shivered at the dark images in his head. "That doesn't explain why you're not happy about taking down his evil henchman."
Alec sighed again. He seemed to be doing a lot of that.
"I can't help it. My life has suddenly become fraught with things to sigh over," he said, his grip around my waist tightening. "I'm not happy because if you are now effectively the Occio di Lucifer, it means every being with half a brain is going to want you."
I stopped and glared at him. "Just because we had sex half an hour after I first saw you doesn't mean I'm a raving nymphomaniac!"
"Want you to use you, Cora," he interrupted, pulling me back up against him. "Or, more properly, to use Bael's power."
Horror skittered along my flesh as I understood what it was he meant. I had a vision of evil being after evil being lining up to use me as some sort of a demonic power source, blasting the world with innumerable cruelties. "Oh, shit."
"And lucky me," he added, his voice as grim as his expression. "It appears you have chosen me to protect you from them all."
Chapter Six
"You know, this doesn't look like hell."
"That's because it's not Abaddon. It's the Akasha." Alec strolled beside me as we walked down a long hallway, our footsteps echoing slightly along the smooth walls and stone floor.
"Yeah, but that greeter person told Diamond and me that this was a place of perpetual torment, and that sounds like hell to me. However, this" - I waved a hand around at our surroundings - "this just looks like any old office building. I don't see anything tormentish about it."
"Try opening one of the doors," he said, nodding to one as we passed it.
I paused. "Why? Is something ghoulish going on in there? Are people being dismembered? Tortured? Eaten by fire ants?"
He crossed his arms and nodded toward the nearest door. "Open it and see."
"All right, but if it's something gross, I'm aiming at you when I barf up my breakfast." I opened the door and looked in, braced for the worst.
A group of a half-dozen people sat around a long table, papers scattered across its surface, which was also littered with half-empty bottles of water, and a rainbow of highlighters. Crumpled paper spilled off the table onto the floor, leading in a trail to a whiteboard covered in several different styles of handwriting.
"We are agreed, then, are we not," said a man in a business suit at the head of the table, "that examining the cost savings that will accrue from our cutback on the performance-related functions will make good any and all productivity shortfalls we experience this quarter ? "
A woman shook her head and tapped at the table with one of the highlighters. "I believe that if we realign our organizational aims to better benefit the enterprise, we can absolve our office of the clearly unsustainable redundancy of not only the expense claims, but of the external consultants, which I think we all agree will lead to the downfall of this and other management teams within the venture."
"No, no, no!" a third man said, hoisting his pants up over his beer belly as he rose to his feet. "If we form a task force to investigate the benefits of a mentor program - "
"Good god," I said softly, closing the door. "It's worse than I thought."
Alec nodded. "Middle-management committees. Still think this isn't a bad place?"
I shuddered. "We have to get out of here."
He slid me a look as he took my hand, making me hurry to keep up with his long-legged stride. "I'm glad you're including me in your escape plans, although I regret to inform you that there is no way to get out of the Akasha short of being summoned out."
"Then we'll just have to arrange for that," I said, feeling a bit mulish. I didn't plan on spending the rest of my life dodging committee meetings.
"And just how do you expect to pull that off when we're stuck in here with no way to communicate to the outside? "
"I don't know, but I'm sure as shooting not going to sit around here waiting for people to use me for who knows what bad - Diamond!"
A familiar face turned as I called out her name. She was standing with two other people, but smiled when I almost dragged Alec up to her, her eyes moving from me to him, widening when she took in all his manly glory.
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