Andras barked out a laugh. “What? Fuck, no.” He was shaking his head emphatically. “To be honest, I don’t even know if what Zachariel and I had could even be called love.”
“But weren’t you together for ages?” Drew asked.
“Over two centuries,” Andras confirmed. “But it wasn’t love. It was affection and companionship and super-hot sex.”
Drew made a face at that but didn’t comment.
“Hell can be a brutal place,” Andras continued, not seeming to notice Drew’s reaction to his comment. “I’m a demon, and I’m pretty good at magic, but I’m not one of the upper demons. I have my uses, but I’m not in anyone’s inner circle. Zachariel was also an outsider. I met him almost eight hundred years after he fell, and he’d long lost his wings by then. He was no longer an angel, but he also wasn’t a demon. He did what he had to do to survive, but he didn’t enjoy it. Didn’t relish it the way most demons do.” Andras’s expression turned soft as he got lost in his memories. “It was always safer for those like me to have someone to watch our backs. Safety in numbers, I suppose. As I’m sure you can guess, there’s not many trustworthy souls in this realm. Zach and I teamed up out of necessity atfirst. It turned to friendship not long after, and a few years after that, it turned physical.”
“You both must have been very lonely,” Drew murmured.
Andras nodded. “Oh, yes. It’s so cutthroat here. If you trust the wrong demon, you end up suffering the true death soon enough.” He snorted. “Even dying temporarily isn’t pleasant. Trust me, I’ve endured that more times than I can count.”
“I still don’t really understand how you can die but not really?” Drew admitted. “How is the true death different? Besides the, uh,permanencyof it.”
“Demons, as well as angels and some other species, are notoriously hard to kill,” Andras explained. “It’s not that we’re immortal, but our bodies are just designed differently. Take humans, for example—you have a very short lifespan and your bodies are fragile. If you manage to make it to what is considered old age for you, without succumbing to illness or injury, your own bodies kill you.”
Drew frowned. “They do? How?”
“Your cells multiply out of control, wreaking havoc on your bodies.”
It clicked then. “Oh, you mean cancer?”
Andras nodded. “Yes. After a certain number of years, your body fails you and you die.”
“But you live much longer,” Drew remarked. “Zach’s like, over two thousand years old.”
Andras snorted. “He’s just a baby.”
“Really?” Drew asked in surprise. “How old are you?”
Andrastsked. “Now, now. Didn’t your parents ever teach you that asking someone their age is rude?”
“Parents are dead, remember? My bad manners can be excused.”
“I wouldn’t have thought you’d be the sort to joke about being an orphan,” Andras said.
Shrugging, Drew tried not to feel self-conscious. “It was a long time ago. Some days if you don’t laugh about it, you just end up crying, and I’ve done enough of that.”
“Fair,” Andras conceded. “I honestly couldn’t give you my exact age. After a while, the passing of time almost becomes meaningless, but I’m considered middle-aged here. Five thousand or so, give or take. So yes, we live much longer than humans, and our bodies are much more durable. Aging is simply damage to tissues, and we don’t get that. We also heal much faster than humans.”
“I’ve noticed,” Drew agreed, remembering the times Zach had been injured. The scratches to his face from when they’d found Leila—and how had that only been a fewdaysago when it already felt like a lifetime?—had faded to almost nothing when Drew had left him, yet the scrape to Drew’s knee from the same day was scabbed over and still sore to the touch. He didn’t even want to think about the bruise he was going to have on his hip and ass from the urco’s enthusiastic greeting.
“That means injuries dealt to us, even ones that could be called ‘fatal,’ can heal fast enough that we don’t stay dead from them. The damage needed to be inflicted on us to cause the true death has to be extreme, like being beheaded, stabbed through the heart, or being torn to shreds.”
Drew shuddered.
“Otherwise, we just heal from them, and it looks like we come back to life,” Andras concluded. “It might take a couple of days, but we’re not out for the count.”
“Okay. Thanks for clearing that up,” Drew said, wondering how he’d never bothered to ask Zach about it over the course of the past year. “So, you and Zach teamed up to keep one another safe?” he prompted, steering the conversation back to the original topic.
“Yes,” Andras said. “Don’t get me wrong—I do love Zachariel. But it’s not romantic love. For some reason, we just never developed that.”
“So why are you jealous, then?” Drew asked, confused.
Andras lifted his head and stared at him for a long moment. Drew stared back, getting a little lost in the depth of those pale grey eyes, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t figure out what thoughts were churning behind them. “I’m jealous because you and Zacharieldohave that sort of connection. It is something I have longed for for many, many years. Maybe jealousy is the wrong word? Maybe envy is more appropriate.” He sighed and scrubbed a hand through his pale curls. “Regardless of the correct terminology, the fact remains that I didn’t steal your ring, Drew. I understandwhyyou thought it possible, and I certainlycould have, but I give you my word that I didn’t.”
“Okay,” Drew said. “I believe you.” He sighed in defeat. “I guess my plans are the same as before, then. Keep backtracking our steps until I find it.”
