Eternal Rider - Larissa Ione [76]
She glared, stung by his rejection, and she didn’t even know why. She didn’t want him. What she wanted was her life back.
And you want that life back… why?
Because in her old life, she might be on the verge of being homeless, but she hadn’t been dying. Demons and evil legends weren’t chasing her.
No hot men were stroking her to orgasm in their showers.
Frustrated by the direction of her thoughts, she jerked the sheet over her, rolled to the side, and smashed her face into squishy softness. Her anger ebbed, replaced by confusion. “You brought me a pillow.”
He gave a casual shrug, but a pink blush smudged his cheeks. “You should be comfortable when you sleep. To find the hound,” he added quickly. As if his feet were on fire, he swept out of the bedroom.
He’d been embarrassed about doing something nice.
Cara stared after him, a sense of disquiet stirring her thoughts. Ares was a hard man—what she’d expect from an ancient warrior. But she’d seen him care for his horse, for the baby goat-demon thing. She felt his gentle touch, his protectiveness. And he’d been thoughtful enough to bring her a pillow.
So why did all of that bother her when she should be happy to know that he was more than a cold-blooded killing machine?
Because you don’t want to like him. Everyone you love holds you at arm’s length. If Ares was capable of caring about her, he’d hurt her, the way her ex had. The way her family had, even if unintentionally, by treating her as if she was different.
The brand, which always tingled in Ares’s presence, stopped, as if punctuating that point. Absently, she looked down, and stifled a cry. No longer angry crimson, it was the color of a dying rose.
Her first instinct was to leap out of bed, get dressed, and demand access to Ares’s library and computer. Her second instinct was to curl up in a ball and sob. That second instinct? Something that had developed since the attack two years ago.
Screw that. She swung her feet over the side of the bed and grabbed the duffel full of clothes. She might have sworn to never kill again, but she hadn’t sworn to give up on life. She was going to live.
When Pestilence was Reseph, he had, for the most part, avoided Sheoul. He’d descended into the demon realm to hang out at the Four Horsemen, but other than that, it had been too depressing. Reseph had liked parties and vacations and surfing. If it got the adrenaline pumping, the females purring, and the alcohol flowing, he was so there.
Reseph had been a pussy of epic proportions.
Pestilence ran his tongue over the sharp point of a fang as he crossed the threshold of his Sheoulin dungeon… which wasn’t actually in Sheoul. Technically, it wasn’t a dungeon, either. When his Seal had broken, he’d gained a massively cool ability… he could turn areas of the human realm into land claimed in the name of hell. Now, in the basement of the Austrian manor he’d commandeered, demons who normally couldn’t leave Sheoul could hang out in the human world and enjoy luxuries they’d never known, which included the ability to torment humans.
And they’d turned the basement into a Disneyland of torture and misery.
Reseph would have been mortified. Pestilence was orgasmic.
Pained screams and moans joined laughter and pleasurable grunts. The mouthwatering scent of blood and lust teased Pestilence’s nostrils, mingled with the stench of death, bowels, and charred bone and flesh. All kinds of earthly and demonic creatures hung from various hooks and chains on the walls and from the ceiling, and different species of demons skittered around, some of them playing, others performing tasks Pestilence had given them.
Starting an Apocalypse required a lot more help than he would have thought.
A graceful, elflike demon carrying a spiked club crossed the room when he saw Pestilence. A Neethul slave trader, Mordiin was Pestilence’s right-hand man, his ruthlessness and uncanny ability to sense fallen angels making him indispensable.
Mordiin