Page 27 of Fallen: Darkness Ascending, Vol.1

M y eyes flutter shut as Laphriel begins his slow, rhythmic licking, swirling his tongue around my neck. Twining it around my neck, really, because his tongue is long enough to wrap around my throat and squeeze, just a little, until I’m gasping and squirming on the bed.

He makes a cruel, satisfied sound and drags his tongue away. When I look up at him, red blood streaks across his lips. He bares his teeth at me.

“Do you enjoy this as much as I do?” he purrs.

Yes.

I’m not giving him the satisfaction of an answer, however, and he doesn’t give me a chance anyway. Because he drags his tongue between my breasts, moaning a little as he licks away the blood. I fall back on the mattress but lift my hand, shaking and tentative, and thread it through his hair.

His response is to coil his tongue around my nipple, and the sleek satin of it makes me moan.

I can feel myself giving in to it, the way I did before—and this time, he’s not even taking my pain away. The blood sticking to my body is blood he put there

to save me

and he makes thick, hungry sounds as he licks it away. Greedy sounds. The same sounds he made when he tongue-fucked me into an orgasm.

He moves from my breast to my arms, rolling his tongue over my skin, shifting his body so that I can feel his erection more firmly as it presses into the soft part of my thigh. It feels like sunlight. Or like fire.

“On your belly,” he growls, rolling me over.

Then he follows the trail of the blood splatter along the side of my waist, licking down to my hips.

I feel more exposed like this, somehow, especially when his eyelashes flutter against my skin.

His chest is pressed against me as he runs his tongue down the length of my spine, stopping in the hollow of my lower back.

“There’s no blood there,” I gasp out into the musty mattress.

“There’s something else interesting,” he says, pulling away from me. “Just like in the front.”

He lifts my hips and shoves me forward like an accordion, folding me in half so my ass sticks into the air. I tremble as his warm fingers slide between my cheeks and then against my opening, soft and teasing. I cry out in surprise. But I don’t try to jerk away.

“No one’s ever done this to you before,” he says. “Filled this particular hole.”

“How do you know that?” I try to twist around to look at him, but he pushes me back down, pinning me in place.

Then his tongue is on my ass, a warm and unfamiliar wetness that makes me jolt.

Just for a second, before he replaces it with his finger, carefully easing himself in. Pain pinches, bright as a star.

“Is that your first question?” He pushes his finger in deeper, and the pain deepens. I don’t respond, but he answers anyway. “I’m changing,” he explains. “Becoming the darkness I’m meant to be. I can sense all your transgressions now. And lack of transgressions, too.”

His finger goes further inside me, an alien, forbidden hardness that burns like fire. I shriek at the pain of it. Laphriel laughs. “More suffering for me to enjoy,” he purrs, and then he licks between my ass again.

I cry out: half in shock, half in pleasure. He moans softly, then flings me onto my back again, and I see the black snake of his tongue disappear into his leering mouth.

Something about him looks different. Sharper and crueler. He rises between my legs, his pants tenting with his erection, and his eyes gleam with a cold, harsh light I haven’t seen before.

“What do you mean, you’re changing?” The question comes out in a rush.

Laphriel runs his hands up my belly, half his eyes cast on my body and the other on my face.

“I told you,” he says, kneading my breasts hard enough that it hurts.

“I’m meant to be the shadow that makes the light worthwhile.

” His rough touch makes me moan. “But I started in the light. So when I fell, the transformation began. It’s happening all around me. ”

A sickness swells in my belly and fear prickles across my skin, even as he keeps squeezing my breasts in big, rough handfuls.

“It’s happening to the house,” he says. “To the animals in the swamp. To?—”

“To me?” I say weakly.

All of Laphriel’s eyes snap to mine, and his lips curl up. “That’s not a true question. ”

I suck down a shuddery breath. “Am I transforming, too?” It comes out as a whisper, barely.

Laphriel leans down, his hair falling like a curtain around us. “You already know the answer,” he breathes. “You felt it earlier. When you flew. When you defended yourself.”

I give a low, choking sob and scramble out from underneath him, my legs slipping over the old bedsheets. He doesn’t try to stop me, but he does say, “I know you still have questions.”

“What are you doing to me?” I scream.

“ I’m not doing anything,” Laphriel says.

“I didn’t even know it would happen when I brought you here.

Because I was—“ He seems to hesitate for a moment.

“I was still of the light, then. Or still trying to be. I wanted you near me, wanted to feel all those delicious choices you make, every second of every day. But then you were able to speak my language, and I knew. I knew what was happening.”

I stare at him, my heart hot and pounding. “What,” I whisper sharply, “am I turning into?”

Laphriel seems to consider this question, his head tilted to the side. “You are not becoming like me.”

“Not becoming a demon?”

He flinches.

“I despise that word,” he says. “Everything I hated for millennia. And now?—”

“Stop feeling sorry for yourself and answer my fucking question!”

Laphriel’s eyes turn to me again, blazing and cruel. “No,” he says. “No, a human cannot become a—” He swallows. “You’re becoming something else.”

I glare at him. “What. Am. I. Becoming?”

And he glares back at me, although the intensity of it makes my belly quake. “A rare thing,” he says. “Something that is of the Earth but not of Heaven and not of…” He lets his words trail away.

“Hell?” My voice shakes.

“Yes,” he says through gritted teeth. “But you can enter its halls as a guest, if you’d like. And other halls, besides. Universes beyond human understanding.”

All the breath flees my body, leaving me shuddery and lightheaded. I knew something was happening. I knew when I saw how the passionflowers changed. I knew when I drank that water and ate that food that it wasn’t free. But this?—

This is too enormous. Too strange. I shake my head and push myself off the bed. “If I can see Hell,” I say, “Why the fuck can’t I go through the front door?”

Laphriel’s shoulders slump. Disappointment flickers across his face. “You likely can now,” he says, after a pause. “I told you before, you weren’t ready. Now you are. You can go where you wish.”

Exhilaration tears through me.

“Clothes,” I say. “Where are they?”

“In the room across the hall.” He jumps off the bed, quick as lightning. Except this time, I can definitely see him move. Another change I barely noticed. “But can I ask you a question?”

He’s close enough that our bodies nearly touch. “If this is about the bath,” I say, “I can manage on my own, thanks.”

Laphriel shakes his head. “No. My question is this: why do you want to go back?”

I freeze. For a moment, my entire life unrolls before me, one flashing image after another: waking up, eating instant oatmeal, riding my bike through the swamp to get to Pearl’s.

Taking orders and abuse in equal measure.

Eating a hamburger that one of the cooks grilled for me in the fifteen minutes I have allotted for lunch.

More orders. More abuse. Counting my tips at the rickety metal table in my kitchen.

The tight knot of dread as I realize they’re lower than I expect.

Crying in my shower, the tile slippery because I’m always too exhausted to clean.

Staring at my ceiling fan because I can’t fall asleep, too worried about the future.

Laphriel watches me, waiting for my response. And I don’t know what to say. My mouth opens, but any answer I could give lodges in my throat.

Everything I’ve ever done since I was seventeen years old was to escape South Florida. And isn’t an escape what he’s offering me?

Laphriel bows his head toward me, his gaze intense. “I’ll show you sights you would never dream of in that life,” he murmurs. “Give you pleasure that’s impossible for a human to feel. Stay with me. Complete your transformation.” His eyes glitter. “Make that choice.”

I can’t move. Make that choice .

I really am Eve in the garden, tempted by the serpent.

“How do I know you’re not lying?” I whisper. “Demons lie.”

“To humans,” he says. “They—we—lie to humans.” He runs his hand through my hair and smiles in that cruel way. “But you aren’t human anymore.”

The room spins, and for a moment, I see it as something else: not a rotting ruin but a gleaming, opulent marvel. There are no vines spilling through the windows, no grime on the walls. Music plays from someplace downstairs, soft and twinkling. A woman’s laughter drifts from the hallway.

Then I blink, and I’m back with Laphriel.

“I told you,” he says. “Not human.”

“I went—” I look back at him, searching his fiery eyes for some hint of mockery. “The house, it was?—”

“I told you,” he says. “You can see wonders beyond all human imagining. You can see the past and the future and worlds beyond this one.” His eyes glitter. “You just need to complete the transformation.” He holds out his hand. “And perhaps accept some help from a guide.”

My heart pounds. I know I was elsewhere, just for that brief second. Before I found Laphriel, I had never come close to that kind of luxury. All I did was work and save my sweaty, wrinkled dollar bills and tell myself, day in and day out, that I just needed a little bit more to escape.

Another $1000. Another $500. And then, after a few bad weeks with low tips, or a broken AC, or a medicine prescription I can barely afford, another $1500.

“Why me?” I whisper. “Why did you choose me?”

“I didn’t,” he says. “You did.” His eyes blink and flash. “You chose me , Natasha, when you found me after I fell.”

Laphriel’s still holding out his hand, his fingers long and pale. I shiver, remembering how they felt as he touched me.

“What do I have to do?” My head buzzes, the question barely forming on my tongue. “To complete the transformation?”

And at that, Laphriel breaks into his wide, vicious grin.

“A bath,” he says simply. “Just as I promised.”