by May Dawson
“You feel it too?” He frowned, the little v between his eyebrows seeming genuine. He leaned forward, his lips grazing mine. I felt cold sparks when his lips pressed against mine.
I took a quick step back, shoving him away, and felt my hip rock hard into the wall bordering the rooftop garden. “Oh, hell no. You haven’t Stockholmed me that far yet.”
For a second, there was real confusion and hurt in his eyes. Then, a beat later, there was nothing but anger. I thought of Samael, of the way he must have looked at Lilith before he murdered her.
He leaned in towards me, his eyes flaring with anger. “You know, you’re not the one in control here, for all your little quips.”
“I know.” The words were gritty on my tongue. My heart was pounding in my chest, telling me to get away, but there was nowhere for me to run. “You think that makes you special? You think that’s something new? Soulless men like you are already all over our planet. If you demons want to poison our world with rape and misogyny, you can save yourself a trip.”
His brows drew together slightly, and he leaned back, just a quarter of an inch, his eyes intent on mine.
“I wouldn’t do that to you,” he said.
“Why not?” I asked. “You think it’s any worse than what you did to Jacob?”
“I didn’t do anything to Jacob,” he said. “I just showed him what happened before.”
“And you didn’t have anything to do with that?”
“Like I said, I wasn’t topside then. It was another demon. And his human minions.”
“How many demons in human-skin are there? Are you special?” I asked him, my voice light and provoking. I didn’t think he was a demon in a human skin. But I was desperate to know just how many enemies like him we faced.
“You’re trying to interrogate the interrogator,” he said. “Cute.”
I stared at him. His face was handsome and mocking, and it made me want to be sick.
“Take me back,” I said. “I don’t want to look at you anymore.”
He shook his head, his lips quirked up in amusement, but there was real fury in his eyes no matter how cool he tried to sound. “You are so lost, little girl, about how much danger you’re in.”
“Keep telling yourself that,” I said. “You aren’t going to get what you want from us. And you’re going to find that you’re the one who ends up in Hell.”
22
Nimshi snapped the last shackle closed, his hands almost jerking on the chains in his anger, and he dropped the chains heavily to the ground. He turned and strode out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
Jacob’s arms closed around me, as best they could in the shackles. He looked down at me with his golden eyes full of worry. “Did he hurt you?”
“No,” I said.
“It sure seems like you made him angry.”
“It’s a knack I have.”
“You do peeve people off. You should be a professional peever,” he said.
“If there’s a way to monetize that, I am all over it,” I said. “Since it’s starting to look like I’ll never make it to college.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said. “We might get out of here alive yet.”
“We’re still in D.C.,” I told him urgently. I wanted him to know everything I knew, in case something happened to me. He had to have the chance to escape still. “And at night, there aren’t any guards. At least, not tonight. I think he doesn’t want them to know…”
“That he wants you,” Jacob finished the statement I hadn’t wanted to say. His eyes were steady on mine. “Are you sure he didn’t hurt you?”
“He tried to kiss me.” I crinkled my nose at Jacob. “I made him regret it. I didn’t get hurt—I hurt his feelings.”
“You’re good at that, too.” He squeezed me tight, as if he had missed me, burying his face in my hair. “Seriously, can that man not get you a shirt?”
“That’s the thing of it,” I said. “I think he is a man. Not a demon in a human-skin. But a half-demon, half-human.”
He pulled back slightly, his gaze questioning.
I filled him in quickly on everything I’d learned, every little hint Jacob had accidentally given away when he meant to tease personal details from me.
When I finished, Jacob stared at me.
“What?” I asked impatiently. I was sure he was going to have a nine-point explanation of how I’d screwed up.
“I’ve been exasperated by you,” he said bluntly. “I thought you could be something useful, if you’d just stop being Princess Ellis. But look at you. You already are something.”
I felt myself flush slightly. “You’re trying to keep my confidence up while we’re locked in the demon’s case.”
He grinned. “All right, if you’re going to be like that, I’m not going to bother complimenting you anymore.”
“I wouldn’t go that far,” I said.
Nimshi came in just then. And for someone so sure he had the upper hand, he sure seemed pissed. He carried a cardboard box in his hands and he dropped it on his chair.
I watched him curiously, but following Jacob’s lead, I let the silence unfurl. Let Nimshi chatter into it.
“Turner knew what you two were working on,” Nimshi said. “He said there was some kind of curse that linked the two of you. A love spell.”
My mind raced. I assumed Turner knew all about the Lilith and the Four. Had he given everything he knew away to Nimshi?
Or had he just given away enough to free his soul from the demons?
“How do you say the words love spell with a straight face?” I asked.
“So we’ll see how quickly you two crumble once you realize you don’t actually give a damn about each other,” he said. “It’s just the curse talking.”
“He’s really taking it to heart that I didn’t want to kiss him,” I said to Jacob in a confidential voice. “But he didn’t have a single breath mint.”
Jacob shushed me. Right, don’t make the torture-man angry.
Nimshi pulled a yoga mat out from the top of the box.
“Well, that’s more relaxing than I expected,” I said.
“I killed a yoga teacher outside,” Nimshi said. “I hate that om, om, peace-and-calm nonsense anyway.” He threw the mat on the ground, out of our reach, and pulled a piece of chalk out of the box. Kneeling at the end of the mat, he drew a rough circle. His movements were jerky, as if he were furious.
He hastily sketched in some symbols and then sat back on his heels. He drew four quadrants in the circle and returned to the box, crumbling various kinds of herbs in his hands and pouring them out into the different quadrants. Mumbling in Latin to himself, he heaped some of those herbs in a bowl in a center of the circle, and then touched a match to it.
The burning herbs gave off a bitter scent. For a second, I smelled Jacob’s irresistible scent, spice and black coffee and faint scent of cherry wine. Then all I smelled was the bitter, acrid scent of the herbs, and black-coffee-and-cherries faded to a memory I couldn’t quite summon.
“Let that burn,” Nimshi said. He threw the box to the ground and sat in his chair. Waving his arm in the usual semi-circle, he said, “You know, I’ve never watched this particular bit of footage. But I remember hearing about Oshak having a taste for human flesh. He brought in a magician to heal you as he took pieces off. Do you remember that?”
He looked over his shoulder at Jacob. Jacob’s eyes were steady on him, his face pale but as cool and neutral as ever.
“Well, you may have blocked it out,” Nimshi said airily. “But you will remember soon enough.”
23
Jacob gritted his teeth as if the pain inside, watching his childhood self suffer again, was just as painful as having it done to him in the first place.
It was on my lips to beg Nimshi to stop. But he wanted to hurt Jacob, to get back at me. Pleading with him wouldn’t help. Pretending that I didn’t care about Jacob might.
The door was thrown open. A big man, as broad
as he was tall, stormed in. “Nimshi,” he said, in a voice that was deep and thunderous.
Nimshi jumped from the chair. “Uncle Samael.”
“Don’t call me Uncle,” Samael said.
Cold dread formed together in my stomach. Samael. I was afraid of what would happen if they knew who I was. And Samael… when I looked at him, I could almost feel the man I’d known before, the millennia past of shared memory.
I had to keep him from touching me. If he touched me, he would know. He would feel the Lilith I was, deep inside, despite all the years that separated us and cloaked me from him.
“Why is this so slow?” Samael asked. “The dark lord tires of waiting.”
“It’s been two days,” Nimshi said. “It takes weeks sometimes to break people into vessels.”
“We don’t have weeks,” Samael said. “It’s exasperating that you’ve been here so long and you have nothing to show for it.”
“I have you to show for it,” Nimshi said. “I brought you into this world.”
“I’m supposed to be grateful to you, boy?”
“It takes time,” Nimshi said.
“You barely did anything,” Samael rumbled. “This vessel wanted to be overtaken.”
“You want me to hurry,” Nimshi said. “So would you leave and let me work?”
Samael reached behind him and took the chair. “I’m going to watch.”
“Great,” Nimshi said. “Welcome to the greatest show between heaven and hell. Let’s get to it.”
But within a few turns of the usual torture tracks, Samael sat forward impatiently. “This is preposterous. If you aren’t willing to take them apart piece by piece—”
“I am!” Nimshi said. “Do you want a broken vessel? I can torture them with their minds…”
“We can just bleed them out. It’s worked before.” Samael said impatiently.
“It doesn’t always work,” Nimshi said. “Do you want to have to tell the dark lord that we failed him?”
Samael said, “I have plans. This is a waste of my time.”
“Why don’t you just go, find some minions, eat someone, I don’t know—distract yourself until I’m done?”
“Because I don’t need to,” Samael said. “I can take over. I can make this faster.”
“Oh, good grief,” Nimshi said. “You want me to torture them physically? I will, if it makes you happy. But it’s old-school and inelegant. All you old demons, all fire and wrath. There are better ways.”
“There are no better ways than the old ways.”
“Spoken like an old,” Nimshi grumbled.
But the demons were turned and twisted angels. There were no young demons. There was no doubt in my mind now that Nimshi was a son of man and of demon.
I thought of those cold sparks on my skin when he touched me, the magic that I had thought it was, and I wondered if perhaps it was something else.
If this evil thing in front of me was supposed to be the Fourth.
I glanced towards Jacob, desperate to convey this question to him, but he was looking away from me. Like he always did; it was hard for him to meet my gaze when we’d been watching his torture. I thought he didn’t want to see pity in my eyes.
As if that pity meant I would see him differently. The only thing that had changed was that now I understood two things about him that had evaded me before. I understood the deep fault line that had cracked open in his personality, the source of his unforgiving hatred of the supernatural. And I could see how strong he was to take a place in the world fighting those forces. No wonder he had been reluctant to tolerate me. And yet he was unfailingly honorable. Dutiful. If an asshole at times.
I wondered if I still smelled like red-hots to him. But even if the curse had been broken, somewhere along the line, I’d come to care for him.
“Send in my tools,” Nimshi said to Samael.
“Have you forgotten yourself?”
“You’re the one by the door,” he said. “I thought you wanted me to hurry up.”
Samael glowered at him, but did go to the door. He said something to the guard outside. A minute later, Samael reached through the door and took the handle of a cart, which he pulled into the room.
The top tier of the cart was all silvery, sharp things, that glittered in a way that made my heart stop in my chest.
In the second tier, there was a blowtorch and bolt cutters.
“Let’s start with an old favorite,” Nimshi said, picking up the blow torch.
Jacob’s eyes were dark with fear and anger.
And despite everything he had said so coldly, Nimshi’s eyes were full of fear and anger as he stared back. Then his eyes fell to the floor.
“Would you go?” he asked Samael. “Your presence is so irritating. I can’t even enjoy torturing them with you around.”
Samael rose slowly from the chair. He reached over Nimshi’s hand and took the torch from him.
“You are weak,” Samael said. “I should chain you to the wall for a while. Teach you firsthand.”
“Hedron wouldn’t care for that much. Might make family reunions awkward.” Nimshi spoke lightly, but I could see the tension in how he held himself.
Samael flicked the trigger, and a narrow, steady stream of flame blazed from the torch.
“I’ll show you how it’s done, boy.”
24
I could hear Samael and Nimshi arguing before the door slammed shut behind them.
I threw myself forward, but Jacob was curled up on the floor, just out of reach. He had passed out. Thank god. I could still hear his screaming echoing in my ears. The room stunk of burning flesh and my stomach roiled.
“Jacob, wake up,” I begged, yanking at the end of my chains. I just wanted to be able to reach him. I stretched out my hands, feeling how they shook. God, when I was this emotional, I was afraid I’d accidentally light this place on fire. We had no way out.
I reached out my hands to him, biting down on my lower lip because I knew I was doing something stupid and yet I didn’t see another way to help him. I imagined him gliding across the floor to me, imagining my fingers sinking into his biceps through the thin white fabric of his t-shirt, dragging him over the floor to me. He was mine and I was going to make sure he was okay.
I glanced towards the mat on the ground, forgotten while Nimshi and Samael sniped at each other. Apparently that spell had stunk up our cell, but it hadn’t done much else.
My fingers were on Jacob’s shoulders. I stared down at his face, near mine now, my lips parting in surprise. I wasn’t even sure how I’d managed that.
But for now, I had work to do, even if I didn’t have all the answers. I pressed my face to Jacob’s, my cheek against his, and felt my eyelashes flutter damply against his skin. I kissed him again and again. More than anything, I imagined the energy in me as a warm and vibrant light, flowing from me to him in every touch.
When he began to stir, I sat back, afraid he’d be disappointed that I’d kissed him when he’d wanted to wait and really kiss me when we were safe and free. But I couldn’t just leave him to suffer.
“I’m going to touch your feet,” I warned him softly.
“Don’t,” he groaned.
But I rested my hand on the undamaged flesh above the burns, imagining the same healing energy. Jacob’s skin began to heal from the inside out, the deep red-singled flesh turning pink, knitting together, his skin closing up white and fragile at first, then healing completely, back to new.
He sat up on his elbows. “Ellis, what have you done?”
“You can’t stay like that,” I said. “What are you going to do when we get the chance to fight and run?”
“What are you going to do when they realize who you are?” he asked me. “Princess, you don’t need to suffer for me. Not ever.”
“Maybe they’ll think angels heal fast,” I said.
“No one knows better than they do how long it takes angels to recover from being tortured,” Jacob told me. His eye fell on th
e mat, even though it was on the other side of the room. “Quick, Ellis. Before they come back. They’re not the right symbols, but at least he opened a circle. It might give us a boost to reach out to Ryker and Levi.”
He held his hand out to me, and I reached out to take his fingers in mine. Our voices joined together softly. I tried to think as hard as I could about the passage through the woods, the pile of stones—god, the thought of that little body lying curled under those stones now made my heart break—and the door to the treehouse. I felt myself duck, the tarp brushing against my hair, and then I was in the treehouse. With Jacob. But there was no Ryker or Levi.
“God damn it,” Jacob muttered. He ran his hand through his hair, his expression frustrated, but then he quickly moved on. “He’s got to be checking here, if he knows we’re gone. We need to leave them a message.”
Quickly, the two of us wrote a makeshift message in the dirt floor of the lean-to.
“Christ, Ellis. I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry,” I said. “I’m the one who wanted to save my sister, whatever it cost.”
“It’s not your fault.”
“And it’s not yours either,” I said. “So let’s stay sane, bide our time, and make some demons pay.”
He grinned slightly. The fond way he looked at me, and the way I wished he would kiss me, made me lean closer towards him.
“Do I still smell like red-hots to you?” I asked.
“Always,” he said.
“Is this far enough from the demon’s case to kiss me?”
He rested his fingers lightly on my jaw. “How can making out be on your mind at a time like this?”
“We have to wait for Ryker anyway, don’t we?” I asked. “Might as well pass the time.”
“Might as well,” he agreed.
His lips met mine. This time was different; his lower lip brushed against mine as he raised his head, and then he kissed the corner of my mouth, thoughtfully, as if he loved the way that corner curled up when I smiled. He kissed the other corner. I turned my face into his, seeking more of him, but his lips were elusive and teasing. He kissed the other corner of my lips.