“You will speak to Blaspheme with respect,” he growled.
“Revenant!” Blaspheme grabbed his wrist and yanked it away. “How about we set some ground rules.” She jammed a finger at Gethel. “You. Call me a bitch again, and you can find a doctor elsewhere. And you” – she stabbed Rev in the chest with the same finger – “try to strangle a pregnant female again, and I’ll take a scalpel to your balls. Got it?”
He grinned. Damn, her fire was awesome. Usually False Angels were more timid. He wondered if she’d be less aggressive outside of work. More pliable. Easier to get naked.
Gethel jackknifed into a sit. “You still have no idea to whom you’re speaking, do you?”
“No,” Blas said, “and I don’t give a hellrat’s ass. I’m here to do a job, so why don’t you quit being a diva and tell me what’s going on with this pregnancy.”
Revenant really, really needed to get Blaspheme into bed.
Gethel looked to him for help, but he just shrugged. Satan had given him orders to bring a doctor to Gethel, and he’d done that. If Gethel screwed things up, he wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it.
With a snarl, Gethel flopped back down on the chaise and placed her hand on her belly. “Everything was proceeding normally,” she said. “I was feeding off infants to nourish the spawn, and his power grew within me every day.”
There was a heartbeat of dead silence. “You were eating babies?”
Gethel sneered. “Of course. My son is a reincarnated fallen angel. It’s required.”
Blaspheme gave Rev a you-are-so-going-to-pay-for-this look. Excellent. He’d happily take anything she wanted to dish out.
Hopefully she wanted to dish out sex. False Angels were notorious for getting revenge through drawn-out, torturous sex.
Imagining the possibilities, he propped himself against a pillar and watched Blaspheme unhook her stethoscope from around her neck.
“I’m going to check your heartbeats, but first, finish telling me what’s going on. How many months along are you?”
Gethel rubbed her belly almost affectionately, but Rev had a hard time believing she actually cared about the hellspawn inside her. “Approximately six months.”
Blaspheme’s eyes shot wide. “You’re, ah… very large for only being six months along. Have you confirmed that there’s only one fetus?”
“The Dark Lord confirmed it. You can talk to him if you doubt me.”
“The… Dark Lord?” Blaspheme paled. “I’ll take your word for it.” She shot Revenant another angry glance before looking over at the dead shifter and shuddering.
Revenant did a mental flick of the wrist, and the poor dead dude disappeared, leaving the rack as clean as if it were brand-new.
“You owe me another plaything,” Gethel said, sounding genuinely sad. “That was one of Limos’s servants. I could have enjoyed looking at him for a few more weeks.”
Blaspheme froze with her hand on the stethoscope’s bell. “Limos? As in, third Horseman of the Apocalypse, Limos?”
“Who else?” Gethel waved her hand dismissively. “Next I want one of Thanatos’s vampire servants.”
For a long moment, Blaspheme stood there, her face going paler by the second. “You’re… Gethel.” She took a step backward. “You… you tried to usher in the Apocalypse by killing Thanatos’s newborn son.”
“Duh.”
Blaspheme looked over at Revenant, and he knew she was having second thoughts. Not acceptable. He had a plan, and he needed Team Good, or, at least, Team Neutral, to pull it off.
“I can’t do this,” she said. “The Horsemen are tight with Underworld General’s staff. They’re friends. I can’t be treating the fallen angel who betrayed them and tried to slaughter an innocent baby —”
Gethel’s barking laugh made Blaspheme back up even more, but Rev kept access to his power dancing at his fingertips, ready to blast the shit out of Gethel if she so much as thought about harming Blaspheme.
“No baby is innocent, you fool. They’re reincarnated souls, all of them. They could have been serial killers in their past lives.” She patted her belly. “Do you really think this child is in any way pure?”
Blaspheme swallowed. “The child is emim, yes? The offspring of two fallen angels. It doesn’t have to be evil if —”
“Oh, it’s evil,” Rev drawled. “You kind of can’t get more evil.”
And technically, since Gethel had been a fully haloed angel at the time she conceived, he didn’t think Lucifer would be considered emim, either. He’d be… vyrm. The only one under Satan’s protection.