“The blood craving isn’t so bad today. Is it your angel blood?”
“It has been said that Nephilim blood can sustain a bloodborn longer than human blood, though we generally don’t make a habit of it.”
“Yeah, sorry about last night. I won’t punk out again. I just had a moment.”
Perhaps I’d given you the impression it was some great sacrifice to have you feed from me. Probably for the best, since I didn’t care to admit precisely how arousing I’d found the experience. That desperate look in your eyes as you stared up at me and the abandon with which you’d fed. To be able to offer you my lifeblood as sustenance somehow made me feel closer to absolution. And the pleasure I could give you in return…
“Breakfast it is,” I announced louder than necessary.
While we dined, I laid out our mission as best I could. The Belial demon we were hunting was connected to your past life, which made explaining things a bit more difficult. Seneser was the reaper who’d agreed to steal souls for Lena. This former angel had been eluding capture ever since committing his treachery nearly two decades ago. I’d chased him all over the Americas. Every time I’d closed in, he’d abandon his host body in order to escape me. But he was getting careless. My Las Vegas safehouse had telephoned Miami to say one of their agents had encountered a being with a demonic energy resembling Seneser’s, and even more helpful, they’d provided a close-up photograph of his human host, taken from surveillance footage. I was planning to set up a sting operation in order to trap him. Let him come to me for once.
“A Belial demon,” you said, mulling over the terminology. “Those are demons who’ve been exiled since the Fall?”
“Or fled.”
“And fate demons used to be humans?” you asked.
“Yes, Lena keeps some in our ancestral lands.”
“She won’t anymore,” you assured me with an earnest look. “She told me she’d free them once she was released from prison.”
It took great effort for me to swallow my rebuttal.
“I wonder if Spooky is a familiar,” you mused.
“It’s possible.” It would explain the animal’s eerie devotion to you.
“My dad…” you began. “He’s like a Belial demon, isn’t he?”
“Your dad is a Malakhim angel inhabiting a human body.”
“Isn’t that kind of the same thing?”
“Demons tend to possess humans toward their own selfish ends, while your father provides a very necessary service to the gods, that of a messenger and medium. His gift allows for communication between the mortal and divine.”
“But he basically had to steal a human’s life in order to do it?”
I studied you, trying to gauge how you might react to the answer to your very pointed question.
“Yes.”
You sat back and chewed on your lower lip.
“Are you upset?”
“No, just… thinking.” Your gaze drifted for a moment and then you started up again. “Can demons use seduction to get money?”
I wondered if you were already planning a heist. The temptation for our kind to amass wealth and power was great, and though it wasn’t exactly a crime against humanity, it sometimes led to more malicious pursuits.
“Seduction is a talent of the bloodborn. For demons, it’s usually not so sophisticated. They’re not bound by a mortal conscience, and they tend to have very little regard for human life, so many times they’ll simply stalk a person of means and then rob them. Or perform less savory acts.”
“And that’s why you hunt them?”
“The Imperium is devoted to maintaining some semblance of law and order among demons traversing the human realm, but some demons are too cunning or slippery for Imperium forces.”
“And Azrael—your boss—he’s the head of it?”
“Yes. Has Mater told you nothing about Azrael?”
“I know that he starves her,” you said severely, “and keeps her in solitary confinement. I know that she’s lonely and depressed because of him.”
Again, I told myself to use caution. “She’s not innocent, Vincent.”
“I never said she was,” you snapped, heated. It was a line I’d been walking ever since you were a child, how to balance your devotion to her with the very real threat she posed. Not to mention you were at the center of one of our most rancorous disputes.
“When you’ve been around for as long as Lena and Azrael have, there tends to be a lot of opportunities for bad blood,” I said, adopting a more diplomatic approach.
“The way Mater speaks of Azrael kind of reminds me of the way you speak of her.”