Eternal Rider - Larissa Ione [113]
A crimson tide bloomed in Pestilence’s eyes, and he swept his arm in an arc, connecting with Ares’s shoulder and sending him crashing through the side of the tent. Before Ares could get to his feet, Pestilence was there, kneeling on Ares’s chest and digging his fingers into his throat. Agonizing pressure on his windpipe closed it off.
“You’re coming with me, brother,” Pestilence said, his voice a nasty snarl. “You’re going to watch me break your Seal, but first, I’m going to make you very sorry that you tried to get in my way.”
Pain shattered Ares’s skull, and all went black.
Man, Reseph loved a good party.
Jimmy Buffett was singing praises to the almighty margarita, the sun was hot, the ocean blue, a pig was roasting in a pit, and women were swinging their bikini-covered hips in an invitation that would give a blind man his sight back.
Limos worked the portable bar she brought out for the bashes she held at her Hawaiian beach house. She always invited the locals, who thought she was a Paris Hilton type, a young heiress living off her wealthy parents’ money. Which explained why she was rarely at the beach house; Limos claimed she had a dozen homes all over the world and spent her time between them.
Reseph sat back against the palm tree, downed half his margarita, and wondered if he should take the hot blonde who was falling out of her swimsuit top into the water for a little below-the-waves action. Emmalee liked it the way he liked it… which was every way. But she got a little extra excited when there was a risk of getting caught, or when she knew someone was watching.
“Brought you a refill.”
He looked up as Limos poured more margarita-on-the-rocks into his glass from a pitcher. “Thanks, sis.” He popped his sunglasses up and scanned the crowd of around fifty, mostly humans. There were a few demons present, but as ter’taceo, they were disguised even to most other demons. “Wish Ares and Than were here.”
Li sighed, plopped down beside him, and took a huge gulp from her pitcher. “Than said he’d be here, but Ares…” She shrugged.
Yeah, Ares rarely came to these get-togethers, and when he did, he had to hang out on the porch and watch from afar. Getting too close to the action caused too many fights to break out. “Did you even invite him?”
“No.”
Ares probably knew about the party, but at least this way, he didn’t have to go through the torture of refusing.
“Is someone going to start up a volleyball game soon?”
One black eyebrow arched. “You feeling the need to beat up a ball?”
He waggled his brows. “I want to watch all the bouncing boobs.”
Limos slugged him in the shoulder. “You have not changed at all. Still the perverted playboy you were when you were human.”
Yeah, he’d been that. The “son” of a powerful Akkadian priestess who claimed a virgin conception by a god, Reseph had been raised to be a spoiled, irresponsible bed-hopper. By the time Limos had found him at the age of twenty-eight, he could have had fifty children by as many women. Fortunately, his priestess “mother” had been well-versed in mystical medicine… to the extent that Reseph suspected that she’d possessed some demon DNA in her background.
Thanks to skullwort, a demon herb that ended pregnancies in females and rendered males sterile for weeks at a time, he’d never had to deal with losing a child the way Ares had. Nor would he.
He could party all he wanted to.
A curvy brunette bent over and bared her breasts to him, and nope, that never got old.
Limos just shook her head. “You’re impossible.”
“Hey.” He assumed his best offended tone. “I can’t help it if the females love me.”
“Whatever.” Rolling her eyes, Li shoved to her feet, brushed sand off her sundress, and gestured to the hog pit. “It’s time to carve. Make yourself useful.”
He grinned as she tromped away, feet kicking in the loose sand. Man, he loved his life. He really did. It sucked that his siblings