Page 17 of Snowed in with the Demon Lord
Abaddon seemed as taken aback as I was, and it took another moment for him to gather his words. He squeezed me tight, our naked bodies pressed together among the wreckage of the sofa.
“I don’t know. A long time, too long.” He shook his head. “No. Ithoughtit was too long, but now I have met you and must revise that estimate.”
My cheeks heated, and I tried to look away. Taking my eyes off of him was impossible, though. He was too beautiful not to look at.
“Abaddon, are you flirting with me?”
He cocked his head to the side. “Why, do you think it would work?”
I laughed, and, for a wonder, he joined me. Stone-faced he might be, but stone-hearted? No, he just looked that way.
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you’re still here,” I said, snuggling in to his warm embrace. “But why? It doesn’t sound like you planned to stick around.”
“I did not, but ‘plan’ is a stronger word than I’d use. I arrived here with nothing other than myself and Belial, and we were both weak from the war. Your world is hostile to demons, I arrived uninvited, and I needed to survive first.”
“You seem to have done a fine job of that,” I said, but he tutted.
“Not true. I have failed every time, but thankfully I limped along until I met you. Now, when your world consumes me, I can go to oblivion happy.”
He frowned and looked around again. “If it ever gets around to consuming me, that is.”
“That eager to get away from me?” I laughed, and he gave me another rib-crushing squeeze.
“You know I am not,” he said, “but I do not understand, and that vexes me. Nothing behaves as I expected since… oh.”
I’ve never seen anyone move as fast as Abaddon. In fact, when he moved, it was too fast for me to follow. One moment we were snuggling in a nest of destroyed furniture, the next he was on his feet, carrying me in his arms. I couldn’t hold in a shriek as he bounded across the room to the wall.
“There.” He pointed to a rune, as dark as all the rest. “Nothing.”
He seemed to expect an answer. “Sure?”
Tail swishing back and forth, he took a deep breath and let it out before trying again. “I carved these runes to keep me and Belial here. No one summoned us to this world, so I had to bind us to it, which took a lot of my power. It didn’t leave enough for me to open a gate and leave.”
I nodded slowly, trying to follow. “But when you killed the hellfire circle, they all went out.”
“And that should have been my end. I lack the strength to recast the circle.”
“Oh.” I slipped out of his grip and looked at the rune, remembering it from the papers he’d shown me. A binding using his true name. Not that I could read or understand it, but it called to me somehow. I traced my finger through it—and Abaddon let out a deep moan. “Oh, so…it’s me? I’m holding you here?”
It was a lot to take in. How? What little I knew about demon summoning came from crappy horror movies, not occult tomes. Anythingreal,I’d learned after meeting him.
And if he was right, Abaddon was relying on me to keep him alive. Which, yeah, no pressure, Holly. Any other guy saying he’d die without me, I’d say ‘good’ and wave him goodbye. Now I slept with a demon once, and it made me responsible for his life?
The thoughts raced through my mind at breakneck speed. Abaddon’s answer came slower.
“Somehow, yes. Your feelings for me are an invitation, and with that, I do not need to devote most of my energy to simply existing. No wonder I feel stronger, even after the injuries I took.”
“And no wonder your generator overloaded. When you pulled power from it, you fed more in than you took.”
“I… yes. You asked me to change my appearance, and I tried to borrow power from the generator. And then, when I tried to restart it, the power I fed it was ten times what I expected.”
“Big boom.” I shuddered at the memory of his blood drop hitting the circle. That nearly killed us both.
He slid his arms around me from behind, the inferno of his touch getting a gasp from me. I wriggled back against him and felt him harden.
“Um.” Part of me welcomed the distraction. Part of me wanted to follow this train of logic. And part of me didn’t care about the thoughts or the distraction, as long as Abaddon fucked me again.
That would have carried the day if another thought hadn’t popped up. One I couldn’t ignore. “You mean that because I want you here, you’ll be able to leave?”
