“Want you to use you, Cora,” he interrupted, pulling me back up against him. “Or, more properly, to use Bael’s power.”
Horror skittered along my flesh as I understood what it was he meant. I had a vision of evil being after evil being lining up to use me as some sort of a demonic power source, blasting the world with innumerable cruelties. “Oh, shit.”
“And lucky me,” he added, his voice as grim as his expression. “It appears you have chosen me to protect you from them all.”
Chapter Six
“You know, this doesn’t look like hell.”
“That’s because it’s not Abaddon. It’s the Akasha.” Alec strolled beside me as we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing slightly along the smooth walls and stone floor.
“Yeah, but that greeter person told Diamond and me that this was a place of perpetual torment, and that sounds like hell to me. However, this”—I waved a hand around at our surroundings—“this just looks like any old office building. I don’t see anything tormentish about it.”
“Try opening one of the doors,” he said, nodding to one as we passed it.
I paused. “Why? Is something ghoulish going on in there? Are people being dismembered? Tortured? Eaten by fire ants?”
He crossed his arms and nodded toward the nearest door. “Open it and see.”
“All right, but if it’s something gross, I’m aiming at you when I barf up my breakfast.” I opened the door and looked in, braced for the worst.
A group of a half-dozen people sat around a long table, papers scattered across its surface, which was also littered with half-empty bottles of water, and a rainbow of highlighters. Crumpled paper spilled off the table onto the floor, leading in a trail to a whiteboard covered in several different styles of handwriting.
“We are agreed, then, are we not,” said a man in a business suit at the head of the table, “that examining the cost savings that will accrue from our cutback on the performance-related functions will make good any and all productivity shortfalls we experience this quarter ? ”
A woman shook her head and tapped at the table with one of the highlighters. “I believe that if we realign our organizational aims to better benefit the enterprise, we can absolve our office of the clearly unsustainable redundancy of not only the expense claims, but of the external consultants, which I think we all agree will lead to the downfall of this and other management teams within the venture.”
“No, no, no!” a third man said, hoisting his pants up over his beer belly as he rose to his feet. “If we form a task force to investigate the benefits of a mentor program—”
“Good god,” I said softly, closing the door. “It’s worse than I thought.”
Alec nodded. “Middle-management committees. Still think this isn’t a bad place?”
I shuddered. “We have to get out of here.”
He slid me a look as he took my hand, making me hurry to keep up with his long-legged stride. “I’m glad you’re including me in your escape plans, although I regret to inform you that there is no way to get out of the Akasha short of being summoned out.”
“Then we’ll just have to arrange for that,” I said, feeling a bit mulish. I didn’t plan on spending the rest of my life dodging committee meetings.
“And just how do you expect to pull that off when we’re stuck in here with no way to communicate to the outside? ”
“I don’t know, but I’m sure as shooting not going to sit around here waiting for people to use me for who knows what bad—Diamond!”
A familiar face turned as I called out her name. She was standing with two other people, but smiled when I almost dragged Alec up to her, her eyes moving from me to him, widening when she took in all his manly glory.
You are making far too much of my appearance, querida.
Oh, don’t tell me you don’t like it, because I can feel just how much you enjoy overhearing my inadvertently and wholly insincere smutty thoughts about you. I bet you just love it when women go gaga over you, pandering to your insatiable ego, inflating your head until it’s approximately the size of Montana . I’m equally sure you love it when women look at you like Diamond is looking at you, which honestly I have to say is way out of line, considering she has a husband she claims she loves, not to mention the fact that she stole him from me.
I thought you no longer wanted him?
I don’t, but no woman likes to have a man stolen out from under her nose, and if Diamond thinks she’s going to pull that again with you, she’s going to be in a whole world of hurt.
Now who’s jealous?
I transferred my glare from Diamond to Alec. “I really don’t like you,” I told him.
“And just when I was beginning to think otherwise of you,” he almost purred into my ear.
A shiver of the purest pleasure rippled down my back.
“Cora! You missed a fascinating breakfast. There were some lovely speakers talking about the sorts of things that are available for us to pass the time here in the Akasha. But tell me, who is your friend?” Her gaze flickered from where my fingers were twined through his to his face.
“This is Alec Darwin. He’s a vampire. He killed a woman several hundred years ago.” I bit back the words that my inner devil was trying to force out, hiding them deep in my psyche so Alec wouldn’t overhear them: And he’s not available.
“Hello, Alec,” Diamond said with a cheery smile.
He responded politely, then peered at her for a few seconds. She’s glowing.
She is? I glanced at her, my eyes widening. Oh, no, she is! Was she affected by me becoming the eyeball of Sauron?
Occio di Lucifer, and no, I don’t think it works that way. I could feel him turning the facts over in his mind. Did you say that Ulfur glowed, as well?
Yes.
And that he had stolen something from Bael?
Something gold, yes. It looked like a flattened disk when he showed it to me.
Before or after you were cast into the Akasha?
After.
Sins of the saints . . . Ulfur must have stolen all three Tools.
You think he’s an Occio, too?
No, it sounds like he’s the Anima di Lucifer. That used to be a dragon-shaped aquamanile. Which means that this woman must have been holding the third Tool.
“And you just met? ” Diamond interrupted my thoughts with a pointed look at where I still held Alec’s hand.
“Yes.” I pushed away the spike of jealousy, focusing on what was important. “Diamond, when we were at the house and you were in the basement, what were you doing? ”
“Taking pictures. You know that.”
“No, I mean right at the moment when suddenly we were zapped here.”
“Oh.” She looked thoughtful. “I was examining a very pretty goblet I found that had rolled beneath the stairs. It looked valuable, and I was going to bring it up to show you, when poof!”
“Goblet?” I asked Alec.
He nodded. “The Voce di Lucifer. All three of you were holding a Tool when Bael banished Ulfur.”
“Bael?” Diamond froze. “The demon lord Bael?”
“Yes.” Alec looked at her with speculation that was mirrored in my mind. “Do you know him?”
“Me? Merciful sovereign, no! But I know of him, of course. Everyone does,” she explained, her hands fluttering in the air as she spoke. “Are you saying Bael sent us here?”