The demons watched him.
He dug his nails deeper into his flesh, bent his head lower so that the cowl of his robe hid his features and squeezed his eyes shut. No one had saved him all those years ago, but the fate that awaited a child amongactualdemons would be much worse. It was not to be born.
Opening his eyes, he lifted his head and spoke to the consort. She could not welcome such a fate for the child; she just could not.
“You can’t allow your daughter to come here, she would not be safe. Allow me to take her away, I’ll watch over her, ensure that she lives ablessedlife.”
A menacing oppressive weight pressed him from all sides of the room.
It was as if the demons dwelling inside of the bodies of the fallen had taken control.
A large serrated knife appeared in the right hand of the gray-eyed fallen, twirling through his fingers at an ungodly speed. The black-haired one blended into the shadows, the heavy veil of his hair rippling around him but there was no breeze; there was barely enough air to breathe.
Cornelius would not look at the female fallen; there was ever only hate and the promise of pain in her gaze. He looked at Lynx instead, but was not prepared to see his friend’s smile no longer kind but predatory, as if blood and flesh hanging within the spaces could be commonplace.
Humanity remained only in the eyes of Terry and Sabrina.
Mama sat crossed-legged on top of the bar near the back of the room, observing him with detachment. He had begun to count on her support, her tolerance; he’d made the mistake of believing himself high in her esteem, forgetting that first and foremost she was the mother of demons. And he’d just taken a stand in opposition to her children. The older woman pulled the strings…in this case, the invisible umbilical cords that tethered nearly everyone on this godforsaken mountain to her. It was an understanding that came too late. He’d been a fool.
“Terry, I know you’re not a man of God, but I would like to confess my sins to you,” Cornelius said.
Terry walked toward him and stopped a few feet to Cornelius’s right.
“What would you like to confess?”
Cornelius thought of the child, gathered his courage.
“Evil is all around you here. You can’t see it but please believe me, you and the consort cannot allow the child to be brought here. If the child is truly the patron’s granddaughter as I believe she is, there is a better place for her. I know of a way to get you, the consort, and the child there, but you must trust me.”
“Zeus, no!” the consort cried out, but the gray-eyed demon’s blade had been released. Terry shoved Cornelius to the ground and he fell with bone-grinding impact as the metal embedded in the door.
Growling filled the space and Cornelius scuttled backward, believing hell hounds had been released upon earth.
The consort stepped in front of the silver-eyed demon and the sound ceased.
Terry walked over and offered Cornelius his hand, lifted him from the floor and steered him toward a stool at the bar before hopping over it and placing a glass of amber-filled liquid in front of Cornelius.
“To steady your nerves, son,” Terry said. “So, what do you need to confess, Cornelius?”
Two more blades materialized in the gray-eyed demon’s hands.
“He wants to confess,” the mother of demons said to the gray-eyed one. “Let him speak.”
With shaky hands, Cornelius reached for the glass of alcohol, praying that his first drink wouldn’t be his last.
Big Country was sprawled across the living-room sofa with his head in Stormy’s lap, feigning sleep as she stroked his hair and talked to his sister. The two women had to be on their second bottle of red wine by now and didn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Garret had gone to his bedroom over twenty minutes ago so the womencould have some privacy. Big Country didn’t give a damn about their privacy, he was going to listen to every word they said.
He was practically obligated—covert intelligence was literally a part of his job description. Plus, when women got into girl-talk mode, they didn’t care about things like boundaries or distinguishing fact from fiction. Nah, he was staying exactly where he was, and if Merlee started sharing stories of his past—like the time his grands took turns chasing after him and whooping him from one side of the farm to the other when he’d glued Merlee’s lips together as she slept one night—he’d be right where he needed to be to disrupt any conversation that strayed into uncomfortable territory, especially when it came to his work with the Brood and the other ways he made his money.
“You go your whole life with this curiosity, this wondering,” Merlee said, guiding Big Country’s attention back to the actual conversation. “I’ve had a great life with all the love I could ever need, yet I never stopped wondering what they would be like, couldn’t understand without better reason thanthey are no good, why our grands wouldn’t allow me and Lucas to have any contact with them.”
There was an extended pause. “I’m about to be a married woman, Stormy, soon to start my own family. I’d gone a lifetime without knowing my parents and my three other brothers, one of which is already dead. I couldn’t imagine going a lifetime without ever seeing the children me and Garret bring into this world; my heart would break every second of the day, that’s what I imagined it was like for them, that their hearts were breaking every second of the day without us. When PaPere called me I thought, with my grands having passed, this would be the perfect time to bring what family we have left together. To right all the wrongs, you know.” She scoffed. “A child should always make space for forgiveness, I thought, so I told them to come.”
Big Country manipulated his breathing, keeping it even as he directed his heart to slow down. He didn’t want Stormy to discover his deception and end her conversation with Merlee, he never had an inkling his sister had been so affected by the absence of the rest of their family. Maybe he’d been selfish, should have known, but what could he have done different? Told her the full truth? Nah.
“I betrayed them,” Merlee said. Big Country could hear she was crying but he wouldn’t get up to comfort her. “I ignored all those years of pain and anger in my grands’ eyes when my parents were ever mentioned. I disregarded what I saw in Lucas’s eyes when our parents were brought up, didn’t understand how it connected to the destruction that followed. I betrayed him for a fantasy, Stormy. I invited them in and for a second, I believed I’d done the right thing, righted the wrong my grands and Lucas had perpetrated by keeping them away. I didn’t know…I still don’t know all of it, but trust me when I say there is this…I won’t say evil, but the feeling when I was around them, it’s like this insidiousfoulnessin them lying just beneath the surface. Hell, maybe itisevil. I don’t know if I can forgive myself for putting my brother right in its path. Again.”
