River
Waking from a night of restless sleep, my hand instinctively stretched out in search of Kobal. The sleeping bag beside me was still warm to the touch, but empty. Bolting upright, I let the blanket fall away from me to reveal the clothing I wore beneath. Kobal had kept me up late into the night, but it wasn’t exactly the best idea to sleep nude when demons and all sorts of other not-so-delightful creatures from Hell were stalking us.
With my ears attuned to the early morning sounds, I searched the trees for Kobal. I didn’t see him through the saplings and some taller oaks surrounding our sleeping area. Only the occasional chirrup of a bird could be heard, and even that was few and far between. It seemed even the animals knew it was best to remain hidden in this place. Reaching over, I grabbed my boots and tugged them on.
Things had been relatively peaceful since we’d established a growing camp of demons and humans outside of The Last Stop bar a couple of weeks ago, too quiet. This lack of action made me more than a little nervous.
I was becoming better adapted to the unnatural gateway into Hell the humans tore open thirteen years ago. Not even Kobal, the one demon who could open and close gateways at will, could close it. I could now stand near it for hours at a time without being drained.
However, being able to close the gateway was another matter. There was no way to know how much time it may take me to figure that out, or if I even had the ability to shut it. Just because my ancestor, Lucifer, had once opened a gateway into Hell, when he never should have been able to do so, didn’t mean I would possess the ability to open or close one too.
Lucifer had been scarce ever since I’d had my dream about him last month, but he’d sent one of his followers after me, and I knew it was only a matter of time before he let his presence be known again. Most likely it would be in a big way. That we knew of, no other seals had fallen since we’d arrived here, but Lucifer was plotting something, I knew it. I couldn’t rid myself of the insidious feeling he intended to drive me into the pits of Hell, somehow.
Finishing tying my boots, I began to rise but sat back down when I spotted Kobal kneeling fifteen feet away from me in front of a thicket of wild roses. The brambles were so thick they’d blocked him from my view. He’d been focused on the clearing in front of him, but when I moved to rise, his head turned toward me.
The chiseled muscles of his broad back and shoulders flexed with his movements. The early morning light filtering through the leaves of the trees surrounding us washed over his body. My breath caught as I drank in the sight of him; my heart fluttered and my mouth watered.
His hair, so rich and deep a brown it sometimes appeared black, was straight and had recently been cut. The shorter length emphasized the intriguing angles of his face. Right now his full lips were pressed into a firm line, but I knew well how sensual and yielding they could be when they ran over my flesh. His square, completely smooth jaw tapered into a pointed chin. Fine lines etched the corners of his eyes, making him appear to be in his late twenties or early thirties instead of the fifteen hundred sixty-two years he really was.
The black of his eyes encompassed his entire eyeball. When I’d first met him, those unusual eyes had unnerved me; now I loved them almost as much as the man himself. Many would consider him intriguing or dangerous looking, but I thought him gorgeous, and he was mine. No matter how many times I saw him, no matter how many times he took me and possessed my body, I craved more of him.
The markings on his upper back flexed when he rose to walk toward me. The black pattern on his right arm ran from the tips of his fingers on the back of his hand, around his arm, and up around his bicep and shoulder. The flames licked the base of his neck before moving down over his back and chest, encircling his upper right pec. He’d once explained to me that the intricate symbols were a part of his ancient, demonic language and were woven throughout his markings.
Etched onto him by the Hell fire that had given birth to him, the symbols were both a blessing and a curse. They had enabled him to survive longer than any of his varcolac ancestors since Lucifer had entered Hell. They had given him powers none of the varcolac demons before him had possessed. The single varcolac who rose from the fires to replace the one who perished before them had always been able to control the hellhounds, but Kobal was the first to actually have two hellhounds residing within him. The symbols had strengthened him, but they had also marked him as more savage, volatile, and powerful than any of the other varcolac demons.
On his left arm, more flames wound their way in the same pattern over his body as his right arm, but two hellhounds were set amongst those flames. The hounds looked ready to leap from his body at any second. They were as real and ruthless as the man himself when he released them and allowed them to roam. They were a lethal extension of his power.
Kneeling before me, his hand enveloped the back of my head, and he dragged me in for a drugging kiss. He broke the kiss with a ragged breath only to place a tender kiss on the bridge of my nose.
“Good morning, Mah Kush-la.” The endearment, meaning my heart in his demonic language, gave me a thrill.
“Good morning.”
“Are you hungry?” My stomach rumbled in response to his question. His thumb caressed my cheek before he pulled his hand away. “I’ll get you something to eat.”
I watched as he rose to his towering six-foot-nine height. He was so massive, he blocked out the rays of the sun and the trees behind him. Turning away, he lifted a shirt from where it hung over a branch and tugged it over his head.
Disappointment filled me when he covered himself. However, there was no way I wanted anyone else to see so much of him. He was captivating enough without adding the temptation of all his deeply bronzed, well-honed flesh.
I watched him as he walked out of the foliage and toward the main camp, which was close to the bar the skelleins had established around the gateway leading into Hell itself.
Gathering my clothes, I tugged my rumpled shirt off and pulled on a scraggly brown uniform shirt that I’d had since my days in training when I’d first been brought to the wall. I hadn’t exactly been thrilled about being ripped away from my brothers and forced to go to the wall, but I’d accepted my fate. Though I was far from a good soldier, I’d learned how to defend myself during my training.
I’d especially learned a lot about my heritage and abilities. I hated that the reason I possessed the abilities that had always made me different from other humans was because Lucifer was my ancestor. However, I wouldn’t deny what I was, or walk away from the possibility I could help fix the mess the angels had started when they’d thrown Lucifer out of Heaven six thousand years ago, and that the humans had escalated thirteen years ago.
I untied my boots, tugged them off, and removed my pants. I pulled on a pair of loose-fitting pants with a hole in the upper thigh. The pants had fit better before our journey, but lack of food, a lot of walking and running, and being this close to Hell had caused me to lose weight. I’d never been heavy, always more athletic in build, but now I was leaning toward thin, and I wasn’t sure how to feel about it.
I felt as if every day I was falling further and further away from the woman who had fished for her brothers and becoming more of the woman who could now kill things with her bare hands. At one time not too long ago, I’d hated that the fish I’d caught had to die. Now, I’d shoot a ball of life through the chest of anyone who tried to hurt me or threatened someone I loved.
My intricate bond with Earth and the life around me had always been a part of me, and I’d cherished all living things. Now I’d killed more than fish, like Lilitu, a powerful canagh demon who had attacked us. I felt no guilt over what I’d done, but I’d be lying to myself if I didn’t acknowledge that my growing powers frightened me.
And they were growing; I felt it every day. I was able to draw on the energy of life more readily and with far more strength than I ever had before. Every injury I sustained healed faster than the one before it, as bruises faded from my flesh within hours and cuts were healed by the next day.
Every day that passed, I felt less human and more something else. What that something else was, I wasn’t sure yet, but I knew I would discover the answer to it one day.
I was Lucifer’s last remaining descendant. He’d once been an angel; he was now a monster determined to enslave the human race and rule over the demons. Something had made him that way. I believed the loss of his connection to all things living had turned him into the twisted creature he’d become, but I didn’t know what had caused it. I didn’t know if that severing had come when he was tossed from Heaven, or if it had been when he sheared off his wings, or maybe when he’d entered Hell and the gate had closed behind him. Then again, I could be completely wrong. It could have been none of those things that had warped him into something entirely different than the angel he’d once been.
Ever since I shared a dream with the fallen angel who considered himself my father, I’d known it was possible I could become like Lucifer. It terrified me more with each passing day and every change of my body.
By the time I was done pulling on a fresh pair of socks and wiggling my big toes through the holes in the tips of them, Kobal returned.
“I’ll find you some new clothes soon,” he said as he handed me a jar of peaches and a couple pieces of beef jerky.
“Not necessary.” The last thing I cared about was what I wore.
“I did destroy a good number of your things,” he replied.
His arrogant grin made me laugh. “You did,” I agreed as I took a bite of my jerky. Kobal had a habit of sometimes being a little too impatient when undressing me. I’d lost more clothing to his hands than anything else over the months I’d known him. “But all the losses were worth it.”
“I’m going to hold you to that.”
I pulled on my hiking boots. The soles had worn down, but thankfully there were no holes in the bottoms or the tops of the boots. I finished off my odd breakfast before holding my hand out to him. His entirely black fingernails flashed in the light as he easily tugged me to my feet. Those nails could lengthen into lethal, three-inch-long claws.
Instead of releasing me, he pulled me up against his solid chest. I’d never get used to the nearly electric thrill that always went through me when we touched. I tilted my head back to take in the harsh planes of his magnificent face.
“If you don’t mind me ruining your clothes, I can start again now,” he said.
“If you don’t mind me walking around naked in front of everyone in the camp and the skelleins, feel free to do so.”
The smile slid from his face. “Unacceptable.”
“Then don’t leave my clothes in pieces,” I teased before rising on my toes to give him a kiss on the cheek.
He chuckled before setting me away from him. I grabbed my guns and holster from the ground and secured them to my waist before slipping my katana over my back. I’d come to rely on my natural abilities more than the human weapons, but I still felt naked without the weight of them on me. Besides, I’d rather be over prepared than under.
Kobal took my hand and led me through the trees toward the camp comprised of almost three hundred humans and demons. I kept expecting something to attack us while we were encamped here, but Kobal assured me that few of our enemies would dare come at us right now.
There were too many demons amongst us now, and the skelleins would be enraged if anyone tried to skip over them in order to gain access to the gateway, or attacked their king and queen. I still hadn’t wrapped my head around the fact that Kobal and the other demons considered me to be his queen, but as Kobal’s Chosen, they had all accepted me as such despite my mortal status.
Maybe if we got married it would make a difference in the way I felt about it, but I doubted it. I knew we were irrevocably joined for the rest of my life, so it wasn’t a lack of wedding vows and rings that made me uncertain about the whole queen thing.
It was the whole queen of Hell thing, in general, that had me more than a little uncertain.
I mean, what did the queen of Hell do all day? Before meeting Kobal and the others, I would have said she pulled the arms off babies, or some such thing, but these demons weren’t like that. There was no sun in Hell, so no tan to work on, and no lap of luxury on which to sit. I didn’t feed on souls, so there was no punishing the souls of the damned who entered Hell in my future.
Right now, Hell was torn apart thanks to Lucifer, the angels, and the humans, so I had enough to deal with without throwing royalty status into the mix. If Kobal and I both survived this, I would deal with it after. For now, I could only take each day one minute at a time.