Not the diamond.
Me.
Once again, his expression went serious as he nodded to my bag. “Until I stole The Ingress no one knew my real intentions. I knew it would blow my cover, but I couldn’t risk leaving it in Hell’s hands just so I could stay inconspicuous. That was when I learned that I could use it to teleport around Earth.”
March sat back in his chair. The motion made the towel come untucked. Fortunately, it stayed on his lap where it covered his more distracting attributes. We both seemed to be more relaxed than we had been just moments before. I found myself shifted on the couch to a more comfortable position as I listened.
“Originally, I took it to Sumeria. They had sorcerers there with knowledge as ancient as the war. I left it with them for safe keeping. That lasted for a while, until the empire faded. Before it could fail entirely, I retrieved the diamond.” His gaze settled on a spot of nothing in the air as he fell into his story. “That was the beginning of the great kings in Israel. I gave it to King Saul where I had hoped it would be placed in a temple, hidden behind Jerusalem’s faith. Everything was fine until Solomon.”
March frowned as he leaned forward again. He rested his elbows on his knees. I thought he looked frustrated enough just telling this story. I wouldn’t have wanted to see him when it had actually happened. “King Solomon was notorious for marrying outside the faith. Which was fine. Whatever. But he started dabbling in mysticism and magic, a big no-no back then.”
I gave a small sound of derision for that. Any sort of magic or association with it had been frowned on by the Christian faith for centuries with a wake of burned, tortured, and hung people behind it. He referred to pre-Christian times, but the prejudice seemed to originate then. Still, I wasn’t going to interrupt.
“He began to use The Ingress to summon demons to fight his wars for him.” March shook his head. “Idiot. He could have let the fallen into the world in his ignorance and pride. When I found out I demanded he give it back to me. Solomon argued. I threatened. I won. After that, I decided The Ingress couldn’t be trusted in anyone’s hands. It was possible that it had corrupted Solomon along with whatever magic he’d been working. But when I had a chance to look it over, I realized that its use had fouled it even more. It wanted to be used.
“I couldn’t destroy it, so I decided to hide it away. But first, I needed something to keep the fallen from finding it. Solomon’s father had managed to get some poor woman in Endor damned to immortality just for using the diamond to summon Samuel’s spirit for advice. I thought she might be interested in some payback.”
Why does power turn people stupid?
It sounded to me as if this was a constant from day one of human history. Not only did March have to protect humans from the fallen, but he had to protect us from ourselves. No wonder he was so grouchy. After all this time I would be, too.
“Did she help?” I asked.
March nodded as a smirk came to his face. “You’d have liked her, I think. She was a lot like you.” He turned that cheeky look to me. “Stubborn.” His smirk became a grin for my vocal protest. “Gorgeous. But brave and independent, too.” I was mollified by what he followed up with, but just to be as stubborn as he accused me of being, I kept my arms crossed. He just laughed.
“She’s the one that made the box and sewed the Seal on the fabric.”
I tilted my head as something occurred to me. “You talk about her in the past tense. What happened to her if she was made immortal?” I hadn’t missed that little detail.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.” He sounded mystified and surprised by his lack of information. “I couldn’t find her after that. It’s possible she’s hiding as well. And if she doesn’t want to be found I won’t betray the favor she did me by looking for her, and possibly leading others to her.”
That made sense and I smiled at March again. He really was a good guy under all that surliness. Fallen angel or not, I knew what my experience with him has been. No, he wasn’t the most outwardly kind person, but he had never hurt me. Aside from keeping these secrets from me before, he was giving them to me now, and hadn’t outright lied about anything. I began to reassess the label of asshole I had given him.
“The rest you know,” he said. “I hid it in Canada thinking no one would ever get to it.” March gave a derisive snort. “Until human ingenuity and curiosity proved me wrong.” The look he gave me said he lumped me in with that group.
“Oh, hey!” I protested. “Don’t give me that look. It’s our world and we’ll explore it if we want to.” I couldn’t quite keep the amusement off my face, so I stuck my tongue out at him.
March laughed at that. It was a nice sound, I decided. It matched his smile. Honest, but with an edge of rakishness that made me wonder what kind of trouble he could get me into.
I apparently had a thing for bad boys.
“Fine,” he conceded with amusement in his voice. He sobered again quickly. “But having it brought back into the open alerted the fallen to its presence. Fortunately, it also alerted me. It became a race to see who would get to it first.”
I nodded as I pieced timelines together in my head. “The museum only had it for a couple of weeks. It had been excavated months before but had changed hands a number of times. Everyone who had it died. Horribly.” And now it made sense why. The fallen must have caught up to them, but somehow, they had sent the diamond on before they’d been killed. Humanity stayed one step ahead out of dumb luck.
“There are things you need to know about that diamond,” he warned. “More than just what it does. The necromancer put a failsafe into The Ingress. I learned that the hard way when I tried to take it back from Sumeria.” He sighed as he rubbed his forehead with his fingertips. Strands of his drying hair fell over his hand. “If or when the diamond falls into mortal hands it can’t just be taken back. The owner must either give it willingly or be killed.” I didn’t understand the pointed look he gave me, so I cocked my head a little. “You’re the current owner of The Ingress, Brenna.”
I felt my eyes widen. “What? No, I’m not.” But even as I denied it, I knew it was true. I just didn’t want to believe it. “The museum owns it.”
March shook his head. “An institution can’t own anything. I could take it now if that were the case.” His expression was apologetic, but firm at the same time. He wasn’t going to let me have my delusion. “I’m sorry, but as soon as you took it out of the lab it technically became yours. That’s why they want to kill you.”
“Oh, come on.” I stood up from the couch but left the bag behind as I paced the small living room. My mind raced as I chewed on a thumbnail. It was a bad habit I had since childhood. Every time I got nervous or scared my fingernails paid the price. “You could have just asked me to give it to you,” I pointed out.
“I did,” he replied bluntly.
“Well, you could have told me this earlier.” I half glared at him as I paced by.
He watched me with a calm expression on his face that annoyed me for some reason.
“And you would have believed me?” He lifted from his leaning position on his knees. “Brenna, you barely believed anything I said, and you were adamant about keeping possession of the diamond. The best I could do was include you in the plan to hide it which meant giving you enough information to make that happen.”
I scoffed in outrage as I came to a stop a few feet away and glared full out this time. “That is so manipulative.”
“Demon.” He held his hands out and shrugged.
I blinked for a moment. My argument had been brought to a dead stop by that. I looked at March and didn’t know what to do. I felt helpless and alone.
March got up from the chair, a sympathetic expression on his face. The towel fell to the floor, but neither of us cared. I was so upset by all of this that his nudity didn’t exactly register in my mind. He came to stand in front of me then tipped my face up with his fingers under my chin.
“I would never hurt you, Brenna.
”
He not only sounded sincere, but as if his heart were behind his words. It was the difference between a promise and a vow. This was a different March than I’d heard before. He’d never spoken to me with such earnest concern. It melted any annoyance I had with him, enough so that I lurched forward to wrap my arms around him and hug myself close.
Reason pushed itself over my panic and fear. With this new knowledge I was able to come to some solid conclusions. He could have killed me at any time. He could have left me to the wolves. He didn’t. He could have explained all of this before, but he was right. I wouldn’t have believed him. I had accepted the existence of demons, magic, and spells, but the rest of it sounded like some kind of dark fairy tale.
In the beginning he was brusque, even outright mean at times, but now he showed real concern, real fondness.
“March?” My voice was small and muffled against him.
“Yeah.”
“You’re naked.” His chuckle vibrated through his chest against my cheek. It made a smirk of amusement curl my lips. It was such a ridiculous point to make, but it seemed the only one I was capable of. When all else failed to make sense, grasp onto the ludicrous.
“So I am.”
He suddenly pulled me up into his arms, so that I was face to face with him. I wrapped my legs around his waist and my arms over his shoulders. There was a remarkably interesting look on his face that sparked a familiar warmth within me.
I believed the term was lust.
This time it was me who laughed before I closed the small distance between us to press a kiss to his lips.
I had obviously forgiven him for keeping secrets. Talk about bad taste in men. I was not only falling for a demon, but one of the original fallen at that.
Oh, he was hot, like a supermodel mixed with a body builder. Shouldn’t that be expected from someone that personified temptation? But it was more than the physical. He was grouchy, impatient, demanding, independent, stubborn, but also gentle, attentive, protective.
Bonus? He seemed to think I was worth more attention than just to keep me alive. It showed in how he kissed me back. How he walked toward the bedroom with me in his arms. I knew what was about to happen: the same thing we did just a few hours ago.
I was looking forward to it. I anticipated the intimacy that would bring us closer. Maybe there was something to that whole survivalism creating strange bedfellows thing. I wasn’t going to argue with it.
ELEVEN
BRENNA
“What about Cambodia?” I asked.
We sat on the couch. March had one foot on the floor, the other spread out. I was leaned back against him and had my laptop open. We were going over some of the places I had found that might work as a location to hide The Ingress. After I had woken up from a much-needed nap after the marathon sex with March, we decided to put our focus into high gear. The sooner we agreed on a location, the sooner we could get out of here and on with other important things, like how to clear my name.
“You want to put it in Angkor Wat?” March asked.
He had his chin on my shoulder and his arms wrapped around my waist, holding me against him. It was a comfortable position, one I could get used to. I could’ve happily stayed like that until the sun burned out, but sooner or later the fallen would find us and ruin everything.
“Sure,” I said as I clicked on a link. “It has the benefit of being a place of strong faith, and lots of places to hide it in.”
March let out a sigh that contained a grumble. “I looked at that place once. The monks are adamant that they want to be left out of everything to do with us. And since they have ways to kick our asses that I don’t understand I’m not going to push it.”
I turned my head enough to look at March with an incredulous expression. “You mean there are mortals who can kick your ass?” A note of amusement colored my question.
March suddenly grabbed me by the waist and squeezed me in his arms while I let out a squeak.
“Yes, smartass. We’re not invulnerable.”
I laughed lightly then kissed his cheek in apology before I turned my attention back to our search.
“Fine. No Buddhist temples. Then how about Lapland? It’s remote, and there are a number of locations of faith scattered all over.” They varied from the old religion of the reindeer herders to modern Christianity, but all that mattered was that the faith was strong enough to work with whatever bindings and charms we used on the diamond.
“That has possibility,” March said. He pointed a finger to some links on the screen. “Bring those up.” e reached over me to get to the keyboard but I swatted at his hand.
“Stop it.” I laughed as I pushed his hand away. “What did I tell you about touching?”
March’s laugh was decidedly naughty. He pressed his mouth against my neck and made me wriggle in place.
“You told me a lot of things about touching, but I thought we were supposed to be working instead of playing.”
“You know what I mean.” I scrunched my shoulder up in an effort to get him away from my neck, but I was still laughing. It was difficult to form a stern protest when I really enjoyed what he was doing. I did manage to click on a link to locations in Lapland in an effort to get back on track. “Behave. And let me drive.” I bounced the shoulder he had his chin on which caused him to chuckle again.
I enjoyed our new closeness, the familiarity that brought about easy banter, light teasing, and casual touch. It was almost like a real relationship. I trusted him more, felt more comfortable around him. That stupid giddy feeling that came with getting to know someone better had formed within me. There was no way I could know where we would go from here or after we hid The Ingress, but for right now I was happy.
“There,” March said and pointed to a name on the screen. “That one.”
I clicked on the link to bring up the location, then read aloud. “Hitonhauta.” My pronunciation was atrocious. “Also called The Devil’s Tomb. Located in Laukaa, Finland, it is the largest gorge in the country being 30 to 40 meters wide and even 25 meters deep. It’s believed to have been created when a cast out angel hit the Earth.” I gave March a side eye, I received a bland look in return.
“Don’t believe everything you read.” He gave a derisive snort. “But that looks like a good place. Lots of little cave systems, and belief in the ridiculous would add to the protections.”
“Speaking of,” I said. We had talked so much about where. I didn’t know anything about what we were going to put it in. “You said the seals were weakened from being opened so we can’t use the original box and fabric. What are you going to put it in once we decide where to go?”
March gave a heavy sigh. “I haven’t gotten that far yet. The Earth is running low on talented mystics. I’ll probably have to do it myself, but my mystical signature would be all over it.”
“Says you,” I said then opened another search window on the laptop. “Allow me to introduce you to a great little shopping place.” It was one of my favorite places to find unusual things and custom-made items.
“Tesy?” March looked at me like I was out of my mind.
“It started out as a place to buy secondhand clothes then evolved into an online marketplace for handmade items.” I typed Seal of the Seven Archangels into the search bar and within a couple of seconds had thousands of results from rings, earrings, and other jewelry to altar cloths, and tapestries. “There. Pick something.”
March huffed in astonishment. I could tell he was impressed by his silence. Since he was being so serious, I let him operate the arrow keys so he could scroll through the site at his own pace. It allowed me to relax against him and enjoy the feel of him wrapped around me. I was the type of person who was very tactile in a relationship. I would give small touches as I walked by, steal the occasional kiss or hug. More than once I had been accused of hogging the bed or blankets for snuggling in close. I never regretted a thing.
After a few moments I thought I’d add to his options.<
br />
“If it just has to be made by someone of faith or a mystic there are all different kinds of things you could find on here. Most of them are already made. All we’d have to do is order it and have it sent wherever you want.”
“I have a number of P.O. boxes around the world, but one of them should be close to one of the sellers.” He seemed fascinated. If there wasn’t such an urgency it would’ve been fun to explore the site with him. Maybe after this was all over, we could open a bottle of wine and hide away for a week or seven, and I could show him all of the things I liked.
And not just online.
I could also ask him some of my more burning questions. One of which I wasn’t going to let wait.
“March?” I waited until he looked away from the monitor. “How come my ankle isn’t sprained anymore?”
A smug smile crossed his lips. “I healed you.”
“Healed me?” My brows lifted with my surprise. “You can heal people?” That was definitely a good thing to know.
“Ah…sort of.” He took in a deep breath then let it out slowly. It almost seemed as if he didn’t want to talk about it. “How to put this…you’ve heard of the Florence Nightingale Effect, right?”
“It’s when a caregiver like a nurse or a doctor falls in love with a patient.” Now I looked at March. My heartbeat felt like it was holding its breath waiting for what March was going to say next. I wasn’t sure I was ready for some declaration of affection. It seemed far too soon for that.
“That’s not what it was originally.” Now he really seemed reluctant. “TV shows, movies and books tweaked it to make better drama. Originally, the story went that intimacy by a caregiver with a patient that they had feelings for would cure them.”
He looked at me expectantly, waiting to see if I understood what he was saying. I didn’t at first. I had to think about it. Once it came to me, I felt like an idiot that it took me so long.
“Nu-uh!” He was obviously holding back amusement as he nodded. “You’re saying that my ankle was healed because we had sex?”
Demons Are a Girl's Best Friend (Good Girls & Demons) Page 9