He handed me the glue. “Would you mind?”
I looked at the small tube then at the two inch wound in his side. “Really?” His arched eyebrow told me to get on with it. I pinched the lid free and tentatively touched the nozzle to the puckered flesh around the wound.
He immediately hissed in a breath. I winced. “Sorry.”
“No, I’m good. Just…” He planted both hands on the edge of the countertop, bowing his head, and smiled. “You’re hot.”
I blinked. “Huh?”
“I mean—your touch—it’s hot, physically.” He laughed lightly, a trickling chuckle that summoned a reluctant smile from me. “Never mind.”
I pinched the wound together, watching lean muscles ripple with tension. Fighting a smile, I squeezed the glue into the wound and held the skin closed for a few seconds. “Best not glue myself to you, huh? I’m not sure how I’d explain that to Akil.”
“Do you love him?”
I frowned. The abrupt question caught me off guard. “That’s personal.”
Stefan looked right at me, his smile gone. “I need to know the answer.” His cold stare could have pierced stone.
“Why?”
He hesitated, his sharp blue eyes searching my puzzled expression. “Because if you do, then it makes my task all the more difficult, and I need your help.”
“What does any of that have to do with whether I love Akil or not?”
He moistened his lips and straightened so that my hand fell away from his side. I looked up into his eyes, sensing the cool energy thrumming inside him. A trickle of power rippled inside me. The warmth embraced my weary limbs, but that was as far as it could get. The marks on the walls surrounding us prevented the power from manifesting outside of me. I felt my demon butt up against my skin, unable to break free.
“Who do you think sent those hounds?” Stefan’s voice deepened.
“It could only be my brother, Val. I don’t know much about Hellhounds, but they’re difficult to summon. Only pure demons can do it, even then they’re virtually impossible to control. Val has wanted me dead for years. Summoning Hellhounds would just be the last in a long list of things he’s done to me.”
Stefan briefly touched my forehead with his fingertips, probably an instinctive touch, but the dance of power that ignited between us immediately jerked me back. The spark had been so intense that it tugged a great wave of energy from inside, briefly staggering me. I reached for the countertop, steadying myself as Stefan stood firm, his cool gaze heavy with intent. What that intention was, I couldn’t be sure.
“Akil sent those hounds, Muse.” Stefan’s voice had lost all of its jovial lightness. The arrogance was back, his tone cold.
It was my turn to laugh. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. Akil and I… it’s complicated.”
“I don’t doubt that.” He raised an eyebrow, implying a great deal with that one gesture.
I tossed the glue on the side and snaked my arms crossed, attempting to control the flicker of anger flaring inside me. “How dare you judge me? You don’t even know me.” He shrugged a dismissive shoulder, further infuriating me. “You have no idea what I’ve been through. You were looked after. Someone cared enough about you to keep you safe, to train you. I had none of that. I was sold, virtually given away to the demons as a plaything. I was raised beyond the veil. Do you even know what that means?”
His hard expression softened a little. He rested a hip against the cupboards, his head bowed a little. “Who told you I was kept safe?”
“It doesn’t matter. What matters is, I don’t know you, but I do know Akil, and he’s done nothing but look after me.”
“He’s a demon, Muse.”
“What are we?”
“We’re human.” He ground his teeth, flicking his hair out of his eyes to glare at me. “And believe or not, we hold more power over them than they’ve led you to believe. Why do you think he keeps you so close?”
Because he loves me? I didn’t speak the words, but they’d been there, right on the tip of my tongue. Stefan didn’t need to hear it. He saw it in my expression, in the hopelessness on my face. He shook his head. “I had hoped you’d be stronger than this.”
“Oh, screw you. You’re impossible. You know that? Like a goddamn force of nature. You waltz into my workshop and ruin my life, and now you pity me? I’m sick of it. Sick of you.” I headed for the door.
“You can’t leave. Not yet.”
With a sigh, I stopped a few feet from the front door, feeling the chill of his gaze on my back. “If you’re not an assassin, and you’re not here to hurt me, then what are you?”
“Whatever Akil told you is a lie. I’m an Enforcer. This tattoo you so readily admired proves it. I wasn’t ‘kept safe,’ Muse. I was plucked from my home, stolen from everything I’d ever loved, and forced into this way of life, but you know what, I love it. I hunt demons and thrive off it. I kill the bastards who step out of line, the ones who breach the human world and wreak havoc, and I need your help to kill your brother.”
“I don’t believe you.” I ignored the ‘kill your brother’ bombshell for now because it was insane to even consider it.
“It doesn’t matter what you believe. It’s the truth. Akil means to kill you. Your brother isn’t behind any of this, and I can prove it.”
Stefan watched me closely, waiting for my reaction. I couldn’t believe him. Akil wouldn’t hurt me. He’d saved me from my owner, given me the tools I needed to slaughter the bastard. Akil had been there ever since, my guardian in a world that despised me. No, Stefan was lying. This was Val’s doing. My brother was capable and had a motive. There was no mystery here.
I sat on the couch with a disgruntled humph and dropped my head back, closing my eyes against the physical and mental aches and pains. “Thank you for everything, but when I leave here, I don’t want to see you again.”
“Muse, if you go back to Akil, he’ll kill you.”
Pinching the bridge of my nose, I squeezed my eyes closed. My headache pulsated. “He’s not going to do that.” Akil wouldn’t hurt me. I’d seen the passion in his eyes, felt the warmth of his arms around me. There was no malice.
“You traded one owner for another, and you’re too blinded by Akil to see it.”
“Shut up.”
“Just because he doesn’t beat you, doesn’t mean he’s not controlling you.”
I snapped open my eyes. “Stop it.”
Stefan glared back at me. “Why can’t you see it?”
“Because…” I winced at my own foolishness.
“Because you love him?”
Maybe I did, but it wasn’t as simple as that. Without Akil, I was nothing. I wouldn’t survive a night without him. The detective at the police department had proven that. “He keeps me safe.”
Stefan smiled bitterly. “You kept yourself safe for five years.”
“It didn’t last. You turned up and ruined it all.”
“I was the reason you were standing on the street when the explosion destroyed your workshop, remember?” His smug grin was back. “Akil set you up. You pissed him off, Muse. You turned your back on him and walked away. Did you think he was going to let you get away with it?”
“Stop it. Just—stop. I don’t want to hear any more of your lies.”
Finally, Stefan gave up trying to force me to believe his propaganda. He came and sat on the couch next to me, resting his boots on the coffee table and propped an elbow on the arm of the couch beside him. He leaned away from me, shuffling down into the cushions and closing his eyes.
“You’re going to sleep?”
“It’s that or listen to the Akil fangirl speech.”
“Asshole.”
He snickered at my insult but kept his eyes closed; the conversation was over.
I watched his chest rise and fall, confident that he couldn’t see me doing so. Stefan’s lean body was built to kill, and evidently he had no qualms about doing so. He’d executed the demon in
the stairwell without hesitation and on the run from the Hellhounds, he hadn’t once stopped to consider his actions. He took it all in his stride, like it was part of his day job. I sat there, in a room where the walls were covered in symbols I’d never even seen before and didn’t have a clue what they meant. But they’d worked. He was well trained, that much was obvious. Even the stunt with the superglue, which I was pretty sure he could have done himself, hinted at his no-nonsense get-the-job-done attitude. So he’d been trained, but I’d never heard of ‘Enforcers’; shouldn’t I know about them? Were there more of them? Who trained them? It sounded like fantasy to me. Half-bloods didn’t have the power to go up against demons. It was impossible.
When he’d called his power, let it ride over him, I’d seen the demon that resided at his soul, and it had been astonishingly beautiful. There wasn’t a rule that said demons couldn’t be stunning. They came in all shapes and sizes, but I had never seen anything like him. The wings alone; jeez, you could understand where the angel-myth came from. I had wings, well, used to. Now only one remained, but they had never been as beautiful as his. My owner had sheared my missing wing off with a scimitar. When I went ‘nuclear’ as Stefan had called it, when the demon rides me so completely that you can’t tell us apart, my remaining wing appears, but it’s a sorry specimen, ripped and useless.
Stefan’s breathing had slowed. Asleep, with the Hellhounds at the proverbial door. Typical. I twisted side on to face him and blatantly let my gaze wander across his fine physique. Honed to the pinnacle of physical fitness with an athletic grace, he wasn’t all muscle, but might as well have been. I skipped my gaze down to the tattoo and had to stop myself from reaching out to touch it. That mark had to be significant. His branding, tattooed into his skin and on his gun.
I gave in to curiosity and reached out. My fingers hovered over the tattoo as it rose and fell with his breathing. Sliding my gaze higher, I deliberately let it linger on his body. A curious urge to touch was proving frustratingly difficult to ignore. Just a little touch. Would his skin be cold or warm? I’d never met an ice demon.
I rested the tips of my fingers lightly on his chest and found his skin to be warm. Settling my hand over the ripple of his abdominal muscles, I let the warmth of him soak into my touch. His breathing continued to slowly ebb and flow. He wouldn’t know how I’d admired him in more ways than one. He was a half-blood, just like me: human but for the demons slumbering at our cores. Ever since I could remember, I’d been deemed unworthy, a lesser being, a mistake, but Stefan oozed confidence. He carried himself as though he didn’t give a damn about what he was; almost as though he knew he was better in some way.
He had hinted that he knew about my past, that my owner had beaten me, but he didn’t know the half of it. It had been worse than that, night after night. Beaten, raped, cut, abused. I’d only survived because Damien wouldn’t allow me to die.
As the memories flowed unbidden, I pulled my hand back from Stefan’s alluring body and stood up, moving away to roam the apartment, my thoughts darkening. Finding a single bedroom, I opened the wardrobe door, looking for some clothes to change into but found only suits and shirts. Come to think of it, the apartment was lacking a woman’s touch. Perhaps the owner was a single guy, separated, who saw his kids on the weekends. I began to feel inexplicably sad for a man I didn’t even know before realizing the sadness I felt wasn’t for him; it was for me.
For as long as I could remember, I’d been in chains. Occasionally, Damien had released me, finding it amusing to let me go and then parade me in front of his peers. I spent so long with him that it became all I knew. It was life. It was normal. So I took the abuse, only summoning the demon inside me when Damien wanted it, so he could torture her too. She is me and I her, irrevocably connected and yet different entities occupying the same human body. And oh, how he despised my human body. I bore many scars, only a fraction of which were physical.
I’d met Akil through Damien. So proud of how he’d beaten his pitiful half-blood into submission and kept her like a pet, Damien had presented me to Akil one night, showing off his accomplishments to one of the Seven Princes of Hell. I’d looked at Akil, at the smartly dressed business man and saw only another anonymous face leering at my disgusting existence. But he hadn’t leered. He didn’t do anything at first. Then he asked Damien to ‘lend me’ to him. Damien couldn’t refuse one of the Seven Princes, so he handed me over to Akil.
I’d expected a whole new world of pain to begin, but Akil hadn’t touched me. All he did was look at me cowering on the floor. He didn’t speak, didn’t do anything, but he watched. In some ways, that had been more terrifying. I didn’t know his name, didn’t know who he was or what he was capable of, but I felt the elemental power radiating from him. I expected him to kill me with one swift, decisive movement, but he didn’t move a muscle.
I began to look forward to my time with Akil. I was terrified of him, of the power coursing through him, but he hadn’t hurt me, and my time with him separated me from Damien. Eventually, Akil coaxed me into speaking. Damien didn’t like to hear me talk, but Akil did. He wanted to know my name.
He calls me Muse. I was Damien’s muse, as though I inspired hatred and disgust in him. My existence gave him leave to hurt me in ways I didn’t even know he could. I was art to him, a bloody, damaged, and violated piece of fragile art. In some sick and twisted way, he thought he was liberating me, that I should be grateful for lashings that split my flesh.
The memories turned my stomach. My reflection in the mirror above the sink paled. I clasped my hands either side of the washbasin and peered at the woman looking back. The gash across my right eye had scabbed over, but the bloody mess down the side of my face was worse than I’d expected. I had glass in my hair and dozens of grazes across my arms. My dress was torn and bloody. Patches of oil or gasoline splattered across the once vibrant red fabric. No wonder Stefan had wanted to clean me up.
I scrubbed my hands with soap and tried to wash the blood off my face. I’d spent a great deal of time washing the filth from my own skin, imagined and real. My hands shook, perhaps from the late onset of shock, or from the assault of memories. Either way, I needed to get a grip of myself. This wasn’t over. I was safe for now, hidden behind Stefan’s clever graffiti, but as soon as I stepped outside that door, I was a target, and it was open season on me. By now, word would have reached the demons. Not only was I still alive, but I wasn’t with Akil. They wouldn’t care that he’d forbidden killing me. Look at the detective at the police department. He hadn’t cared. He’d just wanted me dead. They were all the same.
At least Stefan was different. He’d survived. He may or may not have been protected, but he could clearly look after himself. Nobody had bothered teaching me a damn thing. I only had a name because my owner found it amusing.
“Damnit!” The blood wasn’t coming off. I fell against the sink, gripping the white porcelain so hard that my fingers blanched. My stomach churned as my body rebelled against my attempts to remain calm. What Stefan didn’t seem to realize was that without Akil, I was dead anyway, so what did it matter? What did any of this matter?
I stumbled from the bathroom and dropped my weary body on the edge of the bed. The apartment was alien, the man who’d brought me here had his own dubious motives, and I had nothing.
“You okay?” Stefan’s voice held a softer tone than I’d heard from him.
I didn’t turn, couldn’t find it in me to look at him. He probably stood in the bedroom doorway and could stay there for all I cared. Head bowed, body trembling, I knew how I looked. He’d think me weak, just as he had earlier. Maybe he was right.
“You’re not like me.” I flicked my head around to glare at him. “You don’t know me. You don’t know anything. I’m not helping you kill my brother, an impossible task by the way as he’s immortal. I don’t care what your issue is with him. I don’t even care that you think you have proof Val isn’t behind this. I don’t want to know.”
He lo
oked as though he might say something; clearly, he had some sort of witty retort on the tip of his tongue, but he swallowed it back. Without another word, he left the bedroom. I was glad he’d gone. His presence only served to remind me how pathetic I was in comparison.
I growled and flung myself back on the bed, falling into a fitful sleep within minutes.
The quiet was complete beyond the veil, the netherworld air thick, like soup. I had to drag it through clenched teeth to breathe. Ripples of pain rode through my body. My fragile human skin glistened with perspiration beneath the touch of moonlight, but I had come to embrace the agony. It meant I was alive. I could see my owner’s silhouette only when I lifted my gaze through matted hair. He might have appeared human but for the huge bat-like wings that relaxed behind him.
A flash of pain darted down my back. The wounds he’d inflicted gaping like hungry mouths. The chain coiled around my owner’s right hand dripped with my blood. I couldn’t see his smile. His face was lost in shadow, but I knew it was there. Clouds broiled in the dark sky, briefly smothering the blue moon, snuffing out its waning light. My mortal eyes failed to pierce the complete darkness, but it didn’t matter. I knew what was coming.
When the washed-out light from the moon flowed once more into the clearing, he towered over me. I reared up, baring blunt teeth in a snarl. He could beat me all he wanted. I was not giving up without a fight. He pulled the chain tight in front of him, links rattling. I had enough time to fill my lungs with the cloying air before he wrapped the chain around my neck and pulled it tight. My demon clawed within me, thrashing against my restraint in a bid to be free, but I held her back. I would not let him win. Her talons sunk into my resolve even as my chest burned for air. My head throbbed.
He leaned in, tugging me off my knees, clutching me close to his leering face. When he laughed, the sound boomed about the clearing. Nobody—nothing would hear us. Even if something did, it wouldn’t care.
“The Prince believes he can claim you.” The snarling voice drilled into my skull. “You are mine.”
Demons & Djinn: Nine Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Novels Featuring Demons, Djinn, and other Bad Boys of the Underworld Page 150