Gabe chuckled and turned to face me. My stomach sank as I took in the cold, sinister smile on his face.
“What—?”
The strange bat disappeared in a wisp of smoke, and suddenly, he was holding a damp white cloth.
He took a step toward me, and instinct told me to run, but I was still fighting the cold fingers of shock that had wrapped around my limbs.
I was too slow, and he was too fast.
Before I could make it two steps, he jerked me into his chest and wrapped impossibly strong arms around me.
My nose flooded with a sweet, sickly scent as he pressed the cloth firmly against my face.
I whined and bucked against him, trying to break free, but whatever was on that cloth forced my eyes to roll back into my head, and my body slowly began to go limp.
My kitty knuckles slipped off my fingers and clattered to the ground.
“Shh, just relax, gorgeous. It’s over now,” Gabriel hummed into my ear as I sank against him.
“You’re going to make my hellcat a very happy boy,” he purred, and those ominous words were the last thing I heard before my vision went dark.
Alexa Play: If You Really Knew - acoustic by Joel Ansett
This human booze wasn’t strong enough. I’d been drinking for days, and I still wasn’t drunk—which was a fucking tragedy.
After embarrassing the shit out of myself in front of Gabe, I’d decided I needed to find somewhere to cool off.
Risking Lilith’s wrath, I busied myself with finding another house to commandeer. After befriending a little old witch I’d met in a tarot shop, I convinced her to invite me back to her house for some tea and cookies. Once I was past her protection wards, I killed her and made myself at home. I would have felt bad, but honestly, she was so ancient she should have been grateful that I relieved her of life… and her booze.
Some of those bottles were so dusty I convinced myself I was doing her a favor, taking it off her hands.
Sitting alone on the dead witch’s ugly sofa, I held up my glass of stolen scotch and tilted it in the direction of her corpse.
“Bottoms up, sweetheart.” I smirked just as all the shadows in the room sprang to life.
Aw fuck.
Here we go.
Ramel and Lilith manifested in the old witch’s cluttered living room, and I scowled at them, annoyed that they’d interrupted my private self-loathing session.
Ram raised a sharp eyebrow at me, his black shirt rolled up to his elbows, exposing his tattoos. The silver in his ear glinted in the dim light that filtered in from the ancient, stained-glass light fixtures the dead witch had installed in her living room, and his fuckboy haircut was looking sexy as ever.
It was a damn tragedy that the man was straight, let me tell you.
Lilith, on the other hand, was looking less annoyed than my bestie. She seemed more concerned. Her butterscotch hair fell in soft waves down her back, her fist perched on her curvy hips, which were popped to the side under an oversized Sleep Token T-shirt.
Even after she’d been reborn, she hadn’t lost the love she had developed as a human woman for smut metal, and I found it endlessly amusing that the Queen of Hell was a fan of mortal metal bands.
“What the fuck are you doing, Shem?” Lilith asked, her gaze falling to the dead witch’s corpse at my feet.
“This is the second soul you’ve sent to hell prematurely since you’ve been out here.”
I rolled my eyes and swirled the weak-ass glass of scotch in my hand.
“To be fair, Gabe killed the first one.”
“Hazai,” Ramel rumbled, giving me an irritated look. “You’re being a cunt. You know Lilith hates it when souls fester.” He gestured to the dead body with a ring-laden hand. “This one wasn’t due for another decade. We’re going to need to put her on ice or something to preserve her residual memories.”
