Blood and Sin (The Infernari Book 1)

by Laura Thalassa

  “So you’re still mad about the jambalaya?”

  “No, I’m mad about the leeches, Lana. The leeches.” I sighed and slumped in my seat. “Not at you. I’m not mad at you, I’m just . . . mad.” It took saying it for me to feel the truth of my words.

  I wasn’t mad at Lana.

  God, what was fucking wrong with me?

  You’re losing your edge, Asher.

  Lana stared straight ahead. “Huh. So that’s what Grandmaddox was doing in your room. I was wondering about that.”

  “Madwoman,” I muttered.

  “You didn’t have to drag me out,” she said. “You could have just asked to leave nicely.”

  “And what did we get? Did you lift your spell? No. Do we know where the portal is? No. Do we know anything? No. We just spent the night in an insect zoo for no reason.”

  “Actually . . .” Lana rubbed a strand of her faintly glowing hair against her cheek, “we might know something.”

  “Yeah? What?”

  “Well, while you were sleeping, Jame Asher—”

  “Getting eaten,” I corrected.

  She gave me a look like I was being a baby about it.

  “—I snuck into Grandmaddox’s potion room, and I drank the remem . . . I released myself from the memory block.”

  My eyebrows drew together, and I peered sideways at her. “Wait, you did what?”

  “I got my memory back.”

  “Of . . . ?”

  “The portal . . .”

  I swear she was about to add something else.

  Whatever it was, she bit the words back and finished, “I know where it is now.”

  I blinked, taking a moment to process. “Wait, so you . . . ?”

  “Stole the potion because she wouldn’t give it to me. Now I remember.”

  I stared at her. “And now you . . . now you . . . ?”

  She pulled her blanket around her tighter. “I know where the portal is, alright? It’s in a cave on the slope of a tall mountain above dense jungle. I can see it as clearly as if it were right in front of me.”

  I broke into a grin, all my prior anger forgotten. “Attagirl, Lana!” I leaned over to slap her knee. “Way to step it up. So you know where it is?”

  She nodded and sat up straighter, looking proud of herself.

  “Okay, so where is it?” I focused on the road again. Thanks to Lana, things were starting to go in our favor.

  “I just told you,” she said.

  “Yeah, but where?”

  She looked confused. “Uh . . . in a cave on the slope of a tall mountain above dense jungle, what I just said.”

  I started to sweat. “What . . . what is that? That could be a description of literally anywhere on Earth, that’s not a location.”

  “Well, that’s what I remember,” she snapped, turning defensive. “Once we find the mountain, I’ll know where it is.”

  I groaned and tilted my head back. “How are you supposed to find the portal with that? That’s like saying it’s near water, or on land—or on a planet. They didn’t give you anything else?”

  She crossed her arms. “I’m not going to help you anymore.”

  I quelled my frustration and put on my game face. “No, you’re right, you did great . . . you’re doing great, Lana. Is there anything else you can remember? Anything specific?”

  “Only that it’s the tallest mountain where we’re going . . . but I doubt that’ll help you. I doubt anything will help you, you stubborn ox.”

  “I can work with that.” I whipped out my smartphone, which thankfully I’d left charging in the Hummer. “Tallest mountain in Mexico . . . Pico de Orizaba, right here, a dormant volcano. Beautiful.” I showed her a picture of the snowcapped peak. “That it?”

  Her eyes lit up. “Yeah, it’s down in a valley on the other side, just over here—” She touched the screen, and the image vanished, replaced with a series of bloody, half-rotted bodies. She flinched back. “What happened? What did I do?”

  “You just changed tabs, chill.” I closed out the old search, regarding Azazel—how to dissolve a body in acid—and got back to Pico de Orizaba.

  So there it was.

  The next portal.

  Thank you, Lana.

  “Watch the road for me.” I hopped onto a trip-planning website and booked us a villa in the valley she was talking about, deep in the jungle.

  “Asher . . .” she whined, her knuckles turning white on the sides of her seats.

  I glanced up to see a semitruck bearing down on us. I swerved back into my lane just in time.

  I tossed the phone into her lap and resumed driving, a smile on my face. “It’s ten hours to the border, and then another fourteen hours to our villa. Just a few more days’ driving.”

  “I kept up my end of the bargain, now you keep up yours,” she said. “Give me back your blood. The vial you still have.”

  “So you can curse me?”

  “Only if you misbehave.”

  Didn’t matter anyway. Grandmaddox already had plenty of blood to curse me with. Might as well give Lana some, too.

  “You know, you shouldn’t trust me to keep my word,” I warned her.

  Naïve thing. She was too trusting. It was going to get her killed, and she might be the only Infernarus who didn’t deserve it.

  Begrudgingly, I dug the vial out of my pocket and handed it to her. “I’m not an Infernarus. You told me where the portal was, but I didn’t have to give you this.”

  She put it around her neck again, pausing to marvel at my blood and looking quite pleased with herself. “But you did.”

  Chapter 15

  Lana

  I slept several hours. When I woke, it was to the smell of Asher’s sweat, the scent some combination of salt, alcohol, and human man. Not just human man—Asher.

  He didn’t smell like some of the other natives I came across—like prey, or sickness, or filth. Quite the opposite. I wanted to run my lips over the sweat and taste it even as I mixed my scent with his.

  That had me waking up real quick.

  He still hates you. And you’re not too fond of him at the moment either.

  I rubbed my eyes, catching sight of the beads of sweat that collected on his forehead. A droplet had already snaked its way down his cheek. Meanwhile, hot air still poured from the vents. It was warm enough that I’d kicked off the blanket.

  He’d left the heat on at his own expense so I could be warm.

  I reached over, beginning to press buttons at random as I searched for the one that would turn off the heater.

  Asher startled at my movement, waking from whatever reverie he had been in.

  “Lana,” he said, reaching forward and trying to remove my hand, “we talked about this already. I don’t want you touching—”

  “You can turn off the heat,” I said.

  He glanced over at me. Another bead of sweat slid down his cheek. I almost reached out to touch it before I remembered the shaky terms we were still on.

  Without responding, he reached over to the dartboard and turned a knob. Immediately, the heat blasting through the vents shut off.

  The silence that descended on us felt heavy. My eyes landed on that picture taped so close to the buttons I was pushing.

  Finally, I said, “Are we going to talk about it?”

  I saw his hands tighten on the steering wheel. “Nope.”

  “You don’t even know what it is I want to talk about.”

  “My wife is none of your business.”

  That stung. “Last night, I did it because—”

  “I don’t want to know,” he growled, the muscles of his arms straining, they were so tense.

  “She was very beautiful,” I sai
d quietly, “and she must have been a saint to deal with you.”

  His mouth was a tight line, and I could hear his labored breaths coming in and out. He didn’t bother telling me to stop talking. I’m not sure at this point he could have. Not without losing control, and a cold human like Asher wouldn’t dare lose control.

  “You shouldn’t have kissed me,” I said.

  “You don’t think I regret it?” he said, finally looking over.

  His words were daggers to my gut.

  He steeled himself against whatever expression I wore. “Damnit, Lana, you and I are enemies. I lost my family to your kind.”

  “Do you want to know why I like you, even now?” I said.

  “You have a bad habit of seeing good in people who don’t deserve it,” Asher said. He made it sound like that wasn’t a compliment.

  I wrapped my hand around the vial of his blood. “Because you’re loyal.” I let out a breath. “I was taught that humans weren’t capable of loyalty, not like Infernari. But you are. You defend your family even now. That’s admirable.”

  His expression crumbled, his throat working. “Stop, Lana,” he breathed. “For the love of God, please, stop.”

  This man burned for his mate. Burned. Another fallacy I was told. That the cold natives here were unfeeling. This man wasn’t unfeeling. Behind his stony façade, he was all fire and heat. His passion burned hot, and his grief smoldered.

  We were enemies, and yet I feared he and I had it all wrong.

  And I feared it would make a difference in the end.

  We fell into an uneasy silence, only interrupted when we stopped for lunch. He ordered a kid’s dish for me, which I assumed was supposed to be some sort of insult, but the joke was on him. Chicken fingers were delicious and I got four colorful crayons out of it.

  “I didn’t know chickens even had fingers,” I said now, hoisting myself into Asher’s car.

  The vehicle dipped with his weight as he got in. “They don’t.”

  “Oh,” I peered down distractedly at the crayons in my hand. “Then why are they called that?”

  The engine roared as he turned the car on. “Beats the shit out of me.” He raised an eyebrow at the crayons in my hand. “Do you want to make necklaces for each of those?”

  My eyes brightened at the idea. “Yes. You are brilliant, Jame.”

  I reached back for his rope.

  He gave me chagrined look. “It was a joke, Lana.” He snatched the rope out of my hands. “I need that.”

  “For what? Killing more Infernari?”

  “Give the girl a trophy.”

  I frowned at him. “You know, I was told you were the scariest, most lethal hunter out here. And yet since I’ve been with you, you’re the one getting your ass kicked by my kind.”

  Asher tossed the rope behind us. “You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” he said. “Plus,” he eyed me up and down, “I managed to capture you.”

  “Give the man a trophy,” I mimicked.

  He cracked a smile at that, and his already gorgeous face was now almost painful to look at. My attention moved to his mouth. The mouth that had kissed me . . .

  “We’re about to cross the border,” he said, his smile vanishing. “We need to get you a passport . . . if I steal one for you, you think you could make yourself look like the photo?”

  “A passport? Is that one of those little blue books?”

  “Yeah, they mean you’re a citizen. Since you don’t have one, you’re an illegal alien . . .”

  He trailed off when he saw me reaching down my suit, my beads from New Orleans shivering as I did so.

  I grabbed the little book and the strange, rectangular piece of plastic I was assigned when I began visiting the United States. “Is this what you’re talking about?” I asked, handing them both over.

  “Where did you store that?” he asked, his expression dumbfounded.

  I flashed him a bewildered look. “In my outfit. Where else?”

  His eyes skimmed me over from head to foot. He gave a shake of his head and took the two pieces of identification from me. He spent several seconds reading over the plastic card. “How the hell did you get a license?”

  I opened my mouth to answer, but he put a hand up. “You know what—I don’t even want to know.” He handed them back to me.

  I scratched my arm absently, right where I cut it earlier. The wound had begun to itch.

  “Jame Asher, you worry too much. And you ask too many questions.”

  Asher gave me an indulgent look. “Oh, to be an Infernarus.”

  Asher

  Thanks to Lana’s forged passport, which she’d been hiding God knows where this whole time, we made it across the border without much hassle.

  Okay, so Infernari were cleverer than I thought.

  We got the green light at Mexican customs—a good thing, since a vehicle search would have turned up the small arsenal I was carrying—and then we were back on the road. Maybe Lana was right, maybe I did worry too much.

  That night we stayed in the town of Soto la Marina, about three hours south of the border, where I bought her jeans, shirts, a sweater, and a Mexican knockoff of Vans tennis shoes so she could at least look like a tourist rather than a cosplay character.

  Then it was back on the road, with Highway 180 taking us along the coast overlooking the Gulf of Mexico.

  Lana leaned over me to see the view, her hair spilling into my lap and blocking my sight. I swerved and leaned around her. “Seatbelt, Lana . . . seatbelt!”

  With a huff, she collapsed back in her seat, where she shifted and shimmied in vain to get comfortable, tugging at her new denim jeans. “Ugh, these are so tight.”

  I glanced at my phone. We were making good time.

  Next to me, Lana tugged at her crotch again. “It keeps rubbing me.”

  I hadn’t bothered mentioning the fact that humans had invented a thing called underwear, so she was going commando. Explaining thongs and g-strings to her could have gotten a bit dicey.

  “Oh, come on, tell me those aren’t more comfortable than that animal hide you were wearing before.”

  “That was skin,” she said. “Skin on skin feels good. Skin on this scratchy, stiff, horrible fabric feels awful. It’s like that time I got sand in my clothes.”

  “Mmm.” I suppressed a smirk at the image. “I told you to go with a skirt, didn’t I?”

  “And walk around with my private parts exposed? I don’t think so, Jame Asher.”

  I glanced sideways at her. Seeing her dressed like a normal human girl messed with my head; she was even more distracting than usual. Now her exoticness was tempered by this new girl-next-door look; when she looked like this, Lana was a lethal package.

  She stopped fidgeting and stared at me, her gaze taking in my torso. “Why can’t I wear what you’re wearing? You look comfortable.” She said it like an insult.

  “Because you’d freeze your ass off.”

  Though I’d stripped down to a wifebeater, Bermuda shorts, and flip-flops to weather the arid hundred-degree heat, she was still shivering in her sweater. It made me nervous.

  “How’d you stay warm until now, anyway?” I asked. “It’s hotter here than it was in Virginia.”

  “I’m fine,” she said, fighting another shiver. “I’m not cold.” She readjusted her position, holding her left arm gingerly.

  Thirty minutes later, her shivering had ratcheted up, enough to make me consider turning on the heater again. I glanced over at her. Her hair had stopped moving, and her usual exuberance was gone. We hadn’t stopped once for her to relieve her pea-sized bladder.

  “There’s another rest stop coming up in ten minutes,” I said, now eager to get her to act like herself.

  She ignored me, g
azing blankly out the window.

  “Alright, Lana, what’s going on?” I said. “Normally I’m pulling over every five minutes because you need to take a piss. Today you haven’t once mentioned it.”

  All sorts of warning bells had been going off in my head for the last few hours.

  “I don’t have to go,” she muttered, “stop pressuring me.”

  I chewed my lip, sensing what she wasn’t telling me: she was coming down with a fever.

  Demons might be incredible athletes, nearly invincible warriors, and lightning-fast healers, but they had one weakness.

  Disease.

  The reason was simple. Humans had a larger population, and a larger population bred more pathogens—bubonic plague, cholera, Influenza, HIV, malaria, smallpox, Ebola, SARS, West Nile virus, avian flu, swine flu. The list went on.

  The human immune system had been honed by eons of killer pandemics.

  Demons barely had an immune system.

  It was like the Old World colliding with the New World all over again, except the Infernari were the Native Americans.

  That was why they never stayed topside for very long.

  Only a half demon like Grandmaddox could truly make Earth her home—she had inherited human immunity.

  For full demons, blood magic could keep them healthy for a while—a few weeks, a few months.

  But when their time was up, they had to go home.

  Which, of course, Lana had been trying to do when I captured her.

  Instead, I had kept her on Earth, in this breeding ground of pathogens, for five days longer than she should have been. Because I had destroyed her portal.

  And I hadn’t let her cull enough blood to heal herself.

  For five days.

  I had kept a girl without an immune system trapped on a diseased planet, and now I was taking her into the heart of the Mexican jungle.