Page 25 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

T here’s food waiting for me in my bedroom, a plate and another glass of water sitting on the vanity. It looks like the enchilada plate I buy for myself on my birthday, the only time I’ll waste money on it. But I know it can’t be that. Not here.

I still eat it, though, because I’m ravenous.

Hungrier than I’ve been since I woke up in this nightmare.

I drink all the water, too, which is sweet and fragrant, like it’s been scented with lavender.

Then I do a cursory look around the room for something else to wear, although I know I won’t find anything.

I’m right, but I feel so tired that I stretch out naked on the bed anyway, as boneless as a jellyfish.

My dreams are strange, although that’s all I can remember of them. Strange and horny.

When I wake up, I’m in another dress. Not a ball gown, thank God, but a summery linen dress with a full skirt and off-the-shoulder sleeves. Still too tight, of course. But I suppose it’s better than nothing.

For a moment, I just lay in the bed, staring up at the thick tangle of passionflower vines twining over the fresco. I’m not sure what I can do now. Whatever that barrier is, I couldn’t pass through it. It snared me like a spider’s web.

And then Laphriel did the same fucking thing.

I squeeze my eyes shut against the memory, although that doesn’t stop it from brightening in my thoughts. His soft, inhuman tongue. The weight of his body against mine. The desperate, hungry way he stroked his cock. It all flashes through my head until warmth pools between my legs.

I kick out of the bed, refusing to give in to my eerie, unnatural lust like I did earlier. Or yesterday. Whenever it was. I should have shoved him away and lived with my pain.

Your suffering. My nourishment. He didn’t just lick my pain away. He ate it.

The bedroom feels stifling. Or maybe I feel more emboldened and less afraid. I do feel… different, somehow. Clean, like I had a shower. That pain Laphriel devoured is still gone, too, even the little twinges of discomfort that existed before I ever came to this place.

But when I step out into the hallway, that’s when I really get the sense that something changed.

The hallway is brighter than it usually is, and I take a few steps before I realize that it’s also cleaner.

The grime is gone from the floors and the walls, and the light is coming from the ceiling, through narrow skylights that I swear I weren’t there yesterday.

But there are also vines crawling along the walls—the same lush passionflowers that are in my room, although the flowers seem too big, and their squiggly petals seem to curl in as I pass by, like dying spiders .

“Natasha.”

I freeze when I hear the voice, which I know has to be Laphriel, even though it doesn’t sound like him. The booming is gone, replaced with s soft, velvet melodiousness. More than that, though, it doesn’t cause me any hint of pain. If anything, it’s like being licked by his tongue again.

I turn around to find him standing a few feet away, wings folded behind his back, a new pair of baggy trousers hanging from his hips.

“How do you know my name?” I say softly. “You never did tell me after you said it yesterday, too, before?—”

“Before you flung yourself into the h—into the holy fire?”

I blink, startled that he speaks in a complete sentence. Although the implication of holy fire also buzzes uncomfortably around in my head.

“Before I tried to save myself,” I say defensively. “And it seems you’ve been learning English.”

“No.” The eyes in Laphriel’s face glitter. “No, you learned my language. The celestial tongue.”

I give a sharp, scoffing laugh. “We’re speaking English.”

“We are not,” he says. “But I suppose it sounds that way to you.”

I shake my head, certain this is some mind game. Some trick.

“That’s what I was trying to explain yesterday,” he continues. “It took longer than I thought, the changing. But at least now I can speak to you without destroying that lovely, fragile body.”

Heat courses through me, and I step back and wrap my arms defensively around my breasts. The changing . I don’t know what that means, and I don’t want to dwell on it.

“Don’t be offended,” he says. “You were made to be impermanent. All humans are.”

I swallow, studying him, feeling wary. I find it hard to believe we’re speaking that language that made blood seep out of my eyes, but I can clearly understand him. It makes him seem?—

Less monstrous, somehow. But still dangerous.

“So what do you want to speak about?” I ask. “Why you’re keeping me here?”

He looks at me for a long time with all twelve of his eyes. In the sunlight, they’re the color of the ocean.

Then suddenly I’m pressed against those eyes, his arms wrapped around me. This time, I know what’s coming, and I shriek out a protest as we slide through the layers of the house, passing through dusty, sunlit rooms and tangles of old wiring and rusted metal pipes.

When we stop, we’re in a place that feels impossible.

I guess it’s a room in the mansion, or it was once.

It feels like it’s inside, anyway, but it also feels like a natural formation carved out of white stone.

Crystals hang like grapes from the ceiling.

Large, smooth stones rise like hills. There’s a glittering pool in the corner, connected to a narrow, trickling stream that disappears through a dark crevice in the floor, one I can’t look at too long without feeling dizzy.

“What the fuck?” I say.

Laphriel makes a noise that’s melodic and terrifying and beautiful all at once. When I look at him, his mouth is split open into a smile, which is also beautiful and terrifying, his teeth as sharp as daggers.

He was laughing, I think.

“This is a place between places,” he says. “A foyer, I suppose, that will lead me to the others when the time comes.”

“Others?” My fear spikes. “What others? What are you doing? Why am I here?”

I scream the last question, and it booms and echoes like thunder.

Or like Laphriel’s voice, before I could understand him. Something tightens in my throat, a sense that my words are not the words I think they are.

Laphriel drapes himself on one of the stones near the pool, arranging his wings like the drape of a cloak. The faces in them are clearer than ever, still twisted in anguish.

“What are you?” I barely get the question out because I’m afraid of what the answer will be.

Darkness ripples through Laphriel’s eyes. Darkness and sorrow.

“You already know the answer to that,” he says softly. “I could taste it when I licked your suffering away.”

I wobble and throw my hand out to catch myself against one of the nearby stones, the surface smooth to the touch. Laphriel watches me calmly as I sink down to a seat, the skirt billowing up around me.

“I don’t know what you are,” I mutter unconvincingly. “Just that you’re not human.” I look up at him, his black hair a lovely contrast against the golden glow of his skin. “You said you were from Heaven.”

“And yet you don’t accuse me of being an angel.”

Fear knots in my belly. “What are you?” I ask again, more firmly. Even though he’s right. I know what he is.

An angel who’s not an angel. A devil.

“I am one of the Fallen,” he says, never looking away from me. “I joined a rebellion against a tyrant, but it was a rigged game. You see, the tyrant needs beings that embody the darkness, as that’s what makes the light have meaning. Without those who make the wrong choice, freedom means nothing.”

His eyes bore into me.

“So I fell,” he says. “We all fell, because that is our role. To fight, to lose, to fall.”

My head buzzes. This can’t be real. I can’t be sitting on a rock in a vintage dress in Montcroix mansion talking to a fucking fallen angel.

“I fell through time and space,” Laphriel continues. “And I landed here.” His eyes all lift toward mine. “With you.”

My breath catches, and a heat ignites in my belly. I clench my hands, trying to extinguish it.

“You were the first one I ever saw,” he murmurs. “Weak and frightened and full of pain. And that pain—” His voice cracks, and the hairs on my arm stand up. “I knew what I had become then, when I tasted your pain and wanted more .” His eyes flash white hot. “A being of sin and punishment.”

“You’re punishing me,” I whisper. Then another thought occurs to me, sharp and terrifying, and it makes bile rise in the back of my throat. “Did I die? Am I in Hell?”

Laphriel blinks at me. Then he laughs, although it’s musical and cold and cruel.

“No,” he says. “You are in Florida.”

He flickers over to me, and I think that this time I see him move, his body blurring, the air shifting around him. When he’s solid again, he’s kneeling at my feet, gazing up at me.

“Only your kind has free will,” he says softly. “My kind, no matter what side we fall on, are doomed to follow patterns laid out in the dust and molecules and starlight of a thousand thousand universes. I rebelled because I wanted to break that pattern and forge my own.”

I don’t move. He’s so close to me, his alien face gazing up from beside my knee. I press my thighs tighter together, even though I want to push them apart, to feel his long, sinuous tongue inside my body again.

“Everything I do,” he says, “I am trying to break free. Even now that I’ve lost and I’m transforming into—” His words falter, and his eyes darken. “Into something else.”

His hand slides up my thigh, the heat of it apparent through the dress’s thin fabric.

“But you chose to come to me,” he murmurs. “Didn’t you? When you saw me fall?”

“How do you know that?” I say shakily, forcing myself to look at his face and not his pale, delicate hand.

“I see farther than you do,” he says simply. “I can see what is happening outside these walls, and inside them. What’s happening above us and in the ground below. And as I plummeted to the earth, I saw you watching me, and I felt the pattern shift as you made your choice. ”

He drags up my skirt, slow and steady. My heart hammers against my ribcage, and I consider reaching down and grabbing his wrist. But I don’t.

“There it is again,” he says softly. “You made another choice.”

He shoves my skirt up to my waist, revealing my bare thigh. Then he touches that, too, his fingers feather-soft. I bite back a moan.

“My role has changed,” Laphriel says, looking down at my thigh, his fingers crawling closer and closer to my pussy. “Before, I was a watcher. I didn’t intervene. Now, my sole purpose is to tempt creatures like you into making the choices they aren’t supposed to make.”

He lifts his face toward me, his eyes not blue now but a stormy grey, like the sea before a hurricane.

“Is that why you kidnapped me?” The question comes out raspy and breathless, and I’m not even sure what I want the answer to be.

Because his temptation started long before that, didn’t it?

It started the second I saw my bike twisted on the road and thought a fallen meteor could be a way to escape my life.

Laphriel smiles again and runs his tongue along his teeth, like he’s giving me a glimpse of pleasure. His tongue doesn’t look how I expect. It’s black and tapered at the end, but I still want it inside me again. Desperately.

“No,” he says. “I brought you here because I thought it might break the pattern.”

He slides his hand between my clenched thighs, gently pressing them open. I don’t fight him.

“And how does keeping me here do that?” I ask raggedly. Because I’m not wearing underwear, and Laphriel’s fingers graze along my slit, soft and warm and teasing.

“It doesn’t.” He looks at me as he speaks. “I only thought it might, at first. I was going to let you go. But I kept you because?—”

His finger slides inside me, and I cry out, pressing my fingers down into the smooth, cold stone.

“Because your presence gives me pleasure.” He angles his finger upward, stroking along the sensitive tissue there, and I give in. I groan and push my legs a little wider. “The way I changed… Before my fall, I couldn’t experience pleasure of the flesh. Only pleasure of the spirit. And now?—”

He presses upward again. I buck against his hand, keening softly, especially as he brushes his thumb against my clit.

“I felt it as soon as I saw you, staring down at me. This frail, inconsequential thing witnessing my worst moment.”

He slides another finger inside me and glides them both back and forth, making me gasp and quake.

“But the choices you made,” he says. “To run. To stay. To beg me for silence instead of giving in to the suffering?—”

He fingerfucks me harder, two fingers stroking my walls and a single thumb stroking my clit. I moan, my legs spread wantonly for him.

“I wanted to feel those choices forever,” he says, mouth close to my ear. “I wanted to feel you choose me.”

And with those words, I come.