“Oh, fine. I promised I’d take you out. I don’t want Jack stealing my thunder.”
“Cain?”
“Yeah?”
“Shift back,” she said.
His eyes widened, not believing what he was hearing. “I can’t feed in the demon form, and you don’t want that. You never have to...”
“You can’t feed that way because nobody wants you that way. I do. I love you. Shift back.”
“Are you sure? You don’t have to prove anything to me.”
She rolled her eyes. “Honor a girl’s dying request here.”
He smirked and shifted. She was right, she still wanted him—even in the scary form. In two seconds flat, he’d managed to get out of his ripped pants. It was the quickest sex they’d ever had. Not angry, not lust-filled, but short and somehow sweet despite the negative emotions that bubbled out of the form. Underneath all that, she could feel him, the man hidden deep within the monster, and she knew her comparisons to Jack had been wrong.
When he started feeding, it took almost nothing to bring her over. Her spirit ripped from her body and she found herself hovering. Great, she was going to be like the Doublemint Ghosts with Anna now. Her past lives surged into her, the ones she’d lived before she’d been Tamar. It wasn’t a long list but several brief glimpses stopped her.
“Cain! You’ve killed me before, in like five different lives!”
He shifted back to the pretty form. “Well, shit, Tam. I didn’t know. It was bound to happen. I’ve been around forever. Don’t be angry.”
“No, I’m mad that all those times it was easy, and this one time I actually asked you to do it and we had to go through all this drama to get here.”
He took her hand and pulled her into his arms, making her solid again. “You’re never happy.” He kissed her before she could smack him.
Anna floated in, not on Luc’s arm. “Oh thank God,” she said when she reached Tam. “I thought you weren’t going to make it.”
“No, thank Cain,” Cain said.
Anna looked conflicted. “Thank you,” she finally said. “I’m sorry I said you didn’t care about her. I didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“You’re young. You can’t help these things,” Cain said.
“Luc!” Anna shouted. Her mate ran in.
“What is it?”
“Hold my hand so I can hug the friend I almost lost.”
Luc’s eyes widened at the sight of them together. “You took a mate?”
“Why does everybody think I don’t have layers,” Cain said, beginning to sound irked.
Anna grabbed Luc’s hand and hugged Tam. “Welcome to my ghostly world,” she said. “Parts of it suck. Parts of it are awesome.”
Tam laughed.
When they got back to the demon dimension, Cain pulled her away from the others, taking her off to the caves.
“You know, we can probably just do it wherever we want now,” she said.
“That’s not why I’m bringing you out here.”
Once again, he was holding her hand, taking her out to the caves, only this time she knew it meant something.
“Are you going to regret doing this?” she asked, the slightest bit of insecurity creeping in. The whole thing had sort of happened very suddenly and under duress. For both of them.
“No,” he said, firmly. “I realized before you were dying that I wasn’t just keeping you around for amusement. I like that you aren’t some twenty-year-old, bubble-headed twit. I relate to you. I like that you’re not scared of me.” He paused for a second, and she knew he was still moved that she’d asked for the demon form. No other woman in existence would have done that for him. He quickly regained his composure. “And I like that you can kick my ass—or make a valiant attempt, at least. Though that won’t be true for a while because of your change. But I’ll live until you get unruly again.”
“Oh, I’m queen of the verbal sparring match, you won’t be bored,” she promised. “Speaking of queens, does this make me queen of the demons? Oh oh oh! Or queen of the underworld, like Persephone?”
He winced. “Please, those are such human labels. Aren’t we above all that?”
But she was just screwing with him. Though she did sort of love the Persephone and Hades myth. Maybe there had been a clue in there all along.
Things turned serious when he took her into the caves. Hadrian was chained to a wall, badly beaten and tortured.
“You did this,” she said quietly. For a moment she wondered if she would be the one to regret the mating. The evidence of her mate’s brutality was stark as Hadrian groaned in the shackles. He was healing, but if he was still this messed up as a vampire, it had to have been really bad.
“I did. And I would do it again. I told you before we got split up that you were mine. Did you really think I wouldn’t move Heaven and Earth to get you back?”
She’d known demons were possessive and that words like mine didn’t spill out of their mouths casually, but she’d been in denial at that point.
He turned her face toward him, his hand cupping her chin. “Do you regret the mating?”
Tam looked at Hadrian, then back to Cain. “No. I knew what you were when I agreed. I’m not a twenty-year-old, bubble-headed twit,” she said, tossing his words back at him.
He smirked. “Something we can all be grateful for. I bet you were a terror when you were twenty.”
“Every single time.”
He got serious again. “What do you want to do with him?”
Tam sighed. “Just let him go. I’m too old to be that petty.”
He unchained the vampire and offered him a hand to help him stand. “You’ve no doubt made enemies of everyone, especially Anthony. I’d steer clear if I were you. You might also want to change where you sleep for the day. It’s only a matter of time before things escalate in the human world, even with Jack gone.”
The vampire nodded. “I’m sorry it went like this, Tam. Truly. But bad things will happen from Anthony’s control. Jack was evil, but he was a means to an end for me.”
Tam didn’t reply. She didn’t feel like he wanted her to, just that he had to get that said. He’d probably been holding onto it for a while. Father Hadrian left them alone in the caves, and Tam looked over at her mate.
“Can I still eat food?”
Cain chuckled. “If you like. When you’re not in the ghostly form.”
“But it’s not really what keeps me going?” These, of course, were the questions you typically asked before you gave your soul to a demon, but meh.
“No. We’re tied together now. I can only feed successfully from you, but you gain strength through it, as well.”
“Neat.” She looked down at the sand she couldn’t really stand in. “You know, I’d just love for one century to go by where my life was normal.”
“Good luck with that.”
She turned her palm up and was surprised when she could still form an energy ball, though it was ghostly and wouldn’t do any damage. Someday, though. Cain grabbed her and pulled her to him for a kiss as the glowing purple ball fell from her hand and sizzled in the sand.
