by Cate Corvin
Besides, his name was Exile. Whatever he’d done to get here couldn’t have been anything good.
His back rose under my hand as he took a deep breath, and a second later I was slammed into the softness of the bed, a mountain of weight pushing down on me.
I clawed at his shoulders and arms, fighting for breath past the arm pushed against my throat.
Midnight blue eyes, wide with animal rage, focused on my face. A black veil washed over them, fading and reappearing and fading again until it almost completely vanished.
I gasped when the pressure left my neck, taking deep, gulping breaths. Whatever he was, he was fast as fuck. I hadn’t felt a single muscle move under my palm before he’d had me pinned.
“You,” he breathed.
My heart slammed against my ribs. He was still arched over me, one hand lightly gripping my throat, the other planted next to my head. My wings were crushed beneath me, the worst possible place for them to be.
And he didn’t sound happy to see me at all. What a disappointment.
“Exile. I’m just here to help you.” I kept my voice low and spread my fingers to show I had no weapon. They were still stained with his blood. “You were hurt.”
His eyes flicked to my blood-stained hands and back to my face.
“I healed you,” I whispered. Maybe the Overseers had the right of it, staying away from Exile after a fight. He didn’t entirely look like he was on the same plane of reality as me.
“You touched me.” His voice was a low growl, as deep as Belial’s.
“Yes. I touched you.” Was touching a crime now? Nobody in Hell had this shit straight. “I had to, or you would’ve bled out.”
He took another breath, his stomach clenching against the pain of it, and bit back the start of a groan. His insides probably felt worse than his outside.
But despite his pain, the movement of those muscles was utterly mesmerizing. A coil of that frightening but enthralling heat that Belial had awakened in me was already coming to life, and it was all I could do to stop myself from running my hands up his arms and over his chest.
I wasn’t that far gone.
“You can let me up, Exile. I’m not going to hurt you. I just want to make sure I clean all your wounds, okay?” I kept my tone calm and soothing, coaxing a wild animal into backing down. “I’m not done yet.”
His braid fell over his shoulder, tickling my cheek. Under the tang of blood and sweat, he smelled peppery and clean.
“Don’t call me by that name.” Exile’s lips drew back over his teeth, but the madness was leaving his eyes.
“Exile?” A growl rumbled out of him. “What should I…”
His fingers tightened around my throat for a fraction of a second before he released me, resting his palm there gently. “Tascius.”
“Tascius.” I swallowed, wondering if he felt my frantic heartbeat. “I’m Melisande.”
I wasn’t unaware that for anyone else, I would’ve kicked their asses straight into the ceiling by now. Anybody who threatened my life was going down, or I’d die trying.
But I had a deep-seated desire for Tascius to recognize me as a friend. Like my inexorable pull towards him, I couldn’t explain why I wanted him to like me at all.
Especially with that darkness flickering in his eyes. Whatever it was, it hadn’t completely disappeared, but at least he was no longer in danger of ripping my head off.
His gaze drifted to my wings that pillowed my head and shoulders, and the darkness flickered again. “Why are you here, angel?”
Could nobody call me by my name?
Still, I felt honesty was the best policy with him. Especially since he still had me pinned to his bed, which was both an exhilarating and terrifying experience.
“I’m in Hell because my mentor betrayed me. I’m here with you because I wanted to help you.”
“Nobody sent you? You’re not from Acheron?” His beautiful face was still frozen in a mad snarl.
“I have no idea what Acheron is,” I promised. Maybe brutal honesty would work where comfort didn’t. “Please, can you just let me wash you off? You’re covered in blood and it’s getting on me. Otherwise I’ll have to fetch an Overseer.”
The snarl slowly faded, and when he blinked, the darkness in his eyes was gone again. He groaned and rolled off me, leaving me feeling strangely deprived.
Tascius felt his chest and the salve covering his healing wounds. The torn skin was now whole and pink. “Why would you do this?”
I slid off the bed, giving my wings a short flap to get all my feathers back in place. A few bits of fluffy black down littered his sheets now, alongside the blood.
“What’s a little blood between friends? You needed help, and I need…” I paused, wondering if I was just going to scare him off. “I do need a friend.”
To my surprise, he barked out a short laugh. “A friend? Is that what you think I am?”
“I was hoping for that, yes,” I said stiffly, crossing my arms over my chest and feeling miffed.
As of now, I was leaning towards him being the spawn of a higher demon. It was impossible to tell what kind of wings had been sliced from his back, but with an attitude like that, I could picture bat-like wings to match.
Tascius examined me for a long moment, taking in every detail, then sat up. For a man who’d been passed out and torn apart only minutes ago, he still moved astonishingly fast. At least his shoulders had relaxed, and he seemed to accept my words as truth.
“Nobody in the Seventh Circle is your friend, Melisande.” He took another halted breath, and I had to fight to not watch his chest rise and fall. “If you want to make it past the next week, get those idealized notions out of your head. They’ll only get you killed faster.”
“Aren’t you just a bright fucking ray of sunshine?” I muttered, but he had a point. Everyone except Belial wanted to kill me, and I still wasn’t entirely sure of Belial himself on that point.
I skipped back a step as Tascius rose from the bed, towering over me. I raised an arm, expecting him to attack, but his hands just dropped to the waist of his pants, which were already slung too low for my overactive imagination.
“What are you doing?”
A faint but pretty smile flashed across his lips at the sudden panic in my voice. “I’m getting this blood washed off. Since you were so insistent on staying around for this part.”
There was a very loud voice in the back of my head cheering for that idea.
“Well, I kind of thought…”
“That you’d throw me in the bath with my pants on?” Tascius slid them down and I instinctively shut my eyes.
And opened them just a crack. It wasn’t a sin that I had to see in order to escape, right?
Seeing Tascius fully nude was like getting punched in the gut, scars, blood, and all. His legs were just as muscular and dense as the rest of him, and the cock hanging between his thighs was… well, proportional to everything else, the skin silky and darker at the head.
“Oh, hell.” I just mouthed the words, watching him untie his silver-white braid.
“Are you coming?”
“You seem to have it all under control. I trust you to get it done right.” I couldn’t close my eyes again. I couldn’t even pretend to just have them open a crack. They were threatening to fall right out of my skull.
“Are you sure?” Tascius turned and shook out his hair, giving me a good view of a perfect ass before opening a door I hadn’t seen. At least I knew now that we had private bathrooms. “After all, and I quote, ‘what’s a little blood between friends?’”
“Oh, so we are friends now.”
He jerked his head at the open door. “Come on. Friend.”
Oh my, did the rest of me ever want to follow.
That’s just Belial talking, Melisande. Don’t let him get to you. You can resist any and all temptation.
I couldn’t betray the strictures of my choir, even if they no longer wanted me. Even if Heaven had forsaken me.
Or I’d be proving Belial right.
“I- maybe next time. Good luck with your bath, friend.” I groped for the doorknob behind me and turned it, grateful to find it unlocked.
“Oh, don’t abandon me now, friend. Not in my time of need.” Tascius’s voice took on a silky, playful tone that seemed to stroke my overheated skin.
He seemed completely uninjured now. If I hadn’t just seen him passed out with my own eyes, I wouldn’t have believed how badly his last fight had gone.
And maybe he was more like Belial and his ilk than I thought.
“Sorry, but I gotta go. Things to do, people to kill.”
“Suit yourself. I’ll be here, awaiting a friendly helping hand, if you change your mind.”
His laughter followed me out into the common room as I made my escape and slammed the door behind me.
Lady Savage was still lolling on the couch with her boneless grace, soaking up the heat of the fire. She stared at my red face and smirked. “Oh, you poor, innocent bastard. You won’t last another three days.”
8
Melisande
I did last another three days, just to prove Lady Savage wrong.
By the time I’d escaped Tascius’ quarters, the Overseers had drilled a new plaque to an unobtrusive door near the back of the common room that displayed my name in a swirling script.
My quarters were far more opulent than I’d expected from someone like Belial. I had a massive bed piled with silky sheets, ebony furniture, and a bathroom of my own. I spent most of the first day scrubbing away the remains of Tascius’s blood and soaking in the freshly-refilled bath.
When nobody came for me the next day, misgiving pricked at me.
Belial hadn’t moved me up here to the old-timer’s chambers for no reason, and now there was probably going to be bad blood if I was ever sent back down to the new fighters’ holding pen.
By the second day I wondered if he’d deliberately done this to drive me to insanity. I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of Tascius, and I only emerged to eat before disappearing and locking myself in my room again.
On the third day, I woke up vindicated that I’d outlasted Lady Savage’s bet, but sure that cabin fever would claim me soon.
I was convinced Belial was doing this on purpose. The sooner he called me into the arena, the sooner I could win my remaining six rounds and escape. What if he made me wait years between fights? It was exactly the sort of bullshit an archdemon would pull.
Even if I was trapped here for now, remaining locked in the bedroom was going to wear away whatever was left of my sanity and leave me a husk of my former self. I pulled on the same baggy clothes I’d been wearing for three days and slipped out into the common room at noon.
The fireplace was still crackling with blue flames, but nobody else was there. I felt a little bitter at the thought that they might be fighting right now, taking one more step towards that elusive freedom.
Either way, I was free to explore without interference.
I checked the plaques on each door, coming across other names: Specter, Blood Fang, Chain Sister. Tascius’s room was the furthest from mine.
I paused outside his door, but there were no sounds emanating from inside. An Overseer was stationed in the stairwell, and when I asked for what I was looking for, he obliged much more happily than the ones in the pens downstairs.
The big names had their own training area, a multitude of rooms a single floor down. I took in the sheer number of weapons lining the walls with an absurd amount of joy, but today was for something that had been bothering me.
In the back of the training area was a set of smaller rooms that were completely empty. I chose one and shut the door behind me before kneeling on the smooth stone underfoot.
If I wanted to win, I needed to figure out what was wrong with my magic. Even if I managed to win six rounds, there was no way I was getting through Yraceli without it.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, preparing myself to touch the magic lying dormant inside me.
It wasn’t enough preparation.
The choking taste of ash filled my mouth again, my nerves quivering with the prickly fire of darkness, and I came to on all fours, coughing and spluttering.
The next attempt yielded the exact same result, and I almost gagged on the taste of it.
Something gripped the back of my neck and yanked me upright.
I was still blinded by my corrupted magic when rough hands shoved me against a stone wall. Lady Savage giggled in my ear, a grating noise that raised goosebumps all over.
“Not so high and mighty without Belial around, are you?” she asked.
She gripped a handful of my hair, forcing my cheek against the cold obsidian wall. The point of a dagger was pressed against my side. A hot trickle of blood ran down my hip and soaked the fabric of my pants.
I braced my hands on the wall to push off, but another pair of hands gripped my left wing, spreading it wide open.
The cool touch of a blade pressed into the tender spot of flesh where my wings protruded from my back.
“Move,” Blind Luck whispered in my other ear. “Scream. You’ll be flying sideways for the rest of your life.”
I cursed my lack of magic. “Why are you doing this?”
It was impossible to sound calm or rational when you had a blade threatening your wings. My voice shook, betraying my fear.
“Everybody else had to work for the privilege of living up top,” Lady Savage said. She tilted her head so I could see her with my peripheral vision, even with my face jammed against the wall. “I did my five rounds. Luck did his. As did every other person living like a king. You’re the only one who walked in and was handed luxury on a silver platter.”
“I didn’t ask for Belial to take me.” With half my face mushed against the wall, the words came out in a garbled rasp.
“No, and that’s the problem.” Lady Savage removed the dagger from my side and held it up point-first, so we could both watch my blood roll down the blade. “You didn’t even want it, but you got it. The rest of us wanted it more than anything, but did that matter? No.”
“Sounds like a you problem, not a me problem,” I gasped, and Blind Luck pressed more of his weight into my back, tugging on my wing so hard the pain shot through my spine.
“I’m just curious what it is about you that makes you so special.” She sucked her teeth, making a nails-on-chalkboard noise as she studied me. “Is it your heritage? Does Belial have a wing fetish? It can’t be pussy, because a prissy little fuck like you would never put out anyway.”
I couldn’t help myself and laughed. It became a hiss of pain when Blind Luck tugged a little harder. “Jealous yours wasn’t good enough to let you skip in line?”
“We pull our weight,” Blind Luck said quietly. Out of the two of them, he scared me more; the experimental way he tugged and pulled at my wing made me think he was very, very curious about how easy it would be to separate it from myself. “That’s always been one of the tenets of the Seventh Circle. You earn your way up.”
“And you didn’t earn shit,” Lady Savage added.
“So we’ll be taking a little souvenir.” I felt the tip of Blind Luck’s blade tracing my feathers and finding its way back to the seam between feather and skin.
Lady Savage stuck her tongue in a childish gesture, and then her head hit the wall and she bit down on it hard.
Blind Luck’s grip on my wing slackened and his dagger clattered to the ground. An unearthly roar filled the small room, ringing in my ears as my enemy’s bulk was ripped away from me.
I spun around, my quivering wings folding in tight against my body.
Tascius gripped them both by their collars, his eyes the solid black of pitch as he smashed them into the opposite wall with the force of a freight train several times, and tossed them out of the room in a bloody heap.
Total silence followed in the wake of their destruction, followed by a few pained groans from the fighters who’d tri
ed to cut me. Tascius remained in place, his back to me, shoulders rising and falling with his quick breaths.
“Tascius?” I squeaked his name and had to repeat it.
He didn’t turn around. The scars on his back were obscured by the fall of silvery hair, and his fists were clenched at his sides so hard the veins were standing out on his hands and arms.
I picked up the dagger Blind Luck had dropped, unwilling to think they were completely out for the count. They were too tough to be broken by that alone.
Gripping the dagger, I forced myself to inch forward and raised my hand. It lingered in the air, and I touched Tascius’ shoulder. “Friend?”
He snarled, jerking his head towards me.
The darkness had completely taken over his eyes with no sign of the sorrowful man beneath it. Whatever he was, my only friend was a different person right now.
I stroked his shoulder, letting my fingers trace the delineated edges of his muscles. “It’s just me, friend. You can come back now.”
The sound of Lady Savage and Blind Luck licking their wounds and beating a hasty retreat from the training room faded away. Tascius’ head snapped back towards the sound, the incessant purr in his chest never stopping.
And now I was alone with him, and I had no idea what this black-eyed beast wanted. If he’d even helped me because he was a friend, or if the creature inside him wanted something else.
I lifted my hand from his shoulder, took a silent step back, but he jerked towards me again, spearing me with that impossibly opaque gaze.
He plucked the dagger out of my hand, bent it half with his bare hands, and tossed it in a corner.
I backed up a few more steps as he advanced on me, but it was impossible to make it around the wall of his body without being caught.
He pinned me against the wall, and my mind was filled with thoughts of Belial in this exact same position as not-Tascius buried his face in my neck, taking a deep breath.
His lips grazed my skin, sending a chill through me. My nipples hardened to tight points, sensitive against the scrape of my shirt as Tascius wrapped his arms around me.