bedeviled & beyond 05 - bedeviled & besmirched

• Title Page
  
• Copyright Page
  
• Bedeviled & Besmirched (BEDEVILED & BEYOND, #5)
  
• PROLOGUE
  
• CHAPTER ONE
  
• CHAPTER TWO
  
• CHAPTER THREE
  
• CHAPTER FOUR
  
• CHAPTER FIVE
  
• CHAPTER SIX
  
• CHAPTER SEVEN
  
• CHAPTER EIGHT
  
• CHAPTER NINE
  
• CHAPTER TEN
  
• CHAPTER ELEVEN
  
• CHAPTER TWELVE
  
• CHAPTER THIRTEEN
  
• CHAPTER FOURTEEN
  
• CHAPTER FIFTEEN
  
• CHAPTER SIXTEEN
  
• CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
  
• CHAPTER ONE
  
• Sign up for Sam Cheever's Mailing List
  
• Also By Sam Cheever
  
• About the Author
  

Bedeviled & Besmirched

BEDEVILED & BEYOND, Volume 5

Sam Cheever

Published by Electric Prose Publications, 2015.

This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

BEDEVILED & BESMIRCHED

First edition. October 22, 2015.

Copyright © 2015 Sam Cheever.

ISBN: 978-1944242077

Written by Sam Cheever.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Copyright Page

Bedeviled & Besmirched (BEDEVILED & BEYOND, #5)

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER ONE

Sign up for Sam Cheever's Mailing List

Also By Sam Cheever

About the Author

~SC~

"Sam Cheever never ceases to amaze with the stories she weaves. They continue to be intense, very hot and filled with enough twists and turns to keep the reader amazed and intrigued.  The ending is electrifying and you know we have not seen the last of this couple.  Beautifully done –"
~ 5 stars from Elise at SensualReads.com

Who knew that one little magic hickey could cause so much trouble? Never mind that Astra Q Phelps has no idea how she gave the king of the Royal Devils a Daemon mark. Females aren’t supposed to be able to mark their males. Now everybody’s trying to kill her. Well, half of everybody is trying to kill her. The females on the Devil Court want to know how she did it so they can do it too. And, while Astra’s trying to stay alive, somebody’s making a play for her man and the power he’s about to inherit. It’s a whole lot of stuff for Astra Q Phelps to handle. But, as you probably know by now, she’s...most likely...up to the challenge. Hopefully.

PROLOGUE

Suck it up, bud!

The Devil you want may stoke your fire, and set your loins ablaze.

The Devil you want could love inspire, or lives and continents raze.

My name is Astra Q Phelps. Don’t ask me what the Q stands for because that little piece of info will go with me to the crematorium. I’ve had all printed documentation of the name destroyed and, though a lot of my enemies have tried to dig it out, no one will ever know what it stands for. A girl has to have some secrets. Especially when the truth would cause her some serious embarrassment.

I run a business called the Angel Network, which is the only devil and demon locating and destroying business in the universe. In other words, I kick serious evil butt for a living. I am a halfling. What exactly is a halfling you ask? A halfling is a non-human. We have neither wings nor horns, but generally have both angel and devil in our family forests. Which is probably why we enjoy a higher sensitivity to spectral influence than regular human people.

Recently, the Celestial Army has been keeping me pretty busy saving the world. Over and over and over and...well, you get what I’m saying. The human world just has trouble staying saved.

It’s been a busy and confusing time. But it’s about to get much worse.

My twenty-fifth birthday is just a few months away.

The thing about that twenty-fifth birthday is...well...for halflings it’s kind of make-or-break time. It’s called our Settling and it’s the culmination of our growth period. The time when we become what we will be in life. It’s also the time when the dark side of our nature has the greatest pull.

It is on our twenty-fifth birthday that we decide which way we’re gonna go. Good or bad. Black or white. Gray usually isn’t an option. And outside influences have a lot to do with the outcome. In my case, my influence pool is decidedly murky, given the fact that I hang out a lot with devils.

Lately, my life has taken a turn toward the complex. Dialle, King of the Royal Devils on Earth and my steady boyfriend, is really mad at me because I marked him with a Daemon hickey.

I guess females aren’t supposed to be able to mark males.

How would I know that? Nobody told me that little piece of devil trivia, thank you very much. And apparently it isn’t true anyway...since I did manage to put that cute, little power mark on his sexy throat.

But now he’s all embarrassed and mad and threatened in a male way, and I’m dancing the romance two-step trying to win back his love.

Bleurgh!

To make things even more complex, somebody’s trying really hard to kill me. And they’re doing a bang up job of it too. Staying alive is becoming increasingly difficult.

And my longtime friend and partner Emo is in celestial anger management, dealing with his own Settling.

Forget doing my job slaying demons.

The one place I can go for help isn’t really a good option at all. Since the helpful and sexy Slayer represents mucho temptation to me and my stupid Settling. At any moment my slut-monkey side might just take him up on one of those offers he likes to present during a moment of weakness.

My weakness...not his.

So anyway, those are the high points of my life at the moment. Ugly, huh? What? Oh, you wanted the dirty details? Well, all right, it’s your brain cells that are at risk. Not mine.

Here we go...

CHAPTER ONE

Flick the Dick

Our heroine has gone too far, and done the dirty deed.

The devil got a pretty mark, and now he’s very teed.

I was having trouble concentrating on work. All I could think about was how pissed Dialle was. Just because I gave him that one little hickey. It was a moment of passion. He should feel flattered that I got that carried away, right?

Not.

All right, I could admit it had made him kind of a laughing stock in the Royal Court. But it had been even worse for me. I’d noticed the lower devils were giving me a wider berth, their beady eyes filled with terror when they looked at me. That was okay. But the Royals...well...let’s just say they didn’t like me before I did the impossible and marked Dialle.

After the act they really hated me. I could feel the hate vibrating through the court halls and throbbing against my brain. The Royals couldn’t go after me directly because of Dialle, but the number of “accidents” and “near accidents” had escalated to the point where I walked around with a power bubble wrapped around me whenever I visited the court.

Apparently, I’d really rocked their world. For good or bad depended on your perspective. The females in the devil court, seeing that a female could mark a male, were energized by Dialle’s little hickey. Even if nobody knew how I did it, including me. And they wanted some of that power for themselves. The males were understandably displeased about the turn of events. The power base had definitely shifted out from under them.

It sucketh to be them.

But there was nothing I could do about all that at the moment. So I shook my head, pushing the problem out of my mind, and forced myself to focus on the job at hand. Saving my sagging business. With my best friend and partner Emo in celestial counseling for the foreseeable future, I was short a demon slayer and my business was starting to suffer.

There were just too many demons running around terrorizing people and not enough time in the day for me to handle them all. Especially given the fact that dealing with my Settling was becoming an almost full-time task.

I’d been toying with the idea of hiring my neighbors the werewolves to help me on a contract basis. Bob Gleason and Ralph Peters owned a business called Werever...Whatever, which specialized in shape-shifter justice. In other words, they were thugs for hire for the magical world, a perfect resume for what I needed.

The televisual on my desk bleeped and a fat face with a bald head blinked onto my screen. “Mx. Phelps?”

“That’s me.”

“My name is Arch Magnus. I need your help with a dragon.”

I swallowed hard. My track record with dragons wasn’t great. I tended to make friends and allies with them rather than defeat them. Or else they ate my car. “What type of dragon is it?”

“A green. I’ve never seen a green dragon around here before. But I have one living in my garage. Actually more than one.”

I frowned, thinking about the green dragons I’d seen recently. “Must be a frunkin’ big garage.”

“It is. I repair air vehicles and will have several of them in there at any given time.” The man frowned. “There were five vehicles up on blocks when the dragons moved in. I don’t know what’s left of them. I’ve heard a lot of crunching and smashing in there.”

I sighed. If I took the assignment I’d need help. “Give me your location and I’ll come out.”

“Oh thank Him! I was afraid you’d refuse to help.”

That little statement should have been all the warning I needed. But in my defense, I was distracted. On my best days my life was complex. I punched his coordinates into the televisual and followed up with some personal information and as much as he could tell me about his dragon problem. Then I headed toward the Red Knight, my sleek and sexy air vehicle.

I’d get the lay of the land and then decide who I needed to call in to help.

An hour later I was hovering over the building in question. The windows were all broken out and scorch marks painted the walls around them. The area around the building was thick with debris and all of the vegetation within a half mile of the place was cooked. A cloud of gray smoke hovered over a roof that looked like somebody’d stuck a large pole into it from inside.

Interesting.

As the Red Knight slid silently overhead, fire sprayed from three of the windows at once, on three different walls. Alrighty then. We had the potential for lots of dragons inside.

Goody.

I opened my mouth to have the televisual call Emo and then closed it, remembering. “Shit!” Thinking about it for a moment, I changed my instruction. “Werever...Whatever.”

A series of bleeps ended with Bob Gleason’s pleasant face appearing on the screen. “Hey, Astra.”

“Bob. Can you and Ralph help me with an extraction and extermination?”

“Sure. We have an opening next week. Will Thursday at two work?”

I sat there blinking.

“Astra?”

A column of fire rose up in front of my view port and the Knight surged upward, out of range. I looked down and saw a massive green head with beady red eyes and several rows of deadly teeth. Smoke streamed from the dragon’s nostrils in thick ribbons.

“Yeah. I don’t think that’s gonna work. Thanks anyway. End call.” The televisual went black.

I shuffled my mental drawers.
Dialle, I need you
. He materialized beneath me on the seat almost before I finished the thought. In the blink of an eye I went from piloting my air vehicle on a dangerous mission to being a lap dance for my favorite, sexy devil.

“Hello, my love.” His hot lips found the side of my throat and branded me there, sending pleasure spiraling through me.

Immediately my Settling kicked in and my body tightened with need. His hands skimmed the quivering skin of my belly, sliding down to the moist vee between my thighs. I moaned, opening my legs like a space harlot to give him ready access. Somewhere in the back of my mind my responsible side was screaming at me to stay on task. But my slut-monkey side cold cocked the stupid prig into silence and embraced the moment...as well as the randy devil whose sexy mouth had followed the open neckline of my businesslike shirt and was nuzzling aside my lacy bra.

Heat rolled over me in waves. Stars sparked behind my closed eyelids as the blood surged through my body, propelled toward my sexual hot spots by a wildly beating heart. My mind all but shut down as Dialle tugged my snug, black slacks down my hips and slid a long, thick finger between the moist folds of my sex.