The Coveted (The Unearthly) (20 page)

Chapter 23

My entire body
tingled at his words, or maybe it was being in that house and in his presence for so long. Whatever it was, it felt as though it was killing me slowly.

It took effort to focus on his offer. It was vague, which meant that it was probably exceedingly unfair.

I cocked my head to the side. “Why do you want my soul so badly?” I asked the man in the suit. I narrowed my eyes on him. Not that I expected to receive an honest answer. Out of everything I’d learned about him, the only thing that I knew for sure was his own treachery. “Once I become a vampire, you’ll get my soul then.”

“You misunderstand me Gabrielle. I am offering you a place by my side.”

I laughed at that, and I swear I saw hellfire burn within his eyes.

“You scorn my offer?” His tone was so casual that I almost thought he’d shrug and move on to some other subject. But something about the set of his face alerted me that I’d entered very dangerous waters.

“Not at all. I’m just having a hard time believing that you would share your hard earned position as the leader of the damned with anyone, let alone me.” I wasn’t having a hard time believing it; I just plain didn’t believe it.

He ran a finger down my chest, stopping it only once it rested in the valley between my breasts. “You are much sharper than I expected,”
—
gee thanks
—
“but here I do think you’ve misinterpreted my intentions. I am not going to share my power with you, but you will not be a prisoner of hell. You will be my consort.”

I wanted to disbelieve his offer completely; I knew that’s what I should do. But it was the name I’d heard whispered for the past week that gave me pause. I’d been called the devil’s consort by other entities. Perhaps this was a genuine proposition.

I wandered over to a chaise with a suspicious stain on it to sit and think. Behind me the devil paced, the click of his heels jarring.

My skin prickled. The room was unnaturally cold, as though something as intangible as happiness had been sucked from the space.

I rubbed my arms and thought over the devil’s offer. Being a vampire meant that my soul would be damned
—
if it wasn’t already. And that meant a one-way ticket to hell. Only I wouldn’t be free; I’d be a prisoner.

If I agreed to the devil’s proposition, then the afterlife wouldn’t be as bad as the alternative. It would also mean that Leanne would live
—
if the devil spoke the truth. I doubted he did.

I thought of Leanne, poor, doomed Leanne. She’d made me swear to not give up my soul, not even if someone’s life was at stake. I hadn’t put the pieces together; I hadn’t realized that the someone she was talking about was herself.

I glanced at the red-brown stain on the chair. Choosing to be with the devil meant that I’d willingly choose this, this corruption of the soul. That I couldn’t do.

“No,” I said, making my decision.

The devil’s footsteps stopped clacking against the marble floor. There was something ominous about the silence that followed.

He turned on the balls of his feet, the soles of his Italian leather shoes screeching against the tile. The worst part of the silence was that he didn’t break it. His eyes bore into mine, but his hands stayed clasped behind his back and his legs were rooted firmly in place.

“No,” I repeated, ill at ease with the silence. The room seemed to swallow the sound.

“Come to me,” he finally said.

I didn’t move, partially because I hated taking orders and partially because I knew that getting any closer to him couldn’t lead to anything good.

Tremors began to rack my legs, moving upwards until my entire body shook.

“Come to me,” he repeated, his voice as calm as ever.

My teeth chattered from my trembling body. “No,” I managed to get out.

He sighed, as though I were a kid having a tantrum. He held out his hand and flicked his fingers.

My legs began moving of their own accord. I fought for control of my limbs, but I only succeeded in making my steps more halting and clumsy. I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming from the sensation. In jerky steps I’d crossed the room until I stood in front of him.

“Was that really so hard?” he asked.

An angry tear slipped out of my cheek. He focused on it. “You’re crying. Here, let me.” He reached up, but rather than wiping away the tear, he backhanded me.

My head snapped back, my knees gave out, and I crumpled to the ground.

“You are being ridiculous. You will agree to my terms,” he insisted. He didn’t sound even mildly upset. Like all he was trying to do was slap some sense into me.

I rubbed my burning cheek. “I refuse your offer.”

He kicked me in the gut and I screamed. That brought a smile to his face. “How I enjoy a good lover’s quarrel.” He kicked me again, the pain lacerating my body and bringing tears to my eyes.

“I’m not your lover,” I said around the pain.

“Oh really? Then what, exactly, do you think we were doing that night we were together?”

I didn’t breathe. Where a minute ago I felt cold, now I felt hot, as though I were burning up from the inside out. That couldn’t be true, just like all the other lies he’d told me.

But he does tell the truth sometimes,
a small voice inside me whispered.

“Oh, I do wish you could remember,” he said. “Then again, what’s one night when we have many more ahead of us?”

No, I refused to believe it. Some things were too disturbing to even consider.

“I won’t agree to what you’ve asked of me.”

The devil crouched down next to me. A small smile played along his lips; to him I was amusing. He threaded his fingers through my hair and slammed my head into the ground. The marble beneath my head cracked, and I felt a warm wetness pool beneath my head.

If he were anyone else, I would’ve fought for my life. However, this was the devil. Violence would only beget more violence. And in that arena, I was hopelessly outgunned.

“You know the great thing about being a vampire?” he said conversationally. “You can withstand immense injuries and heal yourself.” Even as he said this, I felt the torn skin of my skull stitch itself back together. “But that doesn’t prevent you from feeling pain.”

To emphasize his point, he slammed my head against the ground again, cracking the marble floors further.

“You do realize this is my day job?” he said. “I know just how much psychological and physical trauma will break a person.”

He moved his hand from my hair to cup my jaw. He squeezed it to the point of pain. “I know exactly how to torture you to agree to my terms. The only reason I have not cut out your tongue, smashed in your eyes, and disemboweled you
—
just to name a few
—
is that I’d prefer that you are not under duress. But that is my
preference
, not a rule I have to abide by.”

I guess smashing my head into the ground, back-handing me, and kicking me in the stomach didn’t count as duress.

“Also,” he continued, “your form happens to please my eyes.” He ran a finger down the exposed skin of my arm, his eyes trailing the movement.

I closed my eyes and breathed in and out my nostrils. Now I needed to be brave. The rest of this evening would be worse, much, much worse. At this moment, Leanne came to mind. No wonder her eyes had that hollow, haunted look to them for the past few weeks. She’d known all along that we’d be tortured, we’d be killed.

If I just agreed, then maybe they’d let her go. But lying here, in a house made from the agony and sin of others,
maybe
didn’t seem good enough. Not when that same seer insisted that I let her die before I acquiesced to the devil’s demands. I had to trust that based on whatever she foresaw, she thought that choosing my soul over her body would lead to the best outcome. It still felt a whole lot like betrayal.

My body tensed as the words left my lips. “I will not accept your offer. Not now, not ever.”

“You foolish girl!” he shrieked in my face. He snapped his fingers and we were instantly back in the cathedral.

He threw me down the steps we appeared before, my cheek banging against a femur. The sound echoed throughout the room.

He grabbed me by my hair and heaved me up. I shrieked as the force used to lift me up ripped hair from its roots. I felt a trickle down my face as blood seeped from my head wounds.

The devil dragged me across the room to the foot of the altar Leanne laid across. “She will die!” he said, thrusting my face towards her. His voice rang out again and again as the sound resonated against the walls.

“I know.” The words slipped out, hushed and broken.

The devil backhanded me again, this time with enough force to send me sprawling across the room.

He stalked towards me and knelt. “Do you know how many others would die for this offer?” He hauled me to my feet. “How dare you reject me!” The bones of the church shuddered at his voice.

He held me in front of him, the fabric of my dress twisted in his hands. I’d never seen such distilled anger within someone’s eyes; I could feel his hands shaking with his rage.

His gaze never left mine when he gave the order. “Kill the sacrifice.”

Chapter 24

My eyes moved
to Leanne’s unconscious form. Shadows peeled themselves from the dark recesses of the room and clustered around the altar. As I watched, their form began to change from something dark and wispy to something solid. Within a matter of seconds, they looked like humans. Whether they were or not was a whole different story.

“You kill her and you lose the only bargaining chip you already have,” I said to the devil.

He laughed. “I don’t think so. There are plenty of people you care about. I will wipe each one of them out, one by one, until you agree to my terms.”

Something about his statement was off. From what Andre had told me about him, the devil didn’t think in terms of a single soul. He always had a larger strategy at play.

In fact, now that I thought about it, I was pretty sure the devil had just slipped up. His offer and the lengths he’d go to get me to agree to it weren’t normal. Which meant that either my soul was particularly coveted, or this was bigger than me.

“I won’t ever agree to your terms.” I glanced over at the altar.

He flashed me a condescending smile. “Forever is a long time, and no mortal I’ve met has held to such absolutes. Everyone has a breaking point.”

“But you only have an evening to convince me,” I said.

His eyebrows rose, and his grin deepened. “You think I only have an evening? You do not understand the property of ley lines. Here, within these energy roads, the laws of time are bendable so long as the user knows how to manipulate them. And I know how to do just that. So this evening can be stretched into an eternity, should you decide to holdout
forever
.”

My heart sunk at his words.

“What is going on?” Leanne’s groggy voice filled the cavernous cathedral. I could no longer see her beyond all the beings that crowded around her.

She didn’t sound like someone who knew they were about to die. She sounded scared and surprised. Maybe I’d misinterpreted what she made me swear to earlier. And now my conscience warred against itself: break a promise, save a life, and damn myself this evening, or save my soul and leave Leanne to die.

“Ah,” the devil said, turning his head towards the altar. “It seems your friend has woken up.”

“What . . . ?” I could hear the confusion in Leanne’s voice. “No
—
” Her voice cut out to a scream and the smell of blood hit my nostrils.

At the smell, anger rose within me. I would no longer be meek. That had gotten me nowhere.

So I did something really, really stupid.

While the devil looked away, I lifted my leg and kicked him square in the chest, throwing all my weight into it. The force threw him across the room, and he smashed into the far wall.

The bones in the wall behind him shattered, and a plume of dust and decayed bone billowed out from the impact.

I ran for the altar, where the smell of blood had increased. I managed to easily elbow my way through the minions that surrounded Leanne since their attention no longer focused on her. Instead their bodies stood rigid, and their black, beady eyes were trained on the devil, probably shocked that anyone would try to harm him.

When I got to Leanne’s broken body and took in her absent, unfocused stare, I lost it. I fell on my friend, clutching her to me. No pulse pounded through her veins, no air moved through her lungs. She was gone.

It shouldn’t have ended this way; she shouldn’t have had to die simply because she was my friend. I was a coward to not insist on letting her go.

I sobbed over her body, only looking up once I felt the hairs along my arm and my neck stand on end.

The devil was impaled against the wall, three sharp white bones jutting out from his torso. They must have speared themselves right through his body when he hit the wall.

As I watched, he put a hand to one of his stomach wounds. It came away drenched in bright red blood.

For a second his eyes pondered the blood, and then a line between his eyebrows formed and his brows pulled together.

From the windows near the top of the church, a bolt of lightning lit up the cathedral, and from below the ground trembled. It seemed as though energy was gathering around the devil.

His lips drew downwards and his hair lifted.

Not again.

Andre had done something similar at Bishopcourt when his anger had possessed him. Something told me that Andre’s show of power would be nothing compared to this.

And it wasn’t. The devil let loose a roar, and the room exploded. Bones of all sizes and shapes burst from the walls. I shrieked and covered myself as fragments hit me, some of the sharper ones embedding themselves into my skin.

Above me the roof had blasted upwards. I only had precious seconds to get out of the room before the thing came back down and crushed me. If ever I needed to use my unnatural speed, now was the time.

I sprinted across the room and back into the catacombs I had passed through earlier.

“
Get her!
” The devil’s voice no longer sounded human. For someone whose day job was to torture damned souls, he sure didn’t deal with pain well.

Seconds after the words left his mouth, the ceiling slammed back down to earth. The ground shook and a burst of wind blew past me from the collision.

I glanced behind me and saw that rubble covered the entrance to the cathedral. I didn’t know how much time that would give me to get away, but I wasn’t going to waste it.

I sprinted down the subterranean hallways, turning down passages without stopping to worry where they’d take me. Anywhere was better than here.

The truth was, if we were on a ley line, I had no idea what city or world I was in. Nor did I know if I could get away from the devil on a night like tonight even if I found my way off the ley line.

“Gabrielle!” a girl’s voice called out.

That voice.
It couldn’t be.

I stopped running and turned around to where the source of the voice had come from. Behind me stood three people I thought I’d never see again: Oliver, Andre, and Leanne.