Page 56 of Demon Sworn
Righteous anger is quickly replaced by fear, though, and then self-flagellation, because I really should have fucking attempted to yank out my phone back in the hallway.Idiot, Katrina. Idiot.
Arariel… One of the demons in her murder is an illusion demon, right? That’s how they’ve been pulling this shit off.
The lust demon like Van is David.
And another, a nightmare demon. Not Tim or Wade, because they were in the dream…who was hiding in the closet? My eyes latch on to Darrel. It has to be him.
One’s a wrath demon, if I remember correctly.
Oh god.
Bile rises in my throat as the final pieces finally click together, completing an image so distorted and misshapen that I immediately wish I never began the puzzle in the first place.
Arariel is a scorn demon, and I can feel her power wafting over me, making my self-worth curl inward at the edges like a flower hit by a blistering wind. If Arariel had hit me with her power a few months ago, she might have blown all my petals of confidence away. But my men have changed me. They’ve shown me that I’m not just some utter geek. So while I bow my head and she laughs, believing everything is easy and I’m too weak to fight back, I think.
For once, I don’t call up random decathlon facts in an attempt to keep panic at bay. Because I want to knowwhy.
I sift through all of our conversations together, looking for any signs of deceit or deception. My guystrustedthem. Probably more than they trusted anyone else in Heaven or Hell.
This is going to destroy them.
Arariel saunters towards me, and I’m grateful that she got dressed while I was unconscious. She’s wearing an extra-extra-large men’s gym shirt, though she didn’t bother tossing back on the illusion that made her look like my classmate and decathlon captain. If I would’ve been forced to stare at her killer nipples—literally. Those things could’ve killed me with how sharp they were—I would’ve died.
I probably still will. But at this point, how I die is a factor, and nipple cuts aren’t the way I want to go. I might be slightly delirious with fear to the point of bad humor at this moment. But don’t judge.
“Did you have a nice rest, little kitty kat?” Arariel purrs, bending down and running a long-tipped fingernail down my cheek. I attempt to shy away from her, but her grip hardens, those nails digging into my skin. Her other hand travels down my throat, over my breast, before dropping to my hip. “Such a pretty thing.” Ignoring my recoil of disgust, she leans forward and licks a wet trail on my cheek.
And my panic-induced decathlon brain clicks on, late to the party. Human saliva contains one to two hundred types of living bacteria at any given time. I wonder how much demon spit has.
“Arariel,” Tim says lazily. Only it’s not really Tim, now is it? “Stop messing with the human.”
“What?” Arariel laughs maliciously. Where I once found the noise oddly seductive, it now sounds like claws scraping down my spine, leaving bloody scratches in their wake. I shiver involuntarily, attempting to get as far away from the she-demon as physically possible. Which is kinda hard to do, considering I’m tied to a fucking basketball pole in the darkened school gym. But semantics. Arariel squats in front of me so she can force me to look right into her eyes as she says, “You don’t want me playing with her like I did with her little brother?”
Rage flares within me, white-hot and blistering. “I’m going to kill you for what you did to him!” I snap, struggling against the ropes.
Arariel throws her head back in haughty laughter before rising gracefully to her feet, her hips swaying as she steps away from me.
“She’s feisty. I like it,” David—or Dajiel, as the case may be—says with a wink. Now that he’s no longer hiding the fact that he’s a lust demon, I can feel the pheromones radiating off of him in waves. Though surprisingly, it doesn’t seem to be affecting me. Maybe it’s my relationship with the guys? The bond between us? My love for them?
“You don’t get to talk,” Arariel snaps, her bright wings flaring out behind her. “You ruined the entire plan by getting caught.”
David shrugs his shoulders nonchalantly. “Maybe. But this is better, wouldn’t you say? Having the little human girl at our mercy…” He gives me a slow, salacious leer, and I bare my teeth at him in response.
Fuck. I wish those damn pink sparks would come back and burn through this stupid jump rope they’ve bound me with. I wiggle my fingers, trying to make something,anything, happen as I try the age-old movie technique—get the villains monologuing so I have time to pull off some badass escape.
Shut up. It’s the best hope I’ve got.
“How long?” I demand through gritted teeth. When all of them turn to stare at me, the men still wearing the faces of people I thought were my friends, I repeat, “How long have you guys been…?” I don’t know how to articulate my question, and my voice tapers off in anger.
“How long have we been in your life?” Arariel cocks a hip to the side, causing her huge ass breasts to jiggle. “The same time Raziel…or Ziel, as he told you his name was…started visiting your dreams. It was quite easy to get the real Alanna, Wade, Tim, and Darrel alone. Actually, it was after one of your decathlon meets. You went to bed early, and the rest of them went out for dinner—”
“Oh god.” Vomit rushes up my throat, because the incident she’s referring to? It happened months ago. Way before I ever met my demons, at least in person. I swallow hard to send the bile back down, but it bubbles in my stomach like a witch’s cauldron. This is sick, dark shit.
“Of course, we’d been following you for weeks before then, after we saw an article about you bringing the decathlon team to state and we recognized you as the little Center he tried to kill when he drunkenly confessed the truth to us after a night of partying. Honestly, we thought you died in the car accident. It’s a shame, really. This could’ve all been over with long ago. We’d started following you long before Raziel found and seduced you, so we knew all of the people you talked to. The fact that he grew so attached just made hurting them and you so much better.” She taps an unnaturally sharp nail against her chin as an eerie smile erupts on her painfully beautiful face. “We knew their quirks, personalities… It was easy to take over their lives once we killed them. And what made it even better was how close their names were to ours, though we did have a hand to play in that. Originally, Wade and Darrel didn’t intend to join decathlon, but with a little—” she shoots her gaze towards a still grinning David, “—persuasion, we were able to convince them. Nerds are horny little bastards, after all.”
“Killed them,” I parrot numbly, weakly, my blood sloshing in my head like the rippling tides of a river. All I can focus on are those two words.
Alanna. Darrel. Tim. Wade. They’re all dead. The real ones, at least.
