As for herself, well, she absolutely refused to feel jealous of something that happened a few thousand years ago with ademon, for heaven’s sake.
“She was better off, if you ask me,” Ash continued. “She didn’t have a clue about anything when we met. She didn’t even know a woman could orgasm, which is just sad.” He cleared his throat. “Anyway. So Sarah’s suitors got jealous and decided to take matters into their own hands. They rallied the town and came after me one night—you know, the classic ‘angry villagers with pitchforks and torches’ thing. I guess they suspected me of being a demon. Or maybe they just couldn’t imagine a situation where a woman would pick a poor man over their rich, fat asses. Either way, they came for violence. So...” He glanced sidelong at her. “I killed them all.”
She blinked. “Um, what?”
“I killed them all,” he repeated.
“You killedsevenpeople?”
He winced. “Seven people... plus the rest of the villagers with them.”
She slapped a hand to her mouth. “Oh my god.” She’d expected he’d killed people—he was a demon after all, and he’d already said he’d done a lot of really bad shit. But hearing him admit to mass murder was a wake-up call as to what he really was.
“Why? Couldn’t you have just... injured them?”
He shrugged. “I got carried away, you know.”
“No, I don’t know!” She was sitting in the car with a murderer. A demon murderer. “You have wings—you could have flown away!”
“In hindsight, that would have been the better option.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“He hadn’t been born yet, thankfully.”
Eva rubbed her eyes.
“So, after that many unsanctioned human deaths, Heaven got pissed off and sent Raphael. He bound me and booted my ass back to Hell. Sarah eventually married, hopefully to a guy who knew how to give her an orgasm, but I doubt it. Those were pretty dark times.”
Eva continued rubbing her eyes.
“But my corruption worked a little too well on her. When she found out what I was, she didn’t want to admit what she’d done, so she made up a bunch of lies about how I tried to corrupt her and failed, and how she begged Raphael for his help to save her after I ruthlessly murdered her suitors. Worse, her version of events got recorded in the Book of Tobit, which is still around today, and it makes me look like an asshole.”
Dropping her hands back in her lap, Eva squeezed her eyes shut and struggled to process all that. The car swung around another corner sharp enough to make her stomach heave, and her eyes snapped open again. It was either that or puke. “What do you mean, Raphaelboundyou?”
“He dragged me out to the desert and put a curse on me. Demons are all about the senses. He took mine away.”
“That’s why you can’t see color?”
He nodded as he ran another stop sign. “There was one more side effect of the curse,” he said, “which is why I lost my title. Raphael made me sort of invisible.”
“You look pretty visible to me.”
“I know, it’s a miracle. I have no idea why.”
“I’m confused.”
“Part of the curse is that members of the opposite sex, or anyone who might be attracted to me as a potential sexual partner, don’t see me. I mean, I’m there. You can meet me, even have a whole conversation with me, but I come across as completely uninteresting. As attractive as plain cardboard. As dull as a rock.” His mouth twisted. “It’s the perfect torture for a lust demon.”
“Oh my god.” Eva’s thoughts raced. She remembered his brothers’ bizarre comments outside the bar. Ash’s bewilderment the first night they met, his utter confusion when she admitted she was attracted to him. Skye’s weird dismissal of him when they’d first been introduced.
But that only dredged up a thousand more questions. “But what about that crowd of women at the bar? You weren’t invisible to them.”
He glanced at her. “I don’t know what happened tonight. Nothing like that has ever happened to me before in three thousand years. I have no idea why. But the curse is back now, so maybe it doesn’t matter.”
Okay, this was confusing. “I’m not sure this curse is very effective. I mean,Isaw you right from the start. I picked you out of the crowd from all the way across that nightclub during my set. And I’m not a lesbian, despite what your brother thinks.”
He smirked. “I know you’re not. And I have no idea why you can see me. You’re an anomaly, all right. You also have the Sight—you can see the supernatural without any special training. That could be part of it.”
