Meph caught his eye and shook his head rapidly.
Ash looked back at Bel and studied him closer, and then he saw it. Bel was calm, all right.Toocalm.
Damn. This was almost worse than if he’d been fully raging. This eerie eye-of-the-storm calm was liable to blow at the drop of a hat, and when it did, it would be scary. Humans would not survive it.
Ash caught Meph’s eye again and nodded to indicate he got the message. He looked around. “Where’s Ra—”
Meph shook his head frantically again.
Bel turned, lowering the spoon. “I don’t know, Asmodeus.” His tone could freeze an active volcano. “Whereisour brother Raum?”
Meph winced in the background.
“I don’t know.” Perhaps a subject change was in order. “So, uh... whatcha cooking?” Ash propped a hip up against the kitchen counter and tried to act cool.
“Risotto.”
“Looks good.”
Bel’s hand clenched around the wooden spoon he held. His nostrils flared like an angry bull about to charge. “It will be good. Everything I cook is delicious because I’m a fucking fantastic chef, and if you don’t agree with that you can get thefuckout of my kitchen before I gut you with this spoon.”
Ash held up his hands. “Nope, no arguments here.”
Damn it, he had no clue what had set Belial off and, thus, no idea how to fix it. He decided his best course of action was to retreat and try again later.
“I’m going to go take a shower.” He spoke like he was talking to a feral animal—slowly and clearly. “I’ll be in the bathroom. Not going anywhere else.”
Bel’s clenched jaw flexed and a vein in his temple bulged, but he said nothing, so Ash slowly backed away, one step at a time. He caught Meph’s eye and jerked his chin toward the bathroom.
Once there, he turned on the shower at full blast. He only had to wait a minute for Meph to slip in behind him and shut the door.
“What the fuck is going on?” Ash hissed, careful to speak quietly so the sound of the running water disguised their voices from Belial.
“He’s fucking livid, man.” Meph shook his head. “I had to dump a full bucket of water on him after you called, and let me tell you, he was not happy about it. He didn’t ignite again after that, but he’s a powder keg about to blow.”
“Why? What set him off?”
Meph dragged his hands through his hair. Of all his brothers, Meph was the only one who would pass for Ash’s blood relation if they defined the word “brother” by human terms. Though he kept his hair short, it was the same midnight color, and their skin was roughly the same shade as well. Except on Meph, that skin was so completely covered in tattoos, it might as well have been solid black. He was bulkier in muscle mass than Asmodeus, but shorter in height. They were demons—they were all naturally attractive and fit—but both Meph and Raum were obsessed with working out.
“It’s the Hunter,” Meph said. “He’s onto us.”
“I don’t believe that. There’s no way they’d send him yet.”
“Well, you’d better learn to believe it fast because it’s true. Bel got word from one of his Hell groupies.”
Though Belial had never given any indication he wanted to rule Hell, he’d never lost the support of a bunch of whack-jobs that worshiped the ground he walked on and wanted him to take down Lucifer—the last thing Belial wanted to do.
Bel’s days as a purely depraved, violently evil bastard were long over, and these days, he was as confused about who he was as Ash was. As all of them were. It was why they’d decided to escape.
“Shit.” Ash dragged a hand down his face. “What did they say?”
“I don’t know.” Meph leaned against the door and crossed his arms, T-shirt straining at the seams around his shoulders. “Bel went homicidal right after he got the message, and I wasn’t going to try talking to him like that. I was too busy disabling the fucking smoke alarms, dumping buckets of water all over the fucking house, and cleaning them up afterward like a fucking maid. Fuck.”
“What a mess,” Ash agreed.
Meph grinned suddenly. “You smell like sex.”
Ash remembered a time when his nose had been sensitive enough to pick up such subtle odors. Ah, the joys of being a demon with properly functioning senses. “Yeah, well, I had a lot of it, so it makes sense.”
