Elizabeth had to refrain from curling her lip in distaste. The hall teemed with half-dressed women, tables brimming with red meat, mushrooms, and roasted beaks, and pitchers of a red substance that was unlikely to be lamb’s blood. Entire game animals’ carcasses hung grotesquely around the hall like a charcuterie board for demons.
“Well, aren’t you a handsome devil,” slurred what could only be a prostitute to Asmodeus, batting her eyelashes. Asmodeus grinned and put his arm around her. The woman muttered, “Tell me how you got those wings to look so real?”
The music wasn’t ballroom fare—this was hypnotic, meant for close dancing in dark taverns. Women lounged half-naked on sofas or danced, swaying their hips to the beat.
Sin was palpable in the air.
Elizabeth’s ancestors were surely rolling in their graves to see her here.
Focus,she commanded herself.You’re here for Caspian. For revenge. Nothing else matters.
The demon princes wandered, their forms ethereal, and mingled with the women.
Elizabeth wondered where Asmodeus had found women who wanted to dance and flirt with demons.
Elizabeth sat stiffly beside Asmodeus, who now had a girl in his lap, stroking his hair.
Finnigan, who sat on her other side, appeared equally disinterested in the proceedings.
“Not going to mingle?” she asked Finnigan with a smile.
“I have no interest in bedding mortals,” Finnigan said, curling his lip.
Ordinarily, she would have been affronted, but for right now, she was deeply reassured. She resolved to sit next to him for the rest of the night.
The girl in Asmodeus’s lap began stroking his broad chest, and Elizabeth flushed and looked away. But everywhere she looked, debauchery reigned.
Elizabeth watched Abbadon’s hands roam over her dance partner's body. An expression of ecstasy crossed the woman’s features. And when Abbadon bit the woman’s neck, drawing blood that ran in rivulets down her chest, Elizabeth’s face heated with embarrassment.
Not embarrassment,she realized with a start.Recognition.She knew that euphoric expression, that desperate arch of the back. She’d felt it herself.
Abbadon kissed the girl, hands coming to rest on her neck, and came away red. The demon raised her blood-covered hands to the sky, dancing to the hypnotic beat of the music.
Around the hall, the women were dancing as if in a trance, unaware that one of their number was in danger. Abbadon circled her prey and roughly pushed her to the floor. Straddling the woman, the demon moved her hips, rubbing her gore-covered hands over her neck, her breasts. The woman on the floor writhed in bliss, her mind fooled into forgetting the pain she was in, how lightheaded she must be getting.
A woman stripped to the beat of the music, baring her breasts.
She was appalled at the open display of vulgarity and nudity around her. Her mother would have lost her mind to see Elizabeth in such a place, inches from the debauchery of the highest level.
The very air pulsed hot and thick.
The music and perfume made Elizabeth want to join them. To dance, to live, and grind against a handsome demon. But she held firm, her will iron. The demons were throwing their charisma and mind-altering powers around to the point she had to physically clamp her knees together against her body’s desire tosquirm in her seat. If I can barely resist with my mental walls intact, these women never stood a chance.
“Hello, mortal girl.”
Lucifer had chosen the form of a dark-skinned man with a powerful chest and tight braids zigzagging across his scalp. His form was more solid than the others, but still slightly blurred at the edges. His voice was impossibly deep and slow, bringing to mind slow, sensual things. She knew it was him by his red eyes.
“Hello, Lucifer, Demon King,” she said, standing and falling into a curtsey.
He nodded, releasing her from formalities. “Do you have a name?”
“Elizabeth, Your Majesty.”
They stood, watching as Abbadon bared pointed teeth and bit into her partner's thigh. Her partner arched in ecstasy, bringing Abbadon closer to her flesh.Gods.
Elizabeth’s throat constricted. She understood that high too well—the mind-altering ecstasy of a demon’s bite, how it could make anyone lose sight of reality. She did not blame the woman writhing on the floor. She pitied her.
“You don’t have to watch,” Lucifer said.
