Page 23 of Forsaken Dream
Chapter Eleven
Angelo
“The two of you can give up anytime you want,” I told the other two males while we patrolled the streets of the town. “I have every intention of claiming my mate.” Three days and nights were enough for Echo to calm down and see reason … I hoped.
Tyler and Vaser had joined me in my hunt for the shades after I told them how I ended up bloody and clinging to the last thread of life on Echo’s doorstep. For all intents and purposes, I should be dead. What the female did after taking me inside her home was beyond my comprehension, but I never looked a gift horse in the mouth. I was alive, able to clear this realm of feral scum, and contrary to everything I’d been told about my life as an Archangel and the solitary existence we led, I had found my mate.
The Creator was good.
“She will never let me anywhere near her.” If the demon sounded anymore dejected I was going to punch him in the nose. “I swear it, I never used my powers …” he trailed off, his feet slowing until all of us had to stop to see what was wrong with him.
“Well?” Placing my hands on my hips, I scanned the area around us in case we got lucky and a few feral shades decided to make my night. I had a ton of frustration, sexual and otherwise, to take out on something.
The female was making me want to scratch the walls with her swaying hips and bouncy breasts. It was like I was paying a penance for not noticing the allure of the female body until I met her, and now it was slamming me like a battering ram with each breath I took. Not knowing what to do with all that, I braved asking the incubus since it was his area of expertise—unfortunately for him in the case of our mate at the moment. My eyes almost rolled out of their sockets when I turned on the phone he gave me and played the video from the website he typed in. It wasn’t all that scandalous, I had to admit, but what I saw the human males doing to their counterparts was not something I ever planned on subjecting my mate to. In the meantime, taking matters into my own hands as he described did the trick to keep my sanity.
I adjusted the growing erection in my pants.
The hardened appendage was as uncomfortable as plucking perfectly good feathers from one’s wings.
“Are you going to tell us what got you looking constipated or should we move along?” Tyler’s grumble pulled me out of my discomfort with my shaft.
“I deserve to die alone from a broken mate bond,” Vaser wailed like a youngling, pulling on his hair.
“Die later demon, first share the reason so we know why we are burying your body in the orchard behind Echo’s house,” I told him in frustration.
“I did use my powers on her.” If possible, he looked paler, his skin greying at the edges.
“What the fuck do you mean you used your powers!” Roaring in his face, I grabbed him by the shirt and yanked him to me. “You manipulated your own mate to have sex with you, you demon scum?” My fury brought up a good question I didn’t know the answer to. “Did you have sex with her?”
“Not exactly …” Voice without inflection, he stared at me as if seeing death in front of his face.
“What does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Tyler perked at those words, moving closer from where he’d been pacing on the street. “I know you’ve kissed her since you did it in front of me too. What else did you do without telling us?”
“That’s not important. That isn’t when I used my powers.” Swallowing thickly, the demon locked his flat gaze on mine. “When Tyler burst through her front door because you were in her house, she panicked seeing two males breaking into her home. I wanted her to hear us out so I could explain that we only wanted to help and protect her … so I used my powers to calm her down, not to use her.”
I pushed him away from me with a shake of my head. What a fucking mess. Leave it to a demon to create a horrible situation out of nothing. The gargoyle must’ve come to the same conclusion, because he grumbled something too low for me to hear and started walking down the street again. I followed behind him, Vaser moving along too after a while.
The quiet town did me no favors, leaving too much time for my mind to come up with different scenarios of what “not exactly” meant for the incubus. It gnawed at my gut for long moments, twisting my insides into an impossible knot that tightened so hard the Celts would’ve been green with envy. Celtic knots my ass. Curiosity about the sexual prowls of an incubus topped that knot by a long shot.
“What does ‘not exactly’ mean?” Tyler repeated the words from earlier, the same ones sitting on the tip of my tongue. I guess not knowing ate at the gargoyle too.
“I made her come apart with my fingers inside her while she writhed on my lap and I tasted her lips.” The dreamy note in Vaser’s voice made both Tyler and me groan.
“I shouldn’t have asked,” Tyler grumbled, stomping the pavement like it owed him a blood debt.
I was with him on that, the zipper of my pants biting into my rock-hard flesh.
I should’ve worn undergarments, for Heaven’s sake.
The street we patrolled was empty one moment and swarming with shades the next, blocking our view. My body tensed as I called out my sword and felt the weight of my wings settling on my back. From the corner of my eye, I watched Tyler shift, his skin turning grey and resembling stone as he towered over us by easily a foot. A red glow pierced the darkness of the shades when Vaser stepped next to me, and I realized the glow was coming from his eyes.
Regardless of my dislike of demon kind, it took me aback every time the incubus showed his true form. His skin gleamed like an oil stain between my pale completion and the grey of the gargoyle. Constellations full of stars blinked over his body, while lava circled the swirls of the demonic symbols covering his right arm from wrist to shoulder. Long talons that were curled at the tips twitched as he observed the shades, and small horns jutted on either side of his forehead poking through the black hair that was down his back. Vaser was as fascinating as he was horrifying to see.
Casting the wards around the street so the humans couldn’t see what horrors walked among them in their town, I winced when the shadows screeched. Squirming and wiggling like specters, their razor-sharp teeth, which was the only solid part of them, snapped at the three of us. Shrill sounds were hurting my ears as they swarmed us from three sides.
All thoughts of sex, discomfort, or the pathetic mood Vaser had that was hovering over us like a dark cloud disappeared. Standing back-to-back, we descended on the shades like death. My sword glowed with heavenly fire as I parried, ducked, and sliced through the feral scum. Claws and teeth raked over my skin, but I pushed through, clenching my jaw until one damn thing wiggled its ass close enough to take hold of my wing.
Crippling pain ripped through me, and throwing my head back, I roared to the night sky when it pulled on it hard, tendons tearing as the shade clung to me for dear life. I’d fought the feral shades for decades wherever I came across the damned things, but they’d never been this vicious. From the first night I entered the outskirts of this town, it was almost like killing me was personal to them. And not just me, but Tyler and Vaser as well. I could understand why they’d have issues with someone who’d been killing them like I had, but I couldn’t understand the rage they displayed for my two companions. It could be because the demon and the gargoyle were helping me battle them. Although that didn’t sound right either.
