“I’ll wait for you in the car.” I promptly grabbed my keys and wallet and left the room.
When you finally emerged, you resembled a young movie star strutting along the balcony toward the stairs with your carefully styled silver hair, dark sunglasses, and unconventional choice in clothing. The top you’d chosen was somehow more revealing than if you were shirtless. Your jeans had tears all over them.
This was a special kind of torture all its own.
Your easy gait as you galloped down the stairs reminded me of what it was like to be so young and carefree, when the world seemed one adventure after another with so many possible fates laid out before you. I couldn’t help but recall how you’d embodied this same spirited potential in your last life, before I took it from you so abruptly.
Do not dwell,I chided myself.
In your arms, not surprisingly, was your cat. I was about to warn you against bringing her when you whispered something in the animal’s ear and set her down in a patch of sparsely vegetated sand. It looked like we’d all be hunting that day.
“I hope you didn’t pay too much for that outfit,” I teased when you climbed into the car. “I believe they were trying to cut corners on the material.”
“Don’t hate, Henri. I finally have abs.” You flexed your muscles and slid one hand along your ribbed mid-section. My eyes zeroed in on the sparse trail of hair above your groin, one that led to forbidden pleasures. I glanced up to see your sly smile. I’d been caught, again.
“Hungry?” I asked, not trusting myself to say anything more.
“Starving,” you said with a wink. “The blood craving isn’t so bad today. Is it your angel blood?”
“It has been said that Nephilim blood can sustain a bloodborn longer than human blood, though we generally don’t make a habit of it.”
“Yeah, sorry about last night. I won’t punk out again. I just had a moment.”
Perhaps I’d given you the impression it was some great sacrifice to have you feed from me. Probably for the best, since I didn’t care to admit precisely how arousing I’d found the experience. That desperate look in your eyes as you stared up at me and the abandon with which you’d fed. To be able to offer you my lifeblood as sustenance somehow made me feel closer to absolution. And the pleasure I could give you in return…
“Breakfast it is,” I announced louder than necessary.
While we dined, I laid out our mission as best I could. The Belial demon we were hunting was connected to your past life, which made explaining things a bit more difficult. Seneser was the reaper who’d agreed to steal souls for Lena. This former angel had been eluding capture ever since committing his treachery nearly two decades ago. I’d chased him all over the Americas. Every time I’d closed in, he’d abandon his host body in order to escape me. But he was getting careless. My Las Vegas safehouse had telephoned Miami to say one of their agents had encountered a being with a demonic energy resembling Seneser’s, and even more helpful, they’d provided a close-up photograph of his human host, taken from surveillance footage. I was planning to set up a sting operation in order to trap him. Let him come to me for once.
“A Belial demon,” you said, mulling over the terminology. “Those are demons who’ve been exiled since the Fall?”
“Or fled.”
“And fate demons used to be humans?” you asked.
“Yes, Lena keeps some in our ancestral lands.”
“She won’t anymore,” you assured me with an earnest look. “She told me she’d free them once she was released from prison.”
It took great effort for me to swallow my rebuttal.
“I wonder if Spooky is a familiar,” you mused.
“It’s possible.” It would explain the animal’s eerie devotion to you.
“My dad…” you began. “He’s like a Belial demon, isn’t he?”
“Your dad is a Malakhim angel inhabiting a human body.”
“Isn’t that kind of the same thing?”
“Demons tend to possess humans toward their own selfish ends, while your father provides a very necessary service to the gods, that of a messenger and medium. His gift allows for communication between the mortal and divine.”
“But he basically had to steal a human’s life in order to do it?”
I studied you, trying to gauge how you might react to the answer to your very pointed question.
“Yes.”
