Demon Bound

by Meljean Brook

  CHAPTER 15

  Whatever he’d been expecting, a dinner party wasn’t it. Yet that was the only description Jake had for the four sculpted figures seated around a table in the center of the large chamber. Three males, one female. Jake recognized the faces of three—they matched the statue of Zakril in Hell, the female statue in Tunisia, and Michael. The woman dressed their nude bodies in tunics, speaking to each one in a soft, lilting language. They were as white as department-store mannequins.

  Everything was white, with the appearance of stone. Not marble, though. Jake narrowed his focus on the table, then the statues, and his stomach lurched.

  It was bone. Shaped and molded into faces, furniture, and overlaying the walls, ceiling, and flooring.

  Threads of orange light, as thin as fiber-optic strands, were embedded in the walls. In the soft glow, he met Alice’s eyes.

  There are degrees of creepy, Jake said. You’re sexy creepy. Nephilim rituals are sick creepy. And this is creepy creepy.

  Yes. She averted her gaze. How long has she been here, do you think?

  She must not have intended for him to respond; she let go of his hand and moved toward the wall. Apparently, something more than the bone bothered her, and he watched as she traced her fingers down the luminescent threads. She stood sideways to the wall, wary, but distracted, her naginata between her body and the woman fussing at the table. Jake angled himself between them.

  Two more chambers led away from the room; the hellhound lay in the left doorway. From his position, Jake could see enough to guess that the interiors had also been surfaced with bone. All that white . . . was she trying to re-create the look of Caelum?

  Pity rose up, and he squashed it. No Guardian he’d known would’ve appreciated it.

  And he didn’t know if this one deserved it.

  “Spider threads,” Alice murmured behind him. Jake felt the light touch of her Gift—and through it, her sudden confusion—before she shielded.

  “Yes.” The woman faced them, smiling brightly. “I have just seen your deaths, but now I see you alive. How lovely.”

  Yep, that would eventually make him crazy, too. “Are those deaths going to be anytime soon? Say, the next five minutes?”

  If she said yes, he was taking Alice and jumping. Of course, he’d feel pretty stupid if he jumped them right into Lucifer’s throne room—and died there, instead.

  Her careless shrug didn’t help. “Who can tell? The only ones I am certain of are those I intend to kill.”

  “I suppose it is very rare that someone shouts out the date in their death throes.” Alice came to stand by his shoulder—close enough to defend him, far enough that her movements wouldn’t be hampered. “How often do you turn to find someone alive in here with you?”

  The furrowing of her brow underlined one of the few demonic symbols Jake knew: lock. It was intertwined with another, directly in the middle of her forehead, and surrounded by hundreds more that had been inscribed over her face. “How many years has it been since Lysander took Lampsakos?”

  At the end of the Peloponnesian War. Jake hoped he didn’t look as thunderstruck as he felt.

  Alice’s face was pale as she responded, “Two thousand, four hundred.”

  She slowly blinked, revealing more symbols on her eyelids. “Only that many? It felt much longer,” she said, and Jake wondered if she’d accurately picked up the concept of “thousand” while rifling through Alice’s future. “In that time, I have only turned my back on visitors once.”

  Them, Jake thought. “How many visitors have you not turned your back on?”

  “One.” She studied him with eyes that were rapidly becoming obsidian again. “You are accustomed to those who tell the truth, but not all of it.”

  “Occupational hazard. Was the other person Michael?” If the Doyen had deliberately left her in Hell—or brought her here—that’d be another reason to jump.

  “No. He does not know I am here—yet.” She turned, trailing her fingers over the shoulders of the male statue Jake didn’t recognize. “When I saw him come, I did not think he would take so long. Or that you would.”

  Jake glanced at Alice, tried to gauge her response. The wariness had almost gone. With her eyebrows drawn, she stared at the woman, as if trying to work something out.

  But they weren’t going to get anywhere unless they asked.

  “Ah,” the woman said before Jake could speak. “I know this moment. This is when you wonder who I am, and I tell you that I am Khavi, of the grigori, sister to Zakril—and sister in spirit, if not flesh, to Michael and Anaria.” She looked over her shoulder with a brittle smile. “Much less so to Anaria.”

  Whoa boy. Jake didn’t even know where to start.

  Khavi’s eyes narrowed into ebony slivers. “You did not know.” She pivoted, paced to the wall and back. Her fingers shoved into her tangled hair, yanked. “How can you not know? No, no—”

  She came to a stop and pointed at Jake. “No. You spoke his name. I heard through the sand. You saw him, and you spoke his name.”

  “Zakril?” Alice walked to the table, her sketchbook in hand. “We only know of him from—”

  “Why do you move like that?”

  Jake’s jaw clenched. Khavi’s expression reminded him of a kid studying an insect through a magnifying glass. But he swallowed his angry response when Alice’s lips thinned, her irritation plain.

  Yeah, it was pretty much a given that anything not relating to Zakril, Michael, and whoever Khavi was, Alice would consider an annoying distraction.

  “My Gift has left its mark.” Alice moved between the statues of Michael and Zakril, opening her sketchbook. “Now, do you—”

  “You can change your form, is that not still true?”

  Alice breathed out sharply through her nose before she said, “Yes.”

  Jake wondered if he mistook the meanness in Khavi’s smile, until she said, “Then why do you wear that face instead of a beautiful one?”

  Fuck hellhounds, fuck nut jobs, fuck this whole fucking realm. Jake stepped forward, but Alice’s calm reply stopped him.

  “Because I already am.” She met Khavi’s eyes across the table. “And you are half-demon.”

  Khavi’s dark gaze landed on Jake. “Yes.”

  He stared back, his poker face on. He should have known Alice wouldn’t feel insulted by that. But Khavi hadn’t known Alice wouldn’t be hurt, so there was no doubt she’d meant to inflict pain.

  So what was it about—was Khavi looking for their weaknesses? Probably. He’d been doing the same since he’d come in. Problem was, if Khavi’s only emotional link was to the hellhound, there wasn’t much Jake could threaten.

  Luckily, Alice hadn’t given anything away in her response. Not so luckily, he had.

  But if Khavi thought that loving Alice was a weakness, Jake would be happy to show her how wrong she was.

  With fury still flooding his veins, he began a wide circuit of the chamber, keeping watch on the table. His gaze swept over Alice’s sharp features as she flipped through the book and turned it toward Khavi. Goddamn. Even a crazy demon should be able to see how flippin’ gorgeous Alice was. Sure, not in the Hollywood sense, all sultry eyes and pouty lips—but for fuck’s sake, all anyone had to do was look at her more than once or twice, and they’d realize it.

  As if aware of his gaze, Alice glanced at him from under her lashes, a question in her pale blue eyes.

  Jake shook his head. He’d sit out for now. Would just listen, and absorb. At least until cutting off Khavi’s head didn’t seem so tempting.

  Not beautiful. Yeah. His hot ass.

  “This is what we know,” Alice said, smoothing her hand over a drawing of winged figures warring against the heavens. “There was the First Battle, waged between angels.”

  Khavi nodded, examining the sketch. “Lucifer’s rebellion.”

  “We know that he and his followers were transformed to demons, and those who abstained became nosferatu—and the angels came to
Earth to guard humans.”

  “Yes.”

  No big surprises here, then. His lethal mood fading, Jake glanced into the right chamber. The terraced recesses in the floor were a smaller version of the baths in Tunisia. They were dry, with traces of red sand at the bottom.

  He turned, found Khavi staring at him. “Both water and fire purify,” she said softly. “But when we bathe, the water becomes muddied. Fire burns clean.”

  Was this a riddle—or something straightforward, in a flaky kind of way? “Fire leaves ash,” he pointed out.

  “The flames are clean. Regardless, there is no water in Hell.” She studied the next drawing, of Lucifer riding at the head of the dragon, and Michael plunging his sword into its heart. “What do you call this?”

  “The Second Battle.”

  Khavi sighed. Jake had seen the look she gave Michael’s statue hundreds of times on Pim’s face, on Charlie’s face. It somehow combined familiarity, affection, and exasperation—and reminded a guy that females were the superior species, with more going on in their heads than between their legs.

  “His strengths never included his imagination,” she said. “What is the story of this battle?”

  “Lucifer became envious of the angels, and brought a dragon with him to Earth. The angels faltered until mankind sided with them, and Michael—one of the men in the human army—slew the dragon. The angels gave Caelum to him, and the power to create the Guardian corps.”

  Khavi sat motionless, as if waiting for Alice to continue. Alice was just as still, waiting for a reaction.

  Slowly, Khavi unrolled her fists. Jake hadn’t seen her clench them. “Is that all?”

  “In essence—yes.”

  She exploded into motion, backhanding the female statue. Its head shot toward Jake. He snatched it out of the air before the face smashed against the wall, his fingers stinging from the catch.

  Alice straightened, her eyes guarded as Khavi stalked back and forth across the chamber.

  Jake’s gut twisted, a sick, heavy knot. “Is it a lie?”

  Her fingers pushed into her tangles. She tilted her head back and screamed, the sound a hoarse rip from her harmonious voice. Frustration poured from a dark psychic scent that was as rich and powerful as Michael’s—as the nephilim’s.

  Jake was beside Alice before the scream ended. But the anger left Khavi as quickly as it had come; she crouched in front of her hellhound, spoke in soothing tones.

  I have often wanted to scream like that, Alice signed.

  Tension no longer whitened her knuckles. Maybe you should, Jake signed, and held up the bone head. Unlike the statues outside and in Tunisia, no emotion or personality had been captured in the blank, staring eyes. Clean break in the neck. She’s beheaded it with a blade before. And there are dents and chips all over—this isn’t the first time she’s hit it.

  Alice’s gaze skimmed the other statues. And only that one.

  Jake began to reply, then realized that although Khavi was still facing the hellhound, she’d switched to English.

  “The dragons are of Chaos,” she said in that low tone. “They create, they destroy—there is no difference between each act. All Chaos knows is destruction and creation.”

  He frowned, glanced at Alice, and saw the same incomprehension on her face. The words made sense, but he had no clue what Khavi was getting at.

  Before he could frame the question, she returned to the table. “It is not a lie.”

  But it wasn’t all of the truth, either, Jake guessed—and his gut didn’t untwist.

  “Then Michael was human,” Alice said.

  “In every way that matters. He called himself a man, and he lived as one. He did not water his mother’s fields with the sweat from his brow, but he did work them.”

  Alice breathed in and out. Wanting, Jake thought, to dance around the question.

  He asked it. “Was Belial his father?”

  “Yes. And no.” The faint smile on Khavi’s lips might have been mocking or sad—Jake couldn’t tell. “Belial was not as he is now. He drank at the table of the dragon, was created and destroyed. When he was full, he became himself again.”

  Jake bared his teeth in a grin. “I don’t suppose you could say that one more time, but without the woo-woo seer-speak?”

  That Alice didn’t hold out her hand for his money told him that she was just as frustrated.

  Khavi’s smile widened, sharpened. “Your novice friends will refer to me as Déjà Vu when I cannot hear. I will not appreciate it.”

  Was that why she was deliberately obscure, or was this just a crazy tangent? “I’ll tell them not to, then.”

  “It is already done.”

  Great. Just . . . flippin’ . . . great.

  Alice’s frown became thoughtful. “How is it you didn’t know that you would have to tell us about Michael? Or that we don’t know everything you do about the Second Battle?”

  “I can only see what I know. I cannot see what you do.”

  For an instant, Jake considered shape-shifting and growing out his hair, just so he could rip it out. “So,” he said, measuring each word, “Michael had a farm. He considered himself a man. Belial wasn’t always such an asshole, and he was the father. Who was the mommy?”

  “A human.”

  “How was she a mommy?”

  Khavi tilted her head. “Surely you know how it is accomplished.”

  “With a demon? Not exactly.”

  “But I have already told you.”

  “Dragons,” Alice murmured. “The hounds, the bats, the spiders.” Her gaze lifted from her sketchbook. “Have they all drunk at the table of the dragon?”

  “Yes.” Ebony eyes gleamed. “And they ate through their mothers’ wombs when they were born.”

  Khavi was going to have to work harder than that to freak them out. “Yum,” Jake said, thinking it through. So, Belial had either eaten dragon meat or drunk its blood—as had the bats and spiders. Their offspring would have changed, generation by generation. The original destroyed, and something new created—except Belial, a demon, had returned to his original form when he’d stopped consuming it.

  And considering the blinding brightness, maybe it truly was his original form—his angelic form.

  “You said Michael worked his mother’s fields,” Alice said. “So he was not born so violently.”

  “No. He slid from his mother with wings of black, and his white-feathered sister not far behind.” She sneered at the head Jake still held, and he remembered the name she’d coupled with Michael’s: Anaria. “And so we came, two by two, the dark and the light.”

  “And Zakril?” Alice asked quietly.

  Khavi’s expression softened. “Our mother was the demon, and Zakril was the white. There were many demons who dined on the dragon, but not all performed the mating of the human’s free will. And of those who did, only five pairs were born.”

  It made a sick kind of sense. A human couldn’t be transformed into a Guardian or a vampire without their consent. Apparently a demon couldn’t conceive without it being willing, either.

  “We were ten: the grigori, who watched the humans. Who saw their fear when they looked back at us. Their greed when they attempted to use us. Their anger and their hate and their envy.”

  “But?”

  Her hand rested on the shoulder of the unnamed male statue. “But Lucifer had not foreseen friendship and family, that demons might care for their human partners and their children, or that the light would balance the dark.”

  Lucifer? Jake had been operating under the assumption that this had been one of Belial’s grabs for power. “Hold on a second. Lucifer planned this?”

  “Yes.”

  Something wasn’t right about that. Frowning, Jake set Anaria’s head on the table, gave himself a moment to think. Michael was stronger than any demon, except maybe Lucifer or Belial. Why create such powerful beings—such powerful potential opponents? Unlike demons and the nephilim, the grigori wouldn’t have been
bound to serve him. So it didn’t make sense.

  Unless Jake was going about this the wrong way. He shifted gears and tried to think as Lucifer would.

  Because the angels couldn’t completely hide their difference from humans, they’d been worshipped as gods—which had pissed Lucifer off. He’d planned to wipe them out using the dragon. And, like any power-hungry prick, he would’ve assumed victory.

  But even with the angels gone, he couldn’t do much to the people. Lucifer was still required to honor human free will and life.

  So, what’s a prick to do? Jake thought grimly. What else, but develop a race of powerful beings and raise them to despise mankind? The grigori wouldn’t have had to follow the Rules.

  Yep. That would have been one hell of a plan: ten hate-filled Michaels, consumed by anger and loose on Earth with no angels left to fight them.

  Just the thought of it coated his stomach with ice.

  It took only a second to sign his conclusion to Alice. She nodded, her mouth prim, and crossed her arms beneath her breasts. Yeah, the idea unsettled her, too.

  “Then you . . . and Michael”—Alice’s lashes flickered as she added the name—“don’t have to follow the Rules?”

  “We do. It was a condition of our transformation—just as dying while saving another’s life was. It still is?” Khavi waited for them to confirm it, then nodded. “We fought alongside Michael after he was changed. As you can imagine, it was not long before we were all killed defending others from demons or nosferatu, just as he was.”

  “Michael was killed?” Alice shook her head. “I cannot even imagine it.”

  “His death might free you, yet you never imagine it?” A hard smile touched Khavi’s mouth when Alice stiffened, but she only continued, “I cannot imagine anyone emerging unscathed from a battle with a dragon—as Michael did not. And three of us—of the grigori—were killed simply defending themselves, and could not become one of the watchers.”

  “Guardians,” Jake said.

  “Yes. And for those of us who were changed, the difference was not so very great. We already possessed our wings, our strength and speed—and we could sense another’s emotions. Afterward, we could alter our shape, move between realms, and we each had our individual abilities.” She paused, and her Gift eddied around them. Pulling in the correct words, Jake realized. “Our Gifts. If we Fall, are no longer Guardians, we give those up—but we no longer have to follow the Rules, either.”