The soap smelled exactly like her: peppermint and sage, tinged with the natural smell of her from all the times it had been rubbed over her skin. Her scent was everywhere in the house — obviously, she lived here, but being surrounded by it for a prolonged length of time was making my cock strain.
It had hardly been two days since I’d fucked her, but it felt like ages. Leaving her needy and desperate on campus yesterday hadn’t been as easy as I’d thought it would be. I’d worked myself up too much teasing her, and had gotten so restless that I’d gone back to the cemetery and found her panties in the grass.
They were still in my pocket, my personal trophy.
I’d left my marks on her neck, but scrubbing myself down with her soap was going to mark me too. How the hell was I supposed to handle that without craving her? She’d infested my mind. She had me desperate to possess her.
That was what we demons wanted, in the end. To possess, to own. We liked to leave our marks: some temporary, some more permanent. The silver hoop with the green jewel in my left ear had been pierced and threaded through by Zane, and I’d put a needle through his tongue in return. A mark was a bond, a claim. Even demons that hadn’t been lovers in years kept each other’s marks.
But bonds were weaknesses, they were vulnerabilities. As I could already painfully feel, they only led to one getting hurt, particularly when it came to humans. The very nature of human delicacy made them appealing: it wasn’t easy to keep them. They died, they broke, they faded away. Trying to keep a human alive could drive one mad.
I shook my head, growling in the water. Rae refused to listen to my warnings, the petulant brat. She’d thought she’d fight off the Eld with a kitchen knife and baseball bat — it was shocking she hadn’t brought her camera along too, to record the evidence of her encounter. She was going to get herself killed, running into trouble like that.
I’d left the bathroom door open as I showered. I couldn’t see her through the fogged glass of the sliding door, but I could sense her eyes on me. She was seated out there somewhere, in the living room likely, pretending to be disinterested.
If she was going to tempt me, then I was going to tempt her too. Tempt her until she broke again.
The drive to claim her, protect her, keep her, was so deeply rooted in my mind that there was no shaking it. Here I was slaying monsters for a human. Worrying over a human. Risking life and limb for a human.
I still needed to find the grimoire. I didn’t know what the hell Everly planned to use it for, or even where she was, but if she decided she wanted to summon me herself, there would be nothing I could do. I’d go back into servitude once more.
I turned off the water, and stepped out of the shower just in time to catch Rae quickly turn back around, head down as she sat on the couch. I grinned at the back of her head, and the floor creaked under my feet as I approached.
“Should I sit?”
She glanced over at me, then quickly looked away again, a blush rising on her cheeks. There was no point in putting back on my clothes if she wanted to tend to my wounds, and seeing her try desperately not to stare made it even better. She got up abruptly from the couch, motioning to it.
“Yeah, uh…sit. Sit down.” Her attempts to avert her eyes from my cock was cute, and ultimately futile. Funny how she could still blush when she already knew what it felt like inside her. But then the sight of my injuries, oozing blood again from the shower, distracted her. “Jesus, Leon! You need stitches!”
“Not necessary.” I settled on the couch, stretching my arms over the back of it, and its firm softness immediately awakened an odd pang of nostalgia. I did have a home back in Hell — I hadn’t set foot in it in over a century, but it was still there, waiting for me. There were some comforts one could only associate with home, with a place that was familiar and safe.
Fuck, what did safety feel like?
Rae threw up her hands, walking away as she grumbled, “So your magical super demon powers grant you the ability to fight off gangrene? Or create new skin? Your shoulder is infected!” She returned, arms full with a bag of cotton balls, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a damp washcloth. Her eyes fell on the gash running from my thigh down across my knee, and she winced as she set her supplies down.
“God, what the hell would you do without me?” she said it playfully, but there was a note of real concern in her voice. It made me frown, and I shrugged.
“Likely go to Zane’s place and sleep it off,” I said. “A few days of solid sleep can heal almost anything. Although, under Kent’s control, I’d just hope for a few days of sleep when I was injured. He never quite grasped that even demons need time to heal.”
She frowned now as she knelt with the cloth and carefully dabbed at the edges of the wound. She still didn’t believe me about Kent — or didn’t want to. But I liked how she looked on her knees.
“Zane is a demon too, isn’t he?” she said. I nodded. “Are there others? In Abelaum?”
“Could be. I haven’t met them. But everywhere there are humans, there are demons. We’re drawn to the brightness: human lives burn so brightly but so briefly. An explosion, a roaring fire in the night. We demons…are more like smoldering coals. Burning on and on. Dulling and flaring. We’re always seeking more. We’re driven toward that light, to take it, own it.”
“Why?”
I chuckled at her curiosity. “Why do humans breathe air or drink water? It’s necessary. It’s irresistible.”
I don’t think my answer satisfied her, but she quieted for a bit.
“You and Zane,” she said slowly. “You’re lovers?”
I snorted. “Once upon a time. We’re companions who share similar pleasurable tastes.”
She laughed, dabbing a cotton ball soaked in hydrogen peroxide along my leg. “Companions, right, okay. Way to not give an inch on any emotions there.” She shook her head. “Are all demons like you?”
“Bisexual? Yes, but we don’t have a need to label our attractions like you humans do.”
She laughed again. “No, that’s — that’s not what I meant. I meant, like, are all of you so…closed up. You just replace emotions with anger or sarcasm. Are you all like that?”
I glared down at her. “Years of torture and solitude will have you learn that anger is the safest emotion. It’s the strongest. It’s a fire that will keep you going in the dark.”
The playful smile on her face fell, and she went on cleaning my leg in silence. The gentle touch of her fingers over my skin nearly made me flinch — not from pain, for pain I could endure, but simply from being touched. Soft hands weren’t something I typically encountered.
A happy little chirp announced the arrival of Raelynn’s cat, sauntering down sleepy-eyed from the stairs. He came straight for me, hopped up on the couch, and curled his chubby orange-and-white body against my side, purring as he kneaded the cushions with his claws.
Raelynn paused as she watched me stroke the cat’s head, using my claws to give him proper chin scratches.
“He rarely comes down to visit people,” she said. “He’s usually too shy.”
“Cats and demons tend to get along well,” I said. “They’re the only animal that can be found both on Earth, and in Hell.”
“Figures.” She laughed, but then her face grew somber. “Thank you for saving him. Really. He means a lot to me.”
“You would have gone after him yourself if I hadn’t. And then we would have had a dead cat and a dead woman. I was trying to minimize damage.”
Her eyes were moving over my face; searching, wondering. It was as if she could tell I was lying; the last thing I’d ever tried to do in my existence was minimize damage. I was a killer. A destroyer. Saving things wasn’t a path I usually chose.
She rose up from her knees. “Okay, time to take a look at that shoulder.”
She leaned over me, pushed up her glasses, and her nose wrinkled as she examined the gash. It wasn’t pretty: ragged torn flesh and still bleeding. She was right about it being infected, but putting so much thought and care into one’s wounds was a human thing. Forget about it and sleep it off was my usual plan. If an injury posed a greater risk to me, I’d know, likely because I’d be in pieces.
She picked up another cotton ball and doused it. “Are you, uh…going to put on pants?”
I grinned, settling in a little more comfortably. “No.”
She rolled her eyes, but a blush rose on her cheeks. The way the blood filled in the spaces between her freckles was adorable. It made me want to hold her face in my hands and feel the heat beneath my fingers.
She shooed the cat aside and, for the sake of easy access, straddled my lap. Her crotch pressed against my cock, and her eyes flickered up to mine as it twitched at her closeness, the cotton ball paused in mid-air.
I widened my eyes teasingly. “Is that comfortable?”
She bit her lip in silence, bending forward to clean the wound, moving slowly around the tender flesh. I kept the grin on my face, her thighs twitching slightly against mine, the scent of arousal flooding her. Her eyes were focused on her work but her mind was elsewhere.
“You said Hell is like Earth,” she said, staring at the wound, as if she could force her arousal away if she focused on gore. “Is it really?”
“It’s bigger,” I said. “So big that only the oldest of demons have ever seen the ends of it. There’s wide empty plains, forests so deep and filled with monsters that only our strongest dare to go in.” I stared at the ceiling as I recalled it. I’d been on Earth for over a hundred years. I wasn’t all that old, for a demon. Nearly a quarter of my life had been spent here in captivity. “There are oceans as clear as glass and as black as ink. Trees bigger than Earth’s tallest mountains. The cities…they’re art. Metal, glass, and stone, carvings of marble and wood.”
Her eyes had grown wide. She was seated on me fully now, too enamored with my words to try to hover over my lap. It had been a long time since I’d spoken of home. Zane had been polite enough not to bring it up, and he preferred to spend most of his time on Earth anyway since he found humans so entertaining.
But I ached for Hell.
“What do you do there?” she said. “Do demons…have jobs?”
“Most do. It keeps us occupied to do something fulfilling. But we come and go as we please. Resources aren’t limited. Money and economies are nonexistent. Precious metals are as common there as dirt. We do whatever pleases us.”
“Sounds more like Heaven than Hell.”
“Heaven is overrated. Too many rules.”
She looked down when she laughed that time. Something about the shy aversion of her eyes and the sound of her laugh was making me…feel…something. But my brain kept confusing whatever overwhelming feeling this was with a desire to squish her, as if I could find an outlet for this annoying emotion by just taking her face in my hands and squeezing.
I managed to resist.
“What did you do there?” Her question snapped me out of my fantasies of affectionately crushing her. “For fun?”
She wasn’t cleaning my wounds anymore. She was listening with rapt attention, waiting eagerly for what I would say. “There’s plenty to do. There’s —”
“No, no, what did you like to do?”
I hesitated. Talking about Hell was strange; talking about myself was even stranger.
“I…I liked to…” Fuck, it had been so long. “I liked to explore. To wander. I wanted to see the edge of Hell, see all the places even others of my kind wouldn’t go to.”
Wandering into the unknown, with hardly any plan and no expectations, was the wildest I’d ever felt. To lay in a dark woodland where no demon had set foot for millennia, or find some ruin of a city the old Gods built, was my freedom.
“You miss it,” she said softly.
“Every day.”
Our eyes locked. There was something about those wide brown eyes that felt as warm as her hand, as bright as the sun, as deep as the forest. Eyes that were searching my face for answers, for insight, as if she could crawl inside my head and nest there like a little bird.
“That damned curiosity of yours,” I said softly. “I was like that once. I think I envy you, to still look at the world with such fascination.”
“You can still,” she said, frowning. “Why not?”
“If you live in the dark long enough, you’ll forget what the light feels like.”
She looked like she wanted to argue, and she tossed the cotton ball aside, back on the coffee table. When she turned back, she laid her hand against my chest again.
“It will heal better now,” she said. “Just…keep an eye on it.”
“I have more important things to keep an eye on. It’ll be fine.”
“You can drop the tough guy act — you have a bloody open wound on your chest that’s likely infected,” she pursed her lips irritably. “I don’t know if demons can die, but it would probably be better if you didn’t.”
“It’ll take more than a few beasts to kill me.” I cracked my neck, and winced when the movement sent sharp pain from the wound down through my arm. “We can die, sure, but I’d have to be ripped to pieces — unable to heal fast enough to keep up with blood loss and shock. It would heal faster with rest but…I have to find the grimoire.”
“You can sleep here,” she said. “The couch is pretty comfortable.”
I tweaked an eyebrow at her. “Trying to tempt me to stay? You’ll have to offer more than a couch.”
She glared. Her hair had fallen forward, the soft black strands partially obscuring her face. I tucked it back behind her ear, my fingers brushing over the multiple studs and rings pierced through her cartilage. The sight of them made my cock twitch.
“Indulge me, doll,” I said. “Convince me to stay. Tell me your deepest, darkest desire.”
