Hell to Pay: A Paranormal Reverse Harem Romance (Razing Hell Book 2)

by Cate Corvin

  My Nephilim shoved it back, but his axe was plain iron, not designed to cut through an unaltered Nephilim’s flesh.

  Azazel dissipated in a swirl of shadows, becoming the creature I’d seen last night. He was no less eerie for the daylight, his features hidden beneath black fog.

  Tascius gripped two of the Nephilim’s arms, holding as much of it back as he could as Azazel glided forward and plunged his hand into the thing’s chest up to his wrist.

  The Nephilim let out a grating gargle that tapered into silence as the Watcher crushed its heart in his fist and withdrew his hand. Not a single speck of blood clung to his shadow-hidden skin.

  Tascius dumped the body over the fire, and the thing’s clothes crackled and slowly caught fire.

  I’d been frozen through the entire thing, my lungs frozen in my chest. I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the gouges in Tascius’s skin.

  “Fly away, Melisande!” Lucifer said again, almost snarling the words. He ripped a blade of pure light from the air and brought it down on the horses’ leads, freeing them from the tree that held them captive.

  They both reared and spun, vanishing into the forest as their thundering hoofbeats faded away.

  I took a deep breath, steeling myself as the remaining Nephilim began to whisper from their hiding places in the forest, speaking a garbled language.

  Despite his still-dripping wounds, Tascius cocked his head to listen. “At least three more.” He picked up his axe again, but he had to know it wouldn’t help.

  There was no way in Hell I was flying away when he was trapped here with them with a useless axe.

  I’d just stepped forward to touch him, to heal what I could of his slashed arms and chest, when I heard the sound of claws scraping away at tree trunks behind me.

  My heart was in my throat when I spun around, raising my knives to catch the first slash of a jagged, rusty blade.

  This Nephilim was taller, a whole head above Tascius, and had the body of a beautiful man. His face, though… his face was all eyes and mouths, opening and closing, hissing words that I knew were insults even if I couldn’t understand them.

  He laughed and swung again, the shock of blade against blade jarring through my arms.

  The clang of swords meeting echoed crazily through the clearing behind me, and I heard Lucifer growl as light flared behind us, illuminating the Nephilim’s multitude of eyes until they looked like tiny suns.

  Straining against the sword that was slowly descending towards my face, I kicked out and caught the Nephilim in the gut. He staggered back a pace, but wasn’t stunned for long, recovering and dropping into a crouch.

  I circled him, ignoring the swish in the air of a sword nearly coming down on me from behind. I felt the passage of air against my feathers, but I couldn’t tear my eyes away from the drooling Nephilim that waited for the perfect opening to gut me.

  Tascius gasped in pain, and several grunts filled the clearing, becoming mangled shrieks.

  Even the Nephilim circling me looked, half of his eyes flicking away just for an instant. I lunged forward, my magic boiling through my arm to elongate my blade.

  It should’ve gone right through his throat, but his skin repelled my magic and the blade danced right off without leaving a mark.

  The Nephilim laughed, then a spear of light split the air and buried itself in his back, and Azazel swept forward in a storm of raging shadows, blowing right through him.

  The Watcher passed right through his body, and I had the strangest sense of double-vision: the Nephilim’s body was still standing, but Azazel’s dark claws gripped a shadowy, pale gray version of it that struggled in his grasp.

  The Watcher’s inhuman face opened wide, swallowing the Nephilim’s soul whole. The shade vanished, narrowing into an event horizon deep inside the roiling mass that Azazel had become.

  I backed away, a tiny bit of fear striking me despite the intense protectiveness I felt through our bond. Azazel was always so upright, so reticent… it was hard to believe that something like this lived under his skin.

  I almost tripped over something and spun around.

  Tascius’s cheek was cut open, blood pouring in a freshet over his chin and chest, and Lucifer was holding a spear of light, raising it overhead to plunge into the… thing they’d made.

  I realized what Azazel had been doing while I was distracted.

  Two of the Nephilim, already monstrous on their own, had been turned to smoke, then solid, fused together into a single mass of flesh and bone.

  It was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. Arms and legs stuck out at odd angles, and one of the heads was crushed beneath it as the ungainly thing tried to crawl away.

  Lucifer brought his spear down in the center mass of the Nephilim, pinning it to the ground. A shockwave burst through the air, stealing the breath from my lungs, and it seemed like time slowed down to a complete stop as the Heavenly light burst to life in the spearhead, incinerating the Nephilim from the inside out.

  I blinked as the light faded, a blazing star burned into my vision.

  Lucifer released the spear. “We need to go now.”

  “What about the horses?” I asked, feeling like my brain’s internal gears were grinding, too clogged to function normally.

  “They’re safer on their own,” Tascius said, throwing a pack over his shoulder despite his wounds. “Let them run as far and fast as they want.”

  Smoke crept over my shoulders. My skin prickled as Azazel approached me, his smoky arms wrapping around me.

  I’d just seen him turn Nephilim to smoke and fuse them together, crush one’s heart in its chest, and swallow another’s soul, but I felt nothing but protected as the shadow-version of himself wrapped me in his swirling mist.

  The mark on the back of my neck seemed to pulse in time with my heartbeat.

  “Did they touch you, lover?” he asked, his voice crackling with electric energy again.

  Shadows drifted across my eyes, turning everything in the clearing into shades of gray.

  I leaned back into him, feeling him condense and become solid to catch me like a cradle. “They didn’t hurt me, no.”

  Lucifer was breathing hard, eyeing the scorched pile of Nephilim remains. “To the road. Melisande…” He stalked closer, and I felt Azazel’s low but silent growl rumble through my bones. “When I tell you to fly and save yourself, will you just listen for once?”

  “No.” I extricated myself from Azazel’s soothing embrace and glared up at him, still gripping my daggers in clammy palms. “I won’t leave any of you alone here to deal with this shit yourself. If any of you stay, I stay, too.”

  “You don’t have the protection we have.” His silvery eyes were far away, still distant and gleaming with the internal light of his soul.

  I snorted, trying my hardest to clamp down on my anger. He just wanted to know I was safe, but I hadn’t made it this far to turn my back and run from a fight. “I might not be a big, strong man with inherent capabilities, but I have you three at my back, and that’s more than enough protection for me.”

  He let out a hissing breath of exasperation through his teeth, and I strode to Tascius’s side, summoning the white fire of my healing magic. It sank into him, glimmering under his skin and swirling around the wounds the Nephilim had made.

  Tascius wrapped his arms around me and held me tight. “He has a point, friend,” he said softly in my ear.

  “Not you, too.” When the last of the wounds had sealed themselves, leaving nothing but a fine glaze of blood behind, I rose up to press a kiss to the corner of his mouth, then turned around. “Let’s make this clear once and for all. I refuse to leave while you stay behind and fight. This is what I was made for. I didn’t spend years in Heaven being tortured by Gabriel to run like a coward at the first sign of trouble.”

  Azazel’s shadows were slipping back under his skin, his features taking on his usual austere cast. “Then you’ll practice your shields.”

  I g
lared at him mutinously for a moment.

  “That’s not a request,” he added, his voice sharp, and I finally nodded.

  “I’ll practice, if all of you agree to let me do what I have to do. If you try to keep me back, all that’ll do is make me weak and out of shape when I need it the most.”

  Lucifer’s eyes flashed. “We’ll discuss this further when we get to the City of Sight. For now, I want us out of this forest in the next five minutes.” He gathered the last pack, and his wings quivered, ready for flight. “Tascius, you’re flying. We’re cutting this journey short.”

  As much as I knew my Nephilim loathed depending on others for flight, for once, he didn’t have so much as a grimace about it.

  He glanced at me, and I realized it was because he was in firm agreement with Lucifer: if it meant getting me out of here faster, there was nothing he wouldn’t do. Of them all, I was the one most likely to sustain a mortal wound against a Nephilim.

  One was bad enough. If I was surrounded by three on my own, I knew I wouldn’t live to see the next sunrise. I wished I’d thought to ask Belial to borrow his knife.

  Azazel touched Tascius’s shoulder, and the two of them became shadows. They didn’t rise until I spread my wings and flapped hard, pelting upwards until I burst through the canopy overhead in a spray of leaves and twigs.

  The pale sun glimmered off the bluish-green leaves, making the spread of the forest look like a glimmering, oddly-rippling sea.

  Lucifer exploded through the trees, leaving a sizable gap, and the sun lit him up like a halo. I felt the shadowy presence of Azazel and Tascius at my side, though the stars were faded by the sunlight.

  “That way,” he said, pointing west. “To the City of Sight.”

  He glanced back down through the canopy at the bodies below. “Others might come looking. When they find their brethren dead, we don’t want to be anywhere near this place.”

  I took his hint and caught a gust of air, riding it to the west as my shadow flickered over the treetops. Lucifer joined me only moments later, ducking under me and playfully flicking me with his wingtips.

  “Melisande, I don’t think you’re fragile.” He rose to fly near me, his hair tousled by the wind. I was sure my own was a mess after all the last day had entailed. “But I couldn’t stand to see you needlessly hurt, understand?”

  “I understand.” I glanced at him sideways and smiled, just enough to let him know he was forgiven. “But I also meant what I said. I wasn’t made to hide behind you.”

  Lucifer drifted closer, so the shadows we cast far below merged almost into one. “I know. And that’s one of the reasons you were meant to be mine.”

  21

  Melisande

  We flew for almost a day straight over a sea of unending trees, and when the City of Sight finally came into view, first as a glimmer on the horizon, and resolving into an enormous tree that towered over the rest, I found a burst of energy I hadn’t known I had.

  My muscles ached from flying so far, but we’d cut three days off our journey. I released a deep breath as we passed over a gap in the trees overlooking a broad lake of perfect blue water, with tiny demons in white robes gathered at its edge.

  “Sibyls,” Lucifer said, drawing closer again. “We’re almost there, Melisande.”

  The City itself seemed to be made from glass spires and domes that were fused to the trunk of the enormous tree and spilled out into the surrounding forest. Several platforms of clear glass had been hoisted in the branches, and as we rounded the city, looking for a clear place to land, I saw more of the white-robed sibyls lying on the panes of the platforms, staring at the ground far below.

  “What are they doing?” I looked up as we descended, spiraling towards a broad courtyard of deep blue glass.

  “They don’t have our enthusiasm for open air,” Lucifer said dryly. “They’re wingless. Some of the sibyls use sensations like extreme vertigo to induce visions.”

  We sank into the depths of the City, our feet touching down lightly on the blue glass. The buildings glimmered like kaleidoscopes, and I could swear I saw some of the round glass abodes slowly shifting shape from the corner of my eye.

  The sibyls clearly loved their plants. Every wall was lined with planters, and the center of the glass courtyard had been devoted to an entire garden. White, bell-shaped flowers spilled over shaded planters full of mushrooms, and red poppies bobbed in the wind, gleaming like splashes of blood.

  Azazel saw me looking, and leaned down to my ear with a secretive smile. “They’re all powerful psychoactives. You see the datura there, along with henbane and mandrake, next to the psilocybin mushrooms. The sibyls don’t grow a single plant that can’t be taken to induce hallucinations.”

  “You seem like you know a lot about this place.” I cracked half a smile when I saw the smug look cross his face.

  “I might’ve spent some time here in the course of my studies.”

  “See anything good?”

  Azazel shook his head, looking ruefully at the garden of visions. “You don’t summon ancient eldritch entities with a lucid mind. On the other hand, I’m not sure I’d say I want to see them again at all.”

  I stared at him as a white-robed sibyl dashed up a winding set of stairs towards us. “So… you’re telling me you were high out of your mind when you opened an interdimensional nightmare portal and started bartering your own body parts?”

  Azazel’s perfect composure cracked for a moment, and he grinned. “Yes.”

  Tascius shook his head, but Lucifer threw back his head and laughed. The sibyl skidded to a halt near him, staring up at the belly-laughing fallen prince.

  “You’re all insane,” I muttered through a smirk I couldn’t suppress.

  Azazel easily looped an arm around my waist. “And you love it.”

  The way he just grabbed me now, like he’d just been waiting for the right moment to start lavishing affection all over me, sent flutters through my chest. “I guess I might love it a little bit,” I said, my words muffled against his chest. “Or a lot.”

  “Um.” The sibyl gave us a tentative wave. Lucifer straightened up, looking down at the little white-robed demon.

  I blinked when I saw the sibyl’s face. All six of her eyes were swirling with different colors like jewels.

  When she was sure she had our attention, she beamed up at us. “Visionary Xrita welcomes you to the City of Sight, and will see you at midnight, when the liminal doors of opportunity are at their most efficacious. I am Seer Antava, and I will show you to your accommodations and fetch you when the Visionary is ready.

  Tascius rose to his feet and fell in behind me as I followed the tiny sibyl down the glassy stairs. “Did she already know we were coming?” I asked curiously.

  Seer Antava turned to face me, somehow managing to walk down the tiny spiral staircase backwards without falling off.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, her face utterly serious. “She received a vision of a falling star, a hungry shadow, a child of Heaven, and a warrior victorious. In her Sight, they came to us seeking advice before their journey could continue. We’ve been prepared for your arrival for some time.”

  We passed through a hallway of opalescent glass before crossing another terrace and taking two more staircases. The sunlight slowly disappeared as we wove below the tree line, and the glass steps ended on cool white marble.

  Everything below the trees looked like it’d been transported from the past, tall Ionic columns lining a seeing pool, and we were led to a marble rotunda overgrown with ivy. Seer Antava opened a door and gestured for us to go in.

  “These are one of our guest chambers,” she said, stepping after us into what looked like a fully furnished home. Several beds lined the circular walls, and wide windows looked out on the peaceful forests. I glanced at a pond swirling with brilliantly copper and orange fish. “Everything you will need to be comfortable is here. I will be back at midnight to bring you to the Visionary.”

  With that, she bac
ked out of the room and shut the door, leaving us in silence.

  I opened another set of doors across the room, finding a bathroom with a large shower. Oddly, my mouth went dry at the sight of it, and the memories of my last enjoyable hot shower assailed me.

  Would it be odd to ask them all to join me? I gnawed my lower lip, wondering how to approach being with all three of them now that we were in a confined space together.

  Lucifer and Tascius had been willing to put their differences aside a week ago, all to make me happy. Would too much pushing shove them apart again?

  Either way, I was coated in days’ worth of dust and forest grime, and I just wanted to feel clean again.

  I stepped inside and began unlacing my corset and kicking off my boots. “I’m taking a shower,” I announced.

  Three pairs of eyes bored into me, each one with his own laser-like focus as I stripped off my pants.

  “And you’re all welcome to join. If you want,” I added hastily, almost tripping over my discarded clothes.

  Smooth, Melisande.

  I yanked a chain that sent waterfall cascading overhead and ducked beneath it, flicking my wings under the downpour to clean them. God, but hot water had never felt so good.

  Whichever sibyl had prepared the rooms had thought to leave behind soap and shampoo. I scrubbed my hair, keeping my eyes closed against the downpour, and my ears pricked up at the quiet murmurs coming from the next room.

  It was impossible to make out what they were saying. I rinsed out my shampoo and opened my eyes, and almost jumped back.

  Tascius was almost nose to nose with me. He chuckled as water blasted me in the face, then pulled me out of the downpour again. “Gotcha.”

  “Silent as a cat,” I said, yanking him in. He was already undressed for my viewing pleasure, and I leaned in and wrapped my arms around him, resting my head on his chest regardless of the water beating down on me.

  “Sly like a fox,” someone whispered in my ear, and Lucifer pinched my ass.

  I whirled around, intending to- I don’t know, pinch his cock in retaliation? - when a pair of nearly-invisible hands slid around me from behind and ran up my stomach to cup my breasts.