The Sweetest Burn

Adrian got out and walked over to the trunk. When he returned, I was relieved at the thermal pants, boots and ski jacket that he held out to me. Thank God his car was stocked for emergencies, and a demon realm landing on us definitely qualified as an emergency.

I stripped off my torn, bloody shirt and shorts without hesitation. Clad only in a bra and panties, I started to pull on the new clothes when Adrian stopped me.

“Wait,” he said, holding up a plastic bag. His headlights, which miraculously hadn’t shattered, showed a cake-like substance in the bag that I recognized as manna. Right, better heal my injuries before bleeding all over my new clothes.

I scooped out a handful, wincing as I spread it over the parts of me that were the most red-splattered. You’d think that I could feel where the cuts were, but with being nearly naked in the cold, everything hurt. I sure felt it when the manna began to heal my cuts, though. They stung like I’d jabbed myself with a fork before the pain faded into a slight itchiness. The fabled bread of heaven that had fed the Israelites while they wandered in the desert had more than one use. Manna’s healing properties were amazing, but it also had its limits, such as how it couldn’t heal a mortal wound. Thankfully, I didn’t have one.

Adrian positioned himself behind me and lifted my hair. His hands were gentle as they moved over me, but any enjoyment I would have normally felt faded at the numerous stabs of pain as he spread manna over the cuts on my back. Once he was finished, I hurriedly put on my new clothes and boots, then grabbed a handful of manna and gestured to him.

“Your turn.”

Either his ears weren’t as damaged as mine or he could lip-read, because he understood although I’d forgotten to shout. He turned around, moving until he was directly in front of the headlights. When I saw his back, I sucked in an appalled breath.

Long, deep gashes rent his skin. Glass was still embedded in multiple slashes, reflecting the light through sheens of red. I couldn’t believe he’d treated my insignificant wounds first. He looked like he could bleed to death from some of these!

And he’d gotten them while shielding me from the worst of the fallout when the windows exploded. I blinked back my tears. These wounds should have been mine, but he’d taken them for me. How did I begin to say thank you for that?

First things first, by healing him. I started to lay my manna-smeared hand on his back, but he stopped me.

“You need to get the glass out first, or it’ll be stuck beneath the newly healed skin.”

I used my other hand to start picking out the glass, wincing at each inadvertent flinch he made. When I had the largest slash cleared, I laid my manna-coated hand on top of it. His muscles bunched and he clenched his fists, but he didn’t make a sound as the wound began to close as if pulled by invisible strings. The rivulets of blood slowed and tan skin replaced the red, puckered line. Then even the new scar vanished. I took in a deep breath. One down, dozens to go.

It took over twenty minutes to clear his back of all the serious wounds. He worked on his front at the same time, so when I was done and he turned around, nothing but smooth, red-stained skin met my gaze. I let out a relieved noise and impulsively hugged him, running my hands over his back as if to reassure myself that all those awful gashes were truly gone.

“Don’t do that ever again!” My words were muffled against his chest, which then shook with suppressed laughter.

“Sure, Ivy. The next demon realm that crashes onto us, I’ll let you take the brunt of.”

Liar. I pulled away, my heart fluttering at the total blackness beyond our headlights. Now that we’d survived the immediate danger, we still had to get out of here. But first, we needed to find out if Costa, Jasmine and Brutus had made it through the lightning in time, or if they’d been swallowed by the new realm. If they were here, we couldn’t leave without them.

“Do you have warm clothes, too?” I asked, a practical sort of mentality kicking in. “If you run around in shorts and sandals, the demons will know it’s you, Archon disguise or no Archon disguise.”

“Zach didn’t glamour me, so I’m not in disguise,” Adrian said, stunning me. I always saw through Archon glamour as if it wasn’t there, so I’d had no idea that everyone else could see the real Adrian now, too.

“Why not? Is Zach trying to get you caught by demons?”

He shrugged, but hardness filled his gaze, making me think I wasn’t the only one who’d wondered that. “Zach said it wouldn’t matter this time, so he refused to do it.”

My jaw clenched. Wait until I saw Zach again. I’d shake the truth of his motivations out of him, because it was well past time that the Archon revealed whether he was trying to help Adrian overcome his fate, or trying to doom him to fulfill it.

“Well, even if you run into a nest of demons you’ve never met before, no one else could stand to be mostly naked in these temperatures without catching hypothermia, so they’d still know it was you,” I said, trying to use a quip to conceal how angry I was by this latest revelation.

“If we’re lucky, we’ll be long gone before more demons arrive,” he replied, sounding far calmer than I felt. “There should be only one here now, judging from the times I watched Demetrius absorb new realms.”

This was the first time I’d heard him mention Demetrius since the day I’d killed him when I’d used the slingshot to wipe out Adrian’s former realm. I liked to believe that I’d walked through Demetrius’s ashes at some point. The last thing I wanted to do was ask Adrian to elaborate on a memory that involved his evil former foster father, but I had to. “Why only one?”

Adrian shot me a jaded look. “Because demons are territorial, and none of them want someone else jumping in to claim their new territory after they absorb a realm. Remember, on their end, this place was only a reflection before now, and that made it up for grabs. So, only the demon who did this will be here because he’s the only one who would’ve hitchhiked through on the gravitational field when he caused these two dimensions to collide. The others will come, but for a little while, this place should be demon-and minion-free, except for its creator.”

That’s right, demon realms started out as nothing more than duplicate reflections of our world. Those reflections were detailed enough to include buildings, cars and other structures, but they weren’t tangible. Not until a demon used enough power to smash the reflective world into the real one, “swallowing” it. If we were mostly demon-free now, we had to make the most of it.

“Does this thing still run?” I asked, giving the Challenger a critical look. We didn’t need windows to look for Costa and Jasmine, but we could sure use a functional engine.

“I’ll check after I’ve changed into my new clothes,” Adrian said, and took off his shorts.

I was so startled to suddenly see him naked that for a few uninhibited moments, I drank in the sight of him. The headlights hid nothing from my view, throwing every chiseled hollow and sinew into stunning relief. If the round, hard globes of his ass and his long, muscled lines weren’t impressive enough, the object framed by the tight gold curls between his legs did the trick. I found the staff, I caught myself thinking. And it is mighty.

“Ivy.”

The amusement in Adrian’s tone broke through my near-blasphemous thought. I turned away, feeling a blush burn my cheeks. I was going to die from embarrassment and then go straight to hell. That was my real destiny.

“Yes, I have warmer clothes,” he went on, his tone turning husky. “I didn’t occur to me to change into them until you weren’t looking, and now, I’m glad I didn’t.”

Me, too! the shameless part of me replied, but the rest of me was still cringing over being caught gawking at him as if I’d never seen a naked man before. Okay, so I hadn’t in real life, but the movies and the internet had to count for something.

“Are you dressed yet?” I said, keeping my back turned.

A rustling sound, then he said, “Enough.”

I turned around, marveling that my hearing was back to normal. The manna must have healed more than my cuts. Adrian was now by the trunk of the car, and the taillights revealed that he had on pants and calf-high boots. As I watched, he pulled a sweater over his head, then grabbed a large knife and what looked like a bag of dirt from the trunk. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">