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

DARK ARTS

T HERE WAS ANOTHER VOICEMAIL FROM A NTOINE ON HER phone the following morning.

Iris sat in the kitchen of her second-floor apartment and listened to the message—“Can we talk? Please, Iris, just call me back”—sipping coffee and soaking up the sliver of sun passing through the window.

It was snowing outside, and the flakes caught the sunlight like diamonds on their lazy drift downward.

After breaking up with Antoine, Iris had decided she was going to stay single until she managed to sort her life out and break her pattern of chasing toxic men. All that shitstorm of a relationship had taught her was the meaning of the word “dysfunctional.”

She’d tried parting the nice way, and he hadn’t gotten the message. She’d tried telling him to eat shit and die, but that hadn’t worked either. Now, six months later, she was ignoring him completely, and he still wasn’t taking the hint.

It was nice to know she was such hot shit, but seriously. The bloke needed to piss off already.

On that note... She deleted the voicemail, pulled up Antoine’s number in her contacts, and blocked it. The sense of relief was instantaneous, and she set the phone down with a soothing exhalation. Shoulda done that ages ago. If only all of her problems could be solved so easily.

You’re a shallow piece of shit with no substance or personality.

Her fingers tightened around her mug as the tension returned to her shoulders.

Last night, she’d come back inside after tearing Meph a new one, and no matter how hard she tried, she hadn’t been able to get in the socializing mood.

It felt like she was viewing everything through a glass bowl over her head, maybe from one of those old-school diving getups that could probably double as a space suit.

The sounds were muffled, the people distorted around the edges, her smile forced, her laughter fake.

And then she’d pulled a Lily.

She’d snuck out of her own party and gone home.

She’d been in her bed, trying to sleep, by one o’clock, which was practically the start of most good parties in this city.

She’d lain awake staring at the ceiling, replaying that stupid conversation in her head and wishing she’d never opened her mouth.

The phone rang, offering a welcome intrusion since it couldn’t be Antoine calling now. Sure enough, her twin’s name popped up on the screen.

“Lils. What’s up?”

“You’re awake.”

“It’s almost ten. Why are you surprised?”

“You never get up early, and last night was a late one.”

For you, maybe. Iris was relieved Lily hadn’t noticed her absence. The last thing she felt like doing was explaining herself.

“Why’d you call then?” She stroked the black fur of her cat, who chose that moment to leap onto her lap. A rare occurrence. Grimalkin was notoriously antisocial and rarely granted such privileges.

“Bel’s cooking breakfast. Eva and Ash are here too. You should come.”

Iris narrowed her eyes. “Eva and Ash live downstairs.”

“So?”

“So, you’re practically roomies with them, and I’m a ten-minute walk away. Why invite me?”

“Because you’re my sister, and it’s our birthday? What other reason do I need?”

Fair point. But Iris was no more in the mood for socializing now than she’d been last night. Especially not with demons. And especially not with Meph.

But, damn it, maybe she ought to go because of him. Not because she wanted to see him, but to determine how he would act after their little altercation. It was purely for Lily’s sake, of course—Iris had promised her twin she’d make an effort to get along.

Her lip curled. She’d rather eat rocks than deal with this crap first thing in the morning.

Grimalkin chose that moment to start making a cat nest on her thighs with his claws. “Ow, Grim!” she hissed as he punctured her in ten different places. He leapt off and stalked haughtily away.

“So are you coming?” Lily asked.

“Fine, whatever. I’ll come.”

“Yay!”

“Yay,” Iris repeated blandly.

“Damn, that looks pretty cool.” Meph stared at the resin cast he was carefully extracting from the mold.

He had created the mold by covering the original clay model with silicone and then surrounding it with solid plaster.

When the materials hardened, he’d removed the plaster, carefully peeled the silicone open, and set the clay aside.

To make the cast, he had painted resin onto the inside of the silicone and added fiberglass for strength.

When the resin hardened, the process was complete.

The full sculpture was done in pieces and then attached at the end, and today Meph was extracting the head and neck—the final and most important part of the piece. He was kind of stoked.

Okay, he was super stoked. This shit got his blood pumping like nothing else. He’d never felt anything like it, and honestly, it scared him a little.

“It really does,” Jacqui agreed from beside him, wiping her hands on a paint-stained apron.

Her thin dreadlocks were twisted into a bun on top of her head, and an almost-reverent smile adorned her face—kind of funny considering what they were looking at.

But then, Jacqui was an artist. She got off on weird stuff.

The sculpture was fucked up. Meph had discovered he was twisted (not a big surprise, considering his background) because every time he tried to make art, freaky shit came out of him.

He’d been a little disturbed by his first sculpture—a guy beating himself with his own severed arm—but Jacqui had been thrilled, telling him over and over it was a masterpiece, he was gifted, blah, blah, blah.

He’d brushed her off, but inwardly, he’d eaten up her praise like an elixir for his hungry, black soul.

This particular piece was no exception to his depravity. He was calling it Flayed Alive because it was a life-size sculpture of a man on his knees with his arms bound behind him, spine arching and contorted, head thrown back as he screamed in agony.

Oh, and he had no skin.

That had been Meph’s big achievement with the original clay figure. He had painstakingly shaped every tendon and muscle as if it were one of those models doctors used to study the human body.

Only this guy wasn’t skinless because he was some deceased fucker who’d donated his body to science. This guy was skinless because somebody had peeled it off him, piece by piece. Hence the agonized screaming—’cause that shit hurt.

Together, Meph and Jacqui carefully maneuvered the final piece of the sculpture and peeled the remaining silicone off, revealing the man’s face, his suffering carved into every hollow of his sunken features. Meph got the creeps just looking at it.

“It’s gorgeous,” Jacqui breathed as if she was looking at the gates of Heaven themselves. “Absolutely incredible.”

“Yeah, it’s all right,” he said lamely, but the truth was, he was feeling kind of emotional.

Weird, he knew, to get choked up at the sight of this freaky, demented thing. But it was his freaky, demented thing. It was his own “unique, personal expression,” as Jacqui would say.

Whenever he made some critical comment about how his art was too dark, she would scold him, telling him to never be ashamed and to never censor his creativity.

She would say that art was meant to be imperfect.

Art was meant to show a little pain and darkness because everyone had it inside them and it was just a part of being alive.

Jacqui was a wise human.

They stood together for a while, examining the piece in companionable silence. Then Jacqui wandered back to keep working on her own sculpture—a slender human hand of dark brown clay the same shade as her skin, reaching for something out of its grasp.

Meph’s phone rang. He saw Raum’s name on the screen and groaned inwardly. “Yeah?”

“Where are you?”

“Um...” Meph glanced around the familiar walls of the art studio. “Out.”

“Bel made breakfast.”

Meph glanced at the clock over the door and added three hours to account for the time difference between Jacqui’s place on Vancouver Island and Montreal. “It’s ten o’clock. You haven’t had breakfast yet?”

Raum’s grunt said, Duh , and yeah, that made sense. Meph was only on the early-bird schedule because Jacqui was. The woman sprang out of bed at the crack of dawn and spent all day in her studio. She barely remembered to eat unless he dragged her inside for a sandwich.

Jacqui had a few issues of her own, starting with one asshole angelic husband, who had tossed a consecrated blade into Meph’s chest the first time they met.

She and Dan were currently separated, seeing as Dan had neglected to mention during their entire twenty-seven years of marriage that he was actually a Grigori—an angel who’d fallen from Heaven to live on Earth and comingle with humans.

Which meant Eva, their daughter, was actually not a human, but an angel-human hybrid called a Nephilim who would be hunted by both Heaven and Hell for the magical properties in her blood.

Understandably, Jacqui had been pissed.

As much as Meph disliked the Grigori, he didn’t like seeing Jacqui sad. He didn’t like when she forgot to eat or worked herself into a stupor to avoid returning alone to her empty house. It was an uncomfortable feeling, and it made him hate Dan all the more for being the cause of it.

“How long till you get here?” Raum asked.

Meph considered his options. It would only be a matter of stepping into the hellgate drawn on Dan’s office floor, which led to a matching one in Meph’s room in Montreal.

He and his brothers had an unwritten rule not to enter each other’s private spaces uninvited, so they didn’t know about the gate.

He wasn’t comfortable with his brothers knowing what he was up to here.

“I’m not coming,” he said, deciding he’d rather work on his sculpture.

“I wasn’t asking. It’s Lily’s birthday, and she wants you here.”

Meph groaned. “But—”

“Iris is here too. You can flirt with her and be a dick. It’s your favorite hobby.”