Sinners' Kingdom #1: The Book of Lust (Complete)

57

"Wake up. Wake up, Asmodeus! Witch, open your eyes!"

It was probably a bad sign that I recognized Mammon's voice the instant I heard it from even the lowest depths of groggy exhaustion — or maybe recognized his aura even before that. I had been dreaming as I slept, a feverish vision that made no sense. Something had chased me madly through a forest while I dragged my syrup-swimming body in slow motion between the dense trees. The thing chasing me had been animal, primal, ancient, too dangerous to even look back at.

The tiny speck of lucid consciousness that had remained intact as I sprinted barefoot for my life had wondered if it might be an all-too-familiar wolf pursuing me, but Mammon's voice had slipped into my awareness and infiltrated it from somewhere ahead. His black-tattooed body rose up, crimson eyes glowing with rims of feral yellow spinning around them, and he had reached for me. To... help?

Then what was the thing chasing me? Couldn't be Lust, either. This wasn't his energy at all. It was too ragged and bloody and gleeful, an altogether different kind of mania even compared to when Lust was at his most frenzied. Besides, there was Lust too, fading into existence next to Mammon as they both ran toward me, urging me to run faster, faster—

"Witch! You can sleep later. You need to be awake to fight a siren's song!"

Oh! I'd almost drifted back into sleep, but at Mammon's insistence, I blearily opened my eyes and let the waking world pull me back out of the simultaneously terrifying yet sluggish nightmare. Ugh. I felt sick. How long had I been out? I felt no more rested than before, sorer actually, and even the light jostling between Lust's arms as he picked me up made every muscle ache and throb. God, did I get hit by a truck when I wasn't looking? Even my fingertips hurt. I was no doctor, but even if Lust and Mammon had put me through the wringer, I doubted it was supposed to hurt everywhere like this.

"I'm awake, I'm awake." I opened my eyes despite the pointlessness if only to prove I wasn't still on the brink of passing back out. Which I was, but... "What do you mean, fight? We have to fight the sirens? It's really them?"

"I caught their scent on a downdraft. The storm winds are exposing them."

"It's storming now, too?"

"Not yet, soon. It's thick in the air. A strong one, too strong for you to be caught in it."

He was right. Now that the last stubborn traces of sleep faded away, it was clear that the rains hadn't yet begun in earnest. A slight sprinkling had dampened my hair earlier before Lust found shelter, but no doubt that was only the beginning of what was to come. I didn't have to be a wolf to taste the mounting humidity all around us. But the sirens?

"Will the sirens attack in the storm?" Lust asked the question before I could. "If it'll be so severe, they'll need to shelter as well. They're no safer than humans would be in those conditions."

Right. The so-called proto-sirens were birds, after all, if what they had explained to me earlier was accurate. Birds didn't go hunting in heavy rains. I should be safe until the weather cleared, which meant I really should be sleeping... And honestly, maybe it was the fatigue clouding my mind, but could bird-people really pose that much of a threat? I didn't feel like I was going crazy yet, or whatever their singing was supposed to accomplish. I mean, I was resisting an incubus. Pretty sure that ranked a lot higher in the list of difficult things to overpower with sheer will than some enchanting music spouted by people with feathers. Just saying.

Or maybe the confidence was part of the spell. I had to watch myself. I clenched my hands into fists and steeled my resolve before tugging on Lust's arm. He had me in the air, I was sure, but I couldn't tell how far I was from the ground with my feet dangling over nothing. All I could tell was that he had seated me on his forearm as if I were some one-ounce sparrow and squeezed me to his chest to make me lean against his chest and shoulder.