Page 28 of Try As I Smite
Delilah, when he’d asked for help with a demon problem, had sent him to a demon. A fucking demon. One who’d locked them in this powerless state.
“You will have to go through me,” Hazah said with a bloodthirsty smile that sent a chill down his spine.
“Kill you and finally fulfill my task, all at the same time?” The demon—named Belial, apparently—set his feet wider, getting ready to charge. “Must be my lucky night.”
Before the thing could attack, a man manifested in the center of the room, landing in perfect superhero pose, massive white wings outstretched, armor so gleamingly blinding, he hurt to look at.
Alasdair gaped at the spectacle. The man may as well have dropped down from heaven.
“Delilah,” Hazah snapped. “Touch the mage.”
In a blink, Delilah reached out and placed her palm over Alasdair’s heart, that spot on his skin warming instantly, almost painfully, at her touch.
Blackness consumed his vision. The last thing he heard in that room was Hazah snarling at Belial. “You won’t touch my daughter—”
Silence. Darkness. Shock.
“I’m sure you have questions,” Delilah said. Quietly. Calmly. Way too calm for what just happened.
Fuck it all, he needed to see her face, but the void was blanking her out. Alasdair grasped the first emotion that bubbled to the top of the cauldron inside him. “Hazah is your mother?”
“Yes.” Her voice was a glacier of ice in the darkness.
“A gods damned demon is your mother?” He was snarling now, but that couldn’t be helped.
Bile stung as it rose up his gullet, leaving a sour taste on his tongue. A demon had forced him to kill his own father. The same evil was taking over his people, wreaking havoc and only getting worse. He should hate what she was, but… Hell, he’d just taken her to paradise, and wanted to go back there with her. What did that make him?
A blind idiot led by his dick. That’s what.
“And your father?” he asked, words clipped. “Also a demon?”
Did demons have wings? Was that why the result for her cat had been death? Because she was a spawn of the hells?
“No. That would be the angel who landed beside my mother,” she answered, the words stiff as though she couldn’t quite make her lips work.
He had to stop himself from physically pitching forward to try to get more air into his lungs as those words sent reverberations through his entire system. Alasdair covered his eyes with his hands, pressing hard with his palms, waiting for the aftershocks to stop thundering through him.
Half demon was bad enough, but half angel, too? That was way worse.
…
No. No. No. No…
The word was blending together in her head, turning into useless, nonsensical sounds, feeling as though Zeus himself were hurling thunderbolts after her, one after another.
Watching the horror in Alasdair’s eyes before they’d plunged into darkness tore at her like a son of a bitch. More than just about any other experience she could bring to mind. Which meant she was way further down the road with him than she’d intended to go.
She needed to focus.
A demon—Belial, her mother had called it—had somehow hijacked them. Pulled them half in and half out of her mother’s spell, or maybe stepped inside it himself, so that they remained vulnerable to attack.
Razors of fear slid around her heart, slicing deep, threatening to bleed her out like an animal to slaughter. That had not been a lower-level demon—that had been a sentinel—not once an angel, like her mother, but the most powerful of the demons who’d originated as human souls. And Alasdair’s forehead had glowed with its mark in her office, which meant that thing was the same one who’d been after him since he was a boy.
Which meant Alasdair had to be integral to whatever the demons were planning. If that was true, then he needed to be anywhere but here.
They landed without warning, and the soft light had her blinking after the darkness. Delilah frowned as she looked around. Why were they back here?
They stood once more in the circular meeting room for the Syndicate. Only this time night had fallen, the snowcapped mountains hardly visible outside the blackened windows and glare of the lights on the glass.
