Sins of the Damned (Fallen Cities: Elisium Book 2)

by Elena Lawson

  She purses her lips, accentuating all of her wrinkles. “You’ll consider our debt settled when I’m through with her?”

  “I will.”

  She shakes her head, eyeing me up and down as she does. “All right. I’ll do it.”

  Kincaid extends his hand to her, and with a curl in her lip, she takes it, sealing the deal.

  “I’ll be using a priceless favor to export you to Elisium. I’ll expect you to be ready at dawn.”

  “Yes, yes,” Lady Devereaux chuffs. “As you say.”

  “If you aren’t here,” he begins to warn, and she looks at him like he may be the stupidest lad she’s ever laid eyes on.

  “Are you daft? I said I’d do it, so I will and that’s that. Now, if you’ll excuse me I’d like to finish my knitting.”

  Once back outside, Kincaid gives my hand a squeeze.

  “Is she always so…”

  I couldn’t think of the right word.

  “Bitter?” he offers.

  I nod.

  “No,” he replies and I heave a sigh of relief until he tips his head down to stare at me with mischief in his eyes. “She’s usually much worse.”

  14

  “What happened to you?”

  I sit on the edge of my bed, my aching head resting in my hands. Palm pressing into my eye-sockets to numb the discomfort.

  “Go away, Artemis,” I moan, shivering against a cool sweat breaking out over my chest.

  If this is a hangover, I’m never drinking or touching any form of drug ever again. It’s atrocious.

  Artemis sniffs, and I hear his footsteps pause a few feet away. “Why do you smell like a roast pigeon?”

  I really don’t want to know how he knows what that smells like. Blindly, I reach out a hand to try to shove him off, but he’s just out of reach. “Make yourself useful and get me some water.”

  “I can do that, but first I’ve been ordered to tell you by a very rude old woman that you need to come downstairs. She said she doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”

  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

  “Nope,” he says, lips popping. “She got here hours ago. Moved in down the hall. Master Kincaid said to stay out of her way. That she was here to train you.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost three?”

  “In the morning?”

  With the heavy blanket I threw over the window, it’s impossible to tell the time, but I know I’m only giving myself false hope.

  “Considering you got home at four in the morning…”

  “Will you just,” I wave him over, “do your thing, please. My head feels like it’s splitting in two.”

  Artemis rests his hands on the back of my head, and I tremble as a seeking warmth radiates down my spine, numbing some of the pain. The throbbing behind my eyes dulls to a barely noticeable thudding and when I open my eyes for the second time this morning, they don’t burn quite as much.

  “Thank you,” I murmur. “And I’m sorry about last night. I was…I don’t know what I was.”

  “Sexually frustrated?”

  “Art.”

  “Fine. I’ll stop. You just make it so easy to get under your skin.”

  “If I ever decide I want kids, talk me out of it, okay?”

  Artemis laughs and helps me up, squinting at the state of me. I’m afraid to ask, but it turns out I don’t have to. He’s perfectly happy to tell me exactly what he sees. The little shit.

  “You look like you got run over by a truck.”

  “Thanks. That’s sweet.”

  “And I think there’s a bird’s nest in the back of your head.”

  “Out. Get out before I eat your soul, you little heathen.”

  He rushes away with a chuckle and calls back, “That old lady said she’s going to drag you down there if you don’t come on your own! I’d hurry if I were you. She doesn’t seem like the type to mess around.”

  No, she certainly didn’t.

  I take a moment to crack my stiff neck and stretch out my legs before padding to the bathroom. After the luxurious bath in Kincaid’s tub last week, washing my usual way, in three inches of water on the shower floor has been a sad occurrence.

  If I had the gall, I’d just ask to use his bathroom, but other than that first night, he seems to be entirely fine with me sleeping in my own room. It’s impossible not to wonder what changed, but I try to put that out of my mind as I lather soap through my hair and scrub leftover dirt from beneath my fingernails.

  As clean as I’ll be getting, I drain the gray-tinted water and step out, quickly turning on the shower head and removing my arm to rinse away the dirt residue from the shower floor before quickly turning it off. My heart jackhammering in my chest and a ball forming in my throat.

  I glare at the showerhead, making the decision to defeat the metal foe next time.

  A showerhead is not the hose. I am not at Ford’s house anymore.

  “Next time,” I whisper, pointing at it in warning before I leave the bathroom to dress.

  “Ah,” Lady Devereaux trills as I find my way downstairs fifteen minutes later. “About time, girl.”

  “Sorry,” I mutter, scanning the sitting room in search of Casper or Kincaid, or pretty much anyone who would be an ally in this situation. A moment later Art enters from the dining room with a mouthful of blueberry muffin and plants himself in the armchair in the corner.

  “Mind if I watch?”

  Lady Deveraux doesn’t reply so I assume she doesn’t care. I suppose Artemis would have to be good enough, though I’d really been hoping for Kincaid or my tiny terrifying demon kitty.

  “We’ll train each morning at dawn,” Lady Devereaux says, fixing her reflective stare on me. “If you aren’t down here waiting for me, you will not train that day.”

  “But Kincaid said—”

  “That I must train you,” she snaps. “But I will do it on my terms. Is that clear?”

  I swallow and nod, standing awkwardly in the center of the floor. What now?

  Lady Devereaux rises on shaky legs, and I notice how she has a hunch in her back and how the skin on her forearms hangs off the bones as though there’s nothing else there. No substance. She hobbles around me, muttering to herself, and I feel her poking and prodding at me on the inside and have to press my fingernails into my palms to keep myself from shoving her out.

  I’m not even sure I could if I tried, though, so I don’t bother.

  “Asmodeus says you aren’t aware of your parentage.”

  It’s not a question, but I answer anyway. “No.”

  She huffs, coming to a stop in front of me. Hunched as she is, she’s an entire head shorter than my five and a half feet.

  “It’s unnatural,” she sneers, licking something black from her yellowed front teeth. “The light of your soul is the brightest I’ve ever seen in a Diablim. If I didn’t know any better, I’d have said you were Nephilim straight off. But I can sense the darkness in you. You’re Diablim all right.”

  She continues muttering to herself for a moment before seeming to decide something. “Asmodeus said he has a Spirit Scepter. That you used it to commune with Malphas. I’ve never heard of such a thing. The original seven don’t have souls any more than a daeva does or the demon that stole a fair-sized chunk of yours.”

  “Can you get it back from him?”

  She ignores my question and goes back to her chair, plopping into it like she weighs the same as someone twice her size. Dust wafts up from the old fabric, twinkling in the slanting afternoon light.

  “I think I’d like to see you wield the Scepter.”

  “Not gonna lie,” Artemis says, mouth full with another bite of muffin as he polishes it off. “I kind of want to see that, too.”

  “Quiet,” Lady Devereaux barks and Art shuts his mouth and melds even more into the chair where he sits.

  I wished he listened to me so easily.

  “Run along and fetch it,” she says. “Asmodeus likely keeps it
in his quarters.”

  “Where is he?”

  Her eyes bulge at me. “Do I look like his keeper? Go and fetch it so I can see what I’m working with here.”

  Artemis leaves the room when I do, and I get the sense he doesn’t particularly like the idea of being alone with the old woman either.

  “Where did Master Kincaid pick her up?” he asks as we ascend the stairs.

  “Infernum.”

  His jaw slackens. “Is that where you were last night?”

  I didn’t tell him, not because I was hiding it, but because I really wasn’t sure what Kincaid wanted Artemis to know or not know about what we were doing. He didn’t seem overly happy the last time I blurted out our plans. But then again, he did let Artemis come with us through the Underbridge so…

  “Yes.”

  “How was it there? They say it’s the best of all the cities.”

  “Who says?”

  “The Diablim at The Freakshow. They said it’s like hell on Earth, which I guess for them is like saying heaven on earth, right? Must’ve been pretty cool, huh?”

  I pinch the bridge of my nose, headache returning. “I don’t really know,” I admit. “I remember a weird church with a bunch of naked people and Belial sitting on a throne surrounded by headless statues of saints. After that everything’s sort of a blur until we got to Devereaux’s house. It was hot as hell, though. I do remember that.”

  His brows lower at my description. “You had some, didn’t you? That’s why you were all wrecked this morning. You tried Angel’s Tears.”

  “Not on purpose.”

  He snorts. “Right it just accidentally found its way into your nostrils, then.”

  “I don’t have to explain myself to you. Go take a nap or something, isn’t that what children do?”

  I know he won’t be offended so I feel no remorse as I split off from him to go to Kincaid’s bedroom. In fact, I’m sure he’d be more than happy to take the suggestion. The kid sleeps more hours than he’s awake.

  I rap at the door and wait for a response, but none comes and dread pools in my belly. For one, because I don’t want to go into his room without his permission. For two, because I’m pretty sure if I don’t bring that Scepter downstairs, Lady Devereaux is going to remove my soul from my body. And for three, because if Kincaid isn’t in here, then where is he?

  He said he wouldn’t leave me alone.

  Grounding myself with a long breath, I enter, flinching when the door lets out a shrill squeak. “Kincaid,” I call into the dark, feeling around the wall for a light switch.

  When I find none, I blink into the dim, letting my Diablim eyes adjust.

  My lips part at what I find, and I open the door a little wider, letting some more of the light from the hall inside.

  It’s trashed.

  I recall the terrible sounds the day we returned from Ford’s house. The smashing and shattering and banging and shouting when Kincaid locked himself inside of his room for nearly three days.

  His bed, once a masterpiece of whittled and expertly crafted mahogany beam and frame, is in splinters. The bench at the end is upturned, the legs broken. Several gaping holes in the wall the size of monstrous fists leak plaster down onto the floor like tears from empty eye sockets.

  It’s destroyed.

  I know he’s coming from the smell. That strange sulfuric odor permeates the air a moment before a burst of hot hickory and smoke takes its place.

  Warm air tickles my ankles from behind, and I turn to find him behind me, a billow of quickly evaporating mist around his boots. His staff clutched in the blackened skin of his palm. He isn’t fully in his demon form, but his arms are black to the crease of his elbows, and his horns remain out, as they have for some time now.

  I find I’m getting used to seeing them there, feeling like there’s something missing when they are not.

  He sweeps the room, concern knotting between his brows. “Is everything all right?”

  “I…”

  “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I—I was just…” What was I doing?

  Kincaid watches me warily as he shrugs off his jacket and sets his staff down to lean against the wall by a crooked nightstand. There’s something about him that’s setting me on edge, and I don’t think it’s that his demon form still hasn’t fully retracted. He looks…tired. Exhausted is more accurate.

  His cheeks are sullen and his features are all pinched, wound tightly like coils of string around a top.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I had to speak to Belial,” he replies, sitting heavily on the bed to remove his boots. He tosses them carelessly to the floor and scrubs a palm over his face.

  “You said you wouldn’t leave.”

  I can’t help it, something about knowing he wasn’t here—that he likely hadn’t been for most of the night makes me more than a little uneasy. I’d been passed out, completely dead to the world for nearly twelve hours, and he wasn’t here.

  “I didn’t have a choice, Na’vazēm. Belial would’ve come here if I hadn’t and that wouldn’t bode well for anyone in Elisium.”

  He sighs heavily and untucks his shirt, pulling it up from the back until it’s over his head, leaving his chest bare. I try not to stare at the dip where his torso narrows into the belted waist of his jeans. The curve of his Adonis belt.

  Vaguely, I recall Kincaid promising to speak to his brother later that night, but after our conversation with Lady Devereaux, everything is sort of blank for me. I scarcely remember getting into bed, never mind the trip home.

  I had to have been unconscious.

  “The mortals are growing uneasy,” he says in a distant voice, gaze fixed on a crack in the wall opposite the bed as he thinks. “The general population isn’t aware of our presence in the Fallen Cities, but their leaders are. They know that two of the seven are gone. Mortals who’ve ventured into Astrum and Delirium aren’t returning in much more concerning numbers than before.”

  “That’s their own fault.” I can’t help the haughty tone of my voice or the sneer from forming on my lips. “They were the ones stupid enough to enter.”

  I knew that despite all of my curiosity, when I still believed myself to be mortal, there wasn’t even a lick of a chance that I’d have willingly entered one of the cities.

  They were idiots.

  “You aren’t wrong, Na’vazēm, but that isn’t the only concern.”

  I sit next to him on the bed and crane my neck to see his expression, finding hollows beneath his eyes that weren’t there before. A weight settles like an anvil in my gut.

  “A group of Diablim in Delirium have begun an assault on the barricades of the city. It will take time to wear them down, and the mortal attempt to make repairs just as quickly, but…”

  He needn’t say more.

  So long as the Diablim continue, they will find a way to break through. Our rocky truce with the humans will be at an end.

  “I’ve dealt with it for now, but it’s only a matter of time before the city devolves into chaos.”

  “What can we do?”

  Kincaid shakes his head grimly. “Eliminate them.”

  I gasp. “The entire cities?”

  There has to be another way.

  “If we don’t, the mortals will get what they wanted from the start.”

  “What?” I prod, wishing he would look at me. Wishing he would stop looking like a man burning alive from the inside out.

  “A celestial war. They’ve always wanted the angels to clean up the dark stains on their land.”

  That didn’t make sense, though. Why not just do it themselves? “Why don’t they just nuke the cities? The mortals, I mean? The cities are contained. No mortals around them for miles in most directions. There would be minimal loss of life.”

  He tips his head to one side, a question in the set of his brow. “Because then we would reopen the gates of Hell and unleash an age of darkness on the Earth.”

  He must see the sho
ck in my face because he smiles devilishly, and I grip the rumpled blankets under me to regain control of my features. I’m not afraid of him.

  “You can do that?”

  He considers me for a moment.

  “No one of us can, but the seven lords together could.”

  I wonder why they haven’t, but don’t ask, not sure I want the contents of Hell to empty. There are enough devils here already. “But now there are only five,” I mutter.

  Kincaid’s fingers brush over my knuckles as he settles his hand atop mine. “They don’t know it would take all seven. For now, all they need to fear is that at least one of us will survive to make good on the threat.”

  “And the angels? Why haven’t they initiated a war?”

  I don’t say the other thing I’m thinking. That if there are the same number of angels as there are demons and most of the latter are in Hell, then Kincaid and his cohort are likely vastly outnumbered. Especially considering it seems Angels may travel between the mortal plane and their own at will. Whereas the remains of the demon race are trapped in a nightmare sealed behind unbreakable gates.

  It hardly seems fair.

  Kincaid doesn’t answer right away, just releases my hand. “I need to shower.”

  Remembering why I am here in the first place, I jump to my feet and smooth down the starchy creases in my shirt. “I need the Scepter. Lady Devereaux wants to see me wield it. To test the limit of my power, I think. She doesn’t believe that I spoke to Malphas.”

  His brows draw together. “Then a shower will have to wait.”

  “It’s in the closet over there.” He points to where a door hangs slightly crooked in a slender doorframe. Inside, I can see the edge of the gray blanket that covers the Spirit Scepter, wrapped in silvery rope.

  When I turn back, Kincaid is naked. He strides to where a clean pair of half-folded jeans lie on the floor and pull them on over his bare legs. I catch a smirk before I am able to peel my eyes away, clearing my throat as I rush to grab the Scepter from the closet. I touch it quickly at first, testing to make sure it isn’t going to just suddenly activate and raise whatever dead things may be lying dormant beneath the floorboards of his mansion.

  “It won’t bite.”