Page 22 of Burn for the Devil
“This isn’t bargaining, this is compliance,” I retorted.
He shoved his hair back. “How long does it take the poison to work?”
“No one knows. I can’t remember when I began to feel a difference. Maybe eighteen months ago?”
He stood up and began pacing, halting to snatch a flower from the vase on my desk. “So, this is what I have to look forwardto.” Petals were torn off the stem, fluttering to the floor one by one as he plucked them.
“Sit down, you’re driving me crazy. Fucking pacing back and forth,” Stefan mumbled the last sentence.
Ilya turned to him. “Do you feel any different?”
“No. Not yet,” Stefan replied to his best friend.
“You haven’t offered anyone a chair,” Ilya remarked, and Stefan rolled his eyes. “That’s different.”
“At this point I should be offering to cook everyone dinner, judging by the way you’ve been acting.” Stefan’s fists clenched in his lap. “Being helpful provides comfort and encourages cooperation and compliance. People feel indebted. By me not offering, that may be a bad sign.”
Stefan looked angrier than that time he almost shot me at Kiara’s father’s castle, when I’d killed half the guards. He hadn’t done a fucking thing then, and he wouldn’t now. But the man had a decent point with his truthful statement, the effects were perhaps immediate because he didn’t try to provide his typical assistance after the tense scene. He wasn’t attempting to manipulate anyone. While obviously furious with Ilya and I, he seemed resigned to his new fate.
Then, everyone’s eyes turned to Matthew.
13
Ramone
The angel had been sitting there relatively quietly, unreactive to the assault after his initial shock. I waited, unsure if the curse was designed solely for demons or if it would affect angels in the same manner. Demons were essentially angels—cursed angels. It was debatable whether or not that particular curse was justified.
From what I had heard, Matthew’s antics had at times put my own to shame. There’d been talk in the past about his possible involvement in a few devasting plagues that scoured the earth. Those diseases had been before my time so I couldn’t confirm the rumors.
I didn’t want to think about any of this, what I really wanted was to go home and study or go out and rape and pillage. None of that was a possibility at the moment, seeing as my kind faced an existential crisis. There was also the unusual physical and emotional reaction to my dinner the other night. I couldn’t, in good conscience, feed on anyone but Samantha now, it would seem.
Tired of waiting, I sent the angel a pointed look. “Nothing is different.” He scowled at me. “Other than an intense craving for demon and vampire blood.”
“Has it occurred to you that you’ve crossed over already? Perhaps you’re one of them now or some half-breed.” Alastair glanced up from his cell phone and waited for the angel’s reply. “You’re not known for honesty.”
He scoffed at the words and ignored the insult as I pondered my friend’s cryptic statement. “I’d never lower myself.”
Finally, Alexander spoke up. “Nobody trusts you, Matthew. Nobody expects you to admit if you feel a change, but time will tell us all we need to know, you fucking asshole.”
“Enough,” I cut in. “He won’t be able to hide it for long if he’s changed, as Alexander said.”
A surprising but not unwelcome silence descended over the room while my colleagues rifled through the files. Stefan plugged the thumb drive he’d been given into a laptop he’d pulled from a messenger bag while Alastair returned to his phone. The vampire had his own businesses to run, and I’d forced him to take on more responsibility. A pang of concern crossed me that was swiftly dismissed. We needed him here and he was one of the two people I trusted; Alexander being the other.
Stefan was the one to speak up first. “So, everything is divided into territories.” He nodded at his own words. “And we’re taking the company public? You two have run this under an illusion veil for decades and now you want to make it visible. Why?”
“Depending on the ultimate results of that poison, it may turn out to have been necessary. We don’t know what the effects could finalize as. We have some international recognition, but we’re not widely known. What if we lose everything that makes us,us?” Ilya continued his argument. “I still have my giftsfor now, but I’d hate to find out the hard way that we lost everything. This provides insurance. Plus, the veil has thinned, and we have been beginning to be noticed, as I said, to a small degree.”
Stefan paled. “I don’t want to find that out. We can still pull energy from the atmosphere, and through hunting in person.”
“For now. That’s why we’ll still be primarily a media and software-based corporation, we know what we’re doing. Matthew is in commercial real estate, which helps. If we stop being able to feed the way we’ve been primarily doing, we’ll still have money coming in. Matthew, get out of sex trafficking and open a chain of strip clubs or something,” Ilya turned to the man alongside him.
“You owe me.” Matthew glared at him. “And who said I’d pool my resources with you fuckers?”
Ilya shoved his notes into the folder on his lap. “You’re here, aren’t you? I let you in and that includes your resources. You now have access to ours. If that wine affects you, you won’t stomach selling girls anyway, eventually. You might as well build something that lasts and feeds us. Lust is one of the denser auras.”
The angel appeared to have forgotten that the invisible to the human eye veil that surrounded everyone may disappear. It was our lifeblood, feeding us and sustaining us, giving us our power. Ilya had brilliantly devised a computerized manner of capturing and focusing the sin-based energies and frequencies, utilizing the internet, malware, viruses, and other avenues I’d never cared to investigate. It allowed our kind to feed off human weaknesses in a fashion no one had ever seen before. We’d been stronger than ever.
Without the network, we’d be back to hunting humans primarily in person every time we needed to feed, having to touch them for sustenance. It’d been a luxurious convenience tomerely have to breathe the sin-drenched air. Being the beasts that we were, we still craved human contact, but the ease we’d been enjoying allowed us time for other pursuits.