Page 25 of Demon with Benefits (Hell Bent #3)

“It’s not that bad. Sure, it’s not perfect, but don’t let your angel bias make you blind. Lots of vampires live decent lives. If Jacks decides that’s what she wants, she can make that choice.”

“Jacks?”

“Yeah. Or are we talking about someone else here?”

“You’re calling my wife Jacks .”

“Yes, I fucking am because we’re friends. I’ll call her whatever I want to call her.”

Dan’s nostrils flared, and with that blond hair and powerful build, he suddenly looked a bit like Belial about to snap. A terrifying thought. The last thing the world needed was two Belials.

All of a sudden, Meph was sick of putting up with other people’s crap. He had enough of his own to deal with.

He was done ignoring the elephant in the room, pretending Belial’s temper wasn’t a big deal.

He let Bel accuse him of all sorts of shit, agreeing that yeah, he was a loose cannon, yeah, he was a pain in the ass.

But no one ever mentioned how much of a loose-cannon-ass-pain Belial was.

No, no one said anything about Belial because nobody wanted to set him off.

Well, fuck that. And fuck Dan for trying to act all high and mighty. Like Meph was the one in the wrong when he was the only one telling Jacqui the truth?

Meph opened his mouth to tear Dan a new one and then realized that he didn’t care. He just wanted to work on his sculpture.

The whole point of his art was to escape the drama, and he resented Dan for showing up here and bringing it into his workspace. A workspace that was technically Dan’s first, but still.

So, Meph stuffed his hands into his hoodie pocket and walked past the angel toward the coffeepot, dismissing him completely. If Dan wanted to stab another blade into his back, so be it. Let the asshole put him out of his misery. Someone had to.

“You want some coffee?” he asked, putting on a pot. “Jacks will when she turns up, so if you want me to make extra, speak up.”

Dan didn’t say anything, so Meph shrugged and made the usual amount. Then he went about setting up to work on his sculpture, getting all his sculpting tools ready and a bowl of water to wet the clay with.

A minute later, he sat down with his coffee and tools, ready to go. Except Dan was still just standing there staring at him, and he realized it was going to be hard to focus. So, he spun his stool around and looked him in the eye.

“Look, dude, if you want Jacqui back you have to talk to her. She’s mad because you lied to her for so long, so why the fuck would you think lying to her now is going to help?”

Dan’s eyes narrowed as if he wanted to retort, but he blew out a breath instead. “I didn’t mean to lie to her. I honestly didn’t. It didn’t even occur to me to offer to turn my wife into the kind of monstrosity I’ve spent my life hunting. I can’t imagine doing such a thing to her.”

“It’s not that bad—”

“It is that bad. The very existence of vampires is a violation of the rules, and she would be killed by other Grigori if anyone ever found her.” His jaw clenched. “Just like my daughter.”

“So protect her,” Meph said. “And help her learn to protect herself. Like Ash is doing with Eva. I don’t see Ash whining about it.”

“That’s different. Eva didn’t have a choice to become what she is. Jacqui does.”

“Yeah. Jacqui does. Not you. At the end of the day, it’s not your call to make. And if you want her back, you have to stop trying to decide shit for her.”

Dan opened his mouth and then closed it again. He tilted his head. “You’re an interesting character, Mephistopheles. Not at all what I expected.”

Meph winced. “Uh...”

“To be honest, I want to stab you again for getting close to my wife while I’m not around. But I’m also grateful. She deserves to have a friend she can talk about this with, and I suppose she could do worse than you.”

Meph held up a hand. “Nah, let’s stop right there. I don’t want to like you any more than you want to like me. You can just leave it at wanting to stab me again.”

To his great surprise, Dan laughed.

At that moment, crunching on the gravel outside snagged their attention. They looked through the glass and saw Jacqui approaching with a tray of food in her hands.

Breakfast. She always brought breakfast for Meph when she came in the morning, even if he told her he’d already eaten. Even if he told her not to bother. She always did it anyway “just in case he got hungry.”

Something weird clenched in Meph’s chest at the sight of her with that tray of food, and he found himself looking at Dan. “If you fuck things up with her again, I’ll be the one doing the stabbing.”

Dan didn’t reply. Jacqui reached the studio, her hand on the doorknob. She was looking around at the cedar forest and hadn’t noticed them inside yet.

As she turned the handle, Dan disappeared. Damned fancy angel teleportation. Meph spun his stool back around to stare at his sculpture, pretending he’d been working.

“Morning,” Jacqui said when she saw him. “I brought food!”

“I’ve looked at that one.” Lily pointed to the text in Iris’s hands. It was an old grimoire of faded parchment entitled The Book of Gamigan . “There’s nothing. It’s a bunch of weird sketches and spells written in a freaky language.”

Iris cracked it open and flipped carefully through a couple pages, realizing she recognized some of the characters even though she couldn’t read them. A chill went down her spine. “That looks like Sheolic. What is this? Why do we have this?”

The twins currently sat on the floor in the basement of Le Repaire between the rows of bookshelves. “Don’t know,” Lily replied, “but as far as I can tell, there’s nothing we can use in it. I checked.”

With a shrug, Iris closed the book and set it on the “nope” pile, which was starting to teeter precariously. She thought better of it and moved the book to start a new pile beside it.

Suyin would kill them if there was even a speck of damage on any of the grimoires. Everything here was carefully cataloged and organized, and they’d need to be sure they put everything back exactly where they got it when they were finished.

Iris had discreetly texted the other witch to ask what she was doing that day, and when Suyin had confirmed she wasn’t going in to the coven, Iris and Lily had headed there to use the library.

The shop upstairs was currently open and Marie-Thérèse was working, but she was a relatively inexperienced witch and had no cause to suspect they were up to anything unusual.

“I think you’ve been through most of the library,” Iris said, barely believing it.

The coven’s collection wasn’t that extensive, consisting of only half a dozen bookshelves crammed into their underground cellar. Still, half a dozen bookshelves held a lot of books, and until now, Lily had been searching alone.

“Do you ever leave here?” Iris asked. “When was the last time you hung out with your demon? Went on a date?”

Lily looked up from the grimoire she was flipping through, her green eyes lit with an impassioned fervor Iris had never seen in them before.

“This is Mist’s freedom we’re talking about.

It’s not something I can just forget about.

I have control of the brands. Therefore, it’s my responsibility to get rid of them. ”

“Lil...” Iris sighed. “I thought you were going to ease up on the obsession a little bit.”

It had been over two weeks since their conversation at movie night, but this was Iris’s first time coming to the library with Lily. Now, she was realizing she should have made an effort to help sooner, if only to try to save her twin from falling any further down this rabbit hole.

“I have eased up. I’ve been forcing myself to only spend four hours here a day.”

“Four hours... a day ?” Iris gaped at her. No wonder she’d read the entire library already. “That’s insane.”

Lily shook her head. “I don’t think there’s anything here anyway. I think I need to visit Hell again.”

There was a pause in which Iris’s mouth dropped open.

“I’m sorry, but I did not just hear you say you want to voluntarily visit Hell.”

“Think about it,” Lily said, proving that she had, in fact, said that.

“Bel told me once that he used to have one of the most extensive libraries in the underworld, and well, I was wondering... Bel gave up his territory when he went rogue, but maybe there’s still a way to access that library.

Or, at the very least, to find someone else to do it for me. ”

“Someone... like who?”

“Well, I know Bel and Mist said he was bad news, but... what about Murmur? He bargained to help us out once. Maybe he’d do it again.”

Iris was speechless. Her sister wanted to return to Hell and bargain with a zombie-demon necromancer who’d butchered an entire army of gargoyles and then threatened to kill them unless Mist vowed not to challenge him for Paimon’s lair.

Luckily, Mist had no desire for the defeated Queen of Hell’s creepy castle and had agreed to his terms, and they hadn’t been forced to discover what Murmur would have done had they made him their enemy. In return, the Necromancer had vowed not to track them back to Earth.

Sheolic blood vows were unbreakable, but that didn’t mean Iris trusted him. Of course she bloody didn’t.

She’d accepted that there were some demons who weren’t wholly evil anymore, but Murmur wasn’t one of them. And his vow contained no promises not to immediately capture the prophesied blood-born twins and sell them to the highest bidder, should they ever cross his path again.

So no, Iris did not like the idea of Lily contacting the Necromancer at all.

“Are you fucking crazy ?”

Okay, she’d found her voice again. That was good because she needed to scream at Lily until her sister saw sense.