The Demon Beside Me (19 page)

“Don’t strain yourself,” she said.

“I’ve lived through worse. Hell, so have you.”

She gave me a quick grin. “So I have. So has Caleb, for that matter.”

“I wouldn’t expect to continue that streak, halfbreed.”

I looked up at Victor. “I know your sense of honor is practically non-existent, angel, but will you let her go afterwards?”

He cocked his head as if in deep thought, then smiled. “As I said, I have no reason to kill her at this time. You are the one I’m here for.”

“I am so deeply honored,” I said.

“Wait a minute-” Tink said, then yelped as one of the angels grabbed her under the shoulders and lifted her into the air. The other one grabbed the front of my shirt and hauled me to my feet, face to face with Victor. “Demon! No, you can’t do this!”

“I should have said that your sense of honor is non-existent when it comes to beings outside the Choir,” I said. “At least you follow orders well enough. Don’t bother trying to deny it. Someone gave you orders to come after me early. That Cherub?”

Victor shrugged and slugged me in the face again. My head rocked to the side and I felt my jaw creak. “Perhaps,” he said, and hit me again with the other fist. “Perhaps not. Perhaps I did this all on my own.”

I felt around my mouth with my tongue first before speaking to make sure I wouldn’t be spitting teeth at him. “Are you kidding me, Victor? You don’t have the sort of pull to get all of these angels to follow you, much less die for you. You’re just an Archangel, after all.”

He clicked his tongue and gave me a couple jabs to the stomach. Either he was holding back, or he was absurdly weak for a full-blooded angel. “Oh, halfbreed, you talk far too much. I’m going to enjoy shutting you up for good.”

“I’m not sure why you think halfbreed is an insult,” I said. He paused and frowned at me. “I mean, you’re an angel. Demons surely look down on me for my mixed heritage, but why would you? More to the point, why would I care if you did? You’re just an angel, after all.”

Using the same cadence had the desired effect. He hit me some more, hard enough to knock the wind out of me yet again. Tink was shouting something incoherent now, but both of us were ignoring her now. “When I’m done with you, you’ll be begging for me to end this.”

I spat toward him, barely missing. “You’ll need to hit me harder for that, angel. Why are you holding back? Afraid you’ll bruise your hands?”

He didn’t hold back with the next punch. My jaw snapped, my teeth shattered, and a gout of blood burst from my already broken nose. The angel holding me unceremoniously dropped me and I felt boots slamming into my stomach and my back. I tried to curl up, but I couldn’t defend myself from the both of them. When I moved one hand trying to protect my head, a boot came down. Bones snapped and I let out a gargling howl of pain.

After a small eternity, someone flipped me over onto my back. Again, three angels stood impassively over me, but Tink wasn’t in sight. “Let her go,” I managed to say around my mouthful of broken teeth.

“Oh, demon, you’re in no position to bargain,” Victor said softly. His scimitars shimmered into sight. “No position at all.”

I shook my head feebly from side to side. “Don’t care what you do to me. Don’t care about bargains. Let her go.”

One of Victor’s hands came down, stroking my forehead, almost tenderly. “I’ll give you this much, demon. We already let her go. No one needs to see what we’re going to do to you here.”

I forced a smile to my bruised and swollen lips. “Thanks.”

“Don’t thank me quite yet,” Victor whispered.

The blades came into play. I passed out soon afterwards.

Consciousness returned to me in flashes, the only connection between them being agony. Sometimes I remembered flickering colors, gold, black, splashes of red. Voices said words that I recognized but couldn’t relate to ideas. I couldn’t tell if those flashes of wakefulness were days, minutes, or even weeks apart. My sense of time was shattered.

I recognized the last time I woke up. I felt my eyes flicker open and heard the soft beeping of a heart rate monitor. Taking a deep breath told me I had an oxygen line under my nose, but I could also smell the distinctive antiseptic reek of a hospital. I tried to sit up, but padded restraints on my wrists kept me from getting leverage. I pulled on them a little bit, then sighed. I barely had the strength to pull against them, let alone pull myself free.

“Demon?”

I rolled my head. Now I knew where the gold flashes of color came from. “Tinkerbell,” I said, or at least tried to say. My mouth was drier than British humor. I licked my lips and tried again.

She stood up and walked over to my bedside. “Are you actually going to remember talking to me this time?”

“I was talking before?” My voice came out in a thick slurred mass.

“You’ve come out of it for a few minutes before. Three or four times over the last couple of weeks, I think. The doctors have been keeping track, they said it was a good sign that you’d be coming out of the coma soon. For once, they were right.”

She put her hand on my forehead. I tried to smile up at her, but my face didn’t work quite the way I wanted it to. “Coma?”

She nodded. “The doctor said to take it slow for the first few days. You should be fine now that you’re awake.”

“How long?”

“The doctors said you’d ask that right away.”

“Bet they said not to tell.”

“They did.” She looked away, her hand slipping off my forehead. “Two months.”

I shook my head as best I could. “Never heard of a demon in a coma that long. Ichor regenerates-”

“You’re a halfblood,” she said quietly. “And you were practically dead when we found you. Victor had...” Her voice trailed off and she looked away.

“Had what?” I couldn’t remember anything past the first few cuts. My head started to ache when I tried to think back.

“He mutilated you,” she said. She didn’t meet my eye. “He didn’t just want to kill you, he wanted to hurt you. He wanted to hurt everyone who saw you.”

“That doesn’t explain-”

“Asmodeus troops arrived on scene just as he had finished his work on you. If they had arrived thirty seconds earlier, it wouldn’t have happened. If we had held out longer, it wouldn’t have happened.” She sighed and her voice took on an edge. “If that bitch girlfriend of yours hadn’t stopped us from contracting again, we could have killed him.”

“You don’t know that,” I said.

“Don’t I?” She snorted. “That was a stronger spell than what I used on Duke Deshavin, and I didn’t even throw hellfire into that one. There wouldn’t have been anything left of him. It didn’t have the focus or power it needed to do anything more than blind him, and we both know why, demon.”

I closed my eyes and shook my head, but didn’t say anything more. She was probably right. The spell had gone haywire, our blood hadn’t worked together, there was no link between us, and it was my fault. “What did he do?” I asked.

“He bled on you.”

“Bled on me.” If I had been healthy enough to be angry, I would have been very angry indeed. He had turned me into a demonic explosive device. If I had been a full blooded demon, as soon as I regenerated enough ichor to heal myself, it would have been exposed to his purity. Flash, boom, and the end of my all too short life. “How?”

“He splattered purity all over you, and he laughed while he did it.” Tink didn’t quite understand what I was asking, but she’d get to it soon enough. “Once he was gone, I made it in time. Opheran tried to stop me, so I kicked him in the nuts. I inscribed a circle around you and forced your ichor to stop circulating, forced as much healing into you as possible to get you relatively stable, and then forced you into a coma. Not through blunt force, mind you, though I was tempted.”

“Were you?”

Her voice caught for a moment. “No. Not really.” After a moment she continued. “He skinned you with those swords of his. Cut various pieces off. Removed a few organs. I’ve never seen anyone so injured remain alive. Well, Deshavin, but that was a different situation. You shouldn’t have been alive, but there you were. Once I had stopped the ichor production, they wanted to treat you, but none of them wanted to touch you in case Victor had left any other surprises. That’s when Caleb showed up. He didn’t say anything to the Asmodeus demons, he just walked through their lines, in his full angelic form, and not one of them got in his way. He walked up to you, right beside me, and picked you up. Then he simply looked at Opheran until someone told him where to take you.”

“Speaking of that, what hospital is this?”

“You weren’t moved far. Just around fifty miles north, at a hospital controlled by your House. That’s what they told me, at least. Opheran hasn’t exactly been fully forthcoming. Security concerns, no doubt.”

I shifted around in the bed, trying to find some sort of comfortable position. “Why am I strapped down?”

She cleared her throat. “Hikari and I had to remove the purity from your body before we could let you regenerate. It wasn’t a painless procedure. It took us over a month to be completely sure that you didn’t have any of it left in your body, and we had to keep healing you and renewing the magic that kept you from producing ichor. The first couple of weeks were scary. I don’t think either of us got more than a couple hours of sleep each night. It was only about three weeks ago that the House doctors agreed to let you start producing ichor again.”

“Which is why I’m fully regenerated now, right?”

“Yes. They didn’t want you to heal rapidly, since your injuries were so severe. One bit at a time. Once all of your missing pieces were back in place, we stopped renewing the magic that kept you in a coma and let you come out of it gracefully.”

I flexed my wrists against the bindings. I wasn’t strong enough to break them, but I could feel ichor moving within my veins. I’d be strong enough within another day or so. Less if I pushed it. The question was whether I had to push it or not. If Victor’s actions had accelerated the War, the House would need everyone on deck, but I doubted that Opheran would be hanging around here keeping an eye on me if there was any real trouble.

“Don’t push it.” I glanced back up at her. She scowled down at me. “You just need to rest.”

“I was just thinking,” I said.

“Thinking about what?”

“It’s so rare for you to be able to look down at me. Are you enjoying it?”

Her mouth shaped various words and her cheeks flushed. “I see you’re definitely feeling better.”

“There is one thing I’m really worried about.”

“What’s that?”

“I can’t tell if the most important part of me is there, and you’ve got my hands tied down. Can you reach down there and let me know?”

Her knife came out, point down on top of the blankets covering me. “Oh no, demon, you don’t get to play like that anymore. Remember, now I know just how well you regenerate, so I will have no compunction about cutting it off and holding it in front of your face if you piss me off.” She smiled brightly. “It’ll grow back, so no problem, right?”

“You’re getting better at this, much to my dismay. Can you take the restraints off?”

She rolled her eyes, but did unbuckle the straps at my wrists. I sat up, ignoring the twinges of pain from atrophied and weak muscles, then rubbed at the marks on my wrists. “That feels so much better.” I also put my hands in my lap and pressed down. “Oh, good, you were telling the truth after all.”

She stood up and spun her knife around her fingers. “I’m going to let you take care of that sort of business by yourself. I’ll let the doctors know you’re awake. They’re going to be pissed off at me, but they’ll take it out on you. Remember that.”

“Thanks,” I said. As soon as the door closed behind her, I sighed. “Kibs, where you at? We have to talk.”

“Right here,” said the imp, phasing into view at the end of my bed. “And you, my friend, have seen better days.”

“It’s not every day you get tortured by an angel,” I said. “Luckily, I don’t remember a damn bit of it. Good thing I have a low tolerance for pain, right?”

The imp snorted and sat down, his legs dangling off the side. “You were howling like a bitch for weeks, Zay. Surprised your throat isn’t raw still. That being said, I don’t blame you. That fucker wanted you to hurt, and then hurt more people. You have a lot of pissed off demons ready to snap him in half over this. That’s if we catch him, which isn’t likely. The Choir stepped over the line with this shit. Their brass even made a statement deploring his actions, but there’s no way they’re going to turn him over.”

“Bullshit,” I said. “We all know they wanted him to do it. The only thing they deplore is that he didn’t finish the job.”

“Maybe, maybe not. Caleb’s been bitching up a storm, though. He’s been demanding that Victor answer to accusations of behavior unbecoming a member of the Choir. If you ask me, that boy has balls, standing up against his own people like that. The Choir doesn’t seem to want to smack him down, either. It’s weird, Zay, it’s fucking strange.”

I grunted and didn’t answer. The reason they were so unwilling to act against Caleb was because he was one of the few survivors of the Celestial War, and he was one of the members of the Independent Choir that had penetrated all the layers of Hell and killed Lucifer himself. Even a monolithic force like the Choir would have a problem when one of their heroes spoke against them.

“Even with Caleb being a pain in their asses, they’re still getting ready to kick our asses. Last we saw, they were starting full mobilization. The Council is standing firm but we’ve got just under a month left before their time limit expires.” Kibs kicked his heels back into the bed. “Even if all of the Houses turn out their entire trained forces, you’re still never going to win this, Zay. You’re just going to turn this world into a smoking pit, just like the First Circle. What the fuck are you even fighting for?”

I sighed. “Like I know the answer to that? I’m just fighting to stay alive.”

“That’s the best reason I’ve heard so far.”