Fiends and Familiars - Debra Dunbar Page 0,56

to their graves. I was pretty sure my house was under attack, and I didn’t know if even my best wards would manage to hold off Abraxas.

Chapter 15

Typhon

I drove as fast as the car could go, using my demon powers to get us around corners and across intersections without crashing. If only I could teleport Addy with me, but that would involve taking her on a brief detour through hell that wouldn’t save us all that much time and would probably freak her out enough to smash whatever tentative relationship we’d managed to knit together.

Someday I’d show her my home, but not now.

I’d considered leaving her at the party and teleporting to face Abraxas myself, but I knew that too would damage what tonight had healed between us. Addy was the sort of witch who needed to fight by my side, and she wouldn’t like being left behind to catch a ride with her sister. Plus I wasn’t sure she wouldn’t blame the whole thing on me if she didn’t see me confronting Abraxas with her own eyes.

I had no doubt what he was doing. He’d intended to capture and torture her until she gave Faust up, but I’d made it quite clear in that corn maze that Addy was mine, and under my protection. I’d planned to finesse my way around Addy’s wards, but Abraxas wouldn’t care about that. If he had enough time, he’d possibly be able to smash his way through them and grab his prey.

Those three demons he’d sent after us might have given him enough time. Actually, I was pretty sure they had, and that Abraxas had called them off once he had Faust. It was why they’d scurried back to hell in the middle of the fight.

Abraxas would defy Lucien, confident that Satan himself would back him up if he delivered Faust’s soul to hell. We were demons and the ends most definitely justified the means with us. Satan gave Lucien a lot of authority, but he still was the one in charge, and he wouldn’t understand his son’s need to keep his witch lover happy.

I understood, I thought as I glanced over at Addy. It was why I’d backed down and decided to honor her eldest sister’s interpretation of the contract Faust had signed. It was why I’d followed her to that party, practically combusting with jealousy as I watched her talk to that attractive human man. It was humiliating to admit that I was basically stalking her like a lovesick fool, but I was glad I was there when Abraxas had tried to snatch her out of that cornfield.

Fire burned beneath my skin at the thought of what he would have done to her. I would have killed him. I would have ordered my hounds to rip him apart then accepted whatever punishment Satan dealt to me for killing one of his favorite demons. I wouldn’t let any demon lay a hand on my Addy, not while I still had horns on my head.

I glanced over at her again, feeling that alarming sensation in my midsection, as if worms were crawling through my insides, turning what had been fire into a river of molten lava. Shit. No wonder Yeth was such a puppy dog when it came to Addy. I was the same.

And as embarrassing as it was, I didn’t want to be any other way. Her touch, her glance, her smile, did things to me. Painful, and yet pleasurable things. I liked it. I loved it. I loved her.

Which was why I was doing one-fifty through the city streets, racing toward her home, plotting the murder of one of Satan’s favorites. Would Addy wait for me? I’d probably suffer for thousands of years for what I was about to do. Would she live long enough for me to return to her once Satan was done taking his displeasure out on my body? Could I find her soul if she died in the meantime? If she was in heaven, could I beg to just have a glimpse of her now and then?

The thought turned those worms under my skin to knives. I might never see her again, but I’d gladly pay the price to know she was happy.

As we screeched to a stop in front of her house, Addy was far from happy. She let out a cry that nearly ripped me in half, then flung open the car door and raced across her lawn.

“No!”

She scrambled through the wreckage of the front