Demon (9 page)

At last, a champion, or at the very least a cohort. Someone with the power and ability to stand up
to Azazel’s high-handed ways. I gave Beloch a brilliant smile as I sank down on the ottoman.

“So tell me, young lady,” he said, leaning back and surveying me out of those wintry eyes. “What brings you here to the Dark City? Besides our unpleasant friend over there?”

“I have no idea.” I took a tentative sip of the brandy. Again, the taste more than made up for the lack of color, and the richness of it burned my tongue.

“There is no need for games, Beloch,” Azazel snapped. “You know as well as I just why I brought her here. We need answers.”

“And how do you intend to get those answers if you’re terrified of her?”

Azazel’s snort conveyed his contempt for such a suggestion. “Terrified? Hardly. Even at full strength she would never be a match for me. She insists that she has no knowledge of her powers, but even if she did I’m well equipped to counter any of them.”

“Now, why don’t I believe you?” Beloch said in a silky voice.

I sat very still, cradling the brandy I didn’t want to drink, observing. While they were ostensibly talking about me, they almost seemed to have forgotten my existence, an ancient enmity surfacing instead. Which was fine with me—I had my own
skin to worry about. As long as they were fighting, I could stay beneath the radar and try to figure out how to escape.

“You’re terrified the prophecy will come true,” Beloch continued, “so terrified you might have destroyed her before you found out what the Fallen are so desperate to discover. You won’t find out what secrets she holds until you face your fears.”

“Do not be tiresome, Beloch,” Azazel said, unmoved. “I am far older than you are—I never let human fears and frailties affect me.”

This was enough to startle me. If hunky, gorgeous Azazel was much older than the wizened Beloch, then the rules had really gone out the window. But then, I knew that. There was a great deal I knew, simmering just beneath my consciousness, things I didn’t want to remember. Was afraid to remember. It could all stayed buried as far as I was concerned.

Beloch snorted in amusement. “You may be older, Azazel, but you are scarcely wiser. I give you a choice. Take her back and test the prophecy and your resistance to it. Once you know the answer to that, bring her back and I’ll find the answers you need. That, or she stays here with me.”

Azazel’s expression didn’t change, but his hooded glance darted my way, and he couldn’t
miss my watchfulness. He didn’t argue, however, rising from his seat and tossing back the brandy with a gesture that brought a disapproving sniff from Beloch. And then he looked at me. “Come.”

God, I hated that word in his deep, cold voice. Everything about him was icy, and I glanced back at Beloch’s avuncular expression, wondering if it would do any good to throw myself on his mercy.

But I wasn’t that naïve. Beloch might seem like a kindly old professor, but there was a hardness in his eyes that he might reserve simply for an old enemy like Azazel, or that might be a clue to his real nature. Either way, I knew enough to think before I jumped from one trap into another.

I rose, setting my barely touched snifter of brandy down and giving Beloch a smile. “It was so nice to meet you.”

For some reason, my words amused him. “I look forward to continuing our association. Don’t let Azazel intimidate you. You have more power than you realize, if you only decide to acknowledge it. I expect it will be very interesting to discover just how susceptible our friend is.”

Not exactly my friend, but I said nothing as Azazel muttered something unflattering, took my arm in his hard grip, and pulled me out of the
room. A few minutes later we were out in the dark streets of the strange city, emerging on a lower level from the restaurant near a black, fast-flowing river. Earlier, in what had passed for daylight, the city had been shrouded with shadow. Now it was pitch-dark, and I was suddenly ready to drop. Had it been only this morning that I’d been packing for a trip to the Great Barrier Reef and bright, endless sunshine? And now I was in some strange, colorless universe, once more a prisoner, and the fight went out of me as exhaustion swept in. All I wanted to do was find some quiet place to figure out what the hell I was going to do.

“We haven’t far to go,” Azazel said, and if it had been anyone else, I might have thought he had read my exhaustion and was offering respite. Both things were impossible—he didn’t care what I was feeling, and he would never volunteer comfort. He was my enemy, and I couldn’t afford to forget it.

I didn’t say anything, letting him steer me down the street, past the gray inhabitants with their soft voices and disinterested eyes. I had no idea what Beloch wanted him to do, and I didn’t care. As long as I could collapse in a bed for twenty-four hours, I’d be just fine. I stole a glance at my hard-eyed companion. He’d leave me alone, wouldn’t he? In the past he’d wanted
nothing more than to keep his distance, as if I were unclean.

But he hadn’t released my arm, and I made no effort to break his hold as he guided me along the street, back toward the brownstone we’d exited a few hours earlier. There was a strange, perverse comfort in his touch. He was my enemy.

But he was the only familiar thing in this strange world. And for that reason, I wasn’t willing to let him go.

A
ZAZEL KEPT HIS PACE MEA
sured, determined not to give in to the fury that had swept over his body. He despised Beloch and always had, and the feeling was mutual. It wasn’t simply that Beloch was one of the strange, quasi-mortal inhabitants of the unknowable world of the Dark City. Azazel routinely disliked all of the inhabitants—they were like the Nephilim without the appetite. Empty, unreadable creatures, not human nor Fallen nor sanctified, and Beloch, as ruler and high mayor of the Dark City, was the worst of them.

But his power was undeniable for all that it was incomprehensible. He was the one to deal with if you needed to use any of the Dark City’s unpleasant assets. Such as the Truth Breakers. The Truth Breakers were the only beings in existence who
could extract the truth from anyone, though their methods ranged from painful to shattering. The most stubborn never survived, and Azazel had seen more than one body explode into countless pieces as the process reached its conclusion, and the memory still haunted him.

He had survived his own encounter with them countless years ago, and so would the Lilith. She was too epic and powerful a demon to be destroyed by them, no matter how brutal the Truth Breakers were. They would extract the truth from her, and he could leave her here in this bleak, empty world, where she could do no harm and he would never have to see her again.

The Dark City had existed for almost as long as Azazel could remember, a mysterious, floating place of supposed sanctuary and peace, though in truth he had no knowledge of who and what came here. He only knew that those who’d been brought were usually broken in the end. But he expected most of them had been human, unable to withstand the rigors the place offered. He’d been called there centuries ago for both punishment and questioning, when he’d refused Uriel’s demands one too many times. He’d survived. Just as she would.

Beloch oversaw the Truth Breakers, as well as everything in the Dark City, and he’d always
taken special pleasure in the more brutal methods his underlings employed. He sat in his quarters looking like a kindly wizard while he engineered atrocities that sickened Azazel, who had seen the worst that the creatures could offer.

He was convinced Beloch had wanted to take the Lilith immediately, and he’d known an odd regret. Azazel would have forced her to admit the truth eventually, without turning her bones to jelly and her skin to flakes of mold. He could only hope it wouldn’t have to go that far. Physically she was just a girl. Evidently she could no longer shift into the ancient forms she’d once used, of Lamia, the snake woman who devoured children, or the wind demon with raptor’s talons. No matter how hard he’d pushed her when he first took her to Australia, she’d stayed in this form, even facing death. Clearly she no longer had the gift of transformation. Because she was physically as frail as most humans, she would give up her secrets quickly. He could have gotten them out of her, but in bringing her to the Dark City he had no choice but to do as Beloch commanded.

Now he almost wished Beloch had taken her, gotten it over with. The old man’s sadistic alternative made him furious. He despised the Lilith for the vicious, murdering creature she was, for her power and her wickedness, her cruelty over
millennia. But Beloch was right about one thing. He despised her most for the prophecy that held them both, and until he could let go of that rage, a rage he refused to call fear, she would still have power over him.

She’d stopped with her infernal questions, at least for now. She was silent as he force-marched her down the street, no more whats or wheres or whys. He would take her back to the house, shove her into a bedroom, and proceed to get drunk. Beloch had thrown down a challenge, but he was in no hurry to pick it up. And in no mood to test himself.

He loathed the Dark City. It was depressing. Not that that surprised him—not much in creation didn’t depress him nowadays. The raw, screaming pain of Sarah’s death had dimmed to a constant ache, and when he thought of her, which he did often, he did his best to let go of her. She’d hate his mourning. He’d known her so well—if she’d lived out her life normally, she would have had time to prepare him for her loss. Instead, she’d been ripped away by the Nephilim, and Raziel’s wife had taken her place.

At the thought of Raziel’s wife, cold anger stirred inside him. There was nothing he could do about it, and he knew that what had happened wasn’t her fault. He’d even gone so far as
to accept blood from her, though he’d refused to use her wrist, insisting that one of the healers remove the blood from her body first. He’d been starving, close to death, when he’d finally returned to Sheol. He would have welcomed eternal darkness, but that wasn’t his fate. Once he died, he’d continue in everlasting torment, judgment for the sin of falling from grace, for loving a human woman.

Over the thousands of years, he’d often regretted that first impulsive reaching for what he wanted. But not since Sarah had appeared in his life. Sarah had made everything worth it.

And this … this
thing
walking beside him. It was foretold that she would take Sarah’s place by his side, in his bed, to be his consort and wife and rule the darkness with him. But the prophecy was wrong.

She was trying to ensnare him, he knew that much. He could feel the power of her sexuality, the sexuality that had crept into good men’s dreams and seduced them, the sexuality that had filled the beds and pallets of a thousand demons. She was the Lilith, irresistible to most, and it was no wonder he looked at her and thought of sex. No wonder he’d given in to temptation and kissed her when he’d left her in Brisbane. It wouldn’t happen again.

Beloch underestimated him. Azazel had been the Alpha since the fall until Raziel took over seven years ago, and as such he’d chosen the Source, the woman whose blood sustained those who had no wives. He had never thought about finding the perfect mate. When the time came, the right woman had always been there. He’d recognized them, taken them, mated with them, ruled with them. And when one died, he’d simply choose another, loving each one as best he could.

But Sarah had been different from the very beginning. He wasn’t going to think about her, he reminded himself. He just needed to remember that he’d bedded countless women, icy ones, shy ones, hot-blooded sexual ones. He’d performed as he’d needed to, as he wanted to, with tenderness, with passion, with love; but never had one of them held any power over him. Not until Sarah.

The Lilith would hold no power either. He would prove to Beloch and himself that her body was simply a tool he could use and discard, that he would never fall prey to her siren’s lure. He had for a brief moment. He never would again.

The house was just as they’d left it. He hadn’t bothered to lock the place—most of the inhabitants of the Dark City steered clear of him. He frightened them, he knew it. Presumably they looked at him and saw garish color and eternal
damnation, and they wanted neither. The denizens of the Dark City worshipped truth and moderation, attraction rather than desire, appetite rather than hunger. He and his kind were anathema to the curbed needs of the Dark City.

He had never stopped to question who and what populated this drab and sorrowful place. It was Beloch’s kingdom, a place out of time, and the shadows who moved here seemed more like lost souls than human or demon. He didn’t care. They were no threat to him or his kind—not even the Truth Breakers or Beloch’s police force, the Nightmen. They couldn’t leave this place; they simply existed. But even here they couldn’t touch him. They could only touch her, because he’d brought her here for their cruel services.

He could smell her. He’d known her scent the moment she’d walked out her apartment building door that morning, the subtle fragrance of her skin. He wondered if she emitted a mating scent, if that was how she’d doomed so many. If so, he was mostly immune to it. He looked at her and wanted her. He knew that. Beloch must think him a fool not to have accepted that simple fact. Everyone should want the Lilith, even a dried-up husk of a man such as Beloch.

But while he wanted her, he hadn’t been tempted to touch her or take her, and he could
have, so many times. It would go no further than desire, not action. He wanted her and he ignored it, as he ignored so many of his appetites. Beloch was a fool to think he’d be no match for her or his own needs.

He pushed the buttons on the old-fashioned wall switch in the front hallway, turning on the dim lights that only made the shadows deepen. She looked around her nervously, as if worried about what might be hiding in the shadows. She was foolish. The only thing she had to fear was standing right next to her. At least, until he handed her over.