bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (11 page)

After Prevara left, I spent the rest of the day and well into the night poring over the monstrous books she’d dumped on me. The text was written in ancient human English and was often difficult to follow, but, by the time I wandered wearily off to bed with stinging eyes, I felt like I had at least filled in a few of the gaps in my knowledge of devildom. And, more importantly, I felt a little more prepared to go up against the evil courts. As I closed my eyes, I couldn’t help thinking that a little knowledge can be a powerful ally when one is startlingly short of allies.

~SC~

The following day I met with my next “teacher”, a tiny explosively wired angel with matronly curls all over her small head and the air of someone who put out fires for a living, I learned more than I cared to know about the royals. I won’t bore you with all of the details of that lesson now, but suffice it to say that they can get into your head, dabble with your soul, steal your last idea from your brain and get you to thank them for it when they’re done. Aside from their “spectral” abilities, I learned that they can travel from place to place at the speed of light and can appear in many forms, including animal. My little teacher was very clear on the fact that devil royalty are the cruelest form of evil that exists. And they are most dangerous to those who see them as they truly are. This last statement left me a little perplexed, but my teacher wouldn’t explain it any further. She just kept saying that I would understand all with time. Gee thanks.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Devil Pays a Visit

The Devil knocked upon her door, a leer upon his face,

She fought with every pow’r she had and earned herself some space.

It was one o’clock in the morning and she thought she was having that dream again. Her eyes were closed and she thought she was asleep. But maybe she wasn’t quite asleep. His hands were hot. Not warm, but hot, like he had a fever of one hundred and four degrees and had been sitting before a fire covered in blankets. The feverish hands moved across and down her body possessively, causing her to moan despite herself. As she felt his weight ease down on her, her eyes shot open and she gasped. She found herself looking into the deepest, blackest eyes she’d ever seen.

“Hello my sweet. I’ve come for another taste.” She felt the silk of his midnight hair fall against her neck as he lowered his lips to hers. Heat, like flames licked at her tender flesh, searing her where the tempting arc of his lips touched. She flinched at the intensity of her feelings and rose up under him in fear. Of course he mistook her movement for lust and moaned as he pushed his body more heavily against hers.

She began to panic in earnest, pushing futilely against him. He only laughed as he held her pinned and squirming, his long, sharply pointed white teeth gleaming in the half dark as they moved ever nearer to her exposed throat.

I couldn’t take it anymore. I slammed the button on the hologram control and threw my pillow at the spot where the vampire holo-movie had hovered just seconds before. I couldn’t get away from him anywhere, not even in the privacy of my living space in the wee hours of the morning. Every time my traitorous mind found an opening, it brought him to me in my imagination. Now I was even watching holographic films about devils and vampires and their helpless female victims.

My life was shit.

I got up and started to pace back and forth in my bedroom. I paced from one end of the small space to the other and back again, moving faster and faster with each revolution, like a spinning top that was building to its crescendo. My skin started to weep moisture and my heart was pounding hard in my chest, scaring the Hades out of me. But I couldn’t seem to stop myself from flying around the room. No matter how fast I walked my traitorous thoughts kept finding him, outlining him lustfully, wishing for him.... “Shit, shit, shit.” I ran into the personal hygiene room, tearing my clothes off as I ran and flung myself into the shower tube. “Fifty degrees, pulsate on high.”

The icy tentacles of water pounded against my skin, almost sizzling against the heat of it. I suddenly realized that what I was experiencing was more than simple lust and imagination. It was devil-induced mischief making. Even as I had the thought a dark shape shimmered into view on the other side of my glass shower wall.

Proud of myself for not shrieking, I very calmly reached over to push the
Off
button on the shower, not trusting myself to speak to use voice de-activation.

As I emerged he raised one silky, black eyebrow and let his gaze slide down my dripping flesh. “Very lovely. I shall enjoy this very much.”

My pulse exploded in my chest and, for a very brief moment, I thought I would die. But, another point for me, I simply let my gaze slide to the towel he was holding for me, just out of reach of course. “You know, I’ve learned a lot about the Royal Court recently, but I didn’t know you were delusional as a general rule.”

His yummy lips parted in a wide smile, showing just the very tips of his teeth. “Did you know that we can smell lust, little halfling?”

Okay, I’ll admit it, that one got to me. “Give me the damn towel!”

He took one more look-see and then held the coveted piece of cloth out, taking care to hold it just far enough away that I would have to take a step closer to grab it. I looked longingly at the drying tube but quickly realized I would have to turn my back on him and leave him to his own devices for the length of time it would take the tube to dry me off. I wasn’t willing to do that at the moment.

Seeing no other choice, I moved that one step closer and pulled on the towel. Without my even realizing that he’d moved, he suddenly had me smashed full length against his body, with one arm wrapped around my waist like a steel band. His gaze burned into me as he spoke. “I will have just one taste now, as a preview of things to come.”

I tried to jerk away but found that my legs and arms had turned to air. As his incredibly soft lips lowered to mine I felt myself floating, completely boneless in his arms. His breath smelled of lust and sensual things and the sweet heat of it moved like molten pleasure through my body as we kissed. I knew he was playing with my mind again and I wanted to cry with frustration that I was so helpless against it. There I was, a big, bad, demon and devil conqueror and I was putty in the beautiful creature’s hands. I wanted to scream. I wanted to knee him in the balls. Instead I moaned and ground myself against him. Damned traitorous flesh.

His hands moved down my wet body to cup my buttocks and pull me more tightly against him. Putting me into delicious contact with the long, hard ridge of flesh beneath his oh-so-delightfully tight pants, the more intimate contact certainly didn’t make me want to pull away.

However, from somewhere in my misty brain came a single, unbidden but soul saving picture that moved between us, metaphorically speaking of course, like a gust of arctic air. My mind formed a picture of Timmon, spread across a cold, stone floor like so much green blood pudding. On the heels of that vision my anger spiked. Rage produced a tingly feeling that felt like power. It was a power I’d never experienced before. It was one I didn’t know I had. But somehow I recognized it with the primitive instinct that had served my ancestors and my kind well.

For an interminable moment, my mind tried to fight against the wonderful sensations he was producing in my body. I had to create some mental space between us so I could recover my equilibrium enough to kick his ass. His lips had left my mouth and were scorching a trail down my throat, licking away the last of the moisture there and moving inexorably toward more vulnerable destinations. One hot hand already covered my breast, the nimble fingers pulling gently on a rigid pink nipple. Each tug sent an answering flare of need spiking through me...tightening in a coil of lust low in my belly.

In desperation I began gathering the fledgling power around me, using only the barest of instincts to pull it into some kind of focus.

My body vibrated under the building power. His lips left mine abruptly and his eyes narrowed on my face. My flesh began to tingle and jump where he touched me and, with widening eyes, he looked down at the arm he still had wrapped around me. As he did, sparks erupted from the juncture of our flesh and he released me with a surprised laugh. As soon as his flesh left mine, the power exploded. Closing my eyes, I tried to focus all of it into a single stream that centered in my right arm. The air around me buzzed with electricity and began to pulse against my skin, pushing insistently, though I wasn’t at all sure what it wanted me to do. I was acting strictly on instinct, on pure blind intuition, as I raised my arm toward him and opened my eyes.

The power shot out of the fingers of my hand, taking my breath with it and almost pulling me off my feet. My arm jerked under the force of the explosion and, rather than blasting him, I shattered a hologram of my parents that had been hanging on the wall behind him. I gritted my teeth and refocused, leaving a scorch mark on the wall as I guided it toward him.

He could have gotten out of the way. He knew it was coming. But he stood his ground and surprisingly, he had a vague smile on his face as it hit him. Rather than exploding him as I’d hoped, I merely succeeded in raising him up off the floor a couple of inches and pushing him back a couple of feet, until he met up with the wall. He hung there, the smile sitting on his face and his arms crossed against his chest, bringing a memory, sharp and disturbing, of him as he’d been in my apparently prophetic dream. Above the smile, those strange, black eyes, which were now filled with revelation and something that looked like surprised recognition, were locked on me unwaveringly.

All too quickly the power started to drain away. It had pulled every available bit of energy from my cells and had no more fuel to draw on. A final, harmless spurt of power shot from my throbbing fingers and Dialle sank slowly back to the floor, still smiling.

My knees buckled and I collapsed. My whole body felt like just so much stiff rubber. I had no energy left to hold me upright. As I hit the floor, the world faded to charcoal gray around me and I knew I was going to pass out.

I landed on the cold floor and lay shivering uncontrollably, though I somehow knew that the air was suffocatingly warm all around me. As I floated away, my mind just barely registered the sound of his voice speaking in Hades over me, in a surprisingly gentle tone. Then I felt him pick me up and my world faded completely to black. Leaving me to whatever fate I had stumbled against.

~SC~

I woke up in my bed, with a seriously woozy feeling in my head. The room felt unusually cool and, as I pulled the blankets up and tucked them just under my chin, I realized that my arm was sore and stiff. The tips of my fingers still tingled and felt a bit numb. I pulled the strange appendage out from under the blankets and stared at it in awe. Had I dreamed the whole thing? Had I really discovered a new power?

I frowned at the seemingly normal hand in front of my face. I couldn’t see any difference in it. It certainly didn’t feel very powerful at the moment. As I shifted into a more comfortable position, my entire right arm pulsed and punished my movements with spikes of pain that started at my shoulder and ripped a path to the tips of my tingly fingers.

I took deep breaths until the pain passed and lay as still as possible, restricting my gymnastics to the mental kind. It was true, I did have magic in my family tree, on both the angel and the devil sides. I didn’t know much about it and I had made it a point not to find out the details because the idea scared the holy shit out of me. But it seemed I would need to do some research. If the power was going to insinuate itself on me unbidden, then I’d better learn from whence it came and how to control it.

After a few minutes of mental preparation, I forced myself to get out of bed and realized with a jolt that it wasn’t just my arm that was sore. My entire body ached and throbbed. I stood up with a small, wimpy moan and found myself unwilling to move. I just stood there with my eyes closed, trying to outwait the pains that were shooting up the backs of my legs. After a minute I realized standing still didn’t help the pain and took a step toward the food service area. Maybe about a thousand jolts of black caffeine would blast the aches out of me.

The strong, black coffee didn’t take away my aches, but it gave me the energy to keep moving. As I prepared for my day, my muscles slowly warmed and softened and, by the time I stepped into the Viper, I felt almost normal. Only a general fatigue and achiness in my right arm remained to remind me of my late night skirmish with the devil.

Along with the jolt of excitement I felt at having won the minor battle against him with a newfound power of my own, I was deeply aware of a sense of mental discomfort that I wasn’t ready, or willing, to examine too closely just yet. I was only dimly aware that it had nothing to do with my behavior of the night before and everything to do with his.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The Devil’s friend Pays a Visit

The thing had fangs the size of thumbs and claws the length of hands,

It tore the flesh of one she loved and died for its demands.

There is only one thing worse than being tempted by evil. That would be paying taxes. In the year 2091, the tax bite basically eats up about eighty percent of our earnings and business expenses eat up the rest. That’s why I was in such a foul mood that day. It really had nothing to do with my previous night’s frolic with evil.

I posted my electronic signature on the payment for another really scary bill and grimaced at Emo, who, as usual, sat across from me suffering the slings and arrows of my grimaces and pained sighs with a look of terror that was only exacerbated by his devilish countenance. Emo, it seems, has never really learned to trust in our success and, as a result, always stands on the precipice of despair over such mundane things as bill paying and fee collection. In other words, in a world that is split exactly in half between the glass is half empty and the glass is half full types, Emo is on the Board of Directors for the half empty group.