“Exactly.” He murmured. His yummy scent, familiar yet different, with a slight tang that I recognized with a guilty start as lust, rose around me, exploding my senses and closing off all rational thought.
He lifted my arm above our heads and stepped close, dropping his head to scent my neck. I gasped as our bodies met, heat merged with heat, and I felt the hard ridge of his cock against my belly.
“Emo!”
His lips found my throat. I moaned.
My daemon hickey sparked and spat, sending warnings into the musk saturated air around us.
Emo lifted a finger and covered my hickey, silencing it. His tongue swept the sensitized skin of my throat. My nipples hardened into desperate peaks beneath my leather coat.
His hands slid under my coat…hot skin and cool air slipped across my body…
His eyes shot toward my face. “You’re naked!”
I opened my mouth to explain but no words formed in my mind.
Groaning, Emo yanked me up against his body, grinding himself into me. His lips ravaged mine. His hot, sweet tongue plundered my mouth, tangling hungrily with mine until I could barely breathe, hardly think. Everything was sensation. Heat. Musk. The brush of hungry skin against starving flesh.
Somewhere in the center of my lust-drenched brain reason called to me. I squelched it ruthlessly, allowing my Settling to pull me, limp and compliant, into disgrace and debauchery. My body wrapped around his, my leg twined around the backs of his hard, muscular thighs and my mouth consumed his.
I was lost.
Gone.
Plowed under by lust.
There was no way I was going to pull back from it. Emo was no help at all. He wasn’t even trying to fight the pull of my Settling.
Wait a minute.
This was
my
Settling, not his.
He
couldn’t be under its influence.
I gasped and jerked away from him, swiping a shaking hand over my mouth as I backpedaled, putting much-needed space between us.
Emo growled and tried to grab me back. His eyes were no longer even slightly human. They swirled with frantic color and throbbed in a rhythm that matched the surge of blood between my thighs. He panted desperately, beyond reason, and his jeans bulged with clear evidence of his need.
“You and I are about the same age!”
Emo turned away, reason finally sliding in to dull the edge of his raging hunger. “Yes.” His voice sounded strangled, husky from an internal struggle I recognized all too well.
“Oh my god! You’re under
your
Settling!”
Emo nodded.
Suddenly everything made sense. Except for one thing. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
He glanced at me, his pupils looking slightly less frantic but still swirling with color. “I’ve tried to. But you’ve been so wrapped up in your Settling…and Dialle.”
I frowned. He was right. I’d been totally self-involved for the last couple of months. A slave to my body’s constant demands. I couldn’t even imagine what he’d been going through. “I’m so sorry, partner.”
He frowned. “Don’t be sorry for me, Astra. I’ve been dealing very well until today.” He looked away, his perfect features clearly showing his shame. But then he frowned. “What the hell are you doing here with no clothes on, Astra? Are you trying to kill me?”
I pulled my long, leather coat around my body and grimaced. “Sorry. It was unintentional.”
“What? You just forgot to get dressed before you came to the office today?” He glared at me.
My eyes slid guiltily around the room. I knew all too well how Emo felt about Dialle. I really didn’t want to tell him what Dialle and I had just done in my office. Turned out I didn’t need to. My guilty face told Emo everything he needed to know.
“Don’t bother lying to me, Astra.” His dark eyes swirled with disgust. “I have to go.”
My hand shot out to stop him but he disappeared. I was left clutching empty air. And feeling as if something irreparable had just been done to my friendship with Emo.
* * * * *
I didn’t see Emo for several days. I knew he’d been in and out of the office because he left me safe little notes on my desk along with his reports. Business went on as usual at the Angel Network but my partner and I just didn’t interact.
Emo’s daily notes told me which demons I needed to chase and which ones he was going after so we didn’t accidently bump into each other.
It was very efficient.
And very damn depressing.
After checking my assignment list for the day, I grabbed my coat and headed for the vehicle docking area where I’d left the Red Knight, my gorgeous and talented air vehicle.
The flash elevator carried me to the parking level of my office building in the speed it took to pull in a good-sized breath. The doors slid silently open and I emerged, heading for the single bright-red vehicle surrounded by politically correct grayness. In 2090 paint was almost illegal, as environmental laws continued to get stricter and more repressive. But you could still find painted items, and my beloved leather boots and clothing, in the underground market.
Then you just had to avoid the notice of the enviro-nazis. No easy task when you’re flying around in something that’s bright red.
I took two steps toward the Knight and felt the hair on the back of my neck lift. I tucked just before a thick arm with a set of deadly curved claws swept past where my head had been. I dropped into a crouch and kicked out with one foot, hitting my assailant in a thick, scaly knee.
The bone cracked and the devil screamed in pain. As he buckled toward the ground I jumped up and hit him in the chin with my knee, sending him flying backward to skim across the grungy floor.
A whisper of wind was my only warning that a second attacker had arrived. I leapt sideways, springing off my hands and shooting power from my palms as I sprang back into the air off my feet.
My squat, red attacker flew backward on a stream of deadly power and slammed against the far wall, the sword he’d tried to skewer me with clanging to the floor.
He hung there, pinned by my power for a moment before I pulled it back.
I landed in a defensive crouch and looked around the dimly lit space. Visually I came up negative for more devil soldiers but I didn’t trust my visual senses completely where devils were concerned. Sending out my sensing power, I looked for more black auras.
Other than the two I’d already defeated, the docking area was empty. The devilish attacker I’d skewered on a power arrow was dead, his sightless eyes staring straight ahead and his thick chest smoking around a fist-sized hole.
I headed for the other one, who was flopping around in pain with a broken jaw and knee. Kneeling on his chest I forced the creature to look at me. “Who sent you?”
His black eyes filled with hate.
I reached over and clasped his chin, which hung at an odd angle on his ugly face.
His eyes widened as I slowly twisted the broken bone. His shrieks filled the space. “Why are you here? Did someone send you to kill me?”
He said something that sounded like yes, though he couldn’t move his jaw. I stopped twisting the bone and nodded. “Very good. Now tell me who sent you.”
The eyes glared stubbornly at me.
I reached for his jawbone again.
He made a noise and tried to scoot away.
My hand stopped. “All you need to do is tell me who sent you and I’ll let you go.”
The eyes continued to glare at me. Shrugging, I reached down and placed my hand on his broken knee, leaning over and placing all my weight on it.
The docking area filled the sound of his screams. The flash elevator opened and my neighbor, a shapeshifter named Ralph Peters, stepped out. Ralph and his partner Bob were werewolves, whose company “Werever…Whatever” was into shapeshifter justice. They worked as hired muscle.
Ralph looked at my two attackers and grinned. “You need any help?”
I lifted an eyebrow at him.
He chuckled. “Right. Sorry, I lost my mind. See ya around later? Bob and I are gonna hit The Devil’s Den later. We’d love it if you could join us.”
The Den was a popular nightspot for the magic-using public. “Around eight?”
Ralph nodded, climbed into his silver air vehicle and left, sending dust my way in a backwash of air from under his powerful machine.
I looked down at the devil under my palm. “Ready to talk?”
He sighed, nodding.
“Give me a name.” I lifted my hand and he mumbled something I couldn’t understand. Leaning closer I shook my head. “Try again, you’re hard to understand for some reason.” I couldn’t resist. It was the devil in me.
He focused really hard and came out with, “Dialle.” It sounded only slightly muffled that time as he realized he could say the word without moving his jaw.
I frowned. Surely I hadn’t heard him right. “Did you say, Dialle?”
He blinked, looking relieved. “Yes.”
I glared at him. “You’re lying.”
“No! It’s the truth. King Dialle sent me to kill you!” He grimaced as he forgot and moved his mouth, no doubt sending shards of pain stabbing through his jaw.
I stared at him for a long moment and then stood up. Slowly, I lifted my hand, palm out, and he blinked, throwing up his hands. “No! Argghhh!” He tried to scoot away. “You promised. Ouch!”
“I lied.” A numbing cold slid through me, sweeping away any remorse I might have felt as I pulled my power forward and sent it into his thick chest. The black eyes widened in inexpressible pain for just a beat in time and then dulled and darkened as he died beneath my power. “To Hades with you fool, for God hath tired of you.”
Leaving the bodies there, I turned away and headed toward the Red Knight. Somewhere deep in my core I felt concern for the coldness that was even now keeping me from feeling remorse at killing the devil soldier. Somewhere a warning was sounding a strident call. I knew I was sliding toward my dark side. It was my greatest fear. But as my heart broke at the thought that my Dialle would send assassins after me, I couldn’t quite bring myself to care.
Right at that moment I wanted to kill them all. And it really didn’t matter to me how black my soul became.
* * * * *
“Have you heard from Dialle?”
I glanced at my sister’s hopeful face and knew I couldn’t tell her my fears. I simply shook my head. “You heard from Torre?”
She visibly deflated. “No. I thought for sure he’d have contacted me by now.”
“You know they’re in a parallel dimension right? It’s not easy to communicate between where they are and where we are.”
It was kind of a lie. I think. But I was willing to do anything at that point to get the fearful look off Darma’s face. Torre was the first man she’d fallen in love with and she didn’t really know the rules. All she knew was that she had no control over what was happening to her at that moment.
And my sister is all about control.
Over the last few days I’d watched her condense down into a traumatized shell of her former self. And though there were times when we’d been growing up that I’d have given anything to see her lose some of her starch, I was finding that it wasn’t as pleasant an experience for me as I’d thought it would be.
“I know you’re right. But I can’t shake the feeling that something’s wrong. He should have found a way to communicate with me by now.”
I let that thought drift away on a wave of silence. We were walking down the street near Darma’s home, returning from a shopping trip. Not in any way your traditional female, it usually took a cataclysmic event to force me into shopping. But with everybody who usually anchored me off planet and out of my plane of existence—or possibly trying to kill me—I’d been wobbly enough that an invitation for lunch and shopping had seemed, momentarily, like a good idea.
It had only taken a few minutes in my snotty sister’s company to remind me why it was about as far from a good idea as you can get.
“I miss Father and Myra.”
I lifted an eyebrow. “Really?” I mean, I missed our father, Seraphim James Phelps too, but his sister the cranky Archangel with a pretty sizeable stick up her narrow ass was hard to miss.
Darma scowled at me. “Don’t
you
?”
I shrugged. Never once had Darma asked me about my Settling. It was as if she was afraid to know which way I was gonna go with it. But having the lighter side of the family off for several weeks at a Heavenly conference was so
not
doing me any good. All I had for influence on the light side was Darma.
Bleurgh!
“I miss Father. It’s hard to miss Aunt Myra.”
Darma didn’t say anything. I couldn’t help feeling that her silence meant she sort of agreed with me.
“Hey, baby! Wanna suck my dick?”
My head jerked around and I spotted two human males leaning against the side of one of the narrow brownstones that were prevalent in Darma’s part of town. It was generally a very nice area, filled with newly updated homes with professional, young families. But occasionally you’d get a bad element moving into one of the homes that hadn’t been updated yet.
These guys looked like they were part of that bad element.
I stopped and turned toward them, my body going rigid with anger. “I’m sure you weren’t talking to me, slimeball.”
The taller one pushed off from the wall and strode toward us, obviously too blinded by testosterone and his own good opinion of himself to realize he was playing with fire. The other guy followed, looking a little more like he had a brain. A worry line ran deeply between his bushy eyebrows.
Darma grabbed my arm. “Just ignore them, Astra. Let’s go.”
I shook her off. “Get behind me, Darma.”
“Oh Hell no, Astra. You’re
not
going to vaporize my neighbors.”
I snorted. “I won’t vaporize him if he says he’s sorry.”
The guy strode up to us, stopping a mere four feet away. His dark eyes flashed with appreciation as he slid his gaze over Darma. Apparently he went for the beautiful but cranky type. “How about the four of us go someplace and get naked?”
I grinned, but there was nothing happy about the expression. “Does that actually ever work for you? I mean, how many women have fallen into your arms when you yelled out for them to get naked and suck your dick?”