I cocked my head. “And yet, here you all are, locked up behind city walls because you lost a war to us. Quite the conundrum.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “I’ll admit that mortals have impressive military technology, which has made it harder to compete. They developed guns and learned magic they could use to bind us here. But mostly, there are simply more of you since you reproduce like mosquitos.” He gave me a charming smile. “You infest the planet with your shrieking, yogurt-guzzling offspring, taking up more and more space every year and driving out all the other species like a plague of locusts.”
I narrowed my eyes. “I’m fascinated that you all could lose a war to us so thoroughly, surrender so completely, and still convince yourselves of your superiority.” I smiled back at him. “Have you heard the term ‘cognitive dissonance’？”
“In a one-on-one fight without weapons, a demon would win every time. Do you have any idea how easy it would be for me to kill you?”
My smile faded. “Well, we have weapons now,” I said sharply.
He arched an eyebrow, and he leaned closer. “Except you sense it, too. No mortal man has ever sexually satisfied you. Whenever I’m near you, you can feel my superiority to your men. You said I’m the only man you’d ever suspected was up to the task.” His silky voice was like a sinful caress over my skin. Now, he’d moved close enough that his mouth was next to my ear. “And I do think you’re right about that, Rowan.”
A forbidden heat shivered through my body, and my thighs clenched under my bathrobe.
Oh, fuck.
As long as I was near Orion, I was in trouble.
Chapter 12
I couldn’t tell if he was hitting on me or trying to get a rise out of me. But if he was flirting, it was with the utmost condescension, so I wasn’t going to reciprocate. The man’s sense of superiority burned hot enough to suck the oxygen out of the room.
“Do you know the mortal expression ‘beer goggles’？ I had that when I first saw you, except with mojitos.” I wondered if he could tell when I was lying. “You do nothing for me. Now that I’m sober, I view you as a kind of grotesque alien species. Freakish, really.”
He leaned back, then went very still again, staring at me, and I felt like he was using one of Dr. Omer’s tricks—waiting for me to admit that I’d said something stupid. His face was a mask of indifference.
Well, he could wait all day, because I could live with my obvious lies. I raised my eyebrows. “Were you going to teach me about something beyond the staggering dimensions of your ego?”
He spread out his arms over the back of the sofa, ignoring my jab. “Let’s begin with the Lilu, the incubi and succubi. They are the lust demons, the seducers of our world. They feed off desire. Before demons were locked here in the City of Thorns, the Lilu would roam freely among the Puritan cities, seducing uptight mortals. They seduced demons, too. But for a mortal, sex with a Lilu means death. It was one of the major reasons for the war in the 1680s, the lusty Puritans dying of pleasure in their beds.”
What a way to go. “So Mortana—wherever she is—would be trying to seduce mortals at any chance she got?”
He shook his head. “Mostly demons these days. We’re no longer allowed to kill mortals without repercussions. She can draw power from demons just as easily without starting a war.”
I still gripped my bathrobe like a chastity belt. “So I need to seem seductive.”
“Flirtatious. Sensual. Seductive. Comfortable in your own body.” He pinned me with his gaze. “Clearly, we will have to work on those things.”
“When were the Lilu executed? After the war?”
He shook his head. “Not right away. For about ten years, they lived in the Asmodean Ward. Each ward worships a demonic god, and for the Lilu, it was Asmodeus, god of lust.”
“Which ward are we in now?”
“Luciferian. He is the god of pride.”
So Orion lived in the ward for the most arrogant demons. “Yeah, that checks out.”
“In a densely populated city, it was harder for the other demons to tolerate the Lilu. They ruined marriages, manipulated people. Other demon females loathed the succubi, and demon males hated the incubi. Their mind control powers were forbidden, but they used them anyway. And that was a threat to King Nergal’s rule over the populace. What if they controlled his mind? So in the 1690s, when Cotton Mather asked for sacrifices from the City of Thorns, King Nergal was happy to oblige. The other demons were happy to rid the city of the Lilu, and Nergal sacrificed them in the dungeons. They were hanged and their hearts cut out.”