UnFamiliar

Chapter 12

Val's lips on mine felt...good. I stood, wrapping my arms around his neck. He responded by putting his arms around me, one of his hands shoved itself up the back of my shirt. The warmth felt good. I dropped my hands to his waist and pulled him closer. His hand moved from my back to my hair.

Val pushed me away and I stumbled. "Compose yourself," he said in a voice that had me straightening the hair his fingers ran through seconds earlier and brushing wrinkles from my turtleneck.

When I looked up, we were no longer standing in our room. We were in hell—literally. At least that's where I guessed we were based on the black rock walls with red-orange lava cracks creating light. I blinked a few times and my eyes adjusted. I suppose my ears did too, though that probably had nothing to do with the blinking.

Around us stood a crowd of people. We were in the center of them with plenty of space next us, and they all had glowing eyes similar to Val's aimed not at us but at me. Val stood three feet away, it was pretty obvious I was what they were looking at.

A voice rang above the murmuring. "Prince Valfar, is there a reason you brought a mortal with you?"

I turned towards the voice. A demon reminiscent of Val sat at the front of the room on a stage that oddly reminded me of the one in my elementary school gym. Maybe it was the size? The stage was about two feet off the ground and probably about 16 by 16 feet with stairs coming down the front of it. The demon sat on something that could only be described as a throne, and though it was as dark as the lava rock, it was ornately carved wood with rubies set into it. I sensed with my magic, that they were real, and could channel quite a bit of it if I used them.

Val started speaking. "He's my..."

For a moment, I thought he was going to call me his master. That's what he'd taken to calling me recently. Maybe I shouldn't have kissed him. Was that an abuse of power?

"Boyfriend."

I jerked my head to an odd angle to get a good look at Val. I wanted to know what he was playing at. The look on Val's face wasn't what I expected. I expected him to be wide-eyed, trying to come up with the next lie, trying to silently convince me to go along with this hair-brained scheme. However, he was smirking like a chess player that just found the winning set of moves.

The room had gone silent with his proclamation. The silence was deafening compared to the low din of simply having so many people in single room. This really did remind me of an assembly that'd happened in sixth grade, where they'd pulled all the boys into a room and we joked around until the presenter put a picture of female anatomy on the board. Then it'd been exactly this silent.

The demon on the throne, presumably Val's father, said, "you break off an arranged marriage, disappear for a week, and when I summon you, you come with a mortal mate?"

Some small weird part of me was glad that his father's problem with me was my mortality and not my gender. I'd had one very small relationship in the past where his parents just couldn't get over that he was dating a guy. To be fair to them, it seemed like their bigotry was the only reason he was with me.

"His mortality is questionable," Val said, "I mean, he's a witch. They tend to live longer than normal humans."

His father frowned. "A witch, you say?"

"Yes," Val said, "I've even allowed him put this spell on us so that I can't be summoned without him. Isn't it so cute and couply?"

I'm sure the expression on my face was priceless. I was trying to parse out how and why Val twisted the truth into what he was saying.