Blood and Sin (The Infernari Book 1) (28 page)

I would bleed out in two minutes.

Hell, I deserved it.

Other demons joined the fray and wrestled Fidel away from me. The brawl quickly turned violent, as some defended the portal master and others defended Lana, and then others defended those defending the first ones.

Lana crawled free and knelt over me, tears streaming down her cheeks. “No, no, no,” she moaned, cupping my face. One of her tears hit my cheek. “Wait, let me try to heal you . . .
I can heal you
.”

“Lana, no—” Blood bubbled into my throat, and I coughed it up, felt it slip down my chin. More of it pumped out of my neck with each beat of my heart.

Messy way to go.

As I watched, I saw her lock her panic away until she was nothing more than a war medic.

“Stop moving,” she ordered.

“Don’t,” I sputtered, trying to push her away.

Don’t give me that chance. Don’t tempt me.

“Shh.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. Her hair shimmered a deep blue and floated up around her. Watching her brought calm to my own body. When she opened her eyes, they flickered crimson.

She had just accessed her healing power, which meant she’d culled blood. She would always cull blood. That’s what demons did.

And now, as her eyes glowed red and she looked so beautiful and wicked, I knew she’d opened her blood connection to the Infernari. All thousand of them.

I stilled, and time seemed to slow to a halt.

The moment was upon me.

With Fidel’s dagger, she cut a slash in her palm and pressed it over my neck, mixing our blood. A buzzing, golden warmth poured into me. Her spirit.

Under her palm, the skin tightened and stopped throbbing, the blood tapered off, the wound healed. Our temporary blood connection ebbed away, leaving my flesh feeling strangely lonely.

I saw her sag with relief. “It worked,” she whispered, breathless, and now another tear of hers leaked out. She cupped my face, and while demons wrestled and rolled past us, she leaned down to kiss me, her hair falling around us in an aqua-colored tent.

But it was too late. For us. For peace. For escape—for any type of happy ending.

Redemption had been robbed from me.

“I’m sorry, Lana,” I whispered into her mouth, savoring the taste of her lips one last time. “I’m so, so sorry . . .”

She pulled away a little. “For what?” she breathed, her brows pinching together.

“For this.” In one swift motion, I clamped onto her like a vice, whipped her onto her back, and pinned her to the ground. Her eyes widened, no longer a pretty shade of blue-violet, but lava red. Staring into those eyes, I no longer saw my Lana. I saw the blood of all demons, to which she was now connected. My nostrils flared.

Panting, I dug into my boot and pulled out the syringe.

It was filled with venom from the Inland Taipan, the most poisonous snake in the world. A dose potent enough to kill two thousand humans. The toxin so deadly it paralyzed the victim instantly and, if left untreated, led to death within forty-five minutes. Against the demons’ weaker immune systems, it would be more than enough to kill every last one of them.

This was what I’d spent the morning acquiring while Lana slept in.

I stabbed the syringe into her heart and emptied the barrel.

The look in her crimson eyes . . . it shamed me. It
broke
me.

Nothing,
nothing
, could have prepared me for the absolute devastation, the betrayal, in Lana’s eyes, in the eyes of the woman I’d fallen for.

Her body jerked, and she sucked in a sharp breath, her back arching. A tear slipped out.

At this very moment, her heart would be pumping the venom through her veins, and with her connection wide open, it would pass down her connection and into the veins of the last thousand Infernari.

Around the cavern, the warring demons faltered, sensing something wrong. They glanced around, they helped up their fallen brothers, they apologized and hugged.

Then, one by one, they fell to the ground, convulsing.

“Why?” was all Lana could mouth, her body twitching now.

“Because you,” I said, pulling out the syringe, “are a demon.” I had to drag the words out between ragged breaths. “And I . . . am a human.”

I didn’t mean to shed a tear of my own. Now wasn’t the time for remorse. But I felt it. God, how I felt it.

“Asher . . .” Whatever she intended to say, it died on her parted lips.

My name was the last thing she said. Her eyes glazed over and her body went still. She stopped breathing. Still conscious, she was now trapped inside her paralyzed body, suffocating in agonized silence.

All across Abyssos, demons would be dropping like flies.

I wrenched my gaze from Lana’s glassy, doll-like face—Christ, it hurt to look at her—and my own lungs heaved under the weight of what I’d just done. Without a single bullet fired, I had just eradicated a thousand demons.

I had exterminated a race.

I squeezed my eyes shut, and another tear slashed on my cheek. It was wrong.

But it was done.

The demon scourge had been eliminated from the Earth.

Someone had to do it.

This was why they feared me.

Chapter 21

Lana

My heart was
a dying thing. Crushing, shattering, obliterating into a thousand pieces.

I stared up at Asher as my limbs froze. He’d wanted me dead this whole time. He had done the deed himself, all while staring me in the eye, holding me close, and now I had to endure this slow death.

Everything was a lie. Asher’s touch, his kisses—the man had been
inside
me. He’d made me believe he cared for me, and now he was imprinted on my bones. I made him my mate.

If I could cry, I would.

I’d fallen for a human. I hadn’t known what I was doing, and I’d fallen for him.

All that time . . . a lie.

I could feel it—my world falling apart. How huge my hubris had become, to think I could tame this man’s anger.

To think he could love me.

And how terrible to
feel
love for him—not the fickle human love that grew and then decayed with time, but an Infernarus’s love. Something that was woven into my very spirit, something without meaning, without beginning or end. Something that grew with every passing second—even now. Something that was loyal, everlasting.

While I had been plotting how to save Asher, he been plotting my murder. No, he been plotting my species’
extinction
.

It wasn’t enough to be betrayed by a mate—something that no other Infernari had ever experienced. No, the horror didn’t end there. Because I could feel a thousand different lives inside me all dying, their flames dimming and dimming. All those wondrous essences that I cherished my entire life. Eventually they’d all snuff out, and I would feel each and every death alongside mine.

All that would be left of any of us would be smoke and ash.

Asher had betrayed me, but I’d committed the ultimate betrayal

I wanted to sob. I wanted to scream and lash out at the man above me. But I couldn’t move—not even my eyes. They stayed fixed on the cavern ceiling. My lungs had seized up, and I could feel my organs slowing down—
dying
.

Asher leaned over me, brushing a kiss against my forehead, his hair tickling my skin.

How dare he touch me! Kiss me!

I wanted to shriek at him, I wanted to shred his skin from his bones.

There was no justice to this. This was what happened when hate won out. And the irony of it all! Because even now I felt my connection to him growing. Could the sadist above me feel it? Could he feel
anything
?

“Lana,” he said softly, “if anyone could’ve changed me, it would’ve been you.” He began to rise, but then he paused. “It was real, what I felt for you. It just . . . it was too late.”

Can’t breathe. Can’t breathe can’t breathe can’t breathe.

He stood and moved away from my body, his footsteps fading.

And now my anger and soul-destroying betrayal meant nothing because he was leaving—he was
leaving
.

He killed me, and then he walked away, that’s how little he valued this. Us. Me.

And I had given him everything.

My vision was fading, fading . . .

For the best. The pain would all be over soon. Perhaps then my broken soul and shattered heart would be at peace.

But a new, strange feeling blossomed inside me.

I hunger for vengeance.

Foreign, this desire to hurt another. Unnatural this wish to harm a mate. But Mother above, I clutched the emotion close to me,
savored
it. I swear I felt the brush of the primus’s dying essence, heard an echo of his laughter.

And then the darkness swallowed me up, and I felt nothing at all.

Asher

I wove through
the demons’ fallen bodies, the cave now eerily silent, and climbed the stairs back to the surface. My soul stayed down there with Lana. My heart. My conscience. I was too numb to feel anymore, too hollow.

Back at the car, I wadded up a sock and ducttaped it across the stab wounds along my abs, my hands shaking violently. More than once I had to grip the car frame to steady myself, more than once my face contorted in a silent sob . . . but no more tears came.

It was too monstrous to shed tears. Too soulless.

The stomach wounds weren’t lethal. I wished they were.

To die, that would be merciful.

Rather than live with what I’d done.

The job wasn’t finished. From the trunk, I pocketed the Bic lighter I’d bought and hauled out the gasoline container I’d filled at the gas station this morning. Breathing heavily, I heaved it back down to the cave.

The venom alone should kill them, but I’d learned not to take chances.

I only trusted a demon to stay dead once it was a pile of ash.

I descended the cavern steps, the smell of sulfur thick in my nostrils. Once more I passed over bodies, not giving any of them a second look—none of them but one.

I dropped the container down on the bone-littered floor next to Lana, then paused to catch my breath. Of their own will, my eyes found her face.

I thought I’d feel some sort of bitter satisfaction at the end of it all, but even that had been robbed from me somewhere along the way.

Her body lay at my feet, all but discarded. As though her life wasn’t important, wasn’t cherished . . . wasn’t beloved. Her sightless eyes were still open, her body contorted. That beautiful face of hers didn’t look like it conceded to death without a fight.

I’d held this woman last night, and she’d felt so
right
beneath me. How badly I’d wanted more nights like that with her.

Instead it had all come to this.

I fell to my knees at her side. An ominous buzzing rang in my ears, the sound of time stretching out like a taut cord. My body gave a violent shudder, as if resisting every second that took me further away from her, from my Lana, from my fateful decision, from that brief, blissful time when she had been mine. I gathered her in my arms and, head bowed over her body, I wept.

Oh God, what have I done?

I had just murdered the girl I loved.

My sobs began to echo around the cave.

“My, my, I cursed you good,” cackled a voice behind me.

The skin all down my back broke out in prickles. I set Lana down and swiveled around.

I found myself
face to face with the two cloudy glass eyes of Grandmaddox.

“Oops—” She pricked my shoulder with a needle, emptying the contents of the syringe in an instant. “A little dose of your own medicine, Mr. Asher.”

I slapped my shoulder and scrambled backward, my heart’s thunderous beats already slowing under the influence of the venom she’d injected. “No, you’re . . . you’re
dead
,” I croaked.

Then I realized.

Because she was half human, she wasn’t connected to Lana’s blood network. The venom hadn’t spread to her.

I hadn’t even considered.

I reached for my holster, but my holster was lying in the bones ten feet away. Might as well have been a mile. My limbs grew heavy within seconds, my eyes drooped. My elbows buckled and I slumped against the wall.

“Didn’t think of that, did you?” she said, answering my thoughts.

Stooping over Lana, Grandmaddox produced another syringe, which she pierced through Lana’s unmoving breastplate. A moment later, Lana gasped for breath and rolled over to vomit. Seeing her alive made my heart flutter with relief, like it could breathe again. All around the cave, the rest of the demons groaned and staggered to their feet.

The antivenom.

Grandmaddox had brought the antivenom.

I knew there was one, but I hadn’t thought to worry about it.

At the sight of them waking, I rejoiced inside, even as my plan fell to pieces. It had all been undone, my treachery erased, like it was no more than a bad dream. Lana would live. The woman I’d fallen for. My . . . mate.

She blinked at the ground, coughing, her chest rising and falling frantically even as my own breath began to still.

She faced me slowly, her hair hanging in limp cords down her sweaty face. In her feral eyes, I saw something harsh, something that blended with the pain already in them. Something I’d seen in my own eyes every time I looked in the mirror these last two years.

Hatred.

I couldn’t react, I couldn’t even move my facial muscles. But oh God, I felt that look like a kick to the gut.

A blurry face loomed in front of me, blocking her from view, and it took all my willpower to focus. When I did, I wanted to scream. But I couldn’t.

Azazel crouched over me, a slow smirk creeping across his slickly handsome features. “A trickster to his last, dying breath,” he mused, waving his hand in front of my eyes. “A pity to see him finally fall.”

Up close, his suit pulsated like a living thing, and his ashy, rippling scent rolled over me like poison.

“He’s your mate, Lana,” he said. “You say the word and I’ll torch him.”

“I don’t care what you do,” she said weakly. “Just get him out of my sight.”

Azazel cocked his head, his gaze thinning. “No,” he said, recanting his earlier words, “death is a mercy he doesn’t deserve,” he said. “I’m going to take him back to Abyssos and cut out his tongue and then impale him on a spit and roast him slowly, so he screams in agony for all the days of his life. That is how we will honor you, Jame Asher . . . as you have honored us.” His smirk widened.

If Lana disagreed, she didn’t voice it.

Azazel lifted me off the ground and carried me into the portal, where the air opened up and swallowed us.

Then, in the arms of a demon, I plummeted into the deep, dark abyss of hell . . . where I belonged.

Lana

I was no
longer dying, and yet I was. I was drowning in pain, suffocating on my emotions. I forced myself not to call out to Azazel and stop him from literally carrying out the justice my people deserved.

Jame Asher was a monster. My heart burned for retribution.

But it was also dying.

Ah, gods, but everything hurt. I pressed my palms to my forehead and rocked where I sat. This must be a nightmare, a terrible reverie that I would wake from soon.

I didn’t almost die, I wasn’t nearly killed by my lover.

Grandmaddox’s withered hand touched my shoulder. She gave it a squeeze. “He almost got you, child, didn’t he?”

He
did
get me. That was a terrible truth I had to live with.

“He will be dealt with. You both will,” she said ominously.

At this point, I didn’t care what my fate was. Death had to be better than
this
.

Around me, the last of the affected Infernari began to stand. Several of them glared at me. A few wore spooked expressions. Never had something like this happened to us, never had we all been incapacitated so thoroughly and completely.

Of course a clever human would stumble upon this secret: that through my connection I had the power to kill every last Infernari.

I was shaken to my core. I had never imagined anyone would do anything quite this cruel, and by my mate, no less.

And even now, in spite of my terrible, terrible anger, my body trembled as I fought the urge to protect Asher, the very man who’d tried to kill me minutes ago.

I moaned as I rocked. I would go mad with grief, I was sure of it.

The worst agony, though, came from the few Infernari who stared down at me with pity. It shamed me. I’d nearly killed them all, and they felt
pity
for me.

Yes, death would be kinder than this.

As my kin helped each other to their feet, someone crouched at my side. I saw his hooves and heard the jangle of his bone necklace right before his deep, resonating voice spoke. “Don’t hide your face from me, Lana Malesuis. You are an Infernarus, the very magic of the world runs through your veins.”

My body trembled all over as my connection with Asher burned deep beneath my chest. I swear it was growing still, despite everything.

Slowly, I dropped my hands, my shoulders slumping forward. I could barely look at Clades; I’d almost killed him because I’d been too naïve, too gullible.

“Don’t let them see you weak,” he said. “You are the princeps of Abyssos. This doesn’t change that.”

Seeing pity in my comrades’ eyes had cut like a knife, but Clades’ words . . . they broke me altogether.

I let out a choked sob and, on instinct, I reached for the Infernarus, embracing him as I’d so often seen the natives here do. I buried my face in his chest and I sobbed. And I didn’t care that this sort of closeness was far too intimate for our kind, especially under these circumstances. Somewhere along the way I’d become a bit selfish, a bit fickle, a bit clever.

A bit human.

Clades’ arms hung at his sides until he realized that I wasn’t letting go. And then, reluctantly, I felt him loosely clasp me back. I heard him chuff through his nose, his hot breath stirring my hair.

“We need to leave, Lana. The primus will want to see you. There will be a formal inquisition. You will take responsibility for all that has happened.”

I stiffened in his arms. He was right, of course. I would have to answer for everything I had so carelessly let happen.

I began to nod, pulling away from Clades.

“I will do all that I can for you,” he said, his voice echoing off the walls.

I dusted myself off and stood, wiping away my tears as I pulled myself together. I straightened my back. “You have always been kind to me, my friend,” I said to him. “But I won’t involve you in this.” I would just bring him down with me. “I am not afraid of the primus’s justice.”

By the look on Clades’ face, he was. He rose, his giant frame towering over me, and one of his hands fell heavy on my shoulder. I glanced from him to it.

His eyes looked apologetic. “I will have to escort you.”

I swallowed. “I understand,” I said hoarsely.

Prisoner
. I might be the closest thing to royalty where we came from, but even I wasn’t absolved from justice.

Clades didn’t try to bind my wrists, and I appreciated that.

We began to walk, following the others toward the portal. I lifted my chin as Infernari stared. Clades was right—even if I didn’t feel strong, I needed to act like I did. My comrades could sense weakness, and the weak never lasted long in Abyssos.

My boots crushed old skeletons as I strode across the cavern, pulverizing the bone to dust. It had never bothered me before, the sacrifices humans made for my kind, but now—but now . . .

Out of nowhere, a sound like the crack of thunder deafened my ears, rolling through my body. My knees buckled. The sound came from
within
me.

I gasped, doubling over, my hand going to my chest.

No no no no no.

“
Lana?
” Clades’ voice filtered in from somewhere far away.