Page 25 of Malice: The Mate Games (Apocalypse #3)

Chapter

Nineteen

CHAOS

“ M erri?” I said, my voice a tight rasp as I watched the horns retreat and her eyes return to normal.

She turned her attention away from Grim and trained her gaze on me in painfully slow motion. “W-why are you looking at me like that?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“Like you don’t recognize me.”

“I’ve never seen you do anything like what you just did, Red. Forgive me for being taken aback.”

My focus flicked to the bodies littering the ground before us. The power she just displayed would have terrified a weaker man. In my case, a healthy dose of caution was definitely warranted.

“They’re dead,” Malice confirmed, voice low. “All of them.”

“She sucked out their souls. I watched it.” Grim’s voice held both awe and pride as he walked into the mass of death, stepping over the fallen humans and inspecting them as he went.

“I didn’t. Did I?” Merri’s frantic question had me closing the distance between us. I needed her to know she wasn’t in trouble for exercising her power. She stopped them. She defended herself and us. That was more than we could have hoped for. It was what we’d been training her to do all this time.

Taking her face between my palms, I whispered, “You were incredible.”

“But . . . but . . . I killed them.”

“It was them or you, Red. You saw what they did to Sin. You would have been their next target.”

“Oh my God. Sin!” She tried to twist her head out of my hold, but I tightened my grip.

“No need to look. He’ll be fine, and you don’t need that image in your memory.”

“But—”

“No,” I repeated firmly.

I’d been trying to assuage her panic, but I could see it in her eyes as they darted from body to body. “I killed them. Oh my God. I killed them all. I’m the monster Lilith always said I was.”

“What are you going on about?” Malice asked. “You were amazing. That”—he pointed at the pile of corpses at our feet—“was a thing of beauty. Do not for a second regret what just happened.”

Her wide eyes swung to him. “How can you say that? They’re innocent humans.”

“They were trying to kill us,” he retorted, disbelief lacing every word.

“They were desperate. They’re starving and dying in the streets. The world is ending, and they don’t understand, and I... I just killed them all without a second thought.”

“You are the daughter of a horsewoman, and you were threatened and trying to protect those you cared about. That is the beginning and the end of the conversation,” Grim stated.

“But—”

“No,” I said, agreeing wholeheartedly with Grimsby. “You did what you were born to do, Red. There’s nothing to feel sorry about.”

“I wasn’t born to do this. Succubi feed for survival, not to kill. I’ve never killed on purpose. Not once.”

I was still holding her face, so I dropped my hands to her shoulders so I could give her a little shake and interrupt her spiral. “That wasn’t a succubus power, Red. That was all Famine.”

“Excuse me?”

“What you just did? That was from your mother. Sin can do the same thing. We’ve seen him do it. It’s called soul stealing.”

“If I did it, they’d call it reaping,” Grim offered.

“Not helping,” Malice muttered. The assertion mirrored my own, telling me that Malice was as laser focused on Merri and her state of mind as I was.

“Why aren’t you more upset with me? Lilith hid me away after I killed Jimmy. She wouldn’t let me be near her clientele after I accidentally fed on them all. She wasn’t proud of what I could do. She was scared.”

Grim shifted until he was in my line of sight, allowing us to exchange a look.

“Pretty sure that had nothing to do with power and everything to do with control,” I mused. “In both those cases, your use of power was unintentional.”

“So was this,” she shouted, flinging out her arm.

“Was it, though?” Malice asked.

Merri flinched. “Of course it was.”

“No, wildflower. You knew exactly what you wanted to do. The only reason you’re upset right now is because you’re not familiar with that part of yourself.

There’s a difference between instinct and losing control.

Losing control would have been not stopping until every human who walks the earth was laying at your feet. ”

“Trust him on that one. He would know,” I said.

Beside me, Malice nodded. “As would I.”

Tears swam in her eyes, and as one crystalline drop fell, I caught it with the pad of my thumb. “You were so very brave, little succubus.”

A wet cough came from Sin as he lay on the ground, slowly healing. Merri’s shoulders tensed, and she jerked in an attempt to go to him.

“Sin,” she whispered, but I stopped her.

“He’s fine, Red. Don’t look at him right now. He’s too vain to let you see him like this.” As I glanced over to the bloody mess that was the horseman Famine, he gave me a thumbs up. I let out a soft huff of laughter. “I promise he’s okay. He’ll be good as new in no time.”

I could see the disbelief in her eyes, but she’d been through this with us before. We couldn’t die.

Cupping the back of her head, I pulled her into me and pressed my lips to the top of her head. “We will always come back to you.”

“I hope so.”

Malice cleared his throat. “As touching as this is, we need to get back to the chateau, and I suppose we’ll have to figure out how to dispose of these bodies. It won’t be long before the stench is unbearable.”

“That’s rich, coming from you,” Grim said. “You specialize in rot and decay.”

“Doesn’t mean I want to roll around in it. I’ll leave that to you.”

I rolled my eyes, still holding Merri close. “Maybe we should worry about how the hell they got through the wards in the first place.”

“Isn’t it obvious?” Malice countered.

“No?”

“Desperation.”

“How can desperation supersede magic?” Grim asked. “They shouldn’t have even been able to see the place.”

“But desperate people with nowhere to go will push through discomfort in search of safety. To them, it looked like nothing more than uninhabited land. Even if their hackles were raised by the wards, they might still continue on in the hope they’d find salvation. Humans are nothing if not stubborn.”

“What’s the point of wards, then?” Grim grumbled.

“Well, they were never going to be a physical barrier for humans. Just a repellent.”

“Maybe it should have been,” Grim said.

“They weren’t the ones we were worried about,” I reminded him.

“If the humans found us, does that mean Lucifer can?” Merri asked, her voice small and tight.

I pulled her in closer and squeezed her. I didn’t have an answer for her, and neither did the others.

She looked up at me, something flashing across her face before she asked, “Was this because of Christian being injured? Did that somehow weaken the wards?”

“No,” Malice answered. “The magic doesn’t work like that. Wards weaken over time, but he just replenished them, so they should be as strong as ever.”

“Maybe someone spotted Merri when she fell through the wards and decided to come investigate,” I said.

“The shore was visible from my vantage point after I surfaced in the lake.” Merri pulled away from me and blurted, “Oh God, did I cause this?”

“It certainly didn’t fucking help.” Malice could be a real asshole most days. Today wasn’t an exception.

“So our cover is blown. Do we need to run?”

“No,” Grim said. “We stay, shore up the wards once Christian is at full strength, and we stay the course.”

“Grim’s right. We have to hold our ground and focus on beating Lucifer at his own game.” At Sin’s words, Merri turned and rushed to where he was standing, bloody, a little unsteady, but healed.

“Sin! Are you okay? Do you hurt anywhere?” She ran her hands over his face and across his throat as though searching for wounds.

“If I say it hurts, will you kiss it better?”

She wrinkled her nose as she inspected the gore-specked front of him. “If you really need me to...”

He laughed and pulled her in for a hug. “Nah. I already have everything I need.”

The implication was clear and none of us, including Merri, missed it.

“For someone who just nearly had their head blown off, you look quite chipper,” Malice said.

Sin beamed, his arms never leaving Merri. “Of course I fucking do. My girl loves me.”

All of us except Grim visibly startled.

“I do?” she asked.

“Babe, everyone knows that razing your lover’s enemies to the ground is the number one sign of true love. I might be a horseman, but I was an actor first. I’m practically an expert in love stories.”

His logic was flawed, as romantic as it was. I had never loved anyone, but I’ve razed entire armies simply for the sake of bloodlust.

“I... Holy shit, you might be right,” Merri said, stopping my thoughts in their tracks.

With a grin, Sinclair booped her on the nose and said, “I know.”

I shot Malice a look, wondering what he thought about this new development as a cold sweat broke out across my skin.

Was he like me? Feeling a very unwelcome mix of panic and jealousy?

Panic because how did this happen, but jealousy because if she loved him, where did that leave me?

I mean us. No. I didn’t care about the others right now.

They could fight their own battles. She said it herself.

Loving someone meant the center of your world changed.

So if she truly loved Sin, how could there be any part of her world left for anyone else?

“As touching as this moment is,” Grim interrupted, attention locked on the corpses beside us, “we’ve got bigger problems.”

Thankful for the reprieve from dealing with a plethora of unwanted feelings, my gaze followed his to the bodies... and the demons that were climbing out of them.