Page 71 of Siren’s Mark (The Siren’s Mark Duology #1)

AVA

Zane playfully stalks me around the coffee table as I slowly step backwards to avoid him. The alcohol in my blood is affecting my coordination and I stumble slightly.

“You should know better than to fight an Immortal, love,” he says with a smirk.

“What you gonna do ‘bout it, Mister Siren?” I tease, stepping back slightly.

“You’re not afraid of me, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“Why is that?” he asks with a raised eyebrow. “I mean, you’re human. I’m infinitely stronger than you, faster than you. You should find me terrifying.”

His serious expression tells me we’re no longer having the same playful conversation. Zane is so caught up with this feeling that he’s a monster. Sometimes it still creeps into the little moments.

“I know you’re afraid of hurting me,” I say, stepping closer to him and wrapping my arms around his torso. “But I know you never would. I have faith in you. Deep down, I know who you are and you are good .”

“Hurting you… is my nightmare,” he mumbles as he looks at me with a furrowed brow. His eyes scan my face as if he’s working something out in his mind.

“Well, you won’t hurt me, so you have nothing to worry about.”

He smiles and steps back, reaching into his back pocket and pulling out his cell phone.

“Do something for me, would you?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say. “What’s that?”

He holds out his phone as if he’s trying to take a picture of me.

“Say that again for me,” he says softly.

“What?” I ask, rolling my eyes. “I’m not sure I understand. Are you filming me again?”

What is with Zane and the videos today?

“Please?” he asks.

“Okay,” I say, looking into the phone’s lens. “I uh… You are good. You are a good person and I have faith in you.”

“Faith in what? The whole thing…”

His expression is solemn and dark.

“I know that you will never hurt me,” I say. “I trust you.”

He looks at the phone’s screen for a moment before looking back up at me.

In a flash, I feel intense pressure against my cheekbone along with a loud ringing that reverberates in my ears as Zane’s fist connects with my face. I tumble to the floor and hold a hand up to my cheek as my jaw goes slack in horror.

“What about now?” he asks, a smirk growing on his face as he looks me dead in the eyes. “Still so sure?”

“I…” I mumble, unsure of what to say. I feel like I’m hovering outside of my body, unable to speak or react.

This isn’t right. Zane wouldn’t hurt me.

“Oh, come on, Ava,” he says with a chuckle. “A moment ago, you were so sure of me. So much faith. Where did all that go?”

My mind runs through every moment of the night so far and nothing is adding up.

Kami’s words echo in my mind: “You never let that car out of your sight.”

“Where’s your car?” I ask.

“That wasn’t the response I expected,” he says, his voice slightly higher than usual. “All you have to ask is about the damn car?”

It wasn’t just his voice, everything about him seemed off. Maybe the drunkenness made it harder to notice, but now it was all hitting me. There was an undeniable undertone in his voice that made every word seem wrong. Even the way he moved was off .

“Whatever’s happening, Zane,” I say. “This isn’t you. We can fix this.”

“Oh really?” he asks with a smirk.

He types something into his phone before throwing it onto the couch. In the blink of an eye, he has me pinned against the wall by my shoulders, my head snapping back with a hard thunk. The rapid motion alone makes me nauseous.

His deep brown eyes stare back into mine. There’s a shallowness in his eyes that I’ve never seen before. There’s nothing but emptiness behind them.

Brown eyes…

In all the times Zane has even been angry or aggressive like this, his eyes would glow their usual vivid green, but in this moment they are brown.

It’s a kind of detail you might get wrong if you were pretending to be someone you’re not.

He left his car behind with the tow truck driver?

And his skin feels so cold.

What is with the sudden desperation to take these videos?

His words from earlier come back to mind: “what if I want to show all my friends…”

He didn’t say mates .

Oh crap.

He’s a demon.

I can feel my heart pounding in my chest and the room suddenly feels way too hot.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks.

Well that’s just a rude thing to ask. What’s wrong with you , dickhead?

I decide my best bet is to let on as little as possible until I figure out how to get out of this.

“Well, you did just hit me in the face and stuff, so I’m pretty sure I’m not feeling too great about that.”

He chuckles at me as he picks up a glass of water. He takes a sip before flinging it across the loft. The glass loudly shatters against a far-off wall and I flinch.

“What gave me away?” he asks, his voice suddenly shifting to an American accent.

“I… uh…”

“You’re panicking. I can hear your heartbeat speeding up, the blood running faster through your veins.

Something has changed. You’re onto me, so let’s cut the crap,” he says with a small laugh.

He grabs me by the front of my shirt and throws me very easily onto the floor.

His frame then appears above me and a sinister smile stretches across his face.

“I… You said friends…” I mumble. That wasn’t the entire truth, but I found myself panicking to give him an answer before he decided to throw me out the window of our twenty-some story building.

“Friends?” he asks. “Oh damn it. You know, I thought the accent would be the easy part. End every sentence with ‘love’ or ‘mate’, throw around a ‘bloody’ or two and you’ve basically got Zane.”

He sighs and sits down on the couch as I sit myself up and lean back against the wall.

“I speak 23 languages for hell’s sake, yet I can’t properly imitate a single Siren?” he says. “Well now, that’s just embarrassing.”

“Who are you?” I ask.

“Oh Ava, after the moment we shared together, you still don’t remember me?” he says with a smirk. “Everyone is so disrespectful these days.”

My eye catches a fork on the table beside me. He’s currently rambling to himself. Maybe I can catch him off guard and make a break for it?

Okay it’s not a great plan, but I don’t have another one.

I jump up and grab the fork with the fastest motion I can muster and jam it into his shoulder. His hand is around my wrist instantly and, despite my best efforts, I can’t even come close to breaking free. He pulls out the fork with his other hand and grunts.

This is bad.

“There’s that feisty little Ava I expected,” he says with a laugh. “Now that was not disappointing. We’re going to have a lot of fun, aren’t we darling?”

Only one other person has called me that. It was the demon from my dream that was pretending to be Kieran. It was Asmodeus.

“It’s you,” I mumble.

“In the flesh,” he says, raising his palms up. “Well, in someone’s flesh.”

His body shifts into a different form: the one I saw torturing Kieran outside of Pike’s. His hair shortens and lightens to a platinum-blond and his build becomes leaner, almost skeletal. His true form is slimmer and less imposing than Zane’s, but somehow more terrifying.

“There,” he says with a sigh. “That’s better.”

“Why do you insist on pretending to be someone else?” I ask.

The shift between being attacked and having a seemingly normal conversation is jarring.

“I don’t usually, but this was a special case. I was being watched,” he says with a smirk.

“Watched?” I ask. “By who?”

“Your darling Seer friend,” he says. “She was quite powerful, couldn’t risk her catching on to my activities. I’m quite a private person, really.”

“So you decided to look like Kieran?” I say.

“Pretended to be Zane too. I thought I had thrown her off my scent, but she caught on anyway. She was going to tell Kieran, and I wasn’t quite ready for the big reveal at that point.

So she had to die. Shame, too. She was quite powerful.

Why is it that the Seers can never see their own death coming, huh? ”

Asmodeus lets out a sigh and relaxes into the couch slightly.

“I guess you know what they say about best-laid plans,” he says. “Oh well, it all worked out, though.”

“Why are you here?” I ask, mostly to keep him talking. Of course, delaying will only work if someone is coming for me.

Another disturbing thought comes to mind: If he’s here, where is the real Zane? What if something happened to him and he can’t come?

“I’m just here to congratulate Zane’s new bride,” he says.

“And by congratulate, what are the odds you actually mean kill?”

“Relax, Ava. I have no desire to kill you.”

He pulls out a cigarette and lights it before taking a big puff.

“I will, of course,” he says. “Kill you, that is. But it’s not personal. You’re a means to an end. An eye for an eye so to speak.”

I know he’s telling me he’s going to kill me, but all I can think about is how this asshole is smoking in my apartment.

I’m never getting that smell out of the couch, am I?

“So you kill a bunch of random people around town, then you kill me, and that somehow gets you your revenge?” I ask.

“Of course not,” he says. “I do not get my hands dirty, especially not to kill random humans.”

He takes another heavy puff of his cigarette and blows the smoke toward my face. I try not to react, but I end up in a coughing fit.

“My demons got to town and started having their fun long before I knew anything about this place. Turns out the city has a Siren venom problem—wonder how that could have happened. But then word got back to me that not only was Zane in town, but he had a lover. I had to see for myself.”

“Okay, well you’ve seen me,” I say. “You can go now.”

“You should be honored, really. This is a rare occurrence. The personal attention of the one and only God of Lust.”

“I’ve met the God of Lust and you’re not him,” I say.

“Oh please, you mean Dionysus?” he asks, his eyes narrowing. “He’s a wannabe—a poor man’s version of me. I am curious what brought you to meet Dionysus, though.”

I pinch my lips shut, realizing I may have given a part of the plan away. Not that the original plan was really valid anymore.

He stalks toward me and I stumble backwards onto the rug at the base of the stairs.

I try to run up them but he instantly grabs my ankle.

My chin hits one of the wooden stairs with a hard thunk, my teeth biting into my tongue hard.

The taste of iron fills my mouth and I see little red droplets landing on the floor beneath me.

“You think Zane loves you so he’ll just magically save you?” he shouts, rolling me over to face him. “You think his ‘love’ matters??”

He holds both my arms over my head with a single hand and I struggle as the stairs dig into my back.

“He supposedly loved Ilen, didn’t he?” he says. “And what happened? He was selfish, and she suffered. If he really cared for her, would he have let her die? And now look at you—the same fate. But where is your lover? As usual, he’s nowhere to be found.”

My eye catches a slight movement from the open patio and a dark figure appears behind Asmodeus. The figure appears dark even as it steps into the light; black smoke swirls around, consuming their body from head to toe. The only thing I can see through the smoke is a pair of vibrant green eyes.