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  Bedeviled & Besmirched

  BEDEVILED & BEYOND, Volume 5

  Sam Cheever

  Published by Electric Prose Publications, 2015.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  BEDEVILED & BESMIRCHED

  First edition. October 22, 2015.

  Copyright © 2015 Sam Cheever.

  ISBN: 978-1944242077

  Written by Sam Cheever.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Bedeviled & Besmirched (BEDEVILED & BEYOND, #5)

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER ONE

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  About the Author

  ~SC~

  "Sam Cheever never ceases to amaze with the stories she weaves. They continue to be intense, very hot and filled with enough twists and turns to keep the reader amazed and intrigued. The ending is electrifying and you know we have not seen the last of this couple. Beautifully done –" ~ 5 stars from Elise at SensualReads.com

  Who knew that one little magic hickey could cause so much trouble? Never mind that Astra Q Phelps has no idea how she gave the king of the Royal Devils a Daemon mark. Females aren’t supposed to be able to mark their males. Now everybody’s trying to kill her. Well, half of everybody is trying to kill her. The females on the Devil Court want to know how she did it so they can do it too. And, while Astra’s trying to stay alive, somebody’s making a play for her man and the power he’s about to inherit. It’s a whole lot of stuff for Astra Q Phelps to handle. But, as you probably know by now, she’s...most likely...up to the challenge. Hopefully.

  PROLOGUE

  Suck it up, bud!

  The Devil you want may stoke your fire, and set your loins ablaze.

  The Devil you want could love inspire, or lives and continents raze.

  My name is Astra Q Phelps. Don’t ask me what the Q stands for because that little piece of info will go with me to the crematorium. I’ve had all printed documentation of the name destroyed and, though a lot of my enemies have tried to dig it out, no one will ever know what it stands for. A girl has to have some secrets. Especially when the truth would cause her some serious embarrassment.

  I run a business called the Angel Network, which is the only devil and demon locating and destroying business in the universe. In other words, I kick serious evil butt for a living. I am a halfling. What exactly is a halfling you ask? A halfling is a non-human. We have neither wings nor horns, but generally have both angel and devil in our family forests. Which is probably why we enjoy a higher sensitivity to spectral influence than regular human people.

  Recently, the Celestial Army has been keeping me pretty busy saving the world. Over and over and over and...well, you get what I’m saying. The human world just has trouble staying saved.

  It’s been a busy and confusing time. But it’s about to get much worse.

  My twenty-fifth birthday is just a few months away.

  The thing about that twenty-fifth birthday is...well...for halflings it’s kind of make-or-break time. It’s called our Settling and it’s the culmination of our growth period. The time when we become what we will be in life. It’s also the time when the dark side of our nature has the greatest pull.

  It is on our twenty-fifth birthday that we decide which way we’re gonna go. Good or bad. Black or white. Gray usually isn’t an option. And outside influences have a lot to do with the outcome. In my case, my influence pool is decidedly murky, given the fact that I hang out a lot with devils.

  Lately, my life has taken a turn toward the complex. Dialle, King of the Royal Devils on Earth and my steady boyfriend, is really mad at me because I marked him with a Daemon hickey.

  I guess females aren’t supposed to be able to mark males.

  How would I know that? Nobody told me that little piece of devil trivia, thank you very much. And apparently it isn’t true anyway...since I did manage to put that cute, little power mark on his sexy throat.

  But now he’s all embarrassed and mad and threatened in a male way, and I’m dancing the romance two-step trying to win back his love.

  Bleurgh!

  To make things even more complex, somebody’s trying really hard to kill me. And they’re doing a bang up job of it too. Staying alive is becoming increasingly difficult.

  And my longtime friend and partner Emo is in celestial anger management, dealing with his own Settling.

  Forget doing my job slaying demons.

  The one place I can go for help isn’t really a good option at all. Since the helpful and sexy Slayer represents mucho temptation to me and my stupid Settling. At any moment my slut-monkey side might just take him up on one of those offers he likes to present during a moment of weakness.

  My weakness...not his.

  So anyway, those are the high points of my life at the moment. Ugly, huh? What? Oh, you wanted the dirty details? Well, all right, it’s your brain cells that are at risk. Not mine.

  Here we go...

  CHAPTER ONE

  Flick the Dick

  Our heroine has gone too far, and done the dirty deed.

  The devil got a pretty mark, and now he’s very teed.

  I was having trouble concentrating on work. All I could think about was how pissed Dialle was. Just because I gave him that one little hickey. It was a moment of passion. He should feel flattered that I got that carried away, right?

  Not.

  All right, I could admit it had made him kind of a laughing stock in the Royal Court. But it had been even worse for me. I’d noticed the lower devils were giving me a wider berth, their beady eyes filled with terror when they looked at me. That was okay. But the Royals...well...let’s just say they didn’t like me before I did the impossible and marked Dialle.

  After the act they really hated me. I could feel the hate vibrating through the court halls and throbbing against my brain. The Royals couldn’t go after me directly because of Dialle, but the number of “accidents” and “near accidents” had escalated to the point where I walked around with a power bubble wrapped around me whenever I visited the court.

  Apparently, I’d really rocked their world. For good or bad depended on your perspective. The females in the devil court, seeing that a female could mark a male, were energized by Dialle’s little hickey. Even if nobody knew how I did it, including me. And they wanted some of that power for themselves. The males were understandably displeased about the turn of events. The power base had definitely shifted out from under them.

  It sucketh to be them.

  But there was nothing I could do about all that at the moment. So I shook my head, pushing the problem out of my mind, and forced myself to focus on the job at hand. Saving my sagging business. With my best friend and partner Emo in celestial counseling for the foreseeable future, I was short a demon slayer and my business was starting to suffer.

  There were just too many demons running around terrorizing people and not enough time in the day for me to handle them all. Especially given the fact that dealing wi
th my Settling was becoming an almost full-time task.

  I’d been toying with the idea of hiring my neighbors the werewolves to help me on a contract basis. Bob Gleason and Ralph Peters owned a business called Werever...Whatever, which specialized in shape-shifter justice. In other words, they were thugs for hire for the magical world, a perfect resume for what I needed.

  The televisual on my desk bleeped and a fat face with a bald head blinked onto my screen. “Mx. Phelps?”

  “That’s me.”

  “My name is Arch Magnus. I need your help with a dragon.”

  I swallowed hard. My track record with dragons wasn’t great. I tended to make friends and allies with them rather than defeat them. Or else they ate my car. “What type of dragon is it?”

  “A green. I’ve never seen a green dragon around here before. But I have one living in my garage. Actually more than one.”

  I frowned, thinking about the green dragons I’d seen recently. “Must be a frunkin’ big garage.”

  “It is. I repair air vehicles and will have several of them in there at any given time.” The man frowned. “There were five vehicles up on blocks when the dragons moved in. I don’t know what’s left of them. I’ve heard a lot of crunching and smashing in there.”

  I sighed. If I took the assignment I’d need help. “Give me your location and I’ll come out.”

  “Oh thank Him! I was afraid you’d refuse to help.”

  That little statement should have been all the warning I needed. But in my defense, I was distracted. On my best days my life was complex. I punched his coordinates into the televisual and followed up with some personal information and as much as he could tell me about his dragon problem. Then I headed toward the Red Knight, my sleek and sexy air vehicle.

  I’d get the lay of the land and then decide who I needed to call in to help.

  An hour later I was hovering over the building in question. The windows were all broken out and scorch marks painted the walls around them. The area around the building was thick with debris and all of the vegetation within a half mile of the place was cooked. A cloud of gray smoke hovered over a roof that looked like somebody’d stuck a large pole into it from inside.

  Interesting.

  As the Red Knight slid silently overhead, fire sprayed from three of the windows at once, on three different walls. Alrighty then. We had the potential for lots of dragons inside.

  Goody.

  I opened my mouth to have the televisual call Emo and then closed it, remembering. “Shit!” Thinking about it for a moment, I changed my instruction. “Werever...Whatever.”

  A series of bleeps ended with Bob Gleason’s pleasant face appearing on the screen. “Hey, Astra.”

  “Bob. Can you and Ralph help me with an extraction and extermination?”

  “Sure. We have an opening next week. Will Thursday at two work?”

  I sat there blinking.

  “Astra?”

  A column of fire rose up in front of my view port and the Knight surged upward, out of range. I looked down and saw a massive green head with beady red eyes and several rows of deadly teeth. Smoke streamed from the dragon’s nostrils in thick ribbons.

  “Yeah. I don’t think that’s gonna work. Thanks anyway. End call.” The televisual went black.

  I shuffled my mental drawers. Dialle, I need you. He materialized beneath me on the seat almost before I finished the thought. In the blink of an eye I went from piloting my air vehicle on a dangerous mission to being a lap dance for my favorite, sexy devil.

  “Hello, my love.” His hot lips found the side of my throat and branded me there, sending pleasure spiraling through me.

  Immediately my Settling kicked in and my body tightened with need. His hands skimmed the quivering skin of my belly, sliding down to the moist vee between my thighs. I moaned, opening my legs like a space harlot to give him ready access. Somewhere in the back of my mind my responsible side was screaming at me to stay on task. But my slut-monkey side cold cocked the stupid prig into silence and embraced the moment...as well as the randy devil whose sexy mouth had followed the open neckline of my businesslike shirt and was nuzzling aside my lacy bra.

  Heat rolled over me in waves. Stars sparked behind my closed eyelids as the blood surged through my body, propelled toward my sexual hot spots by a wildly beating heart. My mind all but shut down as Dialle tugged my snug, black slacks down my hips and slid a long, thick finger between the moist folds of my sex.

  “Oh god, Dialle, yes, right there.” He slid the finger deep inside my body. “And there, oh yeah, that’s frunkin’ perfect.” Beneath my writhing buttocks I felt the long, impossibly hard ridge of his shaft. He was wearing his usual outfit of form-fitting, black, leather pants and filmy white shirt, unbuttoned halfway down his chest. I loved those shirts because nothing stood between me and his heated skin. I skimmed my hand over smooth, golden pecs and tweaked a small, brown nipple.

  Sliding my hand down his hard torso, I slipped it across his flat belly and past the waistband of his leather pants. The fat head of his thick shaft was just under the band of soft leather. My fingers closed over it and pushed past the barrier of buttery leather to enclose it in my fist.

  He groaned and scooted down in the seat to allow me better access. I happily matched the pace of his hand on my body, bringing a growl from deep in his throat as his pleasure built with mine.

  Dialle’s finger increased its rhythm inside my channel and my muscles clenched around it, bathing his hand in warm cream. His mouth closed over my nipple, covering the stiff, black lace of my bra. Heat infused my tingling flesh as he bit down around the blush-colored skin that was barely visible through the lace.

  Pain, sharp and delicious, shot through me and my heat level surged upward immediately. My back arched under a wave of pleasure. Dialle rubbed my throbbing clit with his thumb as he finger-frunked me with increasing speed and covered the tear-shaped mark on my throat with his hot mouth. Sucking my hickey hard, he sent arrows of delight spearing through me. My toes curled, my mind melted and my limbs stiffened as delicious release rolled over me, bringing a scream of pleasure from my throat. Heat infused my face and stars burst before my eyes as I went over. I murmured his name as his combined ministrations made my body quiver under one wave of pleasure after another.

  Before my body stopped throbbing, Dialle was pulling away from me. His power tingled against my skin as he brought it forward. “I have to go.”

  My mind was still muzzy with residual lust, my eyes lidded. I tried to grab his hand. “Wait, what? I need your help.”

  He kissed me on the end of my nose. “I can’t stay. I have dignitaries from several dimensions meeting in my office in five minutes.”

  Desperate, I reached toward his neck, intending to rub a finger over his new daemon hickey. A tiny spark of power pulsed into that hickey would send him into paroxysms of lust. He’d be helpless against it, as I was against the one he gave me.

  Dialle grabbed my hand and something cold and dark entered his pretty black eyes. “Don’t!” And then he was gone.

  I lay back on the leather seat, which still retained his incredible heat and scent. My body was all melty and soft, but my heart felt as if it had a small fracture in it, and my mind still crackled with problems I needed to solve.

  Dialle had been like that since I’d given him the mark. He was really pissed and he was treating me like an obligation he had to fulfill. When my body craved sex, he gave it to me. Sometimes he took his own pleasure. Sometimes he didn’t. But he was always there and gone with minimal interaction.

  It was the ultimate dichotomy. In the midst of blazing heat and fire he was freezing me out.

  Sighing, I pushed myself upright and straightened my clothes. Looking out of the viewport, toward the building below, I saw a smaller green head peering out the window at me. As I watched, a second small head emerged. Both dragons turned their gazes upward, staring at the Knight with curious, red eyes. The dying sun sparked in the bright
gazes and smoke puffed from their tiny snouts.

  My heart sank. “Frunk me,” I murmured. “It’s a flippin’ nest. I can’t extinguish a bunch of babies.” I dropped my head into my hands and whimpered. I would have to find a way to move the dragons out without hurting any of them.

  And me all alone in the world.

  ~SC~

  “Are you frunkin’ crazy, Astra?”

  I sipped my coffee and frowned. My guardian angel Flick wasn’t exactly known for having a wild streak, an unfortunate thing since he was forced to hang out with me a lot.

  “Nope. Not crazy. I need to get that nest of greens out of that poor man’s building and back to Hell, or at the very least to Olympus.”

  “Then why don’t you ask for Queen Zerphor’s help?”

  “Because I’m all tapped out on favors from the black dragons. And the blacks are having some kind of conclave with the other dragon races this week. They’re trying to come to a meeting of the minds or something...so they can coexist better on Olympus.”

  I knew this because Glynus, my dragon foster child—long story—was really mad at her parents for ruining the event for her. She was being introduced to her future mate Spencer, prince of the white dragons, at the conclave.

  Queen Forvar of the whites had recently stepped in to rescue Queen Zerphor and her mate from Devil King Nerul, creating an expectation of recompense between the two royal clans.

  The white queen had proposed a match between Glynus and her son as payment for her help. Queen Zerphor had readily agreed. The match would be a good one for Glynus and would tie the two races inexorably together, forming a powerful alliance in the dragon world.

  Unfortunately Glynus didn’t agree. To put it mildly, something I’m not known to do, Glynus wasn’t interested in finding a mate.

  In fact, her reaction to the news had just about set my ears on fire.

  Flick shook his head, sending longish, stringy strands of mousy brown hair in a swing around his head. He appeared to be growing it out. I squinted, were those strands of hair on his chin?