Chapter 34
"Luke?" I asked as I stepped into the room. "How well do you know Bel?"
He didn't look up from the desk. "Well enough. Why?"
That wasn't exactly the response I'd been hoping for. "Um, because I'm not sure he understands what it means that I'm Nick's girlfriend."
"Nope." His mouth struggled not to smile. "Not a term that existed back in his day. Women were girls, available, promised, or married. Those were the only options. Terms like sweetheart and girlfriend imply control of your own dating choices, and when Bel was last awake, women didn't get that option." Then he finally looked up. "Well, unless she ended up catching the attention of a demon."
"Ok?" I could tell there was a story there.
He pushed away whatever he'd been working on and turned to face me. "For as long as I can remember – and that's a very long time – demons have always moved in groups. Legions, they call them. Angels have choirs." He waved that off. "Anyway, while the members of a legion aren't inseparable or anything, as you've seen with us, we do tend to stick pretty close. It's the only way to keep from getting surprised by the enemy."
"And how does this apply to Bel's crush on me?"
He leaned back, looking a little too smug. "Most human mating ideas are based on religion, sexism, generations, and possessions – and the construct is passed down through society. Now, for those of us outside those boundaries, we've made different rules."
"Not helping."
Luke chuckled. "Back when Bel last walked the Earth, women were traded like a commodity. We brought them into our culture, not the other way around. Often, we were the wealthiest men around, so fathers were more than happy to sell us their daughters. We just made sure to keep the girls happy, even if that meant not just with us, hence the stories of our hedonistic societies. Well, technically theirs, but I've been with the demons long enough to count as one."
I thought back through all the history they'd shared so far. "Except Nick, right?"
"Uh..." He rubbed at his mouth. "He spent most of his time on Tyrnigg because it was on the front line. He didn't always bring his legion with him. They waited on Earth to lend support and handle the staging area here, building supplies of aether and such. Just like this place. They made a home that served as a safe spot and often got to know the locals while he was doing his thing."
"Luke." I sighed. "Stop trying to be nice. What the hell are you hemming and hawing around?"
"When a woman's husband is gone for years at a time, she gets lonely. A man spending weeks locked away with her might do the same, and who knows if she'll live long enough for one of us to make it back? We don't see a reason to put unrealistic expectations on ourselves or our lovers, so we never have. One man, one woman – that's a societal construct made to secure property inheritance in a species that dies quickly. In case you forgot, we don't die."
"And you think Nick would be just fine with me jumping on, I dunno, you?"
Luke smiled. "Has he ever complained? Look, this is one of those things that if you want to know, you should ask him, not me. As for dealing with Beelzebub? Talk to Sam. If anyone can read Bel's mind, he's the one."
He didn't let me push the issue anymore. Instead, Luke moved right into aetherweaving, explaining the theory and asking hard enough questions that I had to let it go. That's how I learned that aetherweaving was a lot like aethersmithing. Mostly.
The main difference was that weaving required a container. Didn't matter if that was a plant, bacteria, or a sentient creature like an angel. So long as there was aether inside it, I could alter things about it. Aethersmithing took the aether from one thing and used it to make something outside the container. Smithing was what I'd been doing so far. Weaving was more subtle and insidious, and often didn't require the container's cooperation. Naturally, I practiced by changing Luke's eyes.
The eerie green had always bothered me. It wasn't the same color most people had. This was closer to spring green, just a little too vivid to come across as anything but colored contacts. Then there was that ring of yellow meant to hypnotize. Sure, it made mind-fucking people easier for him, but Luke seemed a lot more charming with ocean blue eyes. They matched the pretty-boy blonde hair thing he had going on. I debated making them brown to match the other demons, but the blue just looked too good.
And changing his Earth skin wasn't the only thing I could do. According to Luke, altering thoughts was harder with outworlders, but for me, it was impossible. Changing the inner resonance wasn't. Every plane – and the corridors in between – had its own speed of atomic vibration and tone. In other words, I could shift him into the corridor with a thought. Oh, it wasn't easy, and according to Luke, I'd also be able to send him back to other planes once I knew the worlds better, but he was very impressed.
Mostly, though, we just worked on shielding. That meant forcing my own aether into a hard shell that couldn't be bent or twisted. Over and over, Luke had me shield myself, then he'd try to make me do something stupid. Yeah, after walking around the study pretending to be a chicken – complete with crowing at the top of my lungs, I got better. Nothing like a little shame between friends to drive the point home.
But this was how Mike had mind-fucked my ex-boyfriend. It's how angels had set some devout country boy up to die as a gas station robber. It's how outworlders had twisted the worldview so everyone ended up hating someone else. I wanted to master not only my defense against it, but also the ability to use it on the people who'd made my life a living hell. Sadly, it seemed I wasn't good at everything.
Then he brought in Sam. Working with a demon was very different from trying to twist an angel. For the first hour, I strained, pushed, and tried everything I could think of to change one thing about Sam. Anything. I got nowhere, and the smug little smile was starting to get on my nerves.
"Sia," Luke finally sighed, "how are you trying to move his aether?"
"The same way I did yours."
He nodded, sucking at an incisor. "Ok, but how did you do that? Nick said I'm not allowed to give you directions, just concepts so you don't learn hard limits. Talk me through this."
"I..." I looked at Sam where he sat on the stool before me. "I think of him as being filled with smoke and I want to push it around. To sculpt with it. Like blowing away a cloud of cigarette smoke."
"Ah." Luke crossed his arms and leaned back. "But he's warded. Maybe that's why you're having so much trouble?"
I paused, immediately seeing a problem. "You are too, but I was at least able to touch you enough for you to feel it."
Sam chuckled. "Because you two are already linked." He pointed at where my seal was hidden behind my shirt. "That aether in your skin is no different than a pinhole in a Ziploc bag. Not a whole lot can get through it, but some can." Then he tapped his head. "Waterproof, baby."
"Ok..." I let out a deep breath, trying not to be annoyed at this. "So how do I get in?"
As calm as ever, Luke asked, "How would you get into a sealed Ziploc?"
"Smash it?"
Sam quickly lifted a hand, holding me back. "Easy there. Those are my wards we're talking about, sweetheart. Maybe try the zipper, first?"
"Great. Sounds like a plan. Just one problem. I have no clue what would even correlate to the zipper sealing thing. Anyone wanna explain to me how demon wards even work?"
They tried. Both of them did their best to find an analogy that would settle in my mind, but it didn't help. Wards were like insect repellent. They were traffic signs that directed the aether. Oh, and they were even razor wire on the edge of a battlefield. All I got from that was that their fancy magic symbols worked like a wall, keeping things out and other things in.
But aether worked on resonance. It was all about the pitch, or song. So, closing my eyes, I decided to try again. This time, I didn't force my way in. My goal was to leave what was already inside there but make it work for me. To tell it a story or sing to it, and let it spread the word. It was slower and more subtle, but if it worked?
Sam began to hum softly. When I looked, his eyes had grown heavy. My goal was to make him sleepy, maybe even drunk. To remove his attention so I could do a little more – and it seemed it was working! Struggling not to squeal in excitement, I pushed a little harder...
And something cracked. It wasn't anything tangible, but I could still feel it, like a change in the air pressure but between Sam and me. The wall that had been holding me out was no longer quite as solid. I had control of both sides. Complete control, and Sam had just become my puppet.
"Stand up," I whispered softly.
A smile touched his woozy face, but he did.
"Sia?" Luke asked, sitting straighter.
"Go open the door, Sam." I was going to keep my commands simple.
Luke didn't care. He reached over and caught my arm, demanding my attention. "How'd you get in?"
His voice didn't bother Sam at all. Just like Aaron had when Mike mind-fucked him at my old house, Sam obediently walked to the exit and pulled the door open. Then he did nothing. Absolutely nothing, just stared into the hall like he'd forgotten he was there.
"Put him back," Luke insisted.
"Shut up and I will!" The problem was that putting him back wasn't as easy as getting inside. I had to change his resonance back to the way it had been before I started, but I didn't remember how that was. Desperate to fix him, I decided to go another way. I told his aether to be free. To listen to Sam. To do whatever it wanted.
The demon of seduction dropped like a rock.
"Shit," I hissed, rushing to his side. "Sam?" When he said nothing, I looked back at Luke. "Can you see what I did?"
"No," he insisted. "And I couldn't before."
"Then go get Nick!"
Before Luke could even rush out of the hall, Beelzebub walked up, chuckling at our panic. "Muse? You broke Sam?"
"I don't know! I didn't mean to, I just figured out how to do aetherweaving so I told him to open the door, but I don't know how to put him back. Bel, go get Nick?"
He ignored me. The jerk completely acted like I wasn't in a full-blown panic attack as he knelt at Sam's side. Sliding one hand up his shirt, his palm found Sam's chest and paused over the seal. "Samyaza," Bel said softly. "Be still. Be whole. Be here, Samyaza."
Immediately, Sam sucked in a breath and sat up. "Fuck," he grunted.
"Sam?" I grabbed his arm, trying to help stabilize him. "Are you ok, sweetie?"
"Just..." He groaned and rubbed at his face. "Someone check my wards? See if there's a leak?"
Both Luke and Bel closed their eyes, evidently doing exactly that. I figured I'd already messed up enough I'd just keep my aetherweaving to myself for a little bit. While we waited to hear the verdict, I smoothed Sam's magenta hair out of his eyes and back along the top of his head.
"Are you ok?" I asked.
"I'm fine, sweetheart," he insisted. "Can't feel a leak, but the last thing we need is an angel having a direct line into your inner circle. I'm just so tired. Feel like you gave me a sleeping pill."
"I don't know what I did."
He flashed me one of those seductive smiles he was known for. "Gathered that. Whatever it was, don't forget it, because damn. It worked."
"I'm sorry."
He caught my hand, pulling my attention back to him. "Sia, it worked. Angels can't do much to us. You slipped right between my wards and took over. I don't have a clue how, but I didn't feel it and couldn't stop it. That's a good thing, sweetheart. A good thing."
"I managed to change Luke's eye color, too."
His smile turned into a grin. "Gonna make my hair grow in this color, then?"
"Oh, Sam. I don't want to mess you up anymore. In case you missed it, I don't have a clue what I'm doing."
"Aw, c'mon."
Luke made a pleased noise as he opened his eyes. "She somehow managed to manipulate his aether without blowing apart his wards. Sam, I can't find any vulnerabilities."
"He's good," Bel said a second later. "What happened?"
Sam tipped his head to me. "I just got mind-fucked by a Muse. That's what happened."
The strangest part was that the guys were all smiling like they'd just won the lottery. I couldn't even begin to imagine what they thought this was good for, but I had a funny feeling it meant I'd be practicing this for a while. Next time, I'd make sure I remembered what he felt like before I started making changes. I was not going to mess up my boys - but I did end up fixing Sam's hair.
∞∞∞
Luke locked me in the study alone with him for the rest of the day. Bel grumbled that he wanted to work on my defensive moves, but Luke was having none of it. He insisted I needed to master my inner shields first. Second, I had to figure out how to slip between wards faster. Fast enough to make it into a weapon. The problem was that it didn't work that way.
I finally broke free when Nick announced dinner. Unfortunately, Sam wasn't there. Bel said he'd passed out, which had me worried. It didn't help at all that Nick was distracted by whatever idea he had about magnets. Bel and I traded eye rolls while they yammered on about polar attraction, anti-aetheric properties, and repelling resonances. As soon as the meal was done, Nick gave me a kiss, apologized, then vanished back inside the gold room.
I went to find Sam.
His room was across the hall from Nick's. Standing outside the door, I tapped softly and listened for any hint of life inside. I was expecting a snore, or maybe the sound of blankets as he rolled over. Instead, the response came back fast enough to make me flinch in place.
"Come in!"
Well, ok then. I twisted the knob and opened the door a crack. "Sam?"
"Hey," he said. "Come on in. I'm decent."
I opened the door a little more and poked my head inside. "You feeling ok?"
"Good as new," he assured me. "Had a hardcore nap, but I'm trying to find anything on Muses working with aether. Come see."
Ok, that was an offer I couldn't refuse. Without even thinking about it, I stepped the rest of the way in and paused. Not only was Sam sitting there on his bed, bare-chested, wearing only a thin pair of pajama pants, but I couldn't miss the painting of fire hanging right above him. The one I'd given him. Then there was the thing he was looking at, which wasn't exactly a laptop. Oh, it looked enough like one to pass a casual glance. But the three-dimensional projection gave it away as demon tech.
"So does that thing need to recharge?"
He shook his head. "Not on Earth. There's enough free aether that the conductor never drains. Back home, it's only good for about a day."
"Cool. And Muses working aether?"
He pushed his hand through his fancy new hair, revealing the black lowlights I'd added at his insistence. "Merlin was a master of it, but he had chants and symbols to channel his intentions. There are a few others, but they cast it, Sia. They didn't weave or smith."
"And that's a big deal?" I asked.
He rocked his hand from side to side. "It's unique, but they all seem to be unique. You also seem to have a whole different set of rules than outworlders. The theme is always that a Muse can inspire. Doesn't matter if that's inspire people to fight back, invent marvelous things, or start an artistic revolution. Muses are the catalyst, not the weapon." He paused, wrinkling his forehead like he was thinking. "They're the crack in the dam that starts the flood. That's why they're so powerful, because once the population is in motion, it's unstoppable and a new era is upon us."
"But –"
He smiled before I could even form a real sentence. "But not you," he agreed. "From what we can tell, you have no influence over the masses. Your childhood stories make it sound almost the opposite. Yet you have complete control of aether. I'm trying to see if there's a reason why."
"Maybe I'm just not human?" They'd compared me to a demon often enough, maybe that had something to do with it?
He just shook his head. "Twenty-four years old? Trust me, you're human. A fairy or satyr at your age would still be a child, similar to a ten-year-old human." Then he ran his eyes over me. "Not all grown up. Trust me, you're human."
"But what if one of my ancestors was a demon?"
He shrugged. "Offspring always take the lifespan of the mortal parent. It's not a half and half thing. Not exactly."
"Oh." But that gave me the chance to ask what I'd come up here to find out. "So, you've had a few kids, right?"
"Yeah." His tone was flat. "Why?"
"Well, Luke said Demons didn't necessarily worry about their children being theirs, and that, um..." With a groan, I gave in. "And it was the best segue I could think of. See, Bel wants me to like him. When I tried to explain I'm Nick's girlfriend he didn't get it, and Luke told me it's because that concept is foreign to demonic culture."
The frozen expression on his face began to thaw. "And you want to know if our immoral habits are really true, huh?"
I let out a sound that said he was just missing the mark. "Mostly, I don't want to hurt Bel's feelings, but I definitely don't want to screw up things between Nick and me."
"Mm." Sam patted the bed beside him, encouraging me to come sit. "I'll talk to the big lug, but you gotta understand, he's not going to expect you to jump into his bed. He just wants you to show more affection. Hug him, hang out with him, and treat him the same way you would me."
"Sam, I don't just go randomly hugging guys!"
He chuckled. "Maybe you should try? Pretty sure none of us would mind."
"Yeah, but -"
"Nick," he said, cutting me off, "won't care. If that's what was about to come out of your mouth, then just stop. Don't refuse to do something because of what some guy might think, Sia. Just don't. Figure it out for yourself but stop worrying about fitting in with us. After a few million years of screwing things up, we're still friends. Not just working together, but actually friends. I think we've been around long enough to talk before anyone overreacts."
A little sigh managed to slip out of my mouth. "The truth is I suck at dating. Getting a boyfriend is easy enough. It's keeping them around that's the problem." I chuckled and glanced down, hoping he wouldn't care that I was telling him this. "It's like after we start sleeping together, the new is all worn off and they move on, you know? I guess I'm just a little scared that if Nick gets jealous because I do something stupid, I'll be left to fend off the angels on my own."
"Hey." He reached over and wrapped an arm around my shoulders. "Not gonna happen. You're already slipping into the corridor on your own. You can do some pretty kick-ass stuff with your little Muse skills, and while I may not be able to teach you how to manipulate the force of life, I swear I will be right there if any angel tries to put his hands on you. Nick or no Nick, ok?"
"But I'd kinda rather there's a Nick. Sam, I really do like him."
He gave me a side hug. "I know you do, but I also know that he's really into you, too. Look, Nick's not going to freak out. He's just not like that. In all honesty, he's more likely to let you walk all over him because he'd rather forgive you than lose you. This paranoia about you 'cheating' on him is all in your head, not his. In all the years he's been watching you, I can't remember him ever being upset because you were happy. Not even when he showed up here and found you were dating some dick."
"Uh..."
Sam smiled slyly. "Aaron. Granted, Nick checked him out pretty good, which is how we figured out that Delta Phi had some green-eyed hooligans running the show over there, but yeah. He was honestly ok with just being a friend and seeing you happy. It's pretty much his thing when it comes to women he cares about – and that isn't a very long list, Sia."
"Wait. Angels were joining Delta Phi?"
Sam waved that away. "Yeah. We're pretty sure angels were using the frat guys to hunt down some perfect redhead, among other things. The guys just didn't realize that they weren't looking for a girl with massive boobs, but one with massive multiverse skills. After they mind-fucked those kids to run into your car, we started putting the pieces together. And we may have made the decision not to tell you about it for a bit because we still aren't quite sure what their end goal is. Anyway, that has nothing to do with Nick. My point is that you're fine with him. He's not worried, so you shouldn't be."
"Ok." I had to pause to let some of that sink in, then decided to just not worry about it for a minute and stay on track. "Sam, I'm living with nothing but good-looking demons, and the line between dating and not is kinda a thin one that I sure don't want to cross."
He slowly looked up at me with those pretty plum-colored eyes. "Good-looking, huh?" Then he smiled. "Seriously, though, we've screwed up your life in so many ways, and we all feel bad about it. The last thing we want to do is stress you out about your relationship. You do you, Sia. Let us worry about who is getting pissed, who is up to something nefarious, and how we're going to get you back home so you can become a badass. Right now, that's all Nick wants – to get you safe."
Again, I said, "Ok." Then I took a deep breath. "So, you want to fill me in on the stuff that pre-Muse Sia should've been told."
The tip of his tongue jutted out between his teeth, but it didn't stop the smile. "Nope, because I'm pretty sure that would piss you off, and you're supposed to be focused on learning. How about we go back to how I'm good-looking?"
I gasped and shoved him hard enough to flop back on the bed. "Sam!"
He just folded his arms behind his head. "And here I thought you weren't the kind of girl to roll around in bed with another man."
Yep. That was my cue to leave, because this demon looked a little too good like that, and I didn't dare forget that he was the master of seduction. Sometimes, retreat really was the wisest choice.