Right now, that meant surviving this death-defying car ride.
“You should’ve let me drive!”
She braced her legs against the floor as Ash flew around a corner amidst a barrage of honking. Thelonious hissed from the back. Thank god it was two o’clock in the morning because if Ash had tried driving like this during the day, he would have caused a pileup at every intersection.
“You don’t know where we’re going, and there wasn’t time to explain.” He was perfectly calm. He might as well have been reading the newspaper, not weaving in and out of traffic like they were in a high-speed car chase.
The wound in his side was still bleeding steadily, but he needed two hands to drive so his T-shirt was discarded on his lap rather than being used as a compress. He was looking a little pale, but he’d said he was fine, so she took him at his word.
“If you crash my car, you’re buying me a new one!” If he could. Did demons have money? How did they learn how to drive? How did they learn to play piano, for that matter, or any of the stuff Ash could do?
“Deal.”
God, this night could not get any worse. Or weirder. “You really are a demon.”
“Yep.”
“But... how? And why are you here?”
He shot her a look, which took his eyes off the road for longer than she would’ve liked considering he was in the process of running several red lights. “You heard my conversation with Mist. I’m here because I went rogue. And as for how... I’m not really sure how to answer that. I am what I am. I didn’t choose it any more than you chose to be a human.”
Eva shook her head, overwhelmed. In shock. Freaking the hell out and totally numb at the same time.
“I spent the last two weeks convincing myself I hallucinated what I saw at the nightclub.” She scoffed bitterly. “What was I supposed to think? It’s not every day you see guys with wings and an angel and whatever that hideous troll thing was that you murdered.”
Ash had the nerve to laugh, the asshole. “You didn’t hallucinate. Well, unless you count the angel thing. Trust me, Belial is no angel.”
“Is he even your real brother? Can demons have brothers?”
“We’re brothers. We made a blood pact.”
“What does that even mean!” She tried not to scream at him.
Ash jerked the wheel hard and went around the corner on two wheels. Her grip on the door was white-knuckled. “We formed a bond. We agreed never to betray each other. We’d seen how humans remain loyal to their families, and we decided we liked the concept and wanted to become brothers.”
“You can’t justbecomesomeone’s brother.”
He shrugged. “Brothers are brothers because they share blood, right?”
“Well, kind of, but—”
“We made a blood pact. We shared blood. Now we’re brothers.”
He said it so matter-of-factly, as if that was all there was to it. She couldn’t bring herself to burst his bubble and tell him that there was more to family than mixing up a blood cocktail, so she changed the subject. “Why did you escape Hell in the first place?”
“Because I was sick of playing meaningless games, following pointless rules, and fighting over shit that doesn’t matter. I was sick of being Lucifer’s bitch.”
He whipped the car around another corner with more force than necessary, giving her a hint of the rage behind his words. Thelonious made a god-awful howling sound from the backseat, and Eva wondered if cleaning up cat vomit was going to be the cherry on top of this horrible night.
“Lucifer as in... Satan? The devil?”
“Satan is more of a concept. The evil force in the world. Lucifer is a fallen angel who rules Hell.”
“And what are you?”
“Told you. A demon. We’re created to serve the evil force. Bringers of darkness, treachery, all that fun stuff.”
Oh, dear god. Should she start praying? Because that did not sound like the sort of creature she wanted to trust behind the wheel of her car. “So if you’re an evil demon, why would you want to escape Hell? Wouldn’t you like doing whatever it is demons do? I still don’t get it.”
