by Renee George
“Before Moloch,” I corrected. “But my wedding always included my sisters as my bride’s maids. Charlotte would have been my maid of honor. I was a real person then. Not anymore. I shouldn’t even exist in the present.”
“Neither should I.” David stood up then dropped to his knee in front of me. “I died a month ago. We are both on time that isn’t ours. Let’s make it ours.” His excitement was palpable. “I want to be your husband for as long as I have on this earth. Marry me, Olivia Madder.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. Then I nodded. “But I’m even crazier. Yes. I’ll marry you.”
He swooped me up into his arms, lifting me from the couch until my feet dangled inches from the floor. He kissed me, and I kissed him back. I was serious about his plan to marry being crazy, but it also fell into the category of “it doesn’t make the situation worse” so I didn’t see the harm in making David happy. After all, he had been willing to give up his soul for me. The least I could do is give up my last name for him.
“Then it’s settled,” David said.
“I’ll go grab a bottle,” Ennis said. “We should commemorate your engagement with a stiff one.”
“Here, here,” I agreed. “Go get the hooch.”
Honk! Honk! Honk! The horn sound, the crunch of gravel on tires, and the roar of an engine interrupted our celebration.
David’s brow furrowed. “Now what?”
The three of us went out onto the front porch and watched as a white, luxury SUV skidded to halt about thirty feet from the parking area.
A blonde with Marilyn Monroe sunglasses stretched her neck out the driver’s side window. Sandra Barstow.
I jumped off the porch and rushed toward her. “I want my purse back, you cow!”
She held a gun out the window at me. “Stop right there!” she shouted.
Oh, right. Like bullets were going to stop me. I took off my shoes and kept stalking in her direction. “I’m going to kick your sorry ass.”
She shot at my feet, and a spray of dust and broken rock hit my legs. “I told you to stop.” She wrinkled her nose at me. “I can’t believe you are still wearing the same clothes. Doesn’t all that blood bother you?”
“I like it,” I told her. “I can’t wait to add yours to the mix.”
“How about you add your boyfriend’s?”
David was next to me now, and Sandra aimed the gun at him. His presence tempered my bravado. I might be immortal right now, but David wasn’t. I stopped. “Why are you here, Sandra?”
“Moloch wants a private conversation, and since he can’t reach you, he sent me.” She gave a nod to David but kept the gun steady on him. “Nice trick that. Maybe you can tell me how you did it? You know, keep a demon lord out.”
“We don’t share secrets with soul-sucking bitches,” I told her. “So that excludes you. As for Moloch, tell him he can eat a bag of demon dicks.”
“He thought you might say that.” She lowered her glasses, and I could see the bruise around her left eye. Moloch must’ve been super pissed to give her a shiner. He didn’t usually resort to violence with minions. It was difficult to sell people on bargaining away their souls if the dealmaker looked like chopped beef. “Moloch said that he will meet you at the border of Jensen’s farm. You can stay on the warded side.”
“Why would she agree to that?” asked David.
“Aren’t you cute? And stupid.” Sandra directed her gaze toward me. “Meet him at seven p.m., or you will never see your sisters again.” She put the gun away and looked at her watch. “You have about forty minutes before your sisters go bye-bye.” Sandra pushed up her sunglasses. “I’m outtie.”
“Hey, what about my purse!”
In response, Sandra flipped me the bird, threw the SUV in reverse, and made a big arch backward, before putting it in drive and zooming off in the same cloud of dust she rode in on.
“I’m going with you,” David said.
“Moloch wants me alone.”
He turned me into his arms and held me against his chest. “Promise me you won’t cross the line.”
“I promise,” I lied. I would do my best not to cross the line, but Moloch knew my weaknesses, and they were Charlotte, Elise, and Eliza.
Chapter 15
My pants were stiff and parts of my shirt stuck to my skin. It was kind of yucky, but I decided not the change before meeting Moloch. Let him see that I had bathed in the blood of his foot soldiers, so to speak. I mean, really bathing in their blood would be gross.
I drove my car to the end of the drive, stopped short of the property’s edge and got out. The demon lord was nowhere in sight. “Moloch!” I screamed.
A swirl of dust and black smoke appeared, gathering speed, width, and height for nearly a minute. The debris blew rocks and sticks in my direction. The demonic tornado took on a biped shape, its cyclonic arms waggling like a blow-up waving man at a used car lot. After another minute, the thing began to solidify into a Moloch-shaped golem. Next, the hard dirt cracked then dropped to the dusty drive, and the demon lord, in all his pompous splendor, stepped out of the middle of it. I half expected him to say something like, “Ta-dah.”
He didn’t. His fiery red eyes looked as if they could burn holes into my flesh, and I trembled as I reminded myself that I was safe as long as I stayed on David’s side of the fence.
I wiped the fine layer of accumulated silt from my face. “When did you change jobs from demon asshat to dust bunny?”
His mouth thinned as he glared at me. His voice boomed, shaking the ground under my feet. “It’s never a good idea to taunt me, Olivia. Am I going to have to teach you that lesson over and over?”
“Why, yes.” I crossed my arms to keep my hands still. “Yes, you are.”
“You will not disobey me!” Spittle flew from his lips. “Get over here right now.”
I felt a slight tug in Moloch’s direction, but nothing strong enough to actually make me take a step. I scratched my nose. The wards must have dampened Moloch’s control on me even more because the compulsion was less than a faint tickle on my free will. “Hmm, it seems you can’t control me while I’m on this side of the divide.”
“Olivia?” He made my name a question. “I don’t think you want to try me.” He waved his hand, and a vision of three tiny rooms appeared in front of him.
Oh, my God.
Moloch had manifested their worst fears and locked those phobias in cells with them. Charlotte, who suffered from arachnophobia, was screaming and clawing at the walls as big, black hairy spiders poured in from the floor, crawling and jumping as they charged her. Eliza was in the fetal position, her claustrophobia in high gear because Moloch had put her in a cell the size of a small box. And poor Elise was up on her toes, back against the wall, as she stood ankle deep in the only thing that I’d ever seen her freak out about, cotton balls.
“You’re a monster!”
“Yes.” Moloch smiled and picked his teeth with his pinky nail. “I am. It’s about time you remember just how monstrous I can be. Those sweet Southern Belles have been surrounded by these delicious delusions since this afternoon. I told you to leave Sandra Barstow alone, and you chose to disobey me. How much longer do you think they can take being at my mercy?”
I wanted to reach out and pluck my sisters from the horror Moloch had imposed on them, but it was impossible. “Stop it,” I cried. “You promised not the harm them.”
“I’m not hurting them. But I certainly can’t be held responsible for your sisters’ reactions to illusions.”
“Why? Why do you want David? Is it just to punish me?”
Moloch kept the visions of my sisters up. His own demonic version of reality TV. “I’ll admit, the closest thing I get to joy is watching you suffer. But, frankly, you are not that important to me. No more so than a drop of water is to the ocean.”
“Then why?”
“Because he belongs to Afriel.”
“The teen-angel?”
Moloch gritted his teeth. “An appropriate de
scription. My baby brother has been a brat since his inception.”
“Brother?” I gaped at him.
“Where do you think the demon lords came from, Olivia? We all have the same father as the angels. Those of us who dared to defy Him were cast out of Shamayin and sent to Gehenna. What you humans call Heaven and Hell nowadays.” He curled his lip at me. “Lucifer and his gang were the first cast out of God’s kingdom, but they were not the last. My fall can be traced back to Afriel. I told you, he’s a brat.”
Fantastic. David and I had become pawns in a war between two brothers, a rivalry older than Cain and Abel. Moloch didn’t need David’s soul; he needed freaking family counseling.
I held up my hands. “There has to be something else. Anything else that would satisfy you. I’ll do it. Please don’t make me choose between my sisters and the man I love.”
“They say blood is thicker than water, Olivia. In two days we’ll find out if that’s true.” He disappeared, but he let the images of my tormented sisters hang for another few seconds before they evaporated from sight.
The setting sun marked the sky with a crimson streak. Moloch had done it. He’d defeated me. No matter what toll I had to pay for my sins of dealing with a lord of the underworld, it would destroy me.
But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t make the choice between them. Could I? Christ, I’d just agreed to marry David. I’d been almost happy.
Almost.
I couldn’t bring myself to talk to anyone when I got back to the house. I passed all four men without a word, went upstairs, stripped my grimy clothes off, pulled the rubber band off my ponytail, and climbed into David’s shower. As the hot water sluiced the filth from my skin and hair, I couldn’t help but think there wasn’t enough hot water in the world to wash the grime from my soul.
David’s hand pressed into my back. “You want company?”
I nodded without looking at him. I didn’t want to face him just yet. He stepped into the small shower behind me and wrapped his arms around me. The sound of sobs startled me, and I realized I was crying.”
“Sweetheart,” David murmured as he kept me from collapsing to the shower floor. “We’ll get through this. Whatever it is.”
I turned my face into the hot spray, washing the tears away. “Until we don’t,” I finally said. Moloch had me by the short and curlies, and he damn well knew it. The only choices were unthinkable.
David turned me in his arms, his hard flesh pressing against me. He wiped the water and wet hair from my face. His voice was gentle. The same tone he might take with a trapped animal he was trying to free. “What did he say to you, Liv? I can’t help if I don’t know.”
“He’s torturing them.” I choked up again. “He wants you, or the torture won’t stop. He’s had them locked away with the things that terrorize them the most. Char with spiders, Elise with a tight space, and Eliza with cotton balls.”
David’s eyes widened. “Cotton balls? They weren’t even invented until the nineteen-hundreds.”
“That’s what makes it even worse. She’s never felt them, but she has this unnatural fear of them touching her, and now, Moloch has them all over her.”
“I guess it’s called a phobia for a reason.” His arms encircled my back. “You know, Ennis has a thing about wrinkle nuts.”
I took me a second to process, then I snorted. “Wrinkled nuts?”
“Yeah.” David smiled. “He says he won’t eat nuts that have wrinkles. They give him the willies.”
“It’s a good thing Ray and Frank don’t have that problem.”
David laughed. I laughed. I didn’t want to, not with my sisters so afraid. “Moloch told me that he is tormenting them because I made him angry this morning at the hospital and then again when I went after Sandra. He’s doing this to them, and I can’t help them. Everything I do to save them makes it all worse.”
David tilted my head and kissed me. “Not everything bad that happens is your fault, Liv.” He kissed me again. “Moloch is a demon. The only excuse a demon needs to do evil is for it to be a day of the week that end in Y.” He kissed me again, this time his lips lingering. “If I could take away this pain you feel, take your burdens, I would. I’d do it right now.”
I slipped my arms over his shoulders and locked my fingers behind his neck. “Being here with you makes me happy. That happiness makes me feel guilty. How can I feel so much joy when my family is in so much danger?”
“Our world is filled with awful, Liv. It is an intense fight for good over evil. If we don’t take the micro-doses of joy when we get them, we’ll go crazy. Or worse, become our own brand of evil. You can’t defend the light if you’re always surrounded by darkness.”
I sagged against him, my breasts pressed against the smattering of hair on his chest. Suddenly, I was hyper-aware of his hard length pressing against my stomach. I angled my head back, my fingers winding in his hair, as I pulled his face down for another kiss. His fingers slid down my body as the water from the shower sluiced over us. He cupped my buttocks as a growl rumbled from his throat, and he lifted me, pressing my back against the tiled wall of the shower. When he entered me, I cried out with greedy desire. He moved against me, his hips thrusting as I locked my ankles behind his back and took the pleasure offered and gave it back to him. He kissed my jaw, my neck, his lips finding my breasts, one hand wrapped my waist, the other holding me so that he could tease my nipple between his teeth. The strength of my passion was packed tight inside me like a powder keg ready to blow.
“David,” I murmured through labored pants and moans, “David, David, my David.”
He slanted his face toward mine, his eyes locking on my gaze as he stretched me wide open with every sensuous stroke. “I love you, Liv,” he gritted out with more control than I thought imaginable. “My Olivia.” That was the match to my fuse, and the powder keg blew.
I threw my head back, ignoring the pain of the tile smashing my skull, as ecstasy wracked my body with shuddering pleasure. David’s hips began to move with less rhythm as he quickened his thrusts until a final lunge flattened me to the wall. He held me with a vice-like grip as we sank to the shower floor.
“That was...” he said.
I grinned. “That was.” I don’t know how long we’d gone at it, but it had been long enough for the hot water to run out. “I think our time is up.”
David looked at me. Then a strange expression crossed his face.
“What is it?”
“If Moloch has been torturing your sisters since the elevator, then how did Elise come to you at the Barstow house and Char, less than two hours ago, talked to you in the living room. Did they seem distraught?”
I shook my head. “They didn’t. Other than their inability to stay, they seemed...okay. What do you think that means?”
“Maybe the images he showed you were just illusions to frighten you.”
“It worked.” The water was getting downright cold now. “Can you?” I made knob-turning gestures to David.
He reached up and turned off the shower. “What if he doesn’t have them at all and showing you those images is one of his tricks?”
“Maybe.” It was something to think about, anyhow. “There’s something else,” I said. “I know why Moloch wants you.”
“Because of you.”
“No. Because of Afriel.” I let that sink in for a second. “He and Moloch are brothers.”
“Bullshit.”’
I crossed my heart. My legs, straddling David akimbo, began to cramp, so I adjusted my position. As a result, since he’d never pulled completely out of me, I could feel him getting hard again. Unfortunately, I said the one thing guaranteed to make him go soft. “If Afriel is your grandfather, then I guess that makes Moloch your uncle.”
“Christ, Olivia. How is that even possible?”
“Well, I guess when a mommy angel and a daddy angel give birth to baby angels, and one is a total douche that gets tossed into hell—”
“I can’t think with you
wrapped around me.” He put his hand over my mouth. “Shut up and kiss me.”
I was wrong. David did not go soft. He stayed hard. Very, very hard.
Chapter 16
The next day I managed to wake up before David. I dressed and went downstairs. I followed the aroma of fresh brewed coffee and bacon into the kitchen. Frank stood at the stove over a sizzling cast iron pan.
“Morning,” I said.
“Morning,” Frank replied. “Just in time.” Bread popped up from the toaster. Frank gestured with the spatula. “Can you butter those?”
“Sure.” I walked over the drainboard by the toaster and a short stack of already buttered toast. The freshly creamed butter was in a round glass dish with a lid. I looked at Frank. “Did you go milk a cow this morning?”
He chuckled. “Nothing that extreme. David had some cream in the fridge. I just whisked it until it was butter. No big deal.” He shook his head. “Besides. Ray really loves fresh butter. It’s one of the few things that he still enjoys since he started chemotherapy.”
My heart sank as I buttered the toast and placed two more pieces of bread into the slots. “I’m glad he has you. How bad is it?”
“If he was younger, I’d say really good. They caught it early. But he’s not young anymore. None of us are.” He raised a brow at me. “Well, some of us aren’t young anymore.” He flipped the bacon around. “The treatments take their toll.”
“Are Ray and Ennis awake?”
He nodded. “Ennis has been up for hours. He thinks he’s figured out a way to trap Moloch for a few minutes to give us a little extra time to enact the plan. Ray is working on the soul transmutation spell.” He sounded irritable.
“You can practice tasering me if it’ll make you feel better.”
Frank chortled. “It might.”
David came into the kitchen and wrapped himself around me from behind. He addressed Frank. “Did you hear the good news? We’re getting married.”
“Yep,” Frank said. “Heard.”
My heart sank again. “Today, I marry you. Tonight, I’ll nag. And tomorrow, at the end, I’ll ignore you. That way I get a full lifetime of married life experience.”