Bittersweet Seraphim (5 page)

Nero took her face, so dear to him, his very destination, and held it. She couldn’t meet his eyes. Instead she squirmed and ran her hands over his chest.

“Stop looking at me. Take out your dick.” Jenny reached up and untied her sundress, and it slithered to the floor.

Nero looked down at her body and fell to his knees. He traced the inflamed track Brut’s knife had left. Her system was fighting demon blood. He looked up at her face and she tilted her head back, avoiding him yet again. She swiveled her hips, running her hands down his head and scratching his shoulders.

He could still see hints of her, the real her, but he had no idea how to fix her. At this moment he realized she was trapped with a bit of her worst fear inside her, so the only thing he could think to do was to love her, fill her, make her his.

Nero stood and grabbed a fistful of her hair, just enough to get her attention and turn her eyes his way. “Look at me.”

She could only get as far as his mouth. He kissed her lips and pulled back. “Look at me.”

She raised her eyes to his cheeks and stopped. Nero unbuttoned his pants, and they joined her sundress on the floor. Her let go of her hair and walked into her, knocking her backward, making her stagger. When she fell backward, he reacted, grabbing her hips and forcing her to sit on the bed.

She scooted to the center of the bed. Nero longed to see her smile. He loved her glow of health, but hated Brut’s marks marring her beautiful skin. He followed her onto the bed and waited for her to respond with love, but she was grabby and greedy. He imprisoned her hands above her head and positioned himself between her legs. With one quick push he was in her.

Her silkiness surrounded him, and he had to stop before he lost control. His hand holding her wrists shook as he asked her, one last time. “Look at me.”

And then she met his eyes. And she was there, home, here for him once again. Her eyes filled with tears, and the mania bled from them as she released her emotion.

“Nero.”

It was Jenny, his Jenny. He covered her mouth with kisses, and neither of them closed their eyes. Nero didn’t want to lose sight of her even for a minute. He let go of her hands, and she held his face, keeping him close. He let himself love her then. With every thrust, he let her know he’d fought to be here, he’d done those wrong things—let minions out of Hell and risked everything—so they could be like this, just Jenny and Nero.

She pushed him flat on his back and changed their position so she could straddle him. He watched her achieve her own bliss, amazed as her long scars of minion-induced pain healed. Like a reverse blood poisoning, he was somehow absorbing the venom that had been changing her.

She saw it too and ran her hands along her now-clean body. “How?” she said, still moving on top of him.

“Love,” he answered simply. “I love you so much.”

Jenny felt like herself for the first time in two weeks. Lying in Nero’s arms, in her own bed, without Brut’s creepy stare, she was home. Actually, she felt the best she had in years. She couldn’t burden Nero with her diagnosis now. As much as she wanted him to hold her and share her pain, she knew their time was limited. Jenny tried to force the conversations with her doctor out of her mind and away from this contented moment, but as always, they lay in wait for her. The doctor had been mystified by Jenny’s decline after Kate’s birth. He claimed it was as if she’d ingested toxins. Every blood test came back clean, but her pupils remained dilated, her balance off. Jenny wasn’t sure if it was the demon DNA her body had nurtured or the fact that Nero had claimed her heart, but there was a price to pay for bearing his child. But none of it mattered. Any punishment was worth the gift of Kate. She looked at her lover and smiled sadly.

“I’m so sorry about the things I said to you, my sweet. How did you get here so soon?” She touched his cheek, letting her fingertips reassure her of his realness.

“It wasn’t you,” Nero assured her. “Somehow his blood infected you. And Kate is okay?” He grabbed Jenny’s hand and kissed it.

“She is. I owe her an apology too. I kept saying the most inappropriate things. I felt stronger, but out of control.” Jenny snuggled deeper into Nero’s chest, smelling the scent of him, trying to bathe her hair in it, so she’d be able to prove he’d been here after he left.

“I consorted with other minions to be here. I promised them things. My first instinct was to kill Brut.” He searched her eyes as he pronounced his murderous instincts.

She propped herself up a bit and looked at the whole length of him. “I would’ve killed him to keep him from Kate if I could’ve. I’ll not judge you.”

“Jenny, I’m not a good man. I wasn’t a good man. I’m in Hell for a reason. But if I killed him, I’d have to do his sentence as well. I would have to shovel with two hands.” He held them up.

“You’re good to me. And you’re Kate’s father, so that makes you an angel. If she’s safe, I’ll bring her back. If I stay like this, back in my own head, I’ll try to have her here so you might see her next time.” She straddled him again. “I’d love you to stay, though. I dream of us here—in this bed, in this house, making breakfast, taking showers.” She leaned down to cover him, hugging his chest. “Can you never stay?”

He stroked her hair gently. “Jenny, I have a sentence.”

She sighed, expressing her disappointment eloquently without words.

Chapter 5

Nero replayed fixing Jenny with love in his head so many times. It made him stand a bit straighter on his breaks from shoveling. Brut, however, was furious that he’d missed his trip to the soil and had treated Nero to long, horrific descriptions of the plans he had for his love and his daughter. He repeated them over and over.

To take his mind off of killing Brut, Nero concentrated on making something for Kate. Every other stroke with the shovel, he grazed a lump of rock, carving it. He was trying to create a little puppy for Kate, like the one on her shirt. It took a million swipes to do it. Nero counted—out loud at times.

He took the puppy with him on his frantic runs to the waiting cave. Sin was still buzzed by her sunset, and she wanted to go again, rather than having Velvet or Ransom get their turn. More personalities made the situation even a bigger task.

When it was finally settled, Nero had to promise Sin he would try to smuggle a jack-in-the-box into Hell for her. And Brut was ready this time, tense and flinching at every sound. But Ransom handled the spastic, angry minion with ridiculous ease, pinning him face down in the dirt in moments. Sin took the position on the back of his legs as he seethed.

Velvet was athletic and poised, and she showed Nero faster, more efficient ways to get around the obstacles. When they lifted the rock together, breaking the seal between Hell and Earth, it was afternoon, judging by the sun. It took them both a little while to adjust their eyes. Then Nero wished Velvet well as she headed off to find a field to wait for the fireflies.

The trees seemed taller. Time had gotten away from Nero. But the hose was still where it was supposed to be, and he cranked on the flowing water, drinking and drinking until his tongue finally felt moist. Then he washed off the puppy rock sculpture. It had no color, just midnight black rock, but each hair was defined, the nose small and cute. He hoped Kate would like it.

But first, he needed to find Jenny. He had to break the door, again. There was no one home, but something was wrong. Out of place. Nero had no idea how to find Jenny if she wasn’t home.

He heard the sound of a loud machine in the driveway and simply waited in the kitchen, holding his gift. After a moment a gorgeous young woman came around the door, pointing a gun at him.

“Get out. Get out of my house.”

It took a breath, a moment before he saw it. Kate was no longer five years old. The long, black hair and clear, watchful eyes were the same, but time had lengthened his daughter, added bits of adulthood to her frame.

“Kate. I’m here.” Nero looked behind her for some sign of Jenny.

She slid the safety on the gun and pointed it at the ground. “Father?”

He nodded and glanced at his puppy, so out of place for a young woman. Maybe a flower would have been a better choice.

“Your mother? Is she here?” He turned and set the puppy on the counter carefully. When he looked at her again, the pain in Kate’s eyes made Nero’s soul shake.

“Interesting question. Are you pretending to care? It’s been twelve years,
Daddy
.” Hate dripped from her voice. “What did you bring up with you this time? Vampires? Demons? Just bust open a door from Hell and let all that shit out so you can get laid.” She stepped toward him, full of fire and anger.

Fear gripped him, because then he knew. The answer was easy to see in her eyes, her demeanor.
Jenny, Jenny. Please not Jenny.
“Twelve years? Where is Jenny?” Nero bit his lip.

For a moment he saw a tiny hint of compassion, but as she spoke, a door slid shut in her eyes. “My mother’s dead.”

Nero looked at the ground, swallowing his cry of anguish. Hope flowed out of him, love left him. Jenny could
not
be gone. She flashed before his eyes. For a moment, he saw her everywhere. And then the thought that she was nowhere turned his bitter soul to ash. He was left a husk of a being.

Kate watched the man in front of her lose his love, and as angry as she was at him, she could not stop her sympathy. He was so dirty, his nails caked with black. He looked as if he was created from darkness—that was surely how Kate thought of him. Her mother had lived in a dream world where lovely monsters came from the ground and said and did beautiful things. But Kate had watched as a second pregnancy had robbed her already weakened mother of something tangible.

When Jenny miscarried the baby, her health declined further. She’d been confined to her room, always with the window facing the shed open a crack as an invitation to the thing she claimed to love. It took nine years for her to die—long enough for Kate to learn to hate Nero. Long enough to hear the stories of their fairy tale love. Long enough to be warned to carry a gun, because the things that came out of the shed with her father might want to kill her.

Aunt Bess had wanted to move since the minion battle in the living room, but she’d stayed, despite her unease, saying she needed to help raise Kate. Eventually Jenny wasn’t rational, and Bess had refused to leave her great niece to fend for herself.

Jenny’s insistence on staying turned into resolve for Kate as well when her mother died. She’d been waiting for this day. Waiting to tell the man her mother had wasted her life on that she was gone. But the long lecture full of vehemence and violence that she’d planned died on her tongue when the huge minion buried his face in his dirty hands and quietly lost control.

His silent anguish was heartbreaking. He clenched his fists and bent at the middle, appearing to be in physical pain. Tears came to Kate’s eyes, and she blinked them back. In her daydreams she’d yelled at him, listed off all the things she missed out on because her mother had died. She never imagined her heart softening, the edges growing touchable as her father took to his knees. She took a shaky breath. Her mother had told her all the time that her father was a good man. She couldn’t explain why he was in Hell, but she would say, “Nero loves you, Kate. He does. You’ll see. Someday you’ll see.”

And now she did. She watched as her father composed himself and settled his black eyes on her. “Kate, are you okay? Who’s here with you?”