Chapter Five

Charles lived on the third floor over the bar.

He pushed open the door to what could have been anyone’s living room, kitchen and eat-in nook, with screens to cover the bedroom and a balcony with a view of the skyline over the building across the street—not a million-dollar view, but it wasn’t cheap. The room itself was clean, dressed for functionality and comfort within a subdued gray-to-blue palette common among men who feared the complexity of coordination, although Charles had already proved himself comfortable with a daring color or two.

“Would you like something to drink or eat? It’s free of charge up here.” Charles took off his coat and hung it on the coatrack near the entrance, then gestured for her to do the same. She did so with some reluctance, reminding herself that she didn’t have to worry about him taking advantage of the lower neckline of her shirt. She’d changed out of her scrubs today, but she was still in her usual casual-practical chic with a long-sleeved knit and jeans, because who the hell was she trying to impress at five o’clock in the morning?

“Water would be nice,” she replied.

He even had inexpensive but serviceable water glasses. She’d really appreciate if there was something in this apartment representative of what he was. At least in Threshold, there were other demons in their true physical forms to remind her that some demons wore human faces. But everything about his place and him in it was just so fucking normal.

“Have a seat wherever you like,” he said.

Abby doubted ‘wherever’ included the mini-chandelier over the small dining table, but she decided to sideline the snark for a few minutes and settled into the armchair adjacent to the couch. That way, Charles couldn’t inch nearer to her and try to get his arm around her or put his hand on her thigh like a horny teenager.

He handed her the glass and slouched on the sofa with the carelessness he almost always exuded, fraught with none of the anxiety that Abby experienced being alone in an incubus’ home.

She slipped her hand inside her purse to find her mace.

“You won’t need whatever weapon you think makes you safe.” Resting against the back of the sofa showed off the lean lines of his body through his blue plaid shirt and dark jeans, drawing the clothing tight against his chest and thighs and calling attention to the muscle beneath. “If I wanted to kill you, I would have done it already. I think I’ve explained well enough that I have no interest in hurting you, at least not more than you ask for.”

“If you think I’d ask for it, you’ve lost your mind.”

Charles shrugged. “All hunters have a masochistic streak.”

“I’m not a hunter.”

“So those bruises on your face and back aren’t from fighting demons?”

“How the hell do you know about the ones on my back?”

“Incubi aren’t so different from vampires. We share a good sense of smell for blood, where it flows and where it congeals.”

“I only fight them when I have to,” she said. “I had to. But I’m not looking for demons to kill like hunters do.”

“Your intentions are irrelevant. Your actions make you a demon hunter. You still put yourself into these battles, over and over, regardless of the consequences. And part of you welcomes those consequences.” He raised his hand before she could protest. “I don’t blame you, love. Nothing like war wounds to remind you that you’re alive. Admit it. We’re all alone here, no need to keep up a saintly appearance. Admit you get a thrill out of the hunt, the heroics, the hurt…the whole package.”

Abby withdrew her hand from her purse, which she set on the ground near her feet. It was a gesture of trust—trust she didn’t actually have, but she wanted to believe him when he said he wasn’t going to harm her here. “All right. Fine. I get a thrill—the same thrill I get from working night shifts at the clinic. It’s fulfilling because it’s the right thing to do.”

“Long hours on your feet, putting yourself at risk of disease with sometimes dangerous individuals, then spending your free time engaging with beings indistinguishable from the monsters of fairy tales, monsters who have no problem pulling your head off your neck like clipping a flower off a bush… If that’s not masochism, I don’t know what is.” His smile was abnormally bright in the dimly lit room. He’d turned on the kitchen light to get her water but kept all the other lights off. Perhaps he preferred the dark, nocturnal creature that he was.

“I think it’s a stretch to go from personal fulfillment to sexual masochism.” Just because a person worked herself to the bone doing one thing, that didn’t mean she wanted to be worked to the bone in another area—just like a person enjoying something spicy at the dinner table didn’t necessarily indicate that they’d like something spicy in the bedroom.

“Have you ever tried?” he asked.

“I wasn’t interested. I attended a few workshops with my college roommate, but that’s it.”

“You didn’t volunteer?”

“No. I said I wasn’t interested.”

He narrowed his eyes like a cat. “Hmmm. I’m not usually wrong about these things. In fact, I’m never wrong about these things.”

“Whips, chains, switches, spankings… I’m okay with other people doing it, but the whole thing makes me uncomfortable, historically speaking. It doesn’t turn me on at all.”

“Arousal shouldn’t be a problem, but that’s not what tonight is going to be about.” Charles leaned forward with his elbows on his thighs, peering up at her. “Tonight is about what you think demons deserve. You go out hunting them and never stopped to consider what you were. Whatever you’re fighting against in them, you’re fighting it in yourself as well—and you don’t even know what it is.”

“Just a guess…evil?” Abby said. “It’s not like it’s exclusive to demons, and I know I’m not perfect.”

“But you believe yourself closer to perfect, as the daughter of an angel—blessed.”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Figuring out her purpose didn’t make her perfect, just satisfied.

“Sometimes I did when I was younger, a long time ago. I’m older than I appear—far older—and my father wasn’t just nephil. My blood’s not as diluted as yours. He’d already taken his demonic form—masked from my mother, of course. He was an incubus, planting his seed. He didn’t need my mother to provide an egg. He just needed her to nourish me through the few months it took her to quicken, nurse me, raise me in the scandal of giving birth out of wedlock, then guide me into adulthood before he could show me what I truly was. I was his fruit, not hers, although I took on her family’s appearance through my youth and embraced it the rest of my life as a demon, because it is familiar to me.”

Charles stroked down his cheek, black leather dark against his paler skin.

“My mother raised me like a cuckoo in the swallow’s nest. I only had the barest understanding that I was more than I appeared. But I knew some of it, even before my father unlocked the demon in me. When I touched another…”

He breached the space between them and put his hand on her knee for a few long moments.

Abby forced herself to stay absolutely still in spite of the sweet pleasure of his touch, like a burst of fragrant heat from an oven on a winter night. She could only imagine how potent it would be when there weren’t layers of leather and denim in his way.

“I believed it was a blessing, too,” he said quietly. “I had a wife when my father took me away from human life. I thought she was what this gift was for, to allow me the luxury of choosing the most perfect mate, whomever I desired, in exchange for this prize.”

Abby thought of the woman that Charles had taken in holy matrimony, only for him to one day disappear, not knowing where he had gone or why and fearing the worst. Abby knew that feeling. “Do you miss her?”

“I did, for a time. She died. I didn’t.”

“You didn’t love her. You just got what you wanted from her. Do you even know how to love?”

“I’ve had so many lovers since her that I lost count.”

“Please. I’m not counting all the people you seduced in their dreams or who you lured into your lair with a touch just to suck all the sexual vitality out of them.”

“That does narrow the field a bit,” Charles said, amused. “But even without those discards, I have still had a fair number of lovers since. And there was a time when I thought I was human, as well, and I thought what I had then was love. I learned better after I changed. You speak of fulfillment. We serve a purpose, too, you know. Without demons, there is no sin. Without sin, there is no salvation.”

“I don’t think that’s a get-out-of-jail free card to do whatever you want.”

“Are you sure?” He swept to his feet, the movement graceful and surprising as he loomed over her, sliding his hand under her jaw to guide her head up.

Heat sluiced down her body as though she’d stepped straight into a hot shower that warmed her from the inside. She whimpered before she could stop herself.

“Don’t you want to know what you’re meant for? What you’re capable of?”

Abby jerked her chin away from his hand. “I already know what I’m capable of. I started healing myself at thirteen, other people at sixteen, but I’ve wanted to be a nurse since I was five. I’ve known what I was meant for before some people stop sucking their thumbs.”

“Is that why you’re trolling the streets with little more than trinket weapons in your purse?” Charles asked. “I’d think that battle is the opposite of your supposed calling.”

“I hurt the demons to stop them from hurting other people. Sometimes I get hurt in the process. Acceptable collateral damage, since I can heal most of it.”

“Not all of it?”

“I have limits.”

“I don’t.” Charles gestured to the screens that separated his bedroom from the living room. The screens moved on their own, collapsing to the side to reveal the whips, canes and switches hanging on the wall across from the bed. A foursome set of chains had been attached to the wall adjacent to the beating implements. A double set hung from the ceiling, with the option for height adjustment. Another foursome set were attached to the wrought-iron bed frame—and those were just the ones she could see.

That was more like it, much more demonic. Not intrinsically so, unless her college roommate had had a vestigial tail that Abby hadn’t known about, but still closer to what Abby had expected from an incubus’ lair.

“I’m pretty sure you do have limits.” She practically had to bite her tongue to keep from laughing, because it was all a little cheesy but also not amusing in the slightest.

This was no fantasy dungeon for someone who didn’t know what they were doing. The whips and chains were a bit over the top, but they weren’t displayed against black velvet with ultraviolet light and a disco ball. They were arranged with the same straightforwardness and lack of reverence as the abstract trio of paintings over his living room couch. They didn’t need any additional atmosphere to speak for themselves.

“Okay, I exaggerated a little.” He raised a shoulder and smiled. “I do have limitations. But you would be surprised how few.”

“I thought this wasn’t supposed to be about sex.” She deliberately eyed the sadomasochistic diorama in the middle of his vanilla apartment.

“Do you want it to be?”

“Okay, now you’re just being manipulative.”

“I just think it’s interesting that your first assumption is that I have those up there for sex.”

“They’re in the bedroom and you’re an incubus. What am I supposed to think?”

“They’re in the bedroom because the bathroom is the only other private room in the apartment, and it’s too small for my purposes.”

“Don’t fuck with me, Charles,” she snapped, standing. It didn’t give her much more height to keep him from using his as an intimidation tactic, but it gave her a fraction of power for a fraction of a moment.

“I told you it’s not always about sex—and it doesn’t have to be tonight. Tonight isn’t about pleasure. You don’t want pleasure from me. At least, you don’t think you do.”

“I certainly don’t want pain.”

“There’s more than one way to cause pain. It may not be what you’re looking for yet, but it’ll be what you’re getting tonight.”

“Then what am I looking for?” She crossed her arms and dared him to answer, because even she didn’t know what she was doing here anymore. Whether her father was an angel or a nephil was starting to feel irrelevant. She’d managed to have a relatively normal life doing good work these last few years, no matter what her father was. She’d been doing just fine without Charles playing devil’s advocate and muddying the waters.

“Answers you thought you had,” Charles said. “Life isn’t clear, love. It’s messy and chaotic and foggy, and that’s all before your demon nature emerges in full. Things don’t come together at twenty-five. They fall apart.”

“I’m twenty-seven.”

“And a healer.” He gently guided her away from the living room toward his bedroom, but she stopped before he could compel her across the invisible line into it. The man was good at what he did, but not that good. Not yet.

He ghosted his gloved fingertips over the tight line of her hair. “Tell me, sweet thing, why is it that I can go by your clinic and don’t encounter people praising the Lord for your powers? I should be tripping over the healed. They should be fighting to get in during your shift. Instead, I’ve noticed nothing different in the neighborhood upon your arrival. We haven’t become any more or less popular since you signed on. There are just as many colds and flus and sniffling unwashed as before.”

“I told you. I have limitations.”

“What kind of limitations?”

“I get headaches. They’ve never been too bad, mostly because I feel them coming and know I have to stop.”

“Interesting.” He slowly circled her. She didn’t want to have her back to him, but she also didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of watching her turn around in circles with him, like a wheel within a wheel. “So you can’t use your power indiscriminately, then? You have to pick and choose your beneficiaries. I’ve seen the element that passes through the neighborhood clinic—so many hopeless cases, so many in need of the assistance only you can provide. But you can’t give it to every one of them. And what of the families of those whom you don’t help? Those left behind suffering in the absence of the one they loved. Those who lose hope, who lose sanity, who lose faith because God didn’t answer their prayer for a miracle—a miracle like you. They mourn because of you, Abigail.” He was so close to her now that his breath was warm against her ear.

“It’s not my fault.” She wished it had come out with the strength of conviction. “I save those I can, the ones I get a feeling about, like a whisper. I just know they’re the ones I’m supposed to heal. I can’t give out miracles to everyone or else they wouldn’t really be miracles. I’m not the one decides who stays and who goes.”

“And what of those you do save? How many of them go out and do terrible things? The father given a reprieve goes home to beat his son. The mother is taken three weeks later by a stray gunshot. The ten-year-old boy succumbs to overdose within the year.”

“A bad neighborhood only makes it harder to get help for the same shit that goes on everywhere else. You know better than that. And you know that there’s better here, too.”

Charles continued as though he hadn’t heard her. “The little boy you heal from leukemia grows up to get into a car crash that starts a chain reaction pileup on the highway. The teenage girl you save goes home and violates her body over and over again until it is possessed not by illness but by a demon, drawn to her despair to fill the empty places you left healed. You save people, Abigail, but I cannot think of a less worthy species to save.”

“Someone has to.”

“You?” he asked softly. “You heal the physical body. But those whose bodies you save can still give away their souls, while those whose souls can yet be saved are left to die, because you do not heal them. Because you hope that the still, small voice in your heart is the Creator’s, that you are a vessel of hope. But how can it be true, when you consider the fruits?”

Abby started to speak, but her tongue had never felt so much like lead.

“Kneel.” He didn’t have to raise his voice for her to hear the command.

Everything that she was outside of this apartment told her to never kneel before anyone. A person who demanded that she kneel deserved the sharpest rebuke for believing her to be less than they were. But Charles didn’t see her as less. He considered her an equal—which made her feel like a slimy oil slick beneath his boots.

He rested his hand against the small of her back, bringing her the last few steps into his bedroom, then turning her around to face him. His touch sent flashes of heat through her, but they were negligible compared to the turmoil roiling within the confines of her skull. His smooth words echoed within, resurrecting rooted worries she hadn’t realized she’d buried so deep.

What if all the hours of studying, all the people she’d taken care of and healed, all those she’d had to let go, all the people she’d saved and failed to save, the feelings that she’d followed all these years… What if all of those things hadn’t really been to follow in her angel father’s footsteps? What if they hadn’t been to follow a divine plan for her life?

What if they’d been done in the service of the wrong master all this time, and she hadn’t realized it? What if the whispers in her heart weren’t from God?

What if all this time it had just been about her?

Or worse?

“Does goodness leave this kind of damage behind?”

“All those people,” she whispered, as though they stood before her, ghosts crowded into the tiny apartment to heap her with condemnation Abby hadn’t allowed herself to consider.

“Kneel,” Charles said more forcefully, squeezing her shoulder—a gesture that would have been almost comforting if it weren’t for the wet wool blanket of weight that settled over and inside of her—and not from him.

Abby fell to her knees.

Charles beckoned to the shackles on the ceiling. They slithered down and snaked around Abby’s wrists, holding them just over her head. Abby slumped into them, bowing her head as though in prayer, but she hadn’t felt farther from grace in her life. There were no words in her mind for prayer, no Word in her flesh.

Had it ever been there at all?

“After everything that you’ve done, what does a woman like you think she deserves?” He stepped past where she knelt and held out his hand to brush the whips and canes on the wall. “These are just my display. I have more implements in the dresser. I think the whips are more than you might be ready for, but this…”

He paused in front of a sjambok, a black peacekeeper switch with a long rod and leather handle.

“Your clothing will absorb some of the impact, but I think this will do.” He lifted the switch from its mount. “And of course, you can end this at any time. I don’t do safewords here, love, regardless of what you might have heard about the lifestyle. I know how to handle my instruments. I will give you exactly what you need, hurt you exactly how you deserve. But you can tell me that you’ve had enough, and I’ll stop. I’ll end this, release you from your chains and you can walk out of here without the absolution for which you came. You’ll have spared yourself pain, but you’ll have denied yourself…clarity. Pain, ecstasy and revelation have been closely intertwined throughout history. That is what I offer.”

He laid the switch over the swell of her ass where she bent over. With his left hand, he touched her shoulder blades, his hesitancy there almost reverent. “I can’t see them, but I…”

Abby shuddered under his fingertips, aware of the picture she presented. Her wrists clinked heavily together as she shifted forward more.

“You are not my slave,” he said, as though he read her mind. “Shed all history, love, all sense of right and wrong and God and the devil, wings and horns and tails, angels and demons. We are each other. We are now and no more.”

Then the switch descended upon her.

He hit her thighs first. She’d expected it on her ass, so he took her by surprise, hitting muscles that hadn’t been tensed in preparation. She cried out, bucking and swaying in her shackles. Charles struck her thighs again, five times in a row. He braced her with his free hand between her shoulders to keep her from swinging too far forward.

He not only rained down a kind of pain Abby hadn’t known existed, but through her shoulders, Charles’ touch made her wings itch, like feathers trying to grow out of her skin, made her just as aware of the folds of her cunt pressing against the seam of her jeans, her legs slightly parted as though ready for another kind of activity. But that didn’t distract her from the switch hitting her where she was softest, where she had meat to hit. Even so, after the fifth blow, tears sprang to her eyes, and she wailed again. He spaced out the blows so that she had the chance to feel the sting every time. She was almost sure the denim had split but didn’t feel a cool breeze against her skin.

Then he swung the switch up to her ass, transporting Abby to an older form of chastisement, but this was so much worse. It was supposed to be more humiliating than painful, but this was both, striking just short of her bones, sometimes alternating between sides and sometimes striking both at once.

She tried to wriggle away when he struck her thighs again, but he wouldn’t let her. He gave her only brief respite, stroking the length of the switch over the places he’d hit her. Her skin burned under the fabric and stung like an echo when he applied pressure. He was giving her a chance to tell him to stop, to tell him that she couldn’t take anymore.

But he massaged his strong fingers into her shoulders and neck and down her spine, and although her face was wet with tears and probably looked an absolute fright, she rocked back and forth, up against his hand, back against the stroke of the switch, out of control against the demands of her body. It wasn’t about sex, not really, but Charles was what he was. He could be nothing else, nor could she. Her reaction was undeniable and irresistible, adding another layer to this twisted penance—penance for crimes she didn’t know for certain that she’d committed, yet she had to make sure that if she had, she paid.

“Is this what you deserve, Abigail?” He trailed his fingertips down the dip of her spine to spread over the flat part of her back above the waist of her jeans. He pressed down as he swung the switch again. It hissed through the air before slapping soundly on her thighs again.

She surged forward, her yell hitched with sobs. She buried her face in her sleeve both to hide herself and to wipe her nose. Clothes could be washed.

Charles swept his hand back up her spine again just as he struck her lower back. The angle protected her spine but mercilessly hit one of her bruises.

He hit her two more times on her back before she buckled, her lower half flat on the floor to escape from the switch and her upper half arched up by the shackles.

“Stop. Stop. Don’t. Don’t hit me again.”

“Is this what you deserve?” Charles stroked the switch over her back again. She thought he might have barely stopped from rupturing an organ. She sent out wisps of healing just in case but found nothing more than new bruises. He’d been telling the truth when he’d said he knew how to keep from damaging her—more than surface damage, anyway.

She gazed up at him. “What do you want from me?”

“Your eyes are so green when you’ve been crying.” He tucked loose strands of her hair behind her ear so he could see better. “And tears make your eyelashes glitter.”

“What do you want?” Abby repeated, almost begging this time.

“Do you deserve this?” He brought the switch up and held it between them. He ran the rod against the hollow of her cheekbone. “Or do you deserve this?”

He tossed the sjambok to the side and took her face in his hands, which were still sheathed in their black leather gloves. He guided her back to her knees, although she groaned and winced at the ache that reached all the way down to bone. The stinging left behind from the blows stretched out like a swarm of biting insects amid tendrils of heat.

The lips of her cunt were so swollen with arousal that her jeans were more than a little uncomfortable against her underwear. If she’d been home and unbound, she would have had her clothes off in a second, with the ‘marital aid’ in the box by her bed put to good use to make the ache go away.

Charles’ face was inches from hers, his dark eyes fathomless as he gazed at her lips. Abby wanted nothing more than to kiss him, to lose herself in his charm, let him feed until she fell into unconsciousness and dreamed of him, where he could drain the life from her, but at least it would put an end to his question, because she didn’t have an answer, didn’t want the answer, feared the answer more than she feared the demon.

“I don’t know,” she said.

Charles ran the tip of his tongue over his lower lip as though tasting her reply in the air. Abby whimpered. She didn’t think she’d ever wanted anything so badly as his mouth against hers right now.

“That’s what I wanted, love.” His soft voice had gone husky. “I think that’s a wonderful place for us to start.”

“Us? Start?”

“Do you want me to touch you?” He traced her lips with his thumbs, and Abby almost leaned in to kiss him, the very thing her body screamed at her to do. To pull him down and crawl over him so that she didn’t have to put any weight on her back, ass or thighs, to rub her hips against his to feel him against the place he’d made so wet for him—ripe and full and slick with nowhere to go.

She couldn’t answer him. If she told him no, it would be a lie. But if she told him yes, it would give him permission to end his oath, and she couldn’t let that happen. The uncertainty beaten into her wasn’t enough to give her a death wish.

Instead, she drew upon every last thread of her will and pulled away from him, resting back on her knees. She nearly sat on her heels but remembered the bruises in time to jerk back up.

“No worries, love.” He straightened, his good humor washing over the uncharacteristic solemnity he’d adopted during the beating.

“It didn’t even affect you, did it?” she said. “What you were doing to me, it meant nothing to you. Were you just trying to figure out how long I’d go before I wised up?”

“I wouldn’t be so sure it had no effect. I won’t be applying any precious healing powers to my bum, that’s for sure, but there are other pressing matters that need attending to.” He brought the heel of his palm to the front of his trousers.

Abby didn’t know how she’d missed it, eye level as it was. Their respective positions weren’t lost on Charles, either, from the way that he gazed down at her through heavily lidded eyes. His erection curved in a bulge to the side of the trouser placket. Her mouth watered as Charles squeezed it through his pants, parting his lips slightly in a sigh.

Abby bit her lip, swayed where she knelt. On the one hand, she should demand that he release her. Then she should go home and metaphorically lick her wounds. Everything would seem better with a glass of orange juice after she got some sleep. This enormous mistake would be nothing but a fading memory. Even without using her healing powers, sleep could be an amazing curative.

For everything but the effect of an incubus, that is. Who was she kidding? This wasn’t going to go away in her sleep.

If she couldn’t kiss him and he couldn’t touch her with his bare skin…

As her cunt fluttered over aching hollowness, Abby nudged his hand away from the outline of his cock. She closed her eyes against the flood of stronger arousal that came from stroking his erection through the denim. He was as hot in her hand as her beaten thighs were against her jeans. It only made sense that his power was more potent here. The simple act of feeling him from base to tip, of gripping the hard cock as well as she could through his trousers, gave her as much pleasure as if they were naked and he were kissing her like she wanted him to.

“Yes, ah…” Charles gasped as she nuzzled her cheek against his cock, moaning before she could stop herself.

Her shackles no longer had any purpose other than symbolic. Perhaps that was why Abby didn’t ask him to remove them. They were heavy against her wrists as she held his thighs and rubbed her face over his clothed erection, imagining there were no barriers between them. As her pleasure climbed higher, she pressed her own thighs together to create some kind of friction against her clit and folds—nothing as good as what she could do with her own hands, but she didn’t want to let him go.

His sexual magic coiled tighter and tighter in her lower belly, and he murmured a litany of encouragements. Her moans grew more unrestrained, her hips making little jerking movements until she couldn’t take it anymore. She parted her lips and mouthed his cock, licking the denim of his trousers.

Abby cried out when Charles thrust against her mouth, his head thrown back from his climax. She panted, her mouth pressed desperately to his cock as though it were she who drained the pleasure from him into her. Nothing in her drained into him—that much she was sure of—although she couldn’t determine what else she might have given him.

Her soul?

Do I even have a soul?

Abby tightened her grip on his thighs as she rode out her own orgasm, long and hot and sweet as the cock against her cheek. She thought it would never end until Charles grabbed her hair and yanked her back, his smile showing too much of his teeth as he laughed breathlessly.

The shackles fell from her wrists. Charles helped her to her feet, offering her a strong shoulder as she staggered, her legs not quite ready to hold her up. He didn’t comment on the fact that she hadn’t healed them yet.

He caressed her cheek again before they left the bedroom. “There are special things in store for you, offspring. Just wait and see.”