Faith of the Divine Inferno - Leslie Thompson (best short novels of all time TXT) 📗

last comment had offended Arnold’s vow of chastity and sent him into a seething silence that ended as soon as he slammed the door shut behind me. I heard him venting his spleen with insults about me as he retreated back to the lower floor of the house. I couldn’t help but smile.
“You’re okay.” Shaw was relieved as he slid off of the bed and touched my face lightly with his fingertips. It had cost him something to get out of the bed. I saw pain tighten the skin around his eyes and drain away some of his color. I gently took his hand in my own and held it. “I thought for sure that thing had managed to hurt some part of you.”
“No. I’m as good as always.” I gave him a reassuring smile and then stopped. What is this? I don’t reassure anyone. That sort of thing leads to genuine affection and ends in heartache and grief. I let my smile wilt a bit. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m a little worse for wear, but I’ll heal.” Shaw’s movements were careful, as if he was afraid that any sudden gestures would cause him more pain. I lifted his t-shirt to examine his abdomen where the demon had slashed at him. The gouges were held closed by the tiny butterfly strips doctors favored when they didn’t want to put stitches into their patient. Whoever had done this had been overzealous with their application; Shaw was plastered with them like a modern Frankenstein monster whose creator suffered from a nasty case of ADHD. The skin around the wound was red and feverish, and he jerked with pain when I touched him lightly.
“Why did you risk yourself like that?” My voice was thick with unshed tears of guilt and fear of what might have happened. The emotions constricted my chest and made me tremble. The guilt and fear bothered me, not because they were unjustified given the circumstances, but because I had become unaccustomed to feeling them over the course of the centuries.
Long ago, I learned to avoid close relationships with mortals in order to protect myself from grief when they inevitably died. That habit makes it difficult to care about how other people feel. Now I was under the threat of caring more for a mortal than I ever intended, and I had no idea what to do about it. I cursed my folly and the frivolousness of my emotions. “You could have been killed.”
“What did you expect me to do? I couldn’t very well let it take you.” Shaw’s expression was one of gentle pleasure. He’d seen what I was feeling and he liked it. His response was frightening. If he was falling for me, then it would make it that much harder for me to distance myself before it was too late. He was more dangerous to my well-being than that monster had ever been.
“You should have let it take me. It can’t kill me and I won’t suffer a wound or illness that time won’t eventually heal. It was stupid to put yourself in harm’s way for me.”
“How do you know that you would have survived?” Shaw was annoyed by my scolding. “Have you ever encountered demons before?”
“No.” I relented sullenly. Damn it, I was losing this argument already.
“Then how do you know it couldn’t kill you?” Shaw gently pulled my collar away from my neck and peeked at the burn underneath. “It certainly hurt you.”
“I’ve been dropped into an erupting volcano and I’ve been decapitated twice. If those didn’t kill me, nothing will.” I rolled my eyes to show him how ridiculous he was being.
“Are you sure about that?” he challenged. “Demons are said to have powers that defy the laws of nature-”
“So do I.”
“-and they can summon destruction that goes beyond the reach of anyone but God. From what I saw last night, I’m inclined to believe that.” Shaw finished impatiently. “Can you do the same?”
“Aside from the whole immortality thing? No, I’m just like everyone else.”
“Then how do you know that the demon that attacked us couldn’t have killed you?”
“How do you know it was a demon?” I shot back.
Shaw looked at me like I’d gone retarded. “You mean aside from the bleeding walls, the oozing floor and the moment when your reflection jumped out of the mirror and tried to throttle you? Gee, let me think about that.”
Anytime someone lays the sarcasm on that thick, it’s usually time to change the subject.
“Let me see your arm,” I said reaching for his bandaged limb before he could pull away. The bleeding walls and my independently mobile reflection hadn’t been the only bizarre occurrences in the hotel room.
“It doesn’t hurt,” Shaw said as I unwound the bandages. “It only tingles. I tried to tell the nurse who patched me up that it was fine, but she insisted on smearing me with goop and wrapping me up.”
“She probably wanted to touch you as much as possible,” I muttered neatly rolling the linen strips as I pulled them off. The nurse who had done this had been as enthusiastic with her bandages as she had been with her butterfly strips. There was twice as much wrapping than was necessary. I had two thick rolls set aside by the time I reached gauze that were soaked in grease that reeked of thyme and ginger.
“Yeah right, she and every other hot babe I’ve ever met.” He scoffed. “How does it look?”
Shaw’s fairy star was as vibrant and beautiful as it ever was. It glistened with its coating of pungent grease like finely polished glass. The rest of his skin was cruelly blistered as if someone had tried to roast his arm in an oven. It looked like hell.
“This doesn’t hurt?” I asked in alarm. The injury was significant enough that anyone would weep with pain. The fact that he didn’t mind meant that he might have nerve damage or that he was more of a macho shit head than I thought.
“Nope, it feels fine. Why, is that bad?”
Hell yes it’s bad. It’s never a good sign when a person gets hurt and can’t feel the pain. But I wasn’t going to give him that kind of news. That’s what doctors are for. “I’d give it a couple of days. You can go see a specialist if you think it still feels weird,” I answered as I poked a blister with my finger.
“That hurt, stop it.” Shaw pulled out of my grasp. “I’ve been hurt worse than this before, so stop worrying.”
“How did you kill the demon?” I remembered how brightly his arm glowed when he clobbered the crap out of the monster owl. “You slapped that thing around like you were Hercules. Is it the magic that Bridget gave you when she marked you?” It made a kind of oddball sense that the tattoo would be imbued with some kind of faerie mojo. Why else would Bridget go to all the trouble to seduce the man and get him inked precisely the way she wanted?
“I suppose it could be Bridget’s doing,” Shaw replied, frowning thoughtfully. “I didn’t intend for it to happen, it just did. I saw the opportunity and ran with it.”
“It’s never happened before?”
“I’ve never needed it before. Why?”
Not knowing what to tell him, I shook my head and kept my mouth shut. Over the centuries, I’d heard plenty of stories about mortals recruited by the Fey (usually without their knowledge) to act as great heroes on behalf of the Seelie High Court. I once met a fellow known as Finn Mac Cool who claimed to have hacked his way through piles of demons using a magic sword granted to him by a faerie queen. But the guy had been a bit of a blow hard and tended to pull practical jokes on people with homicidal quirks and no sense of humor, and so he met an untimely and gory death under mysterious circumstances.
Perhaps Bridget had decided to make another hero, though it seemed unnecessary to me. The mortal craving for knowledge had grown into powerful technological advances that made them as powerful as any fabled creature of the past. It made them dangerous and fully capable of taking care of themselves while they rid the world of the evil that faeries had always feared.
Maybe Bridget got bored and wanted to see what would happen is she created another hero and let him run amok. If half of the stories about her were true, then it was well within her character to screw with Shaw out of sheer curiosity. Regardless of her motive’s Bridget’s mark had saved my ass, so I stopped looking the gift horse in the mouth.
“Did the Conservatoris talk to you?” Shaw asked as I wrapped his arm properly and pinned the bandages securely.
“Briefly, I don’t like them and they don’t like me,” I said. “Don’t trust them.”
“Why do they all look the same?” Shaw was simply musing. He didn’t expect an answer. I gave him one anyway.
“I have no idea. They used to look like those people who live in caves in Afghanistan.” Now that I thought about it, the Conservatoris used to be the people who lived in the caves in Afghanistan.
“They offered me a position in their order and told me that there was a place for me in the Children of Orpheus.” Shaw rubbed at the bandages and moved to the edge of the bed.
“You can’t possibly be considering it,” I scoffed. I tried to imagine Shaw in a black and white uniform or skulking around in my shadow, but the very idea was preposterous.
“I wouldn’t join the Conservatoris, but the Children of Orpheus hold an insane kind of appeal,” he conceded. “I might join up if my suspension turned into a termination. The Great Bard offered me a good salary and benefits, plus I’d have more time for my kids.”
I had forgotten that he had children. Why did fatherhood make him more appealing to me? It had never been a selling point for any other man before. “The Children have always been the worst kind of useless.”
“They’ve save our asses a few times. How useless can they possibly be?”
“You’d be surprised.” There have been hundreds of instances when the Children could have rescued the people I sheltered from certain doom. But they did nothing and those people had died horrible deaths. Those times had been brutally dangerous for everyone, so I did not hold their inaction against them. But it doesn’t stop me from thinking that the Children are incompetent cowards.
“It’s still a tempting offer.”
“Promise me that you’ll think long and hard before you say yes,” I warned him.
Shaw gave me a smile that held far too much affection for my comfort. Blushing, I looked away from it before I could say or do something