Page 94 of Interior Design for Demons
“Or struggle if you like,” hisses the other. “We enjoy the challenge.”
Frantic, I back away from them, scanning the audience. Slate and Rusala are there, staring at me, looking aggrieved and disappointed, but also morbidly fascinated. Rath is gone, probably hiding and drinking at the bar in the backstage room. Apollyon is walking out of the auditorium, his arms draped across the shoulders of the demons he was sitting with.
It was all for nothing. They’ve abandoned me, all of them—humans and demons. This is how it felt for Linnea, for Trey, for Zade and Maksim and Charlie Wentworth. The utter panic, the raw, gut-wrenching loneliness.
I close my eyes briefly, wondering whether I should go with grace or give the two approaching demons the fight they crave.
A shout rolls up from the audience, a disturbance ripples through the crowd, and a shrieking roar cracks the air.
Something crashes against my body, and the floor splits open under me in a blast of fire and cerulean wings. Screams of rage and shock erupt through the auditorium, but they’re quickly cut off as my rescuer and I crash into the room below the stage, and the ceiling repairs itself above our heads. I can’t catch my breath, though, because we keep smashing downward, through floor after floor, for stories upon stories—I’m pressed against hard flesh, blinded by whirling scarlet hair, crushed in Apollyon’s death grip. His hand cups the back of my head, shielding my skull from damage as plaster and concrete chunks fly around us.
We smash through the entire skyscraper, each floor healing behind us as we clear it—and then we’re rushing through the dark, racing deep into some liminal space of Hell and there’snothing, nothing—it’s like the time when Naamah took me through Hell’s basement to show me her forest of bones and skin-flakes.
I can’t speak. I can’t scream his name or ask what’s happening.
I can only cling to him as we fall, and fall, spiraling in a tangle of legs and wings, down into the limitless dark.
And then Apollyon’s wings spring out, rigid—I can’t see them but I can hear them whip and flap thunderously. He takes over the fall, and it becomes flight. He’s still cupping my skull, and there are tiny pricks of pain along my scalp where his claws are poking me. I don’t care. I was almost dissolved in a freaking vat of acid, so anything else is an improvement.
Apollyon speed-rushes up a dark slope strewn with bone fragments and we burst out into a sickly half-light. Blinking, I realize that this is, in fact, Naamah’s terrifying bone-forest, the place she has kept a secret from everyone else in Hell.
Probably one of the safest places in the Infernal Plane.
Apollyon sets me down. The bones littering the floor creak under my weight, and a couple small ones snap. This place is still super creepy, but it doesn’t really shock me like it did that first day.
What does shock me is the choice Apollyon made.
I’m shaken, bone-deep. Rocked to my core.
Rath tried to save me, but not hard enough. When it really counted, he stood back, and bowed to the rules, and yielded me to my fate.
But someone else acted. Someone else tore apart everything he had, everything hewas, and broke Hell to save me.
Apollyon stands in the white forest of bones, his blue eyes cracked with emotion. His azure wings drape behind him, ragged from his explosion through the layers of Hell. There’s nothing sensual about his stance now—every angle of his body is taut with passion and determination. But his hands are trembling, his blue claws twitching.
“What have you done?” I whisper.
He gives me a tremulous smile. “Sacrifice.”
“I thought you didn’t care. You told me you wouldn’t help me.”
“An act for the cameras, so Ishtar wouldn’t suspect me, or restrain me. You should have known, darling—you who know me so well. You designed that suite for me—those beautiful, thoughtful rooms. You are inexpressibly precious to me, dove.”
I can’t stand here and look at him. This moment is too painfully beautiful for me not to be touching him; Ihaveto touch him. I have to be pressed up against him, with his aching soul crushed right against mine. Hedoeshave a soul, I’m sure of it. Even it’s just the seed of one, pushing its way through the crevices of his heart.
I lunge for him, but he catches my shoulders, holding me at arm’s length.
“I want you to know that I didn’t do this for myself,” he says. “I don’t ask anything from you. I don’t expect you to be my cure. I am empty of all thoughts and all desires except this: that you are my soul, and I cannot let you die.”
Everything inside me swells bright and golden with mute, giddy happiness, with fierce untameable love. “You adorable bastard,” I whisper, and I lunge forward, slamming into him, sealing my lips to his, burying my tongue in his mouth. I’m sob-panting through the kiss, clutching him tighter, tighter to me.
Apollyon’s love isn’t just fluttery romance, smirks and sly glances and clever innuendo. His love is destructive, explosive, a pulverizing force that is probably going to end up with both of us in Hell’s torture rooms—which is all the more reason for us to enjoythis moment. We’re in a weirdly lit forest of human bones and fluttering skin-leaves, with strange gaunt shadows striping across both of us, and it smells like a musty attic and a leather shop, but I could not care less.
My fingers tear at his pants—he rips my blouse off with shaking hands. Desperately we shed our remaining clothes and collide. He releases a sharp hungry gasp, clawing me closer, pulling my thighs around his waist. There are bones on the ground, bones in the trees, remnants of humans who struggled and sweated and screwed each other just like this. I like to think they would view this as a tribute, not a desecration.
Apollyon kicks our clothes into a pile on the ground and lays me on top of them. It’s bumpy, but the discomfort just makes me more feral for him.Pain and pleasure in equal measure.
He pauses, braced over me, his length burning at the cleft of my thighs, teasing my folds with its silky heat. He moves, and the friction againstthat spotspikes an exquisite torment of pleasure through my lower belly.
