Blood and Sin (The Infernari Book 1) (15 page)

She gave me a petulant look. “Then come and babysit me if you’re so scared. And if I bite someone, you can burn me to ash like you’ve sworn to do so many times . . . you deceitful liar.”

“Lana . . .” I warned.

She stepped up into my space. “Or will you always break your oaths when it comes to killing me?”

I stared at her, the only sign of my turmoil the air hissing from my nostrils.

Below us, a swaggering group of drunk guys caught sight of Lana and started hollering, “Show us your tits!”

“See, not a good place to be.” I turned back to my room. “Me? I’m going to sleep.”

Lana, if anything, only looked more fascinated.

The moment I returned to my room, her bedroom door banged open and her footsteps stormed down the hall.

“Damnit.” I slumped against the wall, utterly exhausted by her.

She was going out no matter what I said. And why shouldn’t we go out? Enjoy ourselves for once? I certainly needed a real meal after that dinner. Hell, maybe I could even get her sloshed and wheedle some more information out of her. Could be fun.

It would beat wiling away the evening in Grandmaddox’s house of hell.

Fine, Lana, you win.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” I muttered, pushing into the hallway and charging after her.

I caught up with her on the curb and steered her toward Bourbon Street. “You want to see a human shit show? Let’s go see a human shit show.”

Chapter 12

Lana

Holy Mother of
Gods, this
place
.

Asher was right, people swarmed the streets. And there were so many of them! It was so unlike Abyssos. So unlike everything I had known.

And the way people dressed . . . I’d once read that long ago our royal court had harlequins—people with painted faces and ridiculous attire who were brought in to entertain the old rulers
and their nobles—but mortal memory of those days had long since been wiped away. But I would imagine that if they still existed, they would look something like these people.

Only, with more clothes.

I glanced over at Asher, wondering what he thought of the crowd. But, as usual, his face was closed off, his expression grim. The man could stand to have some fun.

Everything seemed to glitter in bright, luminescent colors. The lights, the beads, the clothes and makeup people wore. It was all so reminiscent of my magic. Here, humans seemed to revel in it.

People staggered and wove through the streets, and the air was heavy with the scents of sweat, human sickness, and strong spirits.

It was terrible, terrible and wonderful, all of it so contradictory.

Bright purple and green lights hung over the outdoor seating area of the building ahead of us, a string of skull-shaped lights draped in the doorway. The sound of raucous laughter drifted out from inside.

Without thinking, I grabbed Asher’s hand, pulling him behind me as I headed toward the store—
restaurant
, I corrected.

For a moment, the hand beneath my own was stiff, unyielding. And then his fingers curled around mine, his hold tightening.

I expected some resistance or, at the very least, a smart remark. But he was uncharacteristically quiet, and he let me pull him along, into the restaurant.

Here the smell of alcohol was strong, as was the smell of cloistered bodies. It brought back memories of gatherings in war tents. Of sweat-slick, oiled bodies and the hot summers of Abyssos.

A pang of homesickness hit me, but what I missed wasn’t Abyssos. It was this.
Life
.

Releasing Asher’s hand, I took several steps forward, my gaze trying to be everywhere at once.

Music played in the restaurant, and it sounded nothing like Asher’s radio. I looked for the source of it; it seemed to me another strange sort of magic to hear singing and instrumentals coming from a box rather than a group of people.

But the music itself was only background noise. Everywhere people talked and laughed and clinked glasses together. So many happy faces. I’d forgotten what it was like to always be at ease.

A woman approached both of us, and I stood there, blinking at her as she smiled at me and Asher, her eyes lingering on the hunter much longer than necessary. The sight of it stirred something in me, something low and restless.

“Just two?” she said.

Asher nodded.

“Great.” The smile she flashed him was incandescent. I felt my fingers curl at the sight of it. “Right this way.” She spun on her heel and began weaving through the restaurant, toward the tables outside.

A hand pressed against my lower back. Startled, I looked over and realized it belonged to Asher. The frightening hunter had initiated the touch.

I stared at him for a beat longer as he began to maneuver us after the waitress. My roiling emotions settled back down. All because that hand on my back.

Everything that Grandmaddox said earlier came bubbling back to the surface. That I was too soft, too naïve.

I was just tired. Tired of everyone assuming the worst of each other. Tired of focusing on hate and vendettas and war. I just wanted to enjoy a man’s hand on my back and forget for an evening that Asher and I were supposed to be enemies.

I was born with too damn many of them already.

Asher

I ordered Lana
a rainbow cocktail, which had seven layers of colorful alcohol which glowed under the bar’s black light. Predictably, she loved it, and I couldn’t help but smile. For myself, whiskey on the rocks.

Wide-eyed, Lana watched the parade of passersby on Bourbon Street. They spilled off the curb and into the street, staggering with drinks in hand. Still no flashers yet.

“You don’t have places like this in Abyssos?” I said.

“We don’t have this many Infernari in Abyssos,” she said in awe. “I’ve never seen so many humans in one place.”

“You should see it during Mardi Gras.”

The sound of slurping pulled my attention back to Lana, who had drained the drink and was now sucking at the last drops with her straw.

“That’s like four shots, you know.” I ordered her another one. “Better than Grandmaddox’s wine, huh?”

“My own piss is better than Grandmaddox’s wine,” she slurred, already tipsy.

I smirked, downing the rest of my own glass. “And here I thought demons didn’t have fine palates.”

“
Infernari
,” she corrected, her eyes flashing dangerously over the rim of her next glass. “Why don’t you ever learn? Do you not know how to pronounce it? Say it. I want to hear you say it.”

“I’m curious, what’d you think of her jambalaya?” I asked, waving down the bartender for another whiskey.

“Say it, Jame Asher,” she commanded, her hair shifting restlessly about her.

Regarding her coldly, I swirled the glass, clinking the ice. “Getting you drunk was a bad idea. God knows you’re frustrating enough
sober
.”

“I notice this thing you do,” she said, now licking the rim of her second empty glass. “It’s very human and despicable. When you don’t want to answer a question, you say something completely irrelevant.”

I tipped up my glass to her. “Good job, you’re learning.”

“See! You just did it again.”

I frowned. “You made a behavioral observation, and I congratulated you,” I said, my eyes following a passerby that stared at Lana, dumbstruck by her beauty. His gaze moved to me, and he startled at whatever he saw. I watched him scurry away. “What else do you want?” I continued, returning my attention to her. “You want me to buy you a drink? Here, I’ll buy you a drink.” I bought her a third rainbow cocktail. “Happy?”

“Very,” she said, starting in on it with lustful eyes. Then she stopped. “No, you dodged it again . . . you still haven’t said
Infernari
.”

“Infernari,” I said. “There. I’m not afraid of a word.”

“But you are.” She smiled wickedly, her long canines looking particularly sharp under the shine of the outdoor lights. “They say a name has power. Now, when you look at me, you’ll see an Infernarus, not a demon.”

I drained my whiskey and slammed it down, my lips tightening into a pucker. “When I look at Azazel, I see a demon. When I look at Clades, I see a demon. When I look at Grandmaddox, I see a demon. When I look at you . . .” I inhaled sharply through my nostrils, “I don’t see a demon, I see something that I don’t want to be seeing.”

It was the damn whiskey talking.

We lapsed into silence, and I couldn’t meet her eye.
Careful, Asher.

“When I look at you,” she said softly, “I don’t see a monster.”

I frowned down at my empty cup. “I’m not having this conversation with you. Talk about something else.”

“Grandmaddox’s jambalaya?” she offered.

“Will give me nightmares,” I finished, grateful for the change of subject. “I’m serious. Tonight, all I will be dreaming about is centipedes stewing in red Cajun sauce . . . I think some of them were still alive.”

“They’re basically the same as shrimp and crawfish,” she said, “and I saw you eat a shrimp.”

“There were spiders too, Lana . . . and cockroaches.” I shuddered. That fucking dinner was just
wrong
.”

“So? That’s not even unique to Infernari. Humans eat spiders and cockroaches, too.”

“I seriously doubt that.”

“In Cambodia and China. We’re not as different as you think.”

My nose wrinkled. “Is that what they teach you demons in your geography classes? Which country you can visit to get a good deep-fried cockroach?”

“
Demon
is a derogatory word, you know.” The alcohol was making her tongue sharper, and despite her hooded lids, her eyes were piercing when they met mine.

“That’s why I use it.” This conversation called for more alcohol. I got another refill from the bartender and slipped her a fifty. “Leave the bottle.”

“What if humans had killed your family?” Lana asked. “Would you want to exterminate them, too?”

The question caught me off guard. Somehow she’d figured out my sad story. The family that was taken from me by her kind.

I paused, peering down at the ice melting in my whiskey. The alcohol gave me that warm tingly feeling in my stomach, but right now it could go either of two ways.

No, not tonight. Tonight, I wasn’t going to mope. God knew I’d drunk myself to sleep plenty of nights before, sobbing over photo albums.

But I
did
want to talk about it.

I wanted
someone
to ask about it. My reasons. My justifications.

“I’m not a bigoted person.” I tried to keep my voice even, taking another slow sip. “It’s the
nature
of demon magic.” I didn’t even feel the burn of the whiskey, not now that we’d moved to this topic. “They were cursed because some demon somewhere used their blood for I don’t even know what—for all I know, it could have been a fucking parlor trick—and my wife and daughter had to die for that. For no reason.” I looked up at her, nodding grimly as I topped off my glass, spilling some on the bar. “It would be different if you cursed us willingly. If it had been Azazel, or Clades, if they had come in and killed them on purpose, then I would get my revenge and be done with it, like you said. But it wasn’t on purpose. Their death was a byproduct, a mistake. They died because of the very nature of demons.
That
, I’m not willing to abide.”

Now her eyes seemed to have trouble focusing. While she mulled it over, she grabbed the whiskey bottle and filled her own glass. “You think it’s not fair?” she asked.

“I
know
it’s not fair.”

“Do you know what I think isn’t fair?” she said. “That there are scarcely a thousand of us left, while there are billions of humans.
Billions
. They’re like those cicadas earlier. There’s so many that each creature is worth very little. The Infernari are only culling from humans because there’s an imbalance.” Seeing my unamused expression, she added, “I have nothing against cicadas. But you don’t worry about cicadas, do you? You only worry about the rarest creatures . . . creatures you would call
endangered
.”

To compare people to cicadas . . .

I wanted to shout at her, but I held back. She didn’t understand.

“Try losing the two people you love most in the world,” I said, working my jaw, “try doing that, Lana, and tell me every life isn’t precious.”

She held my gaze. “You think I haven’t lost the people closest to me? My father—dead. My mother—dead. My native clan—wiped from existence.

“But it’s more than that,” she continued. “Being a healer . . . Every time an Infernarus falls, it hurts . . . right here.” She pointed at her heart. “I’m connected to all Infernari through their blood; they are
all
family to me, and no, I can’t imagine what losing a mate must be like—I haven’t been mated yet—but there were years during the civil war where I thought I would die of grief. To me, Infernari are everything; they are precious, they are my soul and blood, and I would die to save them . . . like you would for Nicole and Joy.”

I stilled at their names.

She had never spoken their names before. I hadn’t even realized she knew them.
I’d
never told her.

Brad must have.

Strange that she remembered when she didn’t even remember what the A stood for in USA . . . she remembered the names of my wife and daughter.

That realization sat strangely in my stomach.

“You know,” she continued, “your ancestors used to make blood sacrifices to us; they used to worship us. We were gods to them.”

She was talking about the Aztecs, the Incans, the Germanic tribes of Old Europe. “Yeah, and those civilizations got wiped out for a reason.”

“We also
cared
for them,” she said. “We were like shepherds, you were our flock.”

“So you were slaughtering us like sheep,” I muttered.

“Infernari die if they don’t use magic,” she said. “For us, it’s like breathing.”

We were at an impasse.

She was terrified of losing the last of the people she loved. I had already lost mine. But we were the same, too.

“You said you’re connected to Infernari through blood? What do you mean?” I asked.

Her hooded eyes took a moment to focus on me, now showing the alcohol. “Their blood flows in my veins, my blood flows in theirs—so when I heal myself, I’m really healing them.”

“So that’s how you do it at a distance?”

“Uh-huh.” She sucked on the rim of her glass.

“You share blood . . . What, always?”

She eyed me. “Only when I want to,” she said enigmatically.

“So you’re bound to protect me, you’re bound to protect your species . . . to
heal
them . . .” I trailed off, unable to look away from her sad eyes, which flickered under the lights like iridescent abalone shells, matching the faint glimmer of her hair. The background murmur of the bar suddenly fell away—leaving just us, just me and this beautiful creature, alone in our own little bubble of grief.

Bound to each other.

“And you want to kill my species,” she finished for me, “which means my only hope—”

“Kind of a Catch-22, huh?”

“—is to convince you to change.”

I nodded soberly. “I won’t.”

“Then one of my brothers will kill you. I can’t protect you forever.”

I shook off the unsettling moment we’d just had and wrestled the whiskey back from her to refill my glass. “I’m probably going to die, then. I’m too old to change.”

She cocked an eyebrow. “You are so many contradictions, Jame Asher.”

“Like?”

“You are so meticulous to avoid death, yet so reckless when it comes to life. You’re a violent savage to my people, yet fiercely protective of your own. You hate all Infernari . . .” her eyes flicked between mine, “. . . yet you don’t hate me.”

Her words unnerved me. “Yes, I do.”

“Then why did you save me? Why am I not still tied up in the back of your wheeled machine?”

Because you’re innocent.

Because you’re kindhearted and brave.

Because I might like
who
you are more than I hate
what
you are.

“Because it’s easier when you cooperate,” I said, bristling at her questions. I drained the rest of my glass and slammed it down on the bar, startling the girl on the other side of me. Working the cash register, the bartender eyed me like she regretted giving me that bottle. “Look, you’re a good girl, Lana. You might be the
only
good demon out there. If anyone’s got a shot at turning me, it’s you. Hell, Dominus probably hand-picked you just for me . . . a little doe-eyed fawn to fuck with Jame Asher’s head. Whatever . . . I’m drunk.” I grabbed the bottle and staggered off the barstool. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”