Ascending Passion

by Amanda Pillar

  “Isn’t this your eye cream?” But she complied when he gave her a don’t-be-an-idiot look.

  Eye-cream. How stupid am I?

  Suddenly, all the in-jokes she hadn’t understood—between Yael and the other archaeologists, and between Yael and Azrael and Dru—were making a lot more sense.

  Money-launderers. She snorted. Dru must have been going to say ‘monsters’, but stopped when she’d remembered Rowan didn’t believe in magic. It had all seemed so silly at the time.

  After she wiped the dust off her fingers, she opened her eyes. “Whoa.” The entire room was a lot brighter, with white light glimmering over objects and text, some in shapes she could identify, others not. And when she turned to Dr. Campbell… “What the—?”

  He still appeared human, but there was a dull red glow under his skin, and his hair was a lot shaggier, almost like fur in places.

  “His glamor is strong, so you can only see partially through it, but you’ve got a glimpse of what he really looks like.”

  “So were Kayla and Dr. Murdoch human?” But she knew they weren’t. No human could down fifteen cups of coffee a day and not resemble a squirrel on cocaine. If anything, the beverage had calmed the other woman down.

  “No. Kayla was a Succubus, and Murdoch is an Anguis demon, like a praying mantis with scales.”

  “Huh.” She was surprised at Kayla, but Murdoch had always reminded her of an insect; long and spindly.

  “Don’t you want to know what Luke is?” Yael asked, a taunting note in his voice.

  “Luke?” He was too handsome to be human, she had to admit it. But, a demon?

  “His name is Luke M. Starre.”

  “Yes?”

  “You don’t see it?” Yael was incredulous.

  “Don’t see what?”

  “He’s Lucifer. ‘Luke’ is short for Lucifer. ‘M. Starre’ is short for Morning Star. You know, the King of Hell. Well, King of Sheol. Hades and Satan rule the other two circles.”

  “Wait—wait. That story you told me about the circles of Hell is true?”

  “Yes. But that’s what you’re worried about? Not the fact you’ve been working for Lucifer?”

  “Luke is not Lucifer. That’s—”

  “Wait, let me guess. Crazy. Or ridiculous. You were going to go with one of those two.”

  She folded her arms. “You can be a real smart ass, you know that?”

  “Yes, I pride myself on it, really.”

  Rowan laughed, but the sound was cut short when Luke suddenly appeared in the tomb.

  One moment it had just been Dr. Campbell and the next, her boss stood next to the archeologist, dressed in a designer suit, his long hair loose around his face. He wasn’t wearing glasses, although she could see they were tucked into a pocket.

  “Can he see us?” Rowan asked. She stood, and approached them, but Luke didn’t bat an eyelid. “I can’t hear them, can you?”

  Yael shook his head. “And their mouths are moving too slow for me to lip-read. We may as well sit back and watch the show.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is going to take a while.”

  And it did. For ages, the pair just stood there; it was the most irritating thing she’d ever had to witness.

  “This is taking forever.” She let her head fall back against the wall.

  Sometime later, as she was drawing sketches of the artifacts, Yael called out, “There it goes!”

  Rowan quickly turned back, mouth opening as she saw Luke lift the alabaster sarcophagus lid ever-so-slowly, eventually placing it on the ground. “That would be several hundred pounds of stone!”

  “I told you he wasn’t human.” Yael looked smug.

  “I didn’t say I didn’t think he wasn’t human. But King of Hell?”

  “That’s a lot of double negatives there. But I think I follow. He’s the King of Sheol. He’s the first fallen angel. And he’s still an archangel, despite the fact his wings were removed. But most of all, he’s a total asshole and not to be trusted.”

  She watched as Luke peered into the coffin, his face slowly morphing into a mask of anger. He turned to Dr. Campbell, who grew visibly worried.

  Rowan was beside them as Luke pulled on a pair of gloves and removed the lid of the second, nested sarcophagus. There were usually two or three nested coffins protecting a significant mummy. She peered inside. There, wrapped in bandages, was Twosret. Her shrouded body was covered in amulets and jewelry, and four canopic jars were nestled at her feet. Each jar contained Twosret’s internal organs: liver, lungs, intestines and stomach. They weren’t normally placed within the sarcophagus, but this had been a quick reburial, so things weren’t standard.

  The lack of protocol didn’t bother her, though. Rowan’s heart thumped at the significance of the find.

  Luke ran his gloved hands over the bandages shrouding the mummy, and picked up each amulet, studying it before replacing it exactly where it had been.

  Don’t do it. Don’t touch them.

  But he couldn’t hear her thoughts, and even if he could, she doubted he’d pay attention.

  “What’s he searching for?” she asked.

  “Heaven’s Heart.”

  “But you said it was stolen.”

  “There were three pieces. Heaven only had one. Apparently, one was kept in the human realm, and one in Hell.”

  “And you think Twosret had it?”

  “Not just me; apparently Lucifer thinks it as well. It’s why he wanted to find her.”

  “So that’s why you helped me with the trench and the tomb.” She frowned. “But what does it do?”

  “I don’t know. It was never used in Heaven.”

  “It must be powerful if Luke wants it—if he really is Lucifer.”

  “My thoughts exactly.”

  They stood side by side as Lucifer rifled through the grave goods covering Twosret’s body; he even unwound the wrapping at her throat, exposing a severed neck. Rowan’s mind was screaming against the sacrilege. He was unwrapping a mummy, exposing it to the air, before it had been properly studied.

  There was nothing there.

  Luke growled, and shadow-like wings erupted from his back, while lightning danced over his flesh. She could hear the echo of the sound even here. Primal fear danced through her, and she knew that she should never have seen this, never have known what he was.

  He really is Lucifer.

  His moment of rage over, the wings vanished, and Luke returned to his normal, too-handsome self.

  Then, over the next several hours—for Rowan and Yael, at least—Dr. Campbell and Luke returned the sarcophagus to its prior condition. If she hadn’t seen it with her own eyes, she never would have guessed the tomb had been disturbed.

  Her skin crawled at the idea that any number of tombs or bodies could have been manhandled in this way, their final resting places desecrated by treasure hunters, regular archaeologists and historians never knowing what had happened. What had been stolen.

  “That would have taken them all of one to two hours,” Yael said, when Luke disappeared.

  “How long has it been for us?” Rowan asked.

  “Twenty.”

  She didn’t even feel tired. “I think your theory was right.”

  “For once, being right isn’t that much of a good thing.”

  “But it’s odd. I don’t feel hungry, or tired, or any of the usual things that being awake for over twenty hours would do to me.”

  “It must be part of the spell. To ensure that whoever gets trapped lives a long time in this place. It is meant to be torture, after all.”

  Chapter 42

  Five days.

  Five whole mother-fucking days had passed, and Yael was going to go postal. He hated this, being trapped with no way out. He’d tried dozens more spell-breaking charms and had zero luck. And he’d gone over that damned jackal-headed Anubis statue a hundred times, all to no avail. He had no id
ea how to break them out.

  Having Dru’s teleportation ring would be handy right about now.

  Even then there was no guarantee it would work; they’d been taken out of the current reality, or timeline, or whatever. He needed to watch more Star Trek to get up on the lingo.

  In all that time, though, Rowan hadn’t needed to sleep; she’d spent a large majority of it cataloguing the tomb’s contents. He helped her, when the boredom threatened to get to him, but he’d tried to keep his distance, when he could. Being near her, knowing no one else could interrupt them, that they were alone…

  It was dangerous.

  She was human. Mortal.

  His initial objections—not wanting to risk being kicked out of Heaven forever for sleeping with a human—had vanished. It was inevitable, their joining. But he worried now that he was too attached, that he would crave her for years, for centuries, and that one taste wouldn’t be enough.

  She’s going to die.

  Kayla’s demise had just driven the point home earlier than he would have liked. Yael would live for millennia more, provided he didn’t meet with an untimely beheading or angel-killing Cushiel. Was it worth it, to love for a human lifetime, knowing he may never find the same thing again with one of his own kind?

  Two months ago, he would have straight up said ‘no’. Then again, he would have thought the idea of his falling in love with a human was—as Rowan would say it—ridiculous.

  But now, now he thought it might be worth it.

  You’re only thinking this because you’re trapped…

  Maybe.

  But he’d spent five days continuously with Rowan. And weeks before that. Never, not in his entire life, had he ever been able to tolerate spending that much time with another person. Not even the Darts, and he’d adopted them as family.

  He enjoyed his and Rowan’s banter; her quick wit, and her ability to admit she was wrong. She hadn’t formally apologized to him or her family yet for thinking they were cray cray, but she’d accepted that magic was real, and had admitted as much.

  It took a Hell of a lot of resilience to do that.

  To learn that a whole new world was real, one you thought was nothing more than nonsense and legend, and to roll with it, showed she was of stronger character than he or her family had thought. Hell, then even she’d thought.

  “Why are you staring at me like that?” Rowan asked. She stood near the sarcophagus, notepad in hand, her red hair a wild nimbus around her face. She’d never appeared sexier, not even in that black dress of hers.

  “Like what?”

  She gulped. “Like you want to…devour me.”

  “Maybe because I do?” He stepped right up to her, so she had to tilt her head back to look at him.

  “Are you ill?” She tucked her pencil into a pocket and felt his forehead.

  He was feverish all right, but not from illness. “No.”

  “You’re hot.”

  “Thank you.”

  “That’s not what I meant, and you know it.” She rolled her eyes, a smile tugging on the corner of her lips. He wanted to kiss it away until she couldn’t smile, couldn’t laugh, could only gasp his name.

  “I’ll take what compliments I can. You’re so forthcoming with them, after all.”

  “What do you mean by that—?”

  He claimed her mouth in a searing kiss.

  The tingles that accompanied their usual touches flared in an explosion of heat, racing through his body, making his skin come alive. Every touch, every faint stroke of air, it electrified him, made him hungry for more.

  He cupped her jaw and tilted her head to the side, so he could gain better access to her mouth. She moaned, low and needy, against his lips. His cock, already hard, jerked.

  “Fuck.” He pulled away for a moment, resting his forehead against hers. Electrical tingles pulsed through him, making him hotter, harder. “This feels too good.”

  Way too good.

  Kissing had never gotten him so worked up before.

  “More.” Rowan grabbed his face, stood on her tiptoes and kissed him, her passion re-igniting his own into an inferno.

  His hands developed a mind of their own, and they caressed her neck, her back, her waist. One swept up over her ribcage, coming to a stop so it could stroke the underside of a breast. The weight against his hand made him groan, plunge his tongue into her mouth to plunder, take everything she had to offer.

  She pressed closer to him, and his hand closed over her breast. They both gasped, then he pulled away as his fingers stroked over her nipple, felt it harden beneath his touch. He would kiss her there, touch her…taste her.

  “Yael?”

  He glanced down to find her lips trembling, but not from desire. No, her burning gaze was sad, guilty even.

  Had he just totally misread the situation?

  “Yes?”

  “I’m not sure I’m ready…Eric died…and Kayla died…”

  He stumbled back, numb. She didn’t want him? All that fire and passion and she didn’t want him?

  “I see.”

  “No.” She closed the distance between them, grabbing onto his arm. “I want this, I want you, I’m just not ready.”

  He couldn’t look at her. Her words were true, so she believed them, but he couldn’t see past the rejection. Not good enough. Again.

  “Okay.”

  “Yael?”

  He turned to face the wall. “I need some time alone.”

  “I—”

  “Alone.”

  She hesitated, as if she expected him to turn back around, to make peace with her, but he couldn’t. He would have made love to her then and there, had she let him. As a fallen, he wasn’t forbidden from being with a human, but he would still potentially risk giving up his ticket back into Heaven by being with her.

  And Rowan?

  She’d been so consumed with guilt for wanting to fuck him, that she’d stopped.

  Goes to show he was always second best.

  Even to a human.

  Chapter 43

  Azrael gripped his cellphone. For hours, he’d been debating whether to call in help. Yael was gone, as was Rowan. They’d been missing for half a day. There was no sign of them in the tomb, nor at the site or the compound. They could be dead.

  Or they could have been trapped by a spell.

  It was the latter, he suspected, especially since he and Dru had been caught by something like that once before. It was how they’d bonded. Kind of. How they’d learned not to kill each other, anyway.

  The bonding and the sex had come later.

  Dru was prowling under the marquee, her white hair whipping around her face whenever she turned. “Lucifer was in there before,” she said. “I spied on him. He couldn’t find the Heart.”

  He sighed. He’d told her not to go sneaking around, but Dru was Dru. It was why he loved her, after all. “That means Lucifer didn’t see them, either. Angelic help probably won’t be of any use, then.”

  That crossed Seraphina and Trick off the list. He disliked Trick anyway—asshole had tried to seduce Dru about a million times—but he did trust Seraphina.

  “But who else is there?” Dru came to a stop and tapped her lip.

  “Well, we do know an Egyptian god.”

  “Set?” She screwed her face up. “We kind of cut off his head. Plus, he has a hit out on us; that’s why we’ve been playing babysitter. He won’t want to help us.”

  “No, the other Egyptian god.”

  “Ooohh.” A sly look swept into her eyes, and he had to stop himself from pinning her to the ground and kissing her senseless. She grinned, as if she could sense his desire. “Hold that thought. Let me make a quick call to my sister.”

  Chapter 44

  Yael hadn’t talked to her for a day.

  He’d needed space, he said. She’d given him space. But now she felt like an asshole. Kissing him had been the most amazing moment in her l
ife. She’d never felt so alive, so sexy, so wanted.

  And she’d ruined it.

  Because for a split second, Eric had popped into her mind.

  He’d never kissed her that, like he if he didn’t, he’d die. He had never truly been passionate with her, and that solidified her belief that their union had been one of practicality.

  And her guilt had spiraled out of control. There she was, enjoying herself, making out with another man, just two months after Eric had died.

  She’d loved Eric, she had.

  But maybe she hadn’t loved him like she should have.

  And she’d stopped Yael, stopped him right about when things were going to get hotter and even more fantastic, because she’d been scared. Scared and guilty.

  She’d already been falling for Yael; what if having sex with him pushed her over the edge, into love? Did that make her fickle? Not worthy of a second chance?

  Argh.

  She clenched her hands into fists, pressing them against her temples. She hated this, this second-guessing, this not knowing.

  Yael was an angel.

  She’d never get another chance at being with him, not if he gained his wings again. And once their business transaction was over…sure, he might have feelings for her. But he was going to live forever, maybe, and she wasn’t.

  Life is too short to be afraid.

  It was something her cousin, Juliette, had once said on the phone to her. Right before she’d jumped out of an airplane, skydiving somewhere in Peru.

  She’d been right.

  Yael was back over by the Anubis statue, staring at it like he could intimidate it into freeing them. “Yael?”

  He turned to her, his eyes flat and hard. He’d never looked at her like that, not even the day they’d first met back in the mansion.

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted.

  “Excuse me?”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  “For what?”

  She didn’t like this cold stranger he’d become; like he’d shut himself off from her, so she couldn’t reject him anymore.

  “For being afraid. For not believing. For laughing when you said you were an angel. Need I go on?”

  “Please do.”