back. He couldn’t stop himself now. She was soft and warm beneath his calloused palm. Tempting. “It can get a little too much to handle at times. You just have to breathe.”
She nodded, exhaled, and pushed back from him. A sense of loss immediately engulfed him as she slipped from his arms, placing some distance between them, and straightened her robe.
He lowered his hands to his knees and searched for something to say, trying to come up with something that would make him look good. Something reassuring. Women liked that sort of thing.
She swept her hair out of her face and lifted her chin, looking him straight in the eye. “What do they call you?”
“They call me many things, and most of them not complimentary.” He smiled at her formal way of asking. She leapt between antiquated and modern so much that he was going in circles trying to figure out how old she was. He held his hand out to her. “But you can call me Nevar.”
“Nevar,” she whispered and he liked how his name sounded when it fell from her lips, spoken in her soft voice, edged with warmth.
She reached out to take his hand.
A black vortex appeared off to his right. Asmodeus stepped out of it, his expression stormy and dark, relaying his anger, and his golden eyes locked on Nevar like a hawk’s on prey. The portal shrank and Asmodeus advanced, the crowd parting for him. Every demon here knew of his master. It was impossible to mistake him for anyone else as he towered above them, his short black hair and golden eyes matching the Devil’s, and his part
ial gold-edged black armour in place, protecting his hips and shins, and leaving his chest bare.
“The King of Demons,” the woman whispered with the same reverence as she had used to speak Nevar’s name and stared at Asmodeus with wide eyes that were a little too adoring for Nevar’s liking.
Asmodeus paid her no heed, which spared him from Nevar’s wrath.
He seized Nevar’s wrist and dragged him off the stool, and Nevar fought him, clawing at his hand to get it off him. He was damned if the bastard angel was going to drag him around and command him in front of the female, belittling him.
“You will return to Hell, Nevar,” Asmodeus said, the compulsion behind the words sinking claws into Nevar and dragging him downwards, towards that realm.
He wasn’t strong enough to fight Asmodeus or his commands when he was weak with hunger, but that wasn’t going to stop him from trying.
He attempted to pull his arm free of his master’s grip but Asmodeus tightened it, digging claws into his flesh and spilling his blood. He fought him every step of the way as they headed towards the exit. The female left the bar and followed, her gaze darkening by degrees.
“I will not go with you,” Nevar snapped. “I will not return. It is time you did your duty.”
Asmodeus yanked on his arm and sent him barrelling through the open door. He hit the damp tarmac and snarled over his shoulder at Asmodeus. The wretched angel would pay for that.
Asmodeus loomed over him.
The female stopped a short distance away, hovering near the entrance to Cloud Nine.
Nevar fought the change that threatened to come over him and the need to fight Asmodeus burning inside him. A need that would never die. He growled and flashed his fangs at Asmodeus. The male stood his ground and glared at him, his lips compressed into a thin line and his arms folded across his bare chest, as Nevar rose to his feet.
“You will return to Hell, Nevar.” Asmodeus’s deep voice echoed around the walls, drawing a few glances from the mortals in the queue for Cloud Nine.
Nevar shook his head, but he wasn’t answering his master. He was answering the dark hunger inside him, the vile need to surrender to his urges and act on his impulses. He refused. He wouldn’t give in to them, not while the female was watching him.
He hated that part of him and how he felt when it emerged.
Not just the way he changed psychologically, craving violence and bloodshed despite not wanting to feel such things. It was the physical changes he underwent that really sickened him. The claws and the fangs, and how his skin turned the colour of shadows, and most of all the horns that made his skull feel as if it would explode as they emerged.
Asmodeus cast a black portal and the female’s eyes darkened and she bared her fangs, her deadly gaze pinned on his master now.
Was she going to attack him?
Asmodeus didn’t give Nevar the chance to find out. He shoved Nevar into the swirling vortex and he landed in Hell, on the black plateau on which Asmodeus’s ruined fortress stood, high above the rest of the barren basalt wasteland.
He landed hard but was on his feet in an instant, rushing back to the portal, a sliver of him filled with hope that the female would step through the vortex too.
It shimmered.
He waited.
Asmodeus stepped through it and the swirling black ribbons evaporated.
Nevar growled and cursed him in the demon tongue.
His master gave him an unamused look. “You are drunk. I have a way to sober you up.”
Nevar straightened, forgetting his desire to correct his master and point out that he wasn’t drunk, at least not on alcohol. Perhaps he was drunk on the female, intoxicated by her beauty and innocence. All of that fell away though, drowned out by what Asmodeus had said and his overwhelming reaction to it.
All angels suffered from intense curiosity and he was no exception.
Asmodeus folded his arms across his broad chest and crimson bled into the edges of his golden irises, a sign of the anger that laced the incredible wave of power that swept over Nevar, battering him fiercely enough that he had to plant one foot behind him to keep himself steady.
“I sensed you leave Hell and went to the chamber after dealing with the Devil on your behalf.”
Nevar took a step towards him, a trickle of dread running through his veins. “What of the chamber?”
Had something happened to it while he had been absent? The look in his master’s crimson eyes said that it had, and that the Devil would be punishing both of them.
Asmodeus flashed his fangs on a black snarl. “The chamber is dark.”
Nevar’s heart plummeted into his stomach.
“The destroyer has awoken.”
CHAPTER 4
Nevar beat his black wings and swooped lower over the inhospitable obsidian basalt fields. Heat rose from the glowing orange cracks where lava had broken through, creating a pattern of deadly veins across the land. As far as he could see all around him, it was the same, an endless grim plain that would be impossible to traverse on foot.
Had the destroyer come this way?
He rubbed his jaw as he flew. It still ached from the blow the Devil had personally delivered. A punch that had sent him flying across the black courtyard of the Devil’s formidable fortress and crashing into the obsidian spires of rock that formed a sweeping curve around it.
His leg burned with the memory too. The damned spires were still repairing themselves after the battle that had taken place there several months ago, spewing lava from their broken tips and slowly climbing high into the thick acrid air. When he had struck the wall, his impact had created a fissure and lava had bled through, singeing his right thigh before he could escape it.
He growled, grinding his teeth, his head filled with black thoughts, dark desires to head back to the fortress and punish every Hell’s angel who had been present for his humiliation. The minions of the Devil had paused at their work to repair the courtyard flagstones and had laughed as he had suffered. His fangs lengthened as he pictured tearing into them with claw and tooth before silencing them with his blade and sending them back to Heaven to be reborn as angels of that realm.
They would learn not to laugh at him.
Nevar beat his wings and huffed, giving up the pleasing images and tempting thoughts. If he returned to the fortress, the Devil would kill him. He had threatened to do as much when he had banished Nevar from his sight for a period of seven days.
He wasn’t sure the Devil would come good on the threat to kill him, since he had warned Asmodeus and his cohorts to keep him alive at all costs as he was now the Great Destroyer’s master, but he wasn’t willing to risk it. The Devil had a temper and was liable to lose his head and butcher him, and then regret it afterwards. He had seen the powerful male kill the commander of the First Battalion, the best of the Hell’s angels under his command and a male the Devil had treated like a son, all because he had lost his temper over a bet the commander had won.
What made the whole thing more stupid in Nevar’s eyes was that the bet had been the birth date of Erin’s son, the Devil’s grandson.
The Devil had lost, and had taken his commander’s head for it, and had clearly regretted it afterwards when golden light had engulfed the angel’s body, taking him back to Heaven to be reborn. Nevar had been glad that he hadn’t been included in the bet, and Asmodeus had smiled smugly. The bastard had chosen a date weeks beyond the one his master had selected, ensuring he couldn’t possibly win the bet.
Nevar definitely wasn’t willing to risk his neck by returning to the fortress in order to dish out some vengeance on the Hell’s angels.
Hot air buffeted him and he swerved right, away from the broad expanse of lava river ahead of him. He would have to go around it. His gaze tracked the snaking glowing ribbon in both directions. Impossible. It stretched as far as his eyes could see, illuminating the darkness far into the distance.
He sighed and beat his wings to keep himself steady in the warm thic
k air.
His stomach growled, reminding him once again that he had forgotten to get something to eat when in the mortal realm.
He couldn’t fly for much longer without feeding and he was damned if he was going to plummet into a pool of lava and get himself killed and sent back to Heaven.
They had scoured Hell for the beast. There was no sign of it.
Had it hidden itself in one of the thousands of caves that dotted the immense landscape of Hell?
He opened a line of telepathic communication with Asmodeus. No sign of it in this direction.
None in this one either. Came the reply.
It was still strange being able to do this with Asmodeus. He had always been able to communicate with other angels of Heaven via telepathy, but had lost that talent when Asmodeus had contracted with him. He had thought the talent gone forever, until recently, when he had been cursing Asmodeus in his head and the angel had heard it and responded.
Asmodeus had never experienced telepathy before that point.
To say it had freaked his master out a little was an understatement.
Any idea at all where it might have gone? Nevar said and heard Asmodeus huff in his head.
The angel wasn’t pleased with his master, the Devil. The Devil had been vague when they had questioned him, eventually admitting that he had no information on where the beast might go.
Yet he’d had the audacity to punish Nevar and Asmodeus for not finding it the first time they had scoured Hell and had sent them back out to look for it again.
His stomach gurgled again, twisting in on itself so hard that he grimaced and rubbed it. He couldn’t concentrate, not with the constant pressing presence of his hunger. It was a weight in his gut that he could no longer ignore.
Maybe we should check the mortal world. It was worth a try.
No response.
I am starving. I am liable to drop into a boiling pit of lava or expire from lack of sustenance alone. You have orders to keep me alive.
Asmodeus grunted in response to that. Very well. Scour the mortal world for the beast and I will send word to Apollyon, and he can alert the others to the situation. Eat while you are there.
Her Angel: Eternal Warriors Complete Series Box Set Page 115