The Lure of the Devil (The Demons' Muse #4) - Auryn Hadley Page 0,170

came to see me were other broke college students, not angels or my parents. Never mind the whole God problem.

Was I supposed to tell Uriel about her? Should I ignore her existence? My mind was going a million miles a minute, and I was sure I looked like a complete idiot. Still, what else could I do when my mother and father showed up to the house I lived in with my five boyfriends? Yes, I was counting Luke in that group, even if we hadn't really talked about it.

"So," I said gesturing to the elegant furniture in the parlor. "Have a seat. Make yourself comfortable. And can you please explain how or why you ended up not just on Earth, but at our house? What happened to the church? Why did Nick bring you here?"

Uriel grabbed my shoulders and eased me into one of the chairs. Kacira took a corner of the fancy little couch, and once I was sitting, Uriel took his place beside her. My mother was looking around in awe, as if she was trying to memorize every detail of this building.

"You said you needed to get to know us," Uriel told me. "I thought it was only fair to do that on your terms. When Satan -"

"Nick," I interrupted to correct him. "Most of their names are problematic to say out loud here. It's Nick, Sam, Luke, Bel, and Ron."

"Okay," Uriel agreed. "Then, when Nick summoned me, I came in a hurry, thinking there might be a problem. He told me that he just wanted to extend an invitation, so I slipped back, got Kacira, and we decided we'd be happy to wait."

"I've never seen Earth before," Kacira admitted. "Everything is so… busy."

I chuckled at that. "This is what I know as normal. I mean, this house is considered ancient because it's more than a hundred years old. I have a feeling your place has been around a little longer than that."

"My house?" Uriel asked. "It's about a million years old. On Angelis, that's considered new."

"And that's just mind-boggling," I admitted. "Just tell me Bel wasn't a jerk to my mother?"

Kacira smiled at me. "The large, dark one? He was nice to me. I can't say he was the same to your father." Then she leaned closer, resting her arms on her knees. "Is he really a demon?"

"Beelzebub," I said. "So, yes, he really is a demon. Believe it or not, he's actually smaller on this plane than he is in his real body. I think he's gotta be pushing seven feet tall." I paused. "And you probably don't measure things in feet, do you?”

"I understand American measurements," Kacira assured me. "Uriel taught me those things so that I could read the papers about you."

She meant back when I was a kid. In those days, I'd been a media sensation in my itty bitty town. It wasn't like a lot of five-year-old little girls were abandoned without any trace of her parents, and every year, they'd run a story about it again until I turned eighteen. For a long time, I'd been mad about it. Now, I understood exactly why my parents had left me like that. Unfortunately, knowing why didn't necessarily mean that I was okay with it yet.

"So, yeah," I mumbled, wondering what we were supposed to be talking about.

"Nick says the angels are harvesting slaves here," Uriel said, helping me out. "He mentioned that you and Luke went to their college house and caused problems. Sia, you know they're going to come after you for that."

"Yeah," I said, dragging out the word. "Ran into Gabriel today when I was out shopping. He's pissed about it, but offered to forget it ever happened if I left him alone. That makes me think they're worried."

"They are worried," Uriel assured me. "And Michael is still missing. Stieviel is now giving the orders, and rumor has it he's been making trips to Earth. The problem is that he doesn't have a skin. He's never had a skin, and we cannot just make one of those as fast as you do. It takes decades to craft the interlacing molecular structure beneath our bodies so that it will look realistic once we cross the planes. That means that if he's coming to Earth, he looks exactly like an angel."

"And a crippled one," Nick said as he walked into the room. "Since the last time you talked to your daughter, we’ve learned that he and Ronwe were originally two