Eva gasped from somewhere. “You’re not actually going to—”
“You’re a fucking idiot, Asmodeus,” Belial snapped. “Bleeding all over yourself and not telling anyone or doing anything about it.”
“Fuck you,” he mumbled. “Go ahead and rage out and make this about yourself like you always do, asshole.”
“Maybe if you didn’t excel at pissing me off, I wouldn’t have to!”
“Heyyy now, let’s not fight,” Meph interjected.
“Shut the fuck up, Meph!” they both said simultaneously.
“You never know when to quit, do you?” Belial bellowed in Ash’s face. “Always sulking around with the weight of the world on your shoulders, blaming everything on me!”
Ash mustered strength from somewhere and said, “I’m not the one who can’t carry on a conversation without bursting into fucking flames!”
“You should have told me you were bleeding out, damn it!”
“I’m not bleeding out!”
“Yes, you are!”
“Told you... I’m fine...” The room was spinning.
“Shit—”
“He’s passing out!”
“Bel, you dickhead, I’m sure you can see how shouting at him really helped!”
“Oh my god!” Eva screamed. The cat was howling again.
Ash rolled his eyes. He was so sick of the goddamn drama.
Oh, no, actually his eyes were rolling back into his head because he was about to pass out. When the blackness came, he welcomed it. Maybe when he woke up, he’d find that none of this shitty night had happened, and things would go back to how they were before.
He would show up at Eva’s and they’d play some music together and then fuck nice and slow, and then they’d wake up together in the morning and eat tasteless pastries naked by the window in the sunlight. Yeah, that sounded nice.
He held on to that little fantasy as the blackness claimed him.
“Fuck, he’s out cold,” Belial said, catching Ash as he sagged. “Raum, get over here and seal this wound. He’s bleeding everywhere, the idiot.”
“Blade’s not hot enough yet.” Raum was holding the tip of a short dagger into the gas flame of the stove, and it was starting to glow red.
“Here.” Meph handed Belial a dishtowel, which he took and pressed into Ash’s side to stem the flow of blood. Ash’s bloody T-shirt had fallen to the floor with a wet slap when he lost consciousness.
Despite herself, Eva’s eyes filled with tears. She felt awful. Ash had been bleeding a lot the entire drive home and then throughout the entire conversation, and she’d ignored him. She’d been so mad at him for lying about what he was, and since she’d discovered he wasn’t human, she’d believed him when he said he was fine.
“I thought he was okay,” she said. “He said he was.” She set Thelonious’s cage down and hovered behind a still-shirtless Bel as he scooped up Ash like he weighed nothing.
Bel carried him to the other room and dumped him unceremoniously on the couch. All Ash’s gorgeous black hair was tangled, some of it stuck to the dried blood on his shoulder wound, which had closed, thankfully. Her heart ached looking at him, though she kept telling it to shut up because she was still furious with him for lying to her and being an evil demon from Hell.
“He will be.” Crouched beside Ash and keeping pressure on his wound, Bel looked over at Eva wringing her hands and sighed. “I shouldn’t have shouted at you. He’s a stubborn prick and wouldn’t have told anyone he was bleeding out. It’s not your fault.”
“Is he really bleeding out?” She really didn’t like the sound of that.
“He’s fine. We can’t die this way. He’ll just feel a little... parched for a while. We could feed him some blood, but I don’t have an easy source unless you’re volunteering. It has to be human blood.”
Eva choked. “Feedhim... ? Blood?” Surely he didn’t mean what she thought—
