Of course, Reaver thought she’d been unstable before her own father imprisoned her.
“We don’t know where Calder went.” He gestured to the far side of the cavern, where two different tunnels meant two different possibilities. “We could guess, but if we choose wrong, we’ll lose him.”
They couldn’t afford another loss. Reaver hadn’t known Matt well, but he hoped the guy was okay. Tavin, though… Reaver was going to steep in guilt until he got confirmation that the Sem had made it to Underworld General.
Harvester hadn’t moved.
“Harvester?”
She still didn’t move. In fact, he thought she might be shaking.
“Harvester,” he prompted, more urgently this time.
Her gaze flipped up to his. “We have to find him, Reaver.”
She licked her lips, and he caught a glimpse of her fangs, longer than usual, and he felt like a dolt. She needed to feed, and they were out of time.
He shot for a tone that wasn’t dripping with sympathy—she’d hate that—or that wasn’t overflowing with impatience. “You can feed from me.”
“No.” She backed up, crying out when she bumped her wing anchors into a stalactite that hung so low it nearly touched the ground. When she spoke again, her voice was laced with pain. “I might lose control. And it’s against Heavenly law for you to willingly give your blood for food.”
The control thing was an issue for sure, but since when did she care about Heavenly law? “As you’ve pointed out before, I tend to bend rules.”
“Bend? You wouldn’t be bending a rule. You’d be breaking it over the ass of an archangel.”
The visual almost made him laugh. “Don’t worry about that.” After what he’d done, what was one more broken law?
“I’m trying,” she said tightly, “to not make things worse for you with the archangels.”
He actually did laugh at that, even as he appreciated her concern. “I hit the height of worst when I rescued you.”
Her chin came up, and he braced himself for a mulish conversation. “I’m not feeding from you.”
He wasn’t worried about a broken rule that no one would find out about anyway. His concern was that drinking his blood could, potentially, drain his powers as it replenished hers. He could scarcely afford to lose any strength, and he wasn’t sure how much he could trust Harvester if she was significantly stronger than he was.
“Why are you being so obstinate? A year ago, you’d have jumped at the chance to suck me dry.”
“A year ago, I was pretending to be an evil bitch.”
“And now?”
“Now I don’t know what I am!” she shouted. “I used to know, and now I don’t, and it’s all your fault.”
Ah, damn. For so long after he’d lost his memory, he’d wandered aimlessly, not knowing who he’d been and unclear on who he was, other than an angel who had been given the boot from Heaven for saving the life of a human child who had been fated to die.
So yeah, he’d been directionless, but at least he’d been able to start life with a clean slate. Harvester didn’t have that. In her case, she’d spent the majority of her life in the service of Sheoul. She might have fallen from Heaven on purpose, but she’d truly become a fallen angel. Was she going to be able to re-adjust?
One thing was certain. Offering to help her was only going to send her into retreat mode, and arguing with her would do the same. All he could do was give her space, something he was so not good at. So screw it.
“You’re a fallen angel, Harvester,” he said. “But you aren’t evil.” Hopefully. “That means you can be whatever you want.” He moved toward her, noted the way her breaths came faster as he drew nearer. “But you can only be what you want if you survive. Which means you need to feed from me. No more bullshit. Do it or give me a damned good reason why you can’t.”
“Fuck off.”
“There you go,” he growled. “Run to your standard answer when you don’t have a real response.”
“You don’t understand, you fool,” she yelled. “Is your halo squeezing your skull so tightly that your brain can’t get blood? Feeding from you will f**k me up. I did it once. I fed from an angel, and it made me do… horrible things. I killed the angel, Reaver. I couldn’t stop, and I killed him.”
Crushing sadness at the angel’s death… and at Harvester’s obvious regret, sat like a lump in Reaver’s belly. But they had no choice, and he couldn’t let up on her now.
“You won’t kill me. I won’t let you.”
He backed her against a boulder, and she yelped again when she banged her wing achors against the stone. She must be in so much pain, but even now she was schooling her expression as if she hadn’t made a sound. He spared her his pity and tapped his throat.
“Now, bite me.”
Her eyes locked onto his neck and the force of her hunger crashed over him like a tidal wave. This time, she wasn’t going to refuse. A sudden stab of unease pierced his chest, even though he knew they needed for this to happen or they weren’t going to survive.
Then again, if she fell into a sinister haze of bloodlust while he was powerless, drained by her feeding, she might just revisit the time when she’d tortured him. When she’d done her evil best to get him addicted to marrow wine.
Maybe they should wait a little longer for Calder—
As fast as a croix viper, she struck, sinking her fangs deep into his vein.
And then the world shifted under his feet.
Eleven
Eidolon was having a great day. Which was notable, because ever since Pestilence had come through the hospital like a rabid tornado and killed half his staff and destroyed a f**k-ton of equipment, most days were shit.
Underworld General had been understaffed for months, and he’d had to do an emergency hire of untrained people in order to keep the hospital operating at the most basic levels. He was paying to have several ter’taceo—demons who passed as humans—attend EMT, nursing, and medical schools, but obviously that took time. Time he didn’t have.
What was getting the hospital through in the meantime was the hiring of demon species who already possessed healing abilities as part of their breed makeup. Which meant he’d hired dozens of Seminus demons.
It hadn’t been easy—Sems were rare, even for incubi. But thanks to Sin’s prior relationship to Tavin when she’d been his assassin master, Eidolon had been able to bring several of his brothers on board.
Things were finally getting better. He was even getting ready to expand his medical practice by building an urgent-care clinic that would be connected to Underworld General via an internal Harrowgate. He’d chosen his in-laws, Gem and Conall, as well as a False Angel named Blaspheme to run the place.
Eidolon finished stitching up a Mamu who had split his head open while attacking an elderly human male. Eidolon had no idea if the human had survived, and he didn’t ask. His job wasn’t to judge. Usually. He’d been raised by Justice demons, so judging had been trained into him at an early age, and every once in a while he couldn’t help but deliver a little hospital justice. Like using stitches instead of his much less painful healing power. Or operating without anesthesia.
Little things. Little things that gave him an immense feeling of satisfaction.
“Keep the area clean,” he told the Mamu. It was pointless to talk about cleanliness with a demon who thrived in filth, but some habits were hard to break. “You’ll need to make an appointment to have the stitches removed.”
The Mamu hissed, his black lips peeling back from pitted, pointy little teeth. “Appointments. Fuck appointments. I can do it myself.”
“That’s your choice.” Eidolon stripped off his gloves and trashed them. “See the front desk about payment.” He got out of there before the Mamu bitched about that, too.
“E!” Blaspheme’s voice called out from the other side of the emergency bay.
He jogged over to one of the exam rooms, where Blas and a red-haired Sem named Forge were working on a Sem lying on a table.
“Handing this one off to you.” Blaspheme shoved a clipboard at him. “I’ve got a pregnant Sora in exam one I need to prep for delivery.” She gestured to the Seminus demon patient. “He asked for you.”
She swept out of the room in a blur of golden hair and purple scrubs. He moved to the patient and was shocked to see Tavin lying on the table.
“Holy hell, Tav.” The guy had been minced, but Forge’s healing ability was sealing up wounds nearly as quickly as Eidolon could do it. “What the f**k happened? Where’s Reaver?”
“Screw Reaver,” Tav muttered. “He did this to me.”
Eidolon blinked. He didn’t get struck dumb often, but he couldn’t see Reaver turning on someone like this. “You’ll have to be more specific.”
Tavin sat up, fighting Forge when the other Sem tried to hold him down. “This,” he said, yanking down the collar of his shirt.
Eidolon peered closely at the glyph. “I thought you had a worm—”
“I did.” Tavin cursed. “Reaver healed me. It did something… I don’t know what. But when it was done, I had this viper that f**king bites.”
Eidolon brushed his finger over the snake and yanked his hand back when it struck. “That’s interesting.”
“Interesting?” Tavin flopped back down on the exam table. “Maybe you’ll find it interesting how, when I sliced into a demon and got blood on my hand, the damned viper latched onto my throat and injected me with shit that made me go crazy. I went into some sort of berserker mode. Nearly killed myself without even knowing it. I tried to… hurt… Harvester, too. Would have, if Reaver hadn’t stopped me.”
It sounded almost as if Tavin had entered s’genesis, the final stage of a Seminus demon’s maturation, when they turned into monsters who cared only about sex. And they would take it in any way they had to, which often meant trickery and violence.