Knights of Hell

Chapter 2 :)

Azure walked into the apartment behind Kai, and he was not surprised to see that nothing had changed; everything was in place, not a spec of dust visible, just as he knew it would be. He wondered where the boys were right now. He knew they weren’t at his place, and clearly, they weren’t at Kai’s, and the two didn’t have friends besides one another, possibly at Church’s place.

“Have you seen the boys?” Kai asked as he took his shoes off in the small entryway and placed them on the rack. He looked at his reflection, fixing his blonde hair before turning back to look at Azure, who hadn’t replied. No, the man had been too busy staring at Kai to notice the man had even spoken. “Azure?”

“Yes, sorry, what?”

“The boys? Have you heard from them?”

Azure nodded as he began to take his shoes off and placed them beside Kai’s on the metal rack. He paused, staring at them side by side. Kai’s comfortable, plain black sneakers, with his black biker boots decked out in metal, seemed odd. He didn’t think about how domestic it appeared, how they seemed and walked into the plain white and grey apartment and sat on the white couch.

He grabbed the television remote, which sat on the glass coffee table, and turned it on before finding a random channel and letting it play in the background as he waited for Kai to change out of his work clothes to something much more comfortable.

Something was wrong. He knew that much. The demons had been a bit too active, and Lucifer wasn’t hounding him as often as usual, meaning something was stopping him from doing so. Azure had a gut feeling that sooner or later, he would find out why before whatever was dropped on his plate, and he had to deal with it.

Kai came out of his bedroom a few minutes later, a broad smile on his face, in some of his grey silk pyjamas and white indoor shoes. He grinned as he looked into the kitchen and then at the clock before he shrugged. “Do you want to make some brownies?” he asked, smiling as he raised his eyebrow.

Azure peeled his eyes away from staring at Kai’s face to the clock before looking back at the man with an incredulous look. “At this time?”

“Why not?”

Azure sighed but nodded and stood up, following the shorter man into the kitchen. However, as they grabbed the ingredients, they realised they were out of flour. Kai slipped on his white coat, and the two men made a grocery run in the middle of the night. Three demons walked in as they got to the elevator in the apartment building on the fifth floor. Azure made eye contact with the woman. She nodded slightly but said nothing as she hit the ground floor and turned their back on them.

Azure watched, his eyes glued on Kai, whose shoulders were tense, and he was muttering something under his breath. Azure tried to reach out to touch him, and when he burned his hand, he realised what Kai had been muttering. He had been blessing his clothes, or perhaps any demon who touched him would be burned. Azure swallowed the stinging of pain and healed his hand but didn’t go out of his way to feel the man again.

A sharp knock on his mental door had left the man scowling, and he knew it was one of the three demons before him; he rolled his eyes but let them in.

“Why are you in my mind?” he snapped, glaring at the back of their heads, trying to figure out which of the three had been bold enough to knock on the mental barrier of a knight.

“Why the hell are you with a priest?” a woman’s voice snapped, and he pinned the woman in front of him with a death glare.

“Watch how you speak to me,” he snapped back, cracking his knuckles, the glare on his face deepening. “I may be in human form, but I am still a knight of hell.”

There was some hesitance as the woman before him shifted on her foot. “I apologise, my lord. But you are with a priest, sir,” she added.

“Who I am with is none of your concern,” he replied. “If I hear of rumours surrounding this floating about, I will know it is you and I will hunt you down. Get off on the next floor.”

He closed the mental link and watched as the woman exited the second floor, and the two men followed behind her. Kai relaxed only when they had left, shifting away from Azure a little and exhaling. A scowl had managed to find a way on his beautiful face. “They’re everywhere,” he muttered.

Azure ran his tongue over his lips as he braced himself for the comments he knew were coming. “They’re not that bad, Kai,” Azure whispered.

Kai rolled his eyes as he ran a hand through his hair, tugging at it slightly before messing with the collar of his coat to where the black choker was visible, and something about it had never sat right with Azure. “Don’t you start on this too, Azure? They’re horrible, and I will stand by that until the day I die.”

Azure tensed, “don’t say things like that,” he snapped. He didn’t want to think of Kai dying; he had told himself the human still had decades to live, and he would worry about it when his time was closer, but until then, he did not want any reminders that there was only one outcome for them, for him.

“What? That I will die?” he asked, tilting his head to the side a little, a soft frown on his face, as he stuck his hands in his coat pocket. “It’s normal, though,” he said as they exited the small elevator and walked out of the lobby into the cold night. “We will all die eventually.”

Azure didn’t know how to tell him he would not die for a long time, certainly not before Kai. They got to the car, and Kai got into the driver’s seat while Azure got into the passenger seat. The short drive to the grocery store was surrounded by silence. However, tension did ease up a little when they were inside, grabbing items they needed.

Twenty minutes later, they were back at home, and in the middle of making the batter with Azure not so subtly trying to be a nightmare, and throwing some of the flour on Kai, he laughed, and the kitchen came to life, with how wonderful the noise sounded to Azure’s ears. There was a slight wheeze, but it was something so mundane Kai couldn’t help but enjou it. Of course, the man retaliated, and half of the flour went onto the ground. Azure threw some back, but as Kai tried to move out of the way, he slipped. He would have crashed his head on the counter if Azure hadn’t gotten to him first, grabbing him around the waist and pulling him close.

He wondered if Kai could hear how loud his heart was pounding. He must have been able to; he was near his chest, and the fear or maybe adrenaline coursing through the demon’s ears left a loud ringing tone as he stared at Kai, who was safe. The human was safe and in his arms, and he was so close. Why hadn’t he realised how close he was before? Kai stared at him, and Azure stared back, and they could have kissed. It would have been oddly romantic, but Azure’s phone blaring caught both men off guard, and Kai pushed himself out of Azure’s embrace as he cleared his throat, continuing with the batter.

Azure cleared his throat, too, wiping the flour off of himself. He grabbed his phone to see a text message from Nether.

Nether:

Come back now, or i’ll rock up there

In demon form

Good luck explaining that to it

Azure scowled but responded quickly and looked over at Kai. “I’m sorry, I have to go, I have some family coming over, and they just decided to tell me they’re already at my place. I’ll see you soon, go to bed early and save me some brownies?”

Azure didn't wait for Kai to respond before he left the kitchen. He slipped his shoes on and was back out on the cold night. He went into an alley and decided it would be quickest if he teleported home instead, so that is what he did. Inside his apartment, he scowled when he realised Nether and Cedar were both already there, having made themselves comfortable.

“What?” Nether snapped, his blood-red skin glowing slightly. His dark hair was tied up in a ponytail, and he was sitting crisscrossed in the air with a glare on his face. Azure was sure that Nether had inspired the depiction of demons in media, with the red skin, horns and a tail. “Don’t look at me like that. You were the ones who called us here and then went to bone the priest.”

Azure didn’t respond and instead focused on Cedar, sitting on the couch like a normal person. At the same time, Nether paraded his demon form around. Cedar was almost always in his human form—a pale-skinned man with light, nearly white long hair and a gentle smile.

“Cedar,” he said, smiling at the man. “Can you call Feather and Yua? There seems to be a problem with the in between.”

~*~