devil 03 - tween hearts fire and devils delight (2 page)

Darma’s scowl smoothed just a little and she actually gave me a small smile. Then she threw Dialle a scowl and turned back to Torre.

Dialle grinned at me and shrugged. “She’s mad at me for blasting those demons.”

I shook my head and rolled my eyes. “Issues.” Then I grinned at him, “Nice distraction by the way.”

His black eyes sparkled and he raised my hand to his lips. Instead of kissing the hand as I expected he opened his lips and sucked the tips of my fingers into his hot mouth.

One at a time.

Oh so slowly.

My knees almost buckled underneath me.

Unfortunately, the moment was ruined by my sister’s less than soothing tones. “Astra! We’re leaving.”

I jerked my head toward the nails-on-blackboard sound of my sister’s voice and looked upon her with dazed eyes. “Huh?”

Dazzling wit aside, I was shocked to see her clutched in Torre’s delicately muscular arms. “Wait a minute. You and I need to have a little talk.”

She actually looked a little guilty for a split second but she quickly regained her equilibrium. “I agree. But not here and not right now. We have…plans.” She looked up into Torre’s eyes and smiled. The smile made me distinctly uncomfortable. Partly because I so rarely saw her smile and partly because it was a smile filled with secrets and intimacy. My sister didn’t do intimacy. She barely did civil. And with a Royal? Impossible.

I opened my mouth to argue but she had already forgotten me. She and Torre turned away and melted into the crowd. I started to follow them but Dialle’s hand on my arm stopped me.

“Let them go. You can talk to your sister tomorrow.”

I pulled my arm from his grasp, suddenly angry. Not at him, of course but he seemed to be the only one available for me to pound on verbally. “What the hell is going on, Dialle? How long has my sister been dating your brother? Why didn’t you tell me about this relationship?”

He grabbed my hand and we were suddenly on the dance floor together, buried in the mass of humanity with a couple of feet of space all around us so we could dance. If you could call it dancing. It was actually more like mating, upright, with all our clothes on.

Dialle wrapped both arms around my waist and pressed himself against me, feathering kisses over my face and nibbling in strategic spots to take me completely off my game. I started to forget what I’d been mad about. Lifting my arms I wrapped them around his neck and clasped my hands loosely behind his head, sighing happily.

When he spoke in my ear a moment later it felt less like conversation and more like an extension of our mating ritual. His breath was hot and smelled of sexual musk and sweet promises to come.

“I just found out about Darma and Torre tonight. Apparently they’ve been seeing each other for months. Darma made him keep it from me.”

Calm now and refocusing my hot blood in another direction, I barely registered his words. I let my body drape around his and closed my eyes. The music that cocooned us on the dance floor was raw and wild, almost savage. The bass throbbed in my mind and stomach and moved lower, causing me to press myself more completely into Dialle and wrap one leg around his thighs.

He groaned and said, “Let’s get out of here.” But before he could whisk us away the air on the dance floor changed and we were suddenly joined by my damnable guardian angel, Flick.

He pecked me on the shoulder.

“Go away!” I murmured into Dialle’s hard chest and tried to ignore him.

He pecked me on the shoulder again.

“What!” My head lifted and I fixed him with an angry gaze.

He smiled nervously at me. I was still having trouble getting used to my new guardian. After decades of dealing with Myra the cranky and firm, I now had a guardian who was shy and timid. I’d been assured that he was fully able to protect me in my…shall we say…challenging life but I was unconvinced, to put it mildly.

Flick slid a telling gaze toward Dialle, his mild brown eyes going hard for a split second before returning to me. “You are needed elsewhere.”

I frowned and stopped dancing. “What do you mean I’m needed elsewhere?”

Flick shrugged and, before I knew what he was doing, reached out and touched me with the tip of one long, pale finger.

I cursed silently as we left the plane of sound and movement and wondered if this was part of their training. Guardian Angel 101, creep up on your hapless charge and shift her wherever you please, against her will.

I’d been tricked this way about a thousand times with Myra.

We landed on cracked, weed-infused concrete. A strong wind blew my dark auburn hair off my shoulders. As soon as my mouth would work I started spewing foul deprecations in every language I knew, including Hades, at my sneaky, damnable angel.

This, also, was business as usual between me and my guardians.

Flick just stood there looking paler then ever until I started to wind down. Then he peaked one mousy brown eyebrow at me and glanced meaningfully toward the glass and steel building that squatted beside us.

I turned to see a knot of children, probably about ten or eleven years old, huddled in a lighted doorway together, giggling behind their hands.

I turned my back on them and lowered my voice. “Why didn’t you tell me they were there?”

Flick’s mouth flapped helplessly for a minute and then a sickly smile slid onto his nondescript face. He shrugged. “You really should consider taking some anger management classes, Astra.”

I stiffened and opened my mouth to scour the air again but he jerked his head toward the school and I turned to find the entire group of children waiting with expectant faces for their next lesson in gutter language. I closed my eyes on a sigh. “We’ll discuss this later.” I was determined to train this guardian angel much better than the last one. She was my aunt, although I’d only found that out recently, and had kept a watchful and protective eye on me since I’d been a baby. I really hadn’t had a chance to train her up right. This one I could manage better.

I turned toward the school and started walking. Flick, in human-type jeans and a sweater so he could walk beside me without the kids knowing what he was, fell into step a little behind and to the left of me so he could guard my weaker side. I had done
some
training already.

Glaring at the knot of pre-pubescent humans standing in front of the door as I approached, I shooed them off the steps. “You kids go home now. You aren’t supposed to be here.”

“What’s going on, lady?” The young boy had spiky black hair and thick dark eyebrows that looked like fat caterpillars on his face. His face was extremely pale and almost too delicate to belong to a boy. I figured the oversized clothes and pierced nose were ways to compensate. I felt for the boy. I’d been compensating for being small all my life. But that didn’t mean I was gonna be nice to him. He needed to get the hell out of there.

“I don’t know yet but whatever it is, it will probably eat you kid, so go on home.” When he just stood there looking at me I took a threatening step toward him. I might be small but I was way bigger than him. And meaner too. “Go on! Shoo, bidgie bug.”

He jumped and turned, starting down the steps at a pace that was leisurely but not naturally so. He jerked a little about every third step, like he wanted to take off running but didn’t want to embarrass himself in front of the girls.

Flick and I entered the building amid a chorus of snickers. “Where’s the demon?” I asked in an undertone to Flick.

“In the lunchroom.”

I gave him a sickly smile. “Of course.”

The halls were suspiciously quiet. Flick explained to me as we headed toward the lunchroom that the demon had been discovered and contained before it could do much more than terrorize a couple of the ladies who were in charge of keeping the food distribution modules filled. The kids at the dance hadn’t even known they had a demon in their midst. They’d been quickly evacuated and sent home.

The school officials and adults had stayed behind, apparently thinking they could do something to help.

Lord knows what.

Your average demon could eat the whole passel of pinch-faced people in that hallway without even breaking a sweat.

As we approached the closed double doors of what I assumed was the lunchroom, a woman stepped forward and offered me her hand. “Mx. Phelps. Thank God you’re here.”

Yes, He was responsible for you being here,
Flick commented with a wry smile.

I slid a quick glance at him before taking the woman’s sweaty hand. “Has it hurt anyone?”

The woman’s face was unnaturally pale. She wrung her hands nervously. Shaking her graying head she said, “I don’t know. I heard screaming earlier.” Tears leaked from her light-colored eyes. “I think the lunchroom ladies might be injured…or…worse.” She gulped. “But thank God we had a priest in the building and he’s been huddled in front of the door praying since it happened. He’s been able to hold it in up until now.”

I nodded. “There were some kids on the front steps. I told them to go home but somebody should go check to make sure they left.”

The woman nodded and turned to look at the man behind her.

“I’ll go,” the man said. He started off down the hall, looking relieved that he had something to do.

They split apart to let Flick and me through. A small man dressed in stark black and white was kneeling before the door. He was on his knees, praying fervently. I touched him on the shoulder and the Latin-based words he’d been muttering ceased abruptly as his eyes flew open and shot toward me.

He sat back on his heels, sighing in what appeared to be relief. Then he looked up toward the ceiling and clasped his small hands together, raising them upward in front of his face said, “Thank you Lord for delivering me of this horrible burden. Amen.”

He stood up and held a shaky hand out. “Go in His name, child and…” his weary brown eyes slid toward the door and I watched him suppress a shiver, “be very careful.”

I took his hand and he squeezed it warmly. Then his eyes slid to Flick and he gave a little start. “Well I’ll be…”

“Thank you, Father,” I said quickly before he could give Flick away.

The little priest slammed his mouth shut but continued to stare at Flick with a look of awe on his face. Flick gave him a nervous smile and turned with me toward the door.

As I put my hand out to open the door I glanced back at the priest. “You might want to continue praying, Father. Just in case it tries to get past me.”

His awestruck expression slid away and his eyes widened. I realized he hadn’t even considered the possibility that I might fail. “Oh…oh my. Yes, I’ll do that.”

He was dropping back to his knees with a muffled groan as I pulled the door open just enough to allow me and Flick to slip through.

The first thing I noticed was the smell of blood and violence. Then I saw the bright red smears along the tile floor and spattered across the wall. I slid a glance to Flick and he shook his head.

There were no living beings in that room.

Sighing, I closed my eyes and threw out my sensing power, slowly sliding it around the room. I almost missed the demon the first time around. It had hidden itself behind the bodies of the three women and a man, probably the lunch ladies and the janitor. The bodies had all been dragged into a corner of the room, arms and legs and dead, sightless faces tangled together in a sloppy pile.

Their souls had already fled, leaving a blank spot in my senses as I slid past them, almost missing the blip that was the demon behind them.

I reached out and stopped Flick with a hand on his arm. We were standing just about twenty feet from the demon. I opened my eyes and jerked my head for him to move away from me. We would work together better if we were spread out, giving the demon two targets to worry about rather than one.

It was the type of instruction I would never have had to give Myra, since she was a member of the celestial army and therefore well trained in combat. But Flick was unskilled in combat, although I’d quickly discovered he had a natural ability and was an extremely quick study.

Once Flick was in position, I straightened to my full five feet and not much more height and said, “Demon, show thyself.”

It was a summons with power woven into it and it couldn’t be ignored.

I watched as the pile of bodies started writhing, startling me at first before I realized the demon was burrowing under the dead humans and a scaly snout started to emerge. The head that followed was large, nearly two feet across and oval shaped, with a squared off snout and slitted red eyes.

A snake demon,
I told Flick.

He didn’t respond but I could smell his fear from where I stood.
Don’t tell me, you hate snakes.

I do, yes. They terrify me.

Awesome.

Writing him off completely as being any help at all, I figured I could always call Emo if I needed help with the thing and settled into a battle stance.

The snake demon, known as the legendary Basilisk in human legend, was actually not the hundred foot long creature that had been portrayed. It was a relatively small demon of only about thirty feet or so. It couldn’t kill me or any magical creature with a glance but it was true that it could kill humans just by catching their eye.

I shuddered as I thought of the humans outside the door.
Flick, go tell them to evacuate the school. Now!

He hesitated. I knew he was reluctant to leave me with the thing, despite his fear of it.
It’s okay. I can vanquish this thing. But it might take me a while and I don’t want to risk it getting out those doors. Go tell them, okay?

A silence of a few beats throbbed between us and then he said simply, “Okay.”

I waited until I heard the door open and close and then gathered my power. The jolt I fired at the demon pinged harmlessly off the tile floor. I’d forgotten how fast the damn things were.

It was almost on top of me before I realized and I threw myself backward, landing on my hands and springing back to my feet to stay between it and the door. It stopped a few feet away from me, raising its huge head and testing the air with a long, forked tongue. I knew it was trying to sense my fear but I was ready for it. I had a deep respect for these demons but I’d bested worse and I had no intention of letting it slither out that door.