“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 fuck 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 fuck-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 fuck 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 fucking 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.
Eidolon frowned. “You said this happened when you killed a demon?”
At Tavin’s nod, Eidolon strode to the door and shouted at a nurse to fetch Idess, another in-law. As an ex-angel of sorts, she was the closest thing to an expert on an angel-powered… whatever-it-was plaguing Tavin.
While he waited, he helped Forge heal Tavin, who spent the entire time bitching about angels. Eidolon said a silent thanks when Idess showed up, her chestnut hair secured in a long, tight ponytail by a series of gold metal bands.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
Eidolon pointed to Tavin’s symbol. “Do you recognize that?”
Narrowing her honey-colored eyes, Idess leaned in close. But not close enough to get bitten, he noticed. “That looks like a patron cobra.”
“A what?” Eidolon and Tavin asked in unison.
She inhaled a deep breath. “It’s a symbol angels used to brand people requesting protection from demons. But this makes no sense. Not only is it slightly altered—this snake has fangs—the symbol hasn’t been used in thousands of years.” She frowned down at Tavin. “How did it get there? Only an angel could do this.”
“Reaver did it.”
She blinked. “Reaver?” She looked as baffled as Eidolon felt. “Why would he do that? The patron cobra can’t be used on demons.”
“It wasn’t intentional,” Tavin said. “His powers are all fucked up.”
“Oh.” Idess’s expression went slack. “Oh.”
“Oh, what?” Tavin croaked. “I don’t like the sound of that.”