Demon Bound (26 page)

Jesus, his throat was tight.
Just a symbol,
he reminded himself. Feathers didn't make a Guardian. And so he wouldn't let it matter.

Alice's hand smoothed over his head. They'd finally let her go, Jake realized. And the demons were retreating now—except for the twelve sentinels. Their armor was much lighter than the other demons', which told Jake it wasn't often they were a line of defense or used for face-to-face combat. No, these sentinels would be the stealth: the ones that snuck up behind you and pulled your heart out of your back before you turned around.

“Demon!” Alice called out. Jake looked up; her striking face was washed in the painfully bright light, but her eyes were open against it. “There is a prophecy foretelling your rise to power in Hell. But if thwarting that prophecy means that I have to keep Michael's heart safe from you and all of your demons for the rest of my days, I will do it.”

“Are you so certain it is not the Guardians who need to be kept safe from Michael's heart?” Belial's voice was faintly mocking. “For we are all made in the image of our fathers—and you were not safe from me.”

Alice's fingers tightened, but she had no other reaction. She stared ahead until the light faded, and the silence that marked the shielding spell settled around the room.

“He might have been lying.” Jake's rough whisper was like a yell in the darkness. Did the sentinels know any human languages? Did it matter?

“I know.” She ran her fingers up over his hair, and for a moment, the soft rasp covered the sound of twelve demon heartbeats. “Well, then,” she added, and though he couldn't see it, he knew her back had straightened. “Shall we get to work?”

 

Over the next two days, Jake wasn't surprised that they didn't discuss Belial's parting remark about Michael. But they didn't talk about anything else that had transpired, or make plans for escape. Only about the site. But every time Jake tried to steer the sparse conversation in another direction, Alice mentioned how few batteries they had to power her lanterns, and urged him to hurry, to commit the prison's layout to memory.

And even with their Guardian speed, it was one bitch of a project. One hundred and sixteen sarcophagi, each patterned by different symbols. More symbols covered the walls, the ceiling, the floor.

They could have been processing any site on Earth—except that only the demons, Alice, and Jake showed up on their cameras. As in Caelum, apparently nothing in Hell could be photographed. Jake's sketches were shit, at best—and because they couldn't read any of the symbols, the only thing they learned was that one sarcophagus was missing from the pattern.

The sentinels didn't move, didn't breathe, didn't speak. They stood—or perched, if they were one of the six at the corners and middle of the ceiling—and watched.

Jake was sitting with his back against one sarcophagus, his feet stretched out toward another, and thinking about shooting one of the sentinels, when the lantern began fading. No big deal. They had laptops, cell phones. If they
had
to, they could shine their eyes like the demons did.

But Alice started to fret, flitting her hands. She came to sit next to him on the floor, muttering “oh, dear” like it was a one-hit wonder.

Yeah, he thought. Wasn't that just peachy? He went crazy for a woman, and she just went crazy.

He drew in a breath, and frowned. Alice had spent most of her time at the other end of the room, and since they weren't talking, he hadn't been breathing much. With all the rot around them, he didn't think he'd missed anything worth smelling.

Now, though, he could detect the faint, sickly sweet odor of infected flesh.

“Alice,” he said quietly. “Is your shoulder healing?”

“Nooooo!” With a wail, she threw herself over his lap. When she began sobbing into her hands, he got it.

She was setting the demons up. Giving them this impression of a nervous, sickly wreck of a woman. Why, he had no idea—but she was working up to something.

And she was
good
at it. If he hadn't known her, he'd have been convinced.

He also thought that her parents had probably gone gray before Alice was out of her teens. Performances like this didn't just pop out of the ether.

But that infected odor was real, and his concern was genuine when he touched her braid. She wailed louder, and he had to bury his face against her hair. Oh, shit. He was going to crack up, and give her away.

She pinched the inside of his leg, hard. The sharp pain sobered him enough that when she lifted her tearstained face, he managed to keep his straight.

“I don't want to be in the dark,” she said on a shuddering breath. “It frightens me so. I will go mad without light.”

Yeah, right. But he let his concern ride up, so that it was all that showed in his expression. Those poker games were finally paying off. “Shh. It will be okay.”

“We must escape from here.” She began weeping again, laying her cheek on his shoulder. “But there is no way, is there? He said that I couldn't be teleported out of this realm, and I suppose that means I could be teleported
within
it—but we daren't even try with the spell up.”

“No.” Because if they were wrong, and she couldn't be teleported at all, Jake would leave her behind.

“But they will not lower the spell or let in light until he returns,” she sobbed. “I just know it. We need to escape before that, or I am bound to go insane.”

She gave his hand a squeeze on “bound,” but he'd already picked up on her message. Hell, he'd been thinking about it for two days.

Belial could have forced him into an agreement simply by using Alice's life as the other half of the bargain. Something as easy as,
For as long as you serve me, I will spare her life.
But a bargain like that had a few loopholes—if anything happened to Alice, through Belial or not, Jake wouldn't be bound any longer.

Their time locked up here worked in Belial's favor. It gave the demon a chance to develop and word an ironclad bargain.

Jake would do it, to save her life—and they'd both be screwed. “We need to get rid of the spell,” he said quietly, and stroked the backs of his fingers down her wet cheek. “But I can't imagine how we'd get to the symbols, and survive. Not with all of these sentinels. Can you?”

“No, novice.” Her denial was soft and sad, and his heart began pounding. “I cannot. And once we got out, we'd still have to make it past the army. Can you imagine a way to do that?”

He shook his head, and signaled he was lying in the same way she'd used. “No, widow. I can't.”

“Then I suppose I must resign myself to the dark.” She pulled back, and her eyes, bright and shining, met his. “Perhaps I shall occupy myself by weaving. It will settle my poor nerves.”

But she didn't begin right away. First, she knelt in front of the lantern, and wailed again when it died.

 

If Alice hadn't pretended that the darkness frightened her, Jake was pretty sure that twelve pairs of eyes would be lighting the room. Instead, the demons must have been tracking their movements by their heartbeats, the sound of their steps.

He'd bet anything that the assholes were enjoying her rapid, shallow breaths and the fear that occasionally leaked through her psychic scent. Jake mostly just enjoyed that that they were falling for it.

And, guessing that darkness was exactly what she'd wanted, Jake didn't pull anything out of his hammerspace to brighten it. He sat, formed his wing stumps, and gritted his teeth through the healing.

About fifteen hours after the lantern went out, the cackling started. Even knowing that it was an act, it lifted the hairs on his arms. And it apparently creeped out the demons, too. A few seconds after it ended, the sentinels flared their eyes. In the red glow, he saw Alice crouching on a sarcophagus, muttering into her gloved hands. Her waist-length hair was unbound. She cut a hank off and began to play with it: measuring it between her fingers, curling it into loops, then finally tying the ends together until she had a single, long strand.

The light disappeared, then blinked on when she began to run, cackling again. She passed Jake, a rush of wind in her wake, then leapt high into the air. Her fingers touched the ceiling, leaving a gossamer strand dangling almost to the floor. She landed lightly, sat, and cut off more hair.

They left her in darkness after that, and Jake lost count of the times the cackling and running were followed by that eerie muttering. He stayed where he was, sure that after what he'd seen, it wasn't a good idea to be walking around.

She'd been harvesting the spider silk for ten years. How much had gone into her dresses, and how much was stored in her hammerspace?

Judging by how long it was taking her, a hell of a lot.

By the time she began to skitter around the floor on her hands and knees, his wings were about as big as a cherub's. They probably looked pretty flippin' stupid—but at least they didn't hurt anymore.

He vanished them when she approached his row of sarcophagi. His legs were in the way. Jake bent his knees, expecting her to crawl by.

She climbed into his lap, cradled the back of his head in her hands, and kissed the astonishment from his mouth.

Her teeth nibbled lightly at his bottom lip, and Jake knew that he was missing something, knew that there was a message in all of this somewhere. But, hot damn, she couldn't really expect him to think? Not when she tugged his head closer so that she could tap her tongue against his teeth, then lick, and not when her thumbs were stroking that same rhythm behind his ears. Tap, lick, slow, lick, a slight hesitation, tap, lick, on and on, and the tease of it was going to drive him crazy.

It was going to . . . It was . . .
It was his name
. Morse code. J, A, K, E, over and over.

His hands were on her hips, and he squeezed her name back. He felt her open smile against his mouth, her silent laugh.

God. He'd thought he was falling for her? He'd been wrong. That had been nothing compared to the insane exhilaration he felt now. Nothing like his amazement that he'd been lucky enough to cross paths with this strange, brilliant woman.

And in a few seconds, he'd talk with her. But now, he let the moment roll over him, leaning in and taking a taste of her laugh. It faded from her lips, and she was kissing him back. No message there. Just the sweet clench of her fingers, the heat of her mouth.

It couldn't last, though. It wasn't the time, and definitely wasn't the place. And the slight perspiration on her skin wasn't from their kiss.

She was sick.

Something twisted inside his chest, painful and hard. The infected smell was almost gone, but the sword had left something in her. It had to be the sword—a Guardian's wounds always healed cleanly, and Guardians never became ill. But Michael's sword wasn't like any other weapon; when he'd impaled the dragon's heart with it, the metal had taken some of the dragon's power.

Jake had once heard about a Guardian who, before his transformation, had been cut by the sword, tainting his blood. The transformation hadn't completely taken hold, so he hadn't had all of a Guardian's abilities. Eventually he'd Fallen or Ascended—Jake couldn't remember. But he hadn't remained in Caelum.

And there was a vampire living in San Francisco who'd been tainted the same way—but instead of being weakened after his transformation, he was the strongest of his kind. Able to walk in sunlight and resist the daysleep. But the taint had also created in him one of the few anchors to Chaos—the dragon's realm.

What would it do to a Guardian who'd already been transformed?

Maybe nothing, he prayed. Maybe it just took longer to heal, for her body to fight it off.

He drew back, wished that he could see Alice's face. He repeated her name, then again, changing it so that the press of his thumbs was a dot, his fingers on the back of her hips was a dash, and a squeeze of both signaled a break between letters—streamlining the code so that it wasn't so dependent on intervals of time. A waste of superspeed, in his opinion.

Alice picked up on it fast, made hers a subtle right-and-left pressure behind his ears, and fit her lips to his again.

If we only sit quietly together,
she explained,
they might suspect we are communicating.

Her laugh was a soft burst of air into his mouth.
Yes. Exactly.

Yeah.
And they needed to stop talking about it, or his cock was going to demonstrate exactly how easy it was.

Hot damn. But though his body was screaming at him to drag her forward over his happy-to-demonstrate dick, Jake checked himself.

Not the time. Not the place.

He ran his palms up to her waist before heading back to her hips.
How are you feeling, goddess?

Which told him that doing both was going to hurt her, but she'd push through it.
Okay,
he said, and adjusted his plan so that it wouldn't burden her as much. It'd be a little more humiliating for him, but he was used to that.
So how are we getting out of here?

CHAPTER 12

By the time Alice crawled off Jake's lap, cackling again, she'd decided that he was quite possibly mad.