Dining with Angels: Bits & Bites from the Demonica Universe Read online

  Yes, they did. But shopping for the perfect present wasn’t the topic that was scratching at the edges of his angelic intuition. On the other hand, Harvester wasn’t going to open up until she was ready, so for now he let it go.

  Still, something told him he’d better buckle up and hold on to his halo.

  * * * *

  Harvester glanced at Reaver as they materialized inside their Heavenly palace. His face was still flushed from the sex in the green room, and he looked as handsome as ever in fitted black slacks and a sapphire shirt that matched his eyes. His shoulder-length golden hair, which she’d tousled with her fingers, was silky smooth again, making her itch with the desire to muss it up. She liked it when her perfect angel was a little rough around the edges. A little dirty, even.

  “I really think that went well,” she said as she tossed her shoulder bag onto the couch.

  “Any time you don’t destroy a building or kill someone, I consider it having gone well.”

  She snorted. “I’m not that bad.”

  “You’ve gotten better,” he conceded. “You haven’t killed another angel in months.”

  “See? Progress.” She went up on her toes and gave him a playful kiss, getting him ready for the topic she was about to bring up. She hadn’t wanted to talk to him yet, but damn him, he could read her like an ancient text from the Akashic Library. “What do you say I pour a couple glasses of Champagne and we hop in the hot spring?”

  Their luxurious tub, carved from crystal and fed by a natural effervescent spring, overlooked the majestic Blue Mountains of Trinity in the distance. During her time as a fallen angel Harvester had spent thousands of years in the ugly gloom of hell, and now she took every opportunity to soak in the magnificence of Heaven.

  Reaver frowned. “Did you forget? We’re supposed to be at Reseph and Jillian’s place in five minutes.”

  Shit. She’d totally forgotten. Or maybe she’d blocked it out. “Why did we agree to go again?”

  “Because Jillian said there’s something weird going on with her bond with Tracker.”

  Oh, right. She vaguely remembered Reaver telling her the slave bond Harvester had transferred to Jillian had been acting up. The bond connecting Jillian to a werewolf named Tracker wasn’t meant to be hosted by humans, so it wasn’t surprising that Jillian would experience glitches.

  “Damn,” she sighed.

  Reaver caught her by the arm. “Hey, seriously. What is it? Something to do with Reseph?”

  Bingo. She just hated discussing the Four Horsemen with Reaver. He always took their sides over hers, and as their father, he was a little overprotective and blind to their faults. Maybe because he hadn’t even known they were his children until recently, and guilt probably played a role in his feelings toward them.

  “It’s just...” She squared her shoulders and spit it out. “I have a feeling he’s going to do something stupid.”

  Reaver cocked a skeptical eyebrow. “You say that all the time.” Yeah, she did.

  But this was different.

  “This isn’t my Watcher spidey-sense. And it isn’t my wicked step-monster bias.” She loved the Horsemen, but that hadn’t always been the case. And while she did love them, she didn’t always like them.

  And the feeling was generally mutual. Her relationship with Reseph was particularly complex given that, after Reseph’s Seal had broken and he’d become the evil being known as Pestilence, he’d tortured and abused her like none ever had. Not in her thousands of years of being an angel, and then a fallen angel, and now an angel again.

  “Okay, so what do you think he’s going to do?” Reaver folded his arms over his chest as he shifted into his overprotective father mode. “Something you’ll get to punish him for?”

  “I can only hope,” she said, joking. Mostly. “But I have no idea. Like I said, it’s just a sense I get.”

  “Well,” he said, taking her hand. “Let’s see if we can figure it out. Just try not to antagonize him.”

  “Me? Pfft. Never.”

  He ignored that, and a heartbeat later, they were standing at the door to Jillian and Reseph’s Colorado cabin, where Jillian met them with a smile and mimosas. Ah, the human female knew Harvester so well.

  “Thanks for coming,” Jillian said as she closed the door. She was wearing jeans and a light green sweater, perfect attire for the chilly fall weather. Her dark bob just brushed her shoulders, pulled up in a clip on one side. She was adorable, smart, and sensitive; the exact opposite of the skanky females Reseph had sleazed around with in the past.

  Jillian was the best thing that had ever happened to Reseph, and Harvester swore that if he screwed things up with his mate, Harvester would fry him with a Heavenly tempest that would take decades to recover from.

  “Hey.” Reseph strode out of the bedroom, his big body encased in armor, his white-blond hair tied back with a leather thong at the nape of his neck. “Wish I could stay, but I have to go.”

  “Is it something I did?” Harvester asked innocently.

  Reseph’s blue eyes, usually sparkling with mischief and humor, shifted to her, bloodshot and swimming with shadows. Before Harvester became the Horsemen’s Heavenly Watcher, she’d been their evil Sheoulic Watcher, and she recognized that look. A plague somewhere on the planet was drawing him so intensely that it hurt. He could only resist for so long, and if he was armored, he was on his way to the outbreak.

  His voice rumbled, thick and raspy with exhaustion and pain. “What, you think I need to go just because you cursed me with Khileshi cockfire last month?”

  Hilarity. Pure hilarity. “You’re just lucky I didn’t opt for the extra ooze upgrade.”

  “Well, why the hell not?” He drew his sword from the scabbard at his hip to test the edge. “Boils and burning flesh that peeled like a flambéed banana wasn’t enough?”

  Harvester took a sip of her mimosa. “I do adore Jillian. I didn’t want to distress her too much.”

  Reseph gaped. “Distress Jillian?”

  “Ahem.” Reaver’s voice was mild and pleasant. Which meant he was reining in his annoyance. Yeah, well, when he interfered in her Watcher business, she had to rein in her annoyance. “You gave him a demonic venereal disease?”

  “Oh, chill out,” she sighed. “It was Watcher punishment. And it was pathetically mild. I mean, how long did it take to run its course? Twelve hours?”

  “Fifteen. And a half. And my piss burned like acid for three days afterward,” Reseph grumbled as he shoved the sword back into the scabbard.

  He swung around to Jillian, and his tone softened. “I gotta go, Jilly.” He pulled her into his arms and kissed her long enough to make Harvester and Reaver turn away. “I’ll miss you.”

  With that, he stalked outside and threw open a gate to wherever he was going.

  “There’s a plague in China,” Jillian explained. “He’s been resisting the call to go, but we both knew he couldn’t wait another day, let alone another hour.”

  As the Horseman associated with disease and pestilence, Reseph was drawn to outbreaks, just as his sister Limos was drawn to famine, Ares was drawn to war, and Thanatos was drawn to death. Poor Thanatos had it the worst of all of them, since death was the result of disease, famine, and war, so he often haunted the same scenes as his siblings.

  “I didn’t know about this plague,” Reaver said to Harvester. “I’m going to check it out while you two do whatever you need to do. I’ll meet you at our new condo.” He flashed out of the house, leaving Harvester with Jillian.

  “I am sorry about the Khileshi cockfire,” Harvester said. “Well, I’m sorry for you. Reseph deserved it.”

  Jillian eyed her skeptically. “Did he?”

  Harvester shrugged. “He slaughtered a demon who was under Memitim protection. Truly, I went easy on him.” She took another sip of her mimosa. “Now, let’s take care of your problem. What’s happening with the bond?”

  “I used to be able to feel when Tracker was in pain.” Jillian glanced ou
t the window at the small cabin she and Reseph had built as a residence for the werewolf. “But during the last full moon when he shifted, he got into a battle with some other werewolves and he nearly bled to death. I didn’t feel a thing.”

  “Huh.” Harvester put down the glass and pressed her palm against Jillian’s breastbone. Closing her eyes, she let herself feel for the energy signature that was unique to both Jillian and Tracker, and once she found it, she discovered that one of the “tethers,” as she called them, had frayed. With a punch of energy, she repaired the thread. “There. It’s fixed. Let me know if this happens again.”

  “Are you sure the bond can’t be destroyed?”

  “We’ve been over this,” Harvester reminded her. “The bond is part of Tracker. Destroying it will kill him. It can only be transferred. Do you have someone you want to transfer it to?”

  “No.” Jillian glanced out the window again. Tracker was out there now, raking leaves. He was never idle, a trait beaten into all bond-slaves from infancy. “I just want him to be happy.”

  “Are you?”

  Jillian blinked, taken aback. “What? Happy? With Tracker?” “With everything.”

  Something in Jillian’s expression triggered Harvester’s alarm bells, but it was gone as fast as it came. “I’m very happy.”

  “I see.”

  “You don’t believe me?” Jillian sank down on the couch, annoying her cat, Doodle, who reached out to swat her before curling up again.

  Harvester wasn’t sure how to answer. She knew Reseph and Jillian were happy with each other, but something told her a big change was in the wind. She couldn’t tell if it was going to be a good change or a bad one, but she had no doubt it could be traced back to her sense that Reseph was going to do something dumb.

  “I don’t have any reason not to believe you,” Harvester hedged. “But if there’s anything you ever want to discuss, I have a willing ear.”

  “I appreciate that.” Jillian patted the chair next to the couch. “Now, tell me about Suzanne’s show. Was it fun being a guest?”

  Harvester laughed as she sat down. “Absolutely. But I doubt Suzanne will invite me back.”

  Jillian smirked, a reliable sister in mischief. “What did you do?”

  “Me?” Harvester smiled into her champagne flute. “Nothing. She’s the one with silly rules. Can you believe you’re not supposed to talk about bidets on a cooking show?”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Oh, please,” Harvester said with a dismissive wave. “You can talk about food going in but not coming out? In any case, she’s sparked my interest in cooking. I think I’ll give it a shot. I’m going to make some homemade treats for Cara’s hellhounds, too. I’m becoming quite domestic.”

  Jillian clearly wasn’t buying it, but then, being mated to Reseph had given her a lot of practice sifting through bullshit.

  “Well, if you need some easy recipes, let me know. Reseph would rather eat hearty meals at home than go out, so I do a lot of cooking.”

  “Does Reseph cook?”

  “Actually, he does. He grills a lot, and he bought a smoker a few weeks back. We now have enough smoked meats in the freezer to feed Ares for a year.” Smiling, Jillian toyed with Doodle’s paws. “He actually wanted to give some ham and sausages to Cara as a baby shower gift.”

  “I doubt Ares would complain. He eats more than a dozen men can eat at a sitting.”

  Jillian nodded absently, her gaze turned inward, and Harvester frowned. There was something bothering the other female, but Harvester wasn’t sure if she should press more. She wasn’t very good at coaxing information from people. Her style was more along the lines of torturing or, at the very least, annoying her target until they talked, but obviously, that wasn’t an option.

  Cautiously, she dipped a toe in. “Are you sure there’s nothing wrong? Nothing you want to talk about?”

  “I’m sure,” Jillian said, a little too cheerily. “But you know what I’d like to do?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Shop. If you’re not busy, want to go do a little baby shower shopping in Paris?”

  Harvester grinned. She wasn’t much into girl stuff, but she loved going to hoity-toity, upscale shops and floofing with snotty employees and haughty, self-important customers.

  What a perfect ending to a perfect day.

  * * * *

  Reaver hated plagues. The stench of sickness and death burned the nose, and the sights and sounds of human suffering couldn’t be wiped from memory.

  He wished he could interfere—and he could, if the plague was of demonic origin. But no, this was an old-fashioned viral hemorrhagic fever originally caused by an animal bite. Not long ago, he might have snapped his fingers and ended it, but now that he was privy to what he called the Universal Plan, he understood why these things happened.

  And needed to happen.

  But that didn’t change the fact that the human realm could be an awful place.

  A wave of power engulfed him from behind, spiderwebbing across his skin in streaks of electricity. He didn’t have to look to know an archangel had just paid him a visit.

  “Yenrieth.”

  Grateful for a distraction, he turned away from the tragic scene in the village below. “’Sup, Mike.” Reaver flared his gold wings, a reminder that he outranked and outgunned the archangel by a factor of about a thousand. “And it’s Reaver. Not Yenrieth.”

  “Yeah, well, it’s Michael, not Mike.”

  Mike seemed testy today. “Now that we’re clear on names,” Reaver drawled, “wanna tell me why you’re here?”

  The archangel growled deep in his chest. “I still don’t know how it came to be that you were raised to Radiant status.”

  Yes, he did. He was just being an ass. “I could remind you, but we both know you’re too envious to care.”

  All angels were envious that Reaver, who had once been punished with expulsion from Heaven and centuries of memory loss, had been awarded the status of the Radiant. Only one Radiant existed at a time, more powerful than all the archangels put together, and there wasn’t an angel, fallen or not, in Heaven or Sheoul, who believed he deserved the position.

  Reaver didn’t really believe it either, but who was he to question the Almighty? Besides, it was floofing awesome being at the very top of the food chain. So he rolled with it. Times like this, when he had to deal with angels who had once treated him like dirt, he reveled in it.

  Michael exhaled in a huff. “You’re...exasperating.”

  “Harvester is rubbing off on me.” At the sudden glint in Michael’s eye, Reaver went taut. “That’s why you’re here. It’s about Harvester.”

  Dipping his head in acknowledgment, the archangel clasped his hands in front of his purple and gold robes. “The Watcher Council has agreed to consider your request,” he said. “I believe we’ll vote to remove Harvester as the Horsemen’s Watcher.”

  “What?” Reaver cursed. “I didn’t ask you to remove her. I asked you find a replacement for her.”

  “How is that not asking us to fire her?”

  “I just want her to have an option.”

  “Why?”

  Because she hates the job.

  She was always complaining about it, and in Reaver’s opinion, she enjoyed taking out her frustration on the Horsemen. She wasn’t harsh with them...in fact, Reaver had gone harder on them when he’d been their Watcher. But she was just...mean.

  “It doesn’t matter why.”

  “Then it won’t matter if we replace her.”

  Reaver stepped closer, his wings flaring of their own accord. “Don’t do it, Mikey. Not until I make sure it’s what Harvester wants.”

  “You have twelve human hours to decide. If we don’t hear from you, Harvester will be reassigned.”

  “No, you’ll hear from her. This is her decision, not mine. Also,” he said in a voice that resonated through the air like thunder, “you will not reassign her. The sacrifices she made for Heaven and man
kind can’t be overstated. She’s earned the right to do any job she wants...or to not have a job at all. Is that understood?”

  Michael might be an arrogant ass, but he wasn’t stupid or petty, and he respected what Harvester had done to save the world. He nodded. “She deserves to be revered in every corner of the universe.” His mouth quirked. “It would be nice if she made it easier to do.”

  Yeah, that was Harvester. Reaver had penetrated the layers of walls she’d put up, and many of them had come down. But those that remained were as tall and thick as ever, and few made it past them.

  “Twelve hours, Radiant.”

  Michael shot upward in a flurry of wings and light, disappearing a split-second later.

  What a weird ending to a weird day.

  * * * *

  Reaver materialized in the living room of the Spanish condo he and Harvester had acquired a few months ago. Her goal was to have a house or apartment on every continent and eventually in every country. For her, there wasn’t enough time to do and see everything she wanted, and seeing how she’d spent thousands of years in the hell realm of Sheoul, Reaver didn’t argue with her frantic need to do it all. Even if she wanted to do it all at once.

  He started to call out to her when he turned to find his son-in-law, Arik, sitting in Reaver’s favorite recliner, his dark head bent over his phone. From the sounds coming from the device, it appeared he was playing Candy Crush.

  “Hey, Pops,” he said, not looking up. “Harvester’s in the kitchen. She said I could wait.”

  “What’s up?” Reaver took a seat across from Arik and then shouted to Harvester. “I’m in the living room with Arik.”

  Something clinked from the kitchen. “I’ll be right there,” she replied. “I just need to wash the penis off my hands!”

  “Can you bring me a beer when you come out?” He looked at Arik. “Want one?”

  Arik stared at him. “Aren’t you even going to ask?”

  Laughing, Reaver kicked his feet up on the glass coffee table. “I’ve been with Harvester long enough to know better.”