Holy crap indeed.
What the shit was going on?
I blinked. Blinked again. Then I rubbed my eyes. Each time I saw the same image. Eric. Eric. Eric. I have to say…he’d seen better days. Death did not agree with the man.
Dressed in a very slick, overpriced black suit—or maybe it was navy, bad lighting and all— he stood in front of us looking very much not dead, but even as I stared at him, I knew that it wasn’t Emma’s dad. The eyes, they were all wrong, and I’d seen them before. In my nightmares. In lower-demons. In hellhounds. They were the eyes of Hell.
The fact that Hell had taken an interest in Eric should have come as no surprise.
The man, when alive, had been filled with lunatic ideas and probably killed more Divisa than I was ever going to be comfortable knowing. He was one soul that definitely belonged in the underworld.
Adjusting his tie, demon-Eric slinked forward, and he had eyes only for Chase. “Don’t you recognize me…son?”
I think I blacked out at that point.
Surely Chase did.
Tiny stars started twinkling in the back of my eyes. I know I stopped breathing. Together the two of us were having a battle of shock between us.
This wasn’t just any demon. This was the demon. The one no Divisa ever wanted to meet.
Their sire.
My head screamed a string of swear words that would have made the Devil blush. I imagined Chase had a pretty inventive chain of words himself.
Fear pumped inside me.
I had met my fair share of Hell’s minions, but never a higher-demon. My knees started to feel wonky, and I gripped onto Chase’s forearm to steady myself. I dared a peek at him.
He didn’t have the exact same reaction I did. There was doubt written in every line of his face, along with his famous superiority. His chin lifted. “Wow. I wondered when this day would come.” He looked demon/Eric/father over. “You don’t look at all like I envisioned.”
The being from Hell puffed out his expansive chest. “You think I would get that a lot being the Billy badass of the underworld, but believe it or not…you’re an only child.”
Chase angled his head. “Couldn’t find any fresh meat-suits? You had to go for a dead one?”
A tight smile crossed the demon’s dry, sneering lips. “This one holds a special place in my soul. He came through my domain, and I knew that he was the one for my appearance on earth.” Taking a long glance around at the woods, he said, “It’s been awhile.”
I felt Chase’s muscle flex under my hand. “Eighteen years,” he supplied.
“Who’s counting? Eighteen. A decade. A millennium. The years all start to blur.”
“You don’t think that using a dead dude is a little, messy?” Chase asked.
He was goading a higher-demon. It was making me very nervous. My palms were sweating, and I swear the demon could smell my fear. Eric lifted his nose in the air as I tried to figure out what this demon wanted with Chase. What exactly his plan was, and how much shit we were in.
Demon/Eric’s nostrils flared. “I thought it was poetic. After all, you did snap his neck.”
Chase crossed his arms, keeping mine looped in his in the process. He widened his stance. “Yeah, that’s right. I did. So, am I supposed to call you Eric, Dad…? What’s the drill here?”
“Alastair.” He said his name as if it should have some kind of effect on us, like instilling the fear of God or making us drop to our knees in praise.
Well, I was already pretty freaked out, and I might very well have dropped to my knees, but for an entirely different reason. Terror.
Eric’s ghastly looking mouth thinned into a leer. “I’m sure you’ve heard of me.”
Dear God, he was as bad as Chase.
Alastair.
The name rang a bell. Then it hit me. I’d never thought I would hear that name again. Flashbacks of homecoming swarmed in my head. It had been some time since I had thought about that night. I could still feel what it was like having a lower-demon latch onto my life-source and steal it from me. It was a sensation I would just assume never to feel again.
A new onset of fears filled me, thanks to that little jog down memory lane.
Chase ran the pad of his thumb on the inside of my palm, sensing the jackhammering in my chest. “Great. Now that we have the formalities out of the way, what do you want?” he asked.
It was obvious that neither of us wanted to linger longer than necessary. I just hoped that we would be able to leave. If Alastair could force Chase to come to him, what was stopping him from exercising that power to do other things? The thought made me quiver.
Alastair’s eyes glossed with longing, and he stepped forward, crushing a pinecone. “You have something that belongs to me.”
“Oh yeah, what might that be?” Chase asked, beefing up the sarcasm.
I suddenly got this sick feeling in my gut. My throat went dry, and the demon mark at my hip was pulsating like crazy. “He wants me,” I croaked.