Devil's Bargain

by Christine Warren

  Numb with shock and disbelief, Aaron shifted his grip on the woman he’d first met only hours before and brought her into his lap as he sank to the cement floor. A thin trickle of blood seeped out from around the dagger blade and spilled into his hand, staining his skin an obscene liquid crimson. He felt it cooling rapidly in the open air and thought vaguely that here was the proof of the futility of blood sacrifice. Blood was only precious as long as it flowed inside the body of someone you cared about. Otherwise, it had about as much intrinsic value as tap water.

  The first stab of grief hit him with the force of a freight train. If he’d still been standing, he knew his knees would have buckled beneath him. As it was, he doubled over in agony, feeling as if he’d just taken a mule kick right to the kidneys. His heart and stomach clenched in unison and the only thought in his head was that after thirty-five years, he had finally found the woman he loved, and now he would be expected to live the rest of his life without her. He didn’t believe it was possible.

  What he was thinking in that moment, he didn’t know. He acted purely on instinct, which was likely what did it, because if he’d stopped to think, he’d have decided that what he attempted was impossible. Not even the most powerful sorcerer on Earth could bring life back to the dead. Death was the one finality in the universe, and spells that reanimated flesh could never restore the soul that had existed in the living being. So when Aaron placed his palm over the still-bleeding heart of the woman he loved and poured every ounce of energy he had and every ounce of the energy they had raised together into that tiny, cold muscle, he knew somewhere in the back of his mind that his magic was bound to prove useless.

  Bending toward her, Aaron rested his forehead against Lilli’s silken hair and tried to remember how to breathe. More than his heart felt broken. He felt as if everything inside him had fractured, leaving a million tiny, jagged pieces behind, allowing the tears to seep out from between them.

  The first of them fell on her hair and glistened against the dark, shiny strands. Another followed close behind, then another and another until he was weeping for the first time in his adult life.

  Maybe the experience confused him so much that when he felt the first tiny movement, he wrote it off as something he had done. He had shifted or jostled her somehow and that was why it felt almost like her fingers had twitched against his leg.

  But then he felt a second twitch, and fear and hope began to war inside him.

  “Lilli?” he ventured, and his voice was hoarse and soft with grief and doubt.

  The soft moan that answered him was the sweetest sound he’d ever heard.

  Well, maybe the second sweetest, after the sound of her distinctly cranky voice saying, “Christ, do you think you can pull the knife out for me before it gets welded in place?”

  THIRTEEN

  Lilli felt as if she’d not only been stabbed in the heart by a lethally sharp assassin’s knife—which Aaron quickly removed, praise be—but as if said assassin had then hog-tied her, strapped her down in the middle of the African savannah, and allowed herds of zebra, musk ox, and elephants to stampede across her body. Repeatedly. Too bad she knew she had only herself to blame.

  “Lilli!” Aaron’s voice held a wealth of emotion, but it overflowed with hope and excitement as he shook her like a pair of dice and called her name repeatedly. “Lilli! You’re alive? You’re alive! Are you all right? Are you okay? What happened? God, baby, you scared me to death!”

  Clenching her teeth mostly kept them from rattling around inside her head, but she would have preferred not to have to put in the effort. “If you don’t stop shaking me,” she hissed through clenched teeth, “I am going to start having serious doubts about this relationship.”

  Immediately, the shaking ceased and Aaron’s arms wrapped around her, cradling her against his chest while he rained kisses down upon her face.

  “God, Lilli, I thought you were dead,” he groaned, his body shaking as he said the words. “I thought I’d lost you. Come on, sweetheart, open your eyes and look at me. Let me see you in there, baby, please. I thought you were dead.”

  Lilli sighed and took a minute to gather her strength before she could manage to drag her eyelids up and fix her gaze on his. “I’m pretty sure I was, but don’t worry about it. I’m feeling better now.”

  She saw his fear and nearly felt overwhelmed, but then the fear faded and was replaced by relief and joy that left her truly humbled. If she had planned to entertain any doubts about whether he felt as strongly about her as she did about him, they disappeared immediately in the light of those emotions. No one in her life had ever looked at her like that, as if the world would no longer exist if she left it. It kind of frightened her to think she could be that important to someone, but then she realized that was how important Aaron felt to her, and the fear melted under an onslaught of tenderness.

  “What happened?” he demanded, shifting her in his lap so that she could meet his gaze without craning her neck. His hands moved over her almost compulsively, as if he needed to touch her to reassure himself that he wasn’t imagining her with him. “I saw you stab yourself. I saw you die. What happened?” He paused and glared down at her, his eyes narrowing. “No, wait. Scratch that. First you’re going to tell me why you did it, then we can discuss what happened. Lilli, you killed yourself! What the hell were you thinking?”

  Lilli sighed. “It hit me when you were trying to convince me not to listen to Samael. You said something about the prophecy being fulfilled in one fell swoop and I realized that it was possible. Not to fulfill the apocalypse prophecy, but to thwart it and to fulfill the valiant knight prophecy all at the same time.”

  “Explain.”

  She shifted, feeling strength slowly beginning to return to her body. At this rate, she might just be able to get up and walk up the stairs to the kitchen by Christmas.

  “When I read the valiant knight prophecy, I got hung up on the idea that you were the knight,” she explained. “It seemed to make so much sense that it would be talking about you and your family, especially given your uncle’s role in all this. I had no reason to look at it any other way. But then Samael kept urging me to kill you and I knew I couldn’t do that. Not only could I never bring myself to hurt you, but there was a small part of me that feared you might be right and he was trying to turn you into the second sacrifice for the apocalypse. And that’s when you brought up the fell swoop.”

  Lilli paused for breath and sighed with relief when she realized that the pain in her side had lessened to a dull throb as the wound knit itself back together. She didn’t have to look at it to know that was what was happening; she could feel it. Plus, she knew she’d be dying again if a wound that serious stayed open.

  “It was like a bolt of inspiration,” she continued. “All at once, I remembered what you said about the way to avert the apocalypse being for a righteous demon to spill human and devil blood in one blow and I realized that I was the only person in this situation who could do that. My blood is both human and devil, because of my parents, and while I’m not going to claim to be a saint or anything, I thought there was a pretty good chance that I could qualify as a ‘righteous child of Hell.’ I mean, I try not to hurt anyone who doesn’t deserve it.”

  Aaron squeezed her gently. “Oh, so I deserved to have my heart broken, did I?”

  Lilli stilled and watched him intently. “Did I break your heart?”

  He nodded. “But you’re doing a pretty good job of putting it back together now, so I suppose I’ll be able to forgive you.”

  She felt happiness warm her like an internal sun and let him see it in her beaming grin. “I appreciate that.” There was a short pause while she tried to remember what she’d been saying. “Oh, yeah. Anyway, when I realized that I could fulfill all the requirements for averting the apocalypse, I started to think that maybe the valiant knight in the dragon prophecy wasn’t you after all. Maybe it was me.”

  Aaron looked stunned for a moment, then his express
ion turned thoughtful as he mulled that over. “You have a brilliant mind?”

  “No, you do. And I got the book from you, in between falling ass-over-elbows in love with you. I think you just have to look at the words from a different perspective.”

  “I think you should forget my question. Your mind is definitely brilliant.”

  Lilli grinned. “So then it just seemed to make sense. If I paid the appropriate price, I might die, but Samael would be banished. And even if I was wrong about the valiant knight prophecy, my sacrifice could still prevent the apocalypse. It seemed worth it to me.”

  “Well, next time ask me before you decide on that kind of thing.” His voice was fierce as he issued the order. “You might have thought it was worth it, but it was a hell of a lot higher than the price I was willing to pay. I’m crazy-assed in love with you, no matter how long we’ve known each other. That means that the idea of living the rest of my life without you, believing that you killed yourself to avoid having to kill me, is not on the list of noble gestures that I can afford.”

  Lifting her hand, Lilli laid her palm against his cheek and smiled. “I think I’m in love with you, too,” she murmured. “In fact, I’m pretty sure I must be, since I think that’s what fulfilled the final part of the knight prophecy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘The magic’s in the seed,’ ” she quoted, grinning.

  He scowled, then sighed and gave her a raised eyebrow of inquiry.

  She repeated the entire line. “ ‘A knight is fall’n, a prince is fled, the magic’s in the seed.’ The fallen knight was me, clearly, having just stabbed myself and quite literally fallen, I assume. The fleeing prince was Samael. The payment of the price meant that he was banished back to Hell, at least temporarily. And the magic . . .”

  Lilli broke off to feather a kiss across Aaron’s lips, smiling when he returned the gesture with interest. It took several breathless minutes before she managed to tear her mouth away from his and another couple to catch her breath.

  “The magic,” she repeated, her voice husky with tenderness, “was what brought me back to you and healed my wound.”

  She watched as Aaron verified that for himself. He shoved her shirt up under her arms until he could see the round pink mark where Lilli’s misericorde had punctured her fair skin. It was the only remaining sign of her injury.

  “You know, my uncle once told me that love was the greatest magic in all the world.” Finally relaxing, Aaron cuddled Lilli close and asked about the final aspect of the prophecy. “But where was the seed?”

  “Right here.” Lilli pressed her palm against his chest, right above his heart, feeling its strong steady beat beneath her fingers.

  “And here.” Taking his hand in hers, she mirrored the gesture and laid his palm over her own steadily beating heart.

  “The magic was in the seed of the brand new feelings we have for each other.” She grinned. “It was pretty nice of the prophet to word it that way, actually. If he’d said we had to be fully, deeply in love, things might have gotten hairy. After all, we barely know each other.”

  In the dim light of the candles and the first faint traces of dawn that peeked into the basement from the open door at the top of the stairs, Lilli and Aaron gazed into each other’s eyes and knew that the seed they shared had already sent up a beautiful, leafy bloom. The prophets could say whatever they wanted; in the end, it was love that called the shots.

  “Right, that reminds me,” Aaron said, reaching up to tuck a stray lock of hair back behind her ear. “I know we’ve only known each other a few hours now, but what would you say if I asked you to go out with me? I know a place nearby that makes really killer waffles. We could head over there and have some breakfast. My treat. How does that sound?”

  Lilli laughed and threw her arms around his neck, hugging him with a burst of returning strength. “I’d say that sounds like one hell of a bargain!”

  Lara Blair Images

  Born and raised in coastal New England, Christine Warren now lives as a transplant in the Pacific Northwest (she completely bypassed those states in the middle due to her landlocking phobia). When not writing (as if that ever happens), she enjoys horseback riding, playing with her pets, identifying dogs from photos of their underbellies, and most of all reading things someone else had to agonize over. She enjoys hearing from readers and can be reached via email sent to Christine@christinewarren.net.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  “Devil’s Bargain” copyright © 2009 by Christine Warren.

  Originally published in 2009 in the anthology Huntress.

  All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Author photo © Lara Blair Images

  Cover art © Taria Reed Designs

  eISBN 9781466872172

  First eBook Edition: August 2014

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