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“Yes.” Interesting. Dropping the titles, maybe in shock. Lauren?iu bows his head, stands, and leaves.
Regrettably, with no one to talk to, Paimon goes to bed alone.
Chapter 3
Lauren?iu
Lauren?iu doesn’t sleep. He doesn’t need to, exactly, not as a vampire, a soul, or a vampire’s soul, if that’s not an oxymoron. No one in Hell needs to sleep; if anything, it’s a luxury.
He does like to sleep, however. When he doesn’t wake up every hour. Or have the most vivid nightmares that he can’t quite explain, but they leave him more exhausted than if he were to stay awake. He suffered those quite a lot when he was mortal, especially as an anxious child.
Pulling at his bottom lip like he used to do when he was younger, he paces and sits on the edge of his vermilion bed, his bedroom a plume of brilliant red shades because, in Paimon’s words, “It struck me as very vampire.” And when he’d asked about Lauren?iu’s favorite color, the answer was red. Thankfully, it’s not uncommon in Hell.
He thinks about how to face King Paimon again. Whether he went too far and violated a boundary he shouldn’t have. Whether he should apologize. As a courtier, he can’t avoid the king forever. Paimon hadn’t seemed particularly angry, but he never does. In Lauren?iu’s experience, angels have a talent for smiling with daggers behind their backs.
To his dismay, he’s summoned to Paimon’s chambers the next evening.
When Lauren?iu goes, he wears a silk cloak, thickly lined with wool, over his shoulders. It’s plum-red, apparently from a dye exclusively used by ancient nobility. Comes from sea mollusks, Paimon had informed him. Gold feather patterns fan out over the silk.
Though the palace is magically kept warm, the cloak helps. He heads to Paimon’s chambers, crowded with flowers and suits of armor, with a straight back and even shoulders.
The moment he’s in Paimon’s solar, it’s as if nothing happened. Hell is Hell. No torment is enough to cause permanent unrest when the continuous unrest is its own equilibrium.
Paimon lounges in a plush armchair by the yawning hearth, which crackles with purple flames. The damasque walls are lined with full bookshelves and wrought iron candelabras. Waving Lauren?iu in, the king stands and struts forward. He takes an empty wine glass and dips it into the bubbling fountain of sparkling champagne in the center of the vast room. Instead of his royal attire, he’s dressed in a robe with pajama bottoms dotted with geese.
“Nice cloak,” is all Paimon says at first.
They sit together while Paimon drinks from the glass, but not before reclining the chair and crossing his stretched out legs. Lauren?iu keeps his chair as it is.
Speaking into the glass, Paimon asks him, “Did you want something? Grapes?”
With his free hand, Paimon motions toward the table between the plush chairs; a gold bowl is filled to the brim with robust red grapes. Besides the grapes, there’s a tiny plastic goose and a porcelain vase of scarlet poppies.
Lauren?iu blinks. The poppies blink back.
The vampire swallows thickly. “I’m not hungry.”
“Suit yourself.” Setting the glass down, Paimon eagerly helps himself to a few grapes. In the violet firelight, he looks even more diabolically stunning.
Even mussed up and casual and stuffing his face like this, he’s incredibly beautiful. And he smells nice. Sweet with a smoky sharpness, a mildness like cloves or carnations. The thought makes Lauren?iu want to go back to the Circle of Wrath and tear open another soul’s throat and drink them dry. He’s not sure what that means yet, as he spends too much time looking at Paimon’s mouth.
Oh, dear God.
Focus, idiot.
Lauren?iu can eat, but it doesn’t fill him up. Only blood does. Surely, King Paimon knows that. While his enhanced senses make eating more indulgent, it can never satiate him like blood can, specifically when he’s drained people dry while lost in a blood-drunk fugue that lasts for hours after he’s fed. The guilt went away quickly; it was useless to his survival.
One time, he wandered into a clearing of purple and yellow weeds, and the stars above were close; meteors streaked the purple-blue. He could touch and lick them all; they tasted like chimney cakes, caramelized spit desserts he’d drizzle with hot fudge and caramel sauce, and dapple with sprinkles and crushed walnuts. At one point, hating how his clothes felt coated in dried blood, he shed them and promptly lost them forever.
Maybe he should ask a King of Hell what type of dessert Heaven tastes like to him.
Lauren?iu always preferred sweetness with a hint of tartness or bitterness, but he did really like chimney cakes.
“What were you like as a mortal?” Paimon inquires. His voice is light, and the vampire works to dissect it. Hm. Well, he was weak, and easily agitated—not much change there, but he hides it far better—and acne-scarred, and he’d grown his hair long to hide the last one.
Lauren?iu thinks about what to say for a long time, forgetting everything about himself the moment he’s asked. And most in Hell have an agenda, even if the agenda is just to survive without constant torment.
The more he reveals about himself, the more he can lose.
