All Hallows Night (Night Series) (20 page)

Lying down, I pulled him beside me and he immediately crossed his legs over mine.

“I think you’re beautiful,” I whispered.

His lips twisted. “I don’t disgust you?”

Toying with the end of one of his dark curls, I shook my head. “I don’t think that’s possible.”

Then I kicked off the sheets and stretched out with my arms above my head. “Your turn, look at me. All of me.”

“You don’t need to do this. I showed myself to you, knowing I’m nothing like what you’re used to.”

“You’re right, you’re nothing like Luc or any other male Neph in this place.” Total transparency—Asher would never get anything less than the truth from me. “And that’s what intrigues me so much.” I ran my finger down the bridge of his nose. “First time I met you, I fell for your eyes. Because they were warm and brown. Not lavender, not jade or sapphire or glowing like molten rubies... but because they were so perfect it literally took my breath. And when I saw you die”—I closed my eyes—“a part of me died too. Asher, from the moment we’ve met, you’re all I’ve wanted.”

His lashes fluttered and a deep sigh escaped him. He sat up. It was his turn to look. Every bed partner I’d ever taken, I’d transformed into whatever vision of sexy they wanted so I was always perfect for them. There was no fear of not measuring up, of having them witness my flaws.

That my breasts, while perky, weren’t very large. That my stomach, while flat and toned, had the tiniest bump at the bottom. That there was a dimple in both my butt cheeks, and that I too bore a horrible scar—I was terrified and had to close my eyes when his fingers traced the jagged edges of the heart.

He spent a long time tracing it, learning it, before doing to it as I’d done to him and kissing its very center.

I hissed and almost died when a dry sobbing sound escaped my lips. Gentle fingers stroked my jaw.

“Some wounds never heal,” I whispered back at him.

“This one will, little demon. This one will.”

And it was in that moment, in that room, that I allowed myself to fall in love again.

“A
sher, I want to tell you something and I don’t want to make you angry,” I whispered sometime later. We were done exploring the nuances and intricacies of one another’s bodies and were just simply holding on to each other.

“What?” He rubbed a strand of my hair through his fingers.

A sick, twisty feeling ate me up and I wasn’t sure whether I should say this to him, because I wasn’t sure if he’d understand where I was coming from, but I decided to trust my instincts.

“I don’t want to have sex with you. At least not yet.”

His lips thinned and I smiled, wiggling my finger over them until he relaxed them. “Why?”

“Because I think I realized something tonight, why I healed. I control two demons now, and I only need to use one to heal myself. I’ve depended on Lust to feed me for so long that sex became pointless and meaningless. It’s not even fun anymore.”

“But you don’t want it to be like that with us?”

I liked how well he got me.

I nodded. “When we do do it, I don’t want it to be because I’m leaking pheromones that make you crazy, or because she needs to be fed.”

He laughed, and I was ready to slap him, but he grabbed my finger and gave it a hard nip. “I’m immune to your pheromones, Pandora. I can’t be entranced by a Nephilim, any Nephilim.”

“But—”

“That’s not the point, is it?” He finished for me.

“No.”

Moonlight sliced through the narrow glass window, casting a silvery beam of light like a sword down his body.

“No,” I whispered again and traced the light with my finger, across the grooved muscles of his stomach. “Because when I do finally do it, I want you to know it’s because I’m making love and not having sex.”

The end of that sentence was so hard for me to say out loud that I barely managed to squeak it out. Rolling over on top of me, he latched his fingers through mine and his weight wasn’t unpleasant. His scent wrapped me up in a velvety hug and the man was seriously making me reconsider my stance on the whole temporary-celibacy thing.

“Then we wait.”

It was like the world took a collective breath and held it. Literally no sound stirred, no hum of a ceiling fan, no chirping of locusts, no dripping of a leaky faucet. Nothing but us in this space, in this dark room, locking blue eyes to brown.

The fear that I’d shoved away back in the desert came volleying back.

What if I was all wrong? What if Asher was better at deception than I’d given him credit for? What if this was still some elaborate ruse? But then why would he tell me about working with Grace? Why set himself up this way? Put himself in such danger? Live with me inside a carnival full of monsters that would like nothing more than to claim the death of a priest as their own?

What if—

“Stop.” His deep voice commanded and my pulse fluttered into my throat.

I shook my head when his hands clamped tight to my face.

“Little demon, your thoughts are so close to the surface. Don’t you believe me yet? Have I given you any cause to doubt me?”

Grabbing his thumb, I closed my eyes. “Fool me once, Ash. I want so badly for all this to be true.”

His lips hovered so close, so impossibly close, that it would be nothing, nothing at all, to lean forward and claim them. To meld us together until I could no longer tell where he began and I ended, to make us one. But there were still so many questions, so much that needed to be explained, and until I was absolutely sure, I would wait.

“What happened in Hell that night?” I sighed, because I needed to know. I was tired of guessing, of wondering, of reliving the moment I’d seen him shatter in front of me.

Nuzzling my neck one final time, he moved off but didn’t let me go. He turned me so that now I was spooned against him, against his rigid thickness. I sighed, melting into his touch.

“I can’t tell you why I was there,” he began, “but you should know I was simply a catalyst. If it hadn’t been me, it would have been something else. No matter what, you were going to Hell that night.”

I wrapped his arm tighter around me. Holding Asher was like holding the ultimate blankie. I felt absolutely safe from the monsters, ironic considering I could be harboring
the
enemy.

“Grace manufactured a way to make sure I could follow you into Hell, a way that would guarantee my people would know I’d followed you in. I had no idea just how close you’d come to dying that night, or how powerful Wrath would be against you. We’d hoped that your own demonic nature would help prevent complete enthrallment.”

I shuddered when I thought about the father of all nightmares, the beautiful, naked man chained to the stones of Hell. Not as sexy as it might sound.

“I tried to resist him, but if you hadn’t thrown yourself on me, I doubt I would have made it out of there. I thought you were trying to kill me,” I murmured.

“No, never.” He rubbed my bottom lip. “I was working my way to you when I saw Pestilence hopping your way. You were overrun and I didn’t think I’d get there in time.”

His arms banded almost painfully tightly, as if he too fought the terrors of that night.

“Then I saw my chance to kill myself off.” He emphasized the word
kill
. “If I could have warned you, I would have, but I doubt you would have trusted me then. You didn’t trust much of what I said.”

“And yet I still totally lusted after your ass, so yeah, go figure. Clearly I’m wrong in so many ways.” I giggled and he pressed a quick, almost chaste, kiss to my ear.

“I had to make my people think I’d died that night. It’s why I created the Gray Man.”

I rolled over to face him. “You created him? You weren’t born with him?”

“No. He’s my secret and the only way I could safely get you out of Hell without alerting anyone that it was really me.”

I frowned. “But you’re here now. Wouldn’t it be a simple matter of coming to find you?”

“That’s not how we work. When one of us dies, we’re immediately replaced. Life moves on.”

“Just like that?” I snapped my fingers. “I can’t even imagine that ever happening with my family. They’d scour the earth until they found me.”

He snorted. “I don’t doubt that. Thing of it is, it was in their best interest that I die. Even if they did look for priests’ bodies, they would never have looked for mine.”

“Why?”

Frustration mounted in his eyes, and he gave the tip of my hair a gentle tug.

“Read the book. Everything I can’t tell you—it’s in there. Crack the code.”

“Ash...” I rolled my eyes. “That book doesn’t make any sense, and if you say it’s written partially in cypher, I need the key anyway.”

“Grace wants to have a meeting with you. A real one this time.”

I closed my eyes. “I don’t know, Ash. I believe what you told me, but I can’t just let go of this pain either. It’s like being told the guy the cops claimed killed your brother and is now on death row isn’t actually the real killer. I’ve fixated on her for so long that I don’t know how to just shut this off.”

“I hate to tell you this, but you’re going to have to. I can swear to you that if you don’t meet with her, the Order will keep you running in circles that will only wind up getting us killed.”

“Us? No, you mean me. You’re too smart to—”

“I meant exactly what I said.” His words grew thick. “I told you, I’m here now. Where you go, I go.”

And while that was a totally swoon-worthy response, I hated that he’d do that. I shoved him hard enough to make him glare at me.

“Don’t you dare act stupid.”

“I could say the same to you! Do you have any idea how awful it’s been seeing you nearly killed on my watch? Down in that cave—”

I glared. “Where’d you go that night? When I turned around you were gone and I was running for my life. I thought you had my back.”

I didn’t mean for the hurt to leak out, but I guess I was still sort of salty about him ditching me the way he had.

“I had my eye on you the entire time, and if you’d just done what I’d told you to do and kept your head down, that would have never happened. Do you realize how close I came that night to killing Chaos? I almost had her.” He shook his head, and disgust scrawled a tight line across his forehead.

“I thought you bailed, that you were behind everything.”

His eyes flashed for a split second, and then he was running his fingers though my hair and giving it a couple of hard yanks.

“Hey,” I snapped.

“Demons, you drive me crazy. Did you honestly think I’d help you out as many times as I did only to betray you in the end? That’s not a priest’s way.”

“Nothing about you is common, Ash. Nothing. And let’s not forget the multiple times you hurt me.”

Kissing my knuckles, he nodded. “Touché, but in my defense, it was always to protect you.”

“Which I didn’t know at the time. Why were you at Grace’s so long today?”

He cleared his throat and the playful teasing of just seconds ago was replaced by a serious gleam in his eye.

“After the cave this morning, the positions of the bodies and the way they were found, it disturbed me. It didn’t feel natural.”

“Nothing about their deaths was natural, Priest.”

He rolled his eyes. “Obviously, but even though a priest’s job is primarily to put down you sinfully gorgeous creatures—”

I snorted.

“We do occasionally come across others. Why display them that way, in the middle of a desert, where no one would happen upon them except us?”

“Because that’s how the Order designed it.”

“Bingo.” He snapped his fingers.

“Wait. What?” I crooked a brow, completely confused. “Why is that a shock, we were talking about that at the cave, but now you’re acting like it’s some sort of revelation.”

“Think about it, Pandora. The Order designed it that way. But zombies don’t belong to the Order.”

I gasped, feeling so stupid that I hadn’t made the connection earlier. Excitement bubbled through me. “A zombie takes its cue from its queen.”

“Exactly. Grace and I talked it over and we’re absolutely positive that whatever is out in that desert, it’s not sanctioned by the hive. And I had a second hunch, to go back and check on those graves we’d dug for them earlier. They were empty.”

“Empty? Again? Zombies don’t come back that way.”

His look said that he knew it too.

I scratched my jaw. “So if it’s not hive sanctioned and zombies are reanimating at will now, what in the hell is going on?”

“That’s what we’re trying to figure out.”

“Okay, so fine.” I shrugged. “Why did you go back to her tonight?”

“To get you this.” Rolling onto his side, he reached for his jeans and quickly dug something out of his pocket, then opened his palm in the slice of moonlight so that I could see the vial in his hand. “Those bites on you, they weren’t normal.”

“Normal is so subjective at this point.” I laughed.

His dimple flashed at me and I couldn’t help but rub my finger over it.

“You weren’t healing. There are ways, as you know”—he glanced at my chest—“of making sure that damage inflicted to an immortal lingers. But if you can get the antidote in time, the damage can be reversed.”