by Laken Cane
She swerved away from the doors and ran down the alley beside the building, her breath wheezing in her lungs, her eyes running with tears.
The air became so thick and heavy she was forced to slow down as she slogged through it. It was like running through quicksand.
She rounded the corner, her hands full of bloody power, and saw a glowing figure leaning over a dark lump on the ground. She knew the lump on the ground was Trig, but she had no idea who was leaning over him. Not Vogdris. He wasn’t big enough.
“Hey,” she yelled. “Get away from him.”
And seconds before she reached him, she recognized the man. Rafael from Virginia. Obviously not human. Shocker.
A dim white glow surrounded him, and his features were indistinct, unreal. It was as though he were there, but not completely.
She kept her hands up, ready to hit him with a blast of magic. Luke and Talon stood on either side of her, their own power splashing from their hands like liquid silver.
Rafael straightened and took a step away from Trig, but still, the hazy fog surrounded him.
“What did you do to him?” she asked.
“I did nothing. It was the soul-stealer.”
She believed him. He hadn’t been leaning over Triganoth in a menacing way. He’d been shielding him.
She dropped to her knees beside the still and silent Trig. “Why are you here?” she asked Rafael.
“Krista,” Talon said. “You know him?”
“Not really. Saw him at the CIA headquarters in Virginia. He offered me a ride home.”
“I can’t interfere,” Rafael said. “But this man is dying. If he dies, the soul-stealer will win. If Vogdris wins, the demons will win. Do you understand?”
“No, I don’t.” She ran her hands over the demon lord’s body, feeling for a pulse, lifting his shirt to look for wounds, and finally, caressing his carved, cold face. “What can I do?”
“He’s your mate.” Rafael’s voice hadn’t thawed any since she’d seen him last. “Give him your warmth.” He gestured. “Your spark.”
“Zap him?” she asked, lifting a hand. “Shock him back to life?”
“That would only finish him off,” he snarled.
Her heart was pounding painfully hard, and she swayed on her knees as dark spots splattered her vision. She took a deep breath, calming herself, trying to think. “Trig,” she whispered. She could feel the life seeping out of him as though it were seeping out of her.
Her face continued to ache, but the pain was bearable. And the second she thought of her pain, she knew what to do to help him. She knew how to transfer her “spark” to him. She stretched out beside him and pressed her mark to his.
“Take it,” she murmured.
But he could take nothing. She had to give it to him.
Her burning mark began to cool almost immediately as the heat slid into his cold, cold face. He didn’t awaken gradually.
He came to all at once. He snaked his arms around her, flipped her over, and began kissing her like he hadn’t just been dying. Like he wasn’t a demon lord and she wasn’t a demon slayer.
Talon turned away. “We should go.”
She lifted her dazed stare as Triganoth ran his lips over her throat and met Luke’s eyes. He dropped to his knee beside her. “Is this what you want?”
The demon lord lifted his face and growled, his eyes flashing red in the moonlight. “It is what she needs.”
She shivered at the sound of his deep, hard voice. “I want this,” she said. “It has to be.”
Luke gave a nod and stood. “Let’s go.”
But Rafael surprised them all. “No. We need to guard them. Both will be at their most vulnerable and we cannot leave them unprotected.”
“Who are you?” Talon asked.
Krista tuned them out. She had a demon lord on top of her and he was not going to allow anything else in her head but him.
“It’s just you now,” she told him. “Just you.”
He stared down at her, saying nothing. But once again, he lowered his mouth to hers, and his kiss said everything.
His touch awakened her inner slayer like nothing he’d ever done before. And once again, he brought her power.
But when he’d brought it before, he’d done it to show he could, and it had hurt her. Now, he brought it and it slid through her like a caress. Along with the hot ecstasy was cold, dark sin.
And it felt like cold, dark sin. Like all the evil, debased depravity that made up every single being in the red-dark. It was unimaginable, indescribable, glorious perfection.
He was a demon lord, he was masterful, and he belonged to her. With her.
She moaned as his lips took control of hers, as he ripped her shirt open and bared her body to the three watching men. Not only did she not mind, she liked it. She could feel a difference inside her, and she wanted to do every bad thing with her demon lord that she possibly could do.
He began to change as he touched her. He would feel her light as she felt his darkness, and at the end of it, it would alter them both.
And it would strengthen them both.
He began to change physically, as well. He became the demon lord from the red-dark as he drank from her power, and the sweeter, more acceptable version of him fell away. But she’d already seen the real Triganoth Deorthorak and was not shocked.
She couldn’t touch him enough. She slid her sensitive, magical fingers over his hard body and her hands lit with pleasure. Just from touching him.
She gently caressed his white and silver horns, gripping them, running her fingers over their sharp tips. And it was like stroking his cock.
Magic swirled, encasing them both, and part of her was in that magic. When it expanded and almost playfully touched the three watching men, she touched them. She pulled them into the circle, touched them, made them part of the sex between her and Triganoth.
Rafael stumbled away from that magical touch, and the magic didn’t chase him. Luke and Talon, however, took a fascinated step closer, allowing her to nuzzle and caress them until the demon lord forced her thoughts—and her magic—back to him.
He trailed his lips over her throat and her chest, leaving a trail of pebbled skin and sizzling heat, then nipped at her breast before drawing a stiff nipple deep into his warm mouth.
She groaned and arched her back, then cried out when he let her nipple pop from his mouth. But he only moved to the other one and gave it the same attention. He licked it slowly, his tongue rasping against the sensitive bud until she thought she might go mad, and then he sucked it into his mouth.
He took his time with every single part of her, like she was a treasure to explore, uncaring that unbearable pressure was building inside her, pressure that he refused to relieve. He didn’t touch her between her legs, but it was the only spot he ignored.
He parted her legs and ran his lips, his tongue, and his teeth over the flesh of her thighs, deliciously close to the throbbing ache that most needed his attention. Teasing her. Tormenting her. She cried out, grabbed his head, and tried to hold him still so she could wiggle against his mouth.
But he grunted and tightened his grip on her legs, forcing her still. Something was building other than her desperate, looming orgasm, and she realized he didn’t want her to come. Not yet. She didn’t care what he wanted, really. The pressure of that pleasure was so extreme that it was painful. Her entire body throbbed and sang with it. She shuddered and slid her fingers over her belly but he grabbed her wrist before she could relieve the overwhelming pressure.
He turned to his back and lifted her atop him.
“I have more control than you,” he said, but his voice was thick with need. “Take me into your mouth. Pleasure me, Krista.”
That would be her pleasure. With his words, her mouth watered to taste him. She wanted to swallow him, bite him, devour him. Hunger swept through her, an unfamiliar hunger, and she’d never wanted anything more than to open her mouth over his smooth, hot, huge cock.
> But she denied both of them as she leaned forward to slide her tongue along his full lips, to kiss him the way he’d kissed her. She wanted to make him feel the way he made her feel. She wanted him to lose control.
She slipped down his big body until she knelt between his thighs, the breath leaving her lungs in an abrupt rush when she gripped his cock. She ran her lips down the hot length of it, and when she touched her tongue to it, the skin sizzled like a drop of water on a hot pan.
But it was a different kind of heat. It didn’t burn her with pain. It burned her with pleasure. Finally, she ended both their torment and took him into her mouth. Her teeth scraped his hardness and he groaned, and his fingers trembling in her hair as he attempted to maintain the very control she wanted to take from him.
She sucked him deep into her throat and he began muttering words she didn’t understand, though she understood perfectly well the emotion behind them.
And oh, the taste of him. The perfection of him.
She squeezed his firm balls, causing him to groan again, and moved her mouth up his shaft, flicked her tongue over the tip, and then back down. Smoothly, slowly, torturing herself as much as him.
Someone else’s groan registered on the edges of her mind, another pleasure for her to soak in. Luke’s voice, she thought. And suddenly she couldn’t wait to taste him, as well. She would have pulled him to her, perhaps, if the demon lord would have allowed it. But he wouldn’t have. Not then.
Rafael hadn’t been wrong when he’d suggested they would be vulnerable and need guarding. There was only the sex and magic for her and Triganoth, and the danger outside only added to the pleasure. At least, it did for her, and she assumed Trig felt the same. The danger was as delicious as the taste of his cock on her tongue.
Before she was ready to let him go, he sat up, flipped her over, then slid a hand under her belly. He pulled her to her knees, and as she rested her face on her folded arms, he glided his tongue over her sex.
Finally.
The first stroke of his tongue took her breath. No way could she breathe through such intense pleasure. It gathered between her thighs and then began to spread all through her body, and before he was finished, there wasn’t an inch of flesh that didn’t tremble with delight.
His rough hands held her up when she would have collapsed, and as her moans rose into the night air, he took his mouth from her, seized her hips, and with a hard, sudden thrust, replaced it with his cock.
And that right there was when the magic happened.
Melded together, they were, for a glorious heart-stopping moment, one.
There was the sex—the overwhelming pleasure, the climax, the feel of him thrusting inside her—but there was so much that wasn’t sex that even as her orgasm rolled through her, she was amazed by the sheer emotion of it.
She came again, wrapped up in that sexy emotion, and the outside world ceased to exist. But finally, the tremors slowed and gentled, and she drifted back into herself.
And then she realized why Trig had waited to push her over the edge.
Luke and Talon were fighting. She could see them through the haze of power encircling her and her demon lord. They weren’t fighting each other—they were fighting a crowd of demons.
Not humans possessed by demons.
Demons in their own bodies.
8
Triganoth held her when she would have leaped to her feet. She struggled against his hold—she was a slayer, and she needed to slay. Needed it as violently as she’d needed Trig inside her.
“Let me go,” she cried, and drew back a hand to bring her magic, though she really didn’t want to hurt him. She was acting on pure instinct.
“Be still,” he ordered, shaking her a little. “You have no power. I have fucked it out of you.” He sounded unconcerned. Proud.
She was too stunned to react for a moment. He’d taken her power? He wanted sex with her to steal her power. And she’d fallen for it. She drew back her fist.
“Do not.” His voice stopped her cold, because it scared the hell out of her. She’d known him—really known him—when he was inside her. She understood that she should be scared.
And that kept her from doing something really, really stupid.
She lowered her fist, and maybe he read the devastation in her eyes because he relented. He rubbed his thumb over the mark on her face before getting to his feet. He lifted her with him. “It’s only temporary, my love. My power is gone, as well.”
“Your power was already gone,” she snarled.
“I will return to my world to recharge. When I come back, your world will be unable to sap me so quickly.”
“Because of what we did?”
“Yes.”
A demon ran toward their circle of light, then caught sight of Trig. He screamed, then stumbled backward so fast he fell. He scrambled up, and without taking his stare from the demon lord, he turned and ran.
“You must be a real sweetheart in your world,” she said.
He shrugged, then brought his palms to his nose and inhaled softly. “I will carry the scent of you back with me. This pleases me almost as much as you do.” He lowered his hands, his stare intense. “Come here.”
She could not resist him. No matter that a fight was in full swing, that demons had infiltrated the area when she and Trig had apparently ripped a hole in the veil, that Luke and Talon were fighting them without her. She could not resist Triganoth’s request.
His command.
He brushed her hair back when she went to him, his touch tender, his smile gentle. “I am amazed,” he told her, “by the feelings you stir inside me.” He sighed. “Bring your power and fight your demons, my love.”
Her heart leaped. She called her power and to her relief, she felt it trickling back inside her. “Why are there demons here?” she asked. “How are there demons here? Did we do that, as well?”
The CIA was not going to be happy with that development.
“I suspect you did that.” He watched her as she scrambled about looking for her clothes, but didn’t bother with his own. “I prefer you naked.”
She opened her mouth to retort, but he was gone.
She dressed as fast as she could, but her shirt was in tatters. She found his and snatched it up, realizing she had no recollection of him undressing. His scent clung to the shirt and she shuddered as she dropped it over her head.
A demon rammed the wavering circle of power with his black power, and the shield dissipated immediately. Without doubt or hesitation, Krista called her magic, which burst into bright, glorious, red light, and slammed it against the attacking demon.
She missed Triganoth. That was the thought she had as she blasted the demon and then raced into the thick of the battle.
Luke and Talon were fighting close to each other, and she spotted them almost immediately. She didn’t see Rafael. Most likely he’d either run when the fight started or was lying dead upon the dark ground.
It was different killing demons in their own bodies than it was exorcising them from humans and then killing them. There was something hugely exciting about it, and the act was a thousand times more satisfying. That was what she was born to do.
And it did not hurt her to do it.
It was natural and right, and she was glad the demons had found a way to come over in their own bodies. Glad.
She told herself she was happy about it because if they slipped through in their own physical forms, they wouldn’t need to possess humans. But that wasn’t it at all. She enjoyed killing them in their bodies.
There was no goo, no spirit, no pain—just perfect, thrilling joy.
She fashioned her power into a long, red-glowing sword and laughing from sheer delight, drunk on energy and high on death, she sliced through every demon still standing.
The demons were lesser demons, true, but they were not without power. It would dim quickly as they walked the earth. More quickly than a demon lord’s would. Still, they were a bit of a challenge.
<
br /> It didn’t take the veil long to repair itself, but a few dozen demons had managed to slip through before it had. Luke and Talon had killed some of them. She’d killed the rest. Disappointed that they were all dead, she pulled her power and looked around for Luke and Talon.
The field was darker without the flashes of power—demon and slayer alike—lighting up the night. Demons lay in unmoving lumps across the ground. Luke and Talon hurried toward her, both of them bloody and ragged but with a gleam of joy in their eyes. The same joy she knew was in hers.
They stood in a little circle and grinned at each other. “How good did that feel?” Krista asked.
“Fucking good,” Luke said. “But what the hell, Krista?”
She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know if our union caused it, or if something else did. I only know I haven’t felt this good in…ever. This is how we’re meant to kill demons, isn’t it?”
Both men nodded. “It makes me want to go to the red-dark,” Talon admitted, “just to kill demons. Or figure out a way to rip the veil so more of them can come through.”
They laughed at the absurdity of it. They were a little messed up, and that was okay. They’d come down soon enough.
“Dozens of little bitty demon bastards down,” Krista said. “One really big asshole of a soul-stealing demon lord to go.”
They sobered at the mention of Vogdris and reflected quietly for a moment. Then, “They are coming over in their own bodies,” Talon said. “If you did that, Krista, the council will be even more pissed at you than they already are.”
“I don’t know if I did that,” she said, but he was right.
“I said you were different,” Luke told her. “Remember?”
She nodded. “Blood magic.”
“It’s more than that. I don’t know what, or why, but you’re not like us. Not exactly.”
“I think she’s…” But Talon cut himself off abruptly.
She narrowed her eyes. “What?”
He swallowed and looked away. “Different,” he mumbled. “Just different.” And he wouldn’t say another word.
“Rafael saw,” she said. “And then he disappeared. I don’t know what he is, only that he works for the council. He’ll tell them about my relationship with Trig. And about the demons coming through.” She rubbed her temples. “Shit.”