The spawn thudded to the ground in a semi-circle around me. One slashed out with a razor-sharp wing. I leaned back almost horizontal, the tip whooshing past my nose. Their skeletal frames were infused with a hot anger, their dark, malevolent eyes swiveling to track me. A talon swiped hot and fast, lacerating my rib cage.
Running my magic over the demon to my right, I searched for its kill spot. The demon kicked out at me with its powerful thighs. I ducked, but my reaction time was a hair too slow and the kick caught me under the chin. I tumbled into the dirt.
Time lost all meaning. The creatures’ growls, the dry grass snapping into flattened, powdery dust with each step, all was inaudible next to the harsh breaths ringing in my ears. The pain drilled holes in me, filling them with molten lava.
Steam rolled off my clothes, my wounds festering with a green pus that burned, but the demons failed to look any worse for wear.
I flared my magic to eight and was seized with a wild breathlessness. TV made wielding unholy amounts of magic look so easy, but I was locked down on a ride about to run off the rails with the emergency brake just out of reach.
My vision was tunneling, my ribs were bound by an iron vice, and my skin burned with a feverish intensity. The power hadn’t increased exponentially, I wasn’t anywhere close to Lilith’s full abilities, but my body was struggling. Did I just need time to recover from the torture, or given my death and resurrection, was I now overly-sensitive to magic use?
My heartbeat dropped out of rhythm. My heart had raced before out of fear or exertion, but never had it simply fallen away for a long terrifying moment. It was too vivid a reminder of dying.
I refused to ever feel that way again.
These demons were the A-Team; I’d never faced anything like them before. I’d killed demons all the time with my regular magic and yet I couldn’t get the upper hand even with my enhanced electric current. I reached inside me, coiling the magic up and snapping it out like a whip, but they dodged my assault with balletic grace.
My magic flared madly; I was on the verge of losing control. I grappled with it, dialing the power down notch by agonizing notch until, slick with sweat and limbs trembling, I was once more in the driver’s seat.
The trouble was, I didn’t have enough magic to fight them. I stomped down on the curl of fear in my belly. I was a witch and a demon hunter and I was going to nail these bastards. It couldn’t all end here. I had to save Ro. There was a world out there that needed me, and more importantly, I needed me.
My power sputtered out in a cascade of silver forked bolts.
Gathering every last drop of heightened electric magic left, I shaped it into a ball and hurled it at the demon closest to me, nailing him in the translucent membranes between his wing bones.
He winked out of existence. Yes! Take that, sucker.
The largest demon grabbed me by the scruff of my neck, jerking me backwards. I peered blearily past him through my eye that wasn’t swollen shut, up into the vast, overcast sky that was a gauzy net of shifting shadows.
“Ssssomeone wants to meet you. You’re coming with me.” His forked tongue flickered disturbingly close to my face.
“Your boss and I had an agreement,” said a smooth, English voice. “Lilith is mine.”
The newcomer stood on the side with my swollen eye, but he sounded like Malik. Great. Let my day be complete.
The demon holding me danced back a few steps. “You weren’t fast enough.”
Still in my blind spot, the newcomer killed my captor’s sidekick and did something to the demon holding me that made him crumple to my feet in a broken heap, all in a matter of seconds.
“That fast enough for you?” He stepped into my field of vision. Malik’s fitted light-weight shirt and pants spoke of money, but there was no tailoring that could hide the primal wrath that rolled off him.
The injured demon on the ground gooshed out some fluid that splooged over my feet. I dredged up enough magic to light up one hand and finish the bastard off.
“No,” Malik said. “We need a messenger.”
He knelt down, his hands on his knees and spoke in an oddly gentle voice, one that had the soft lull of a mesmerizing cobra that you knew would strike and despite that, found yourself leaning in toward. “Tell him that I’m doing this my way.”
The injured demon opened his mouth, but whatever he saw on the marid’s face made him snap it shut, bob his narrow head, and hobble off into the night.
Malik pushed to his feet and dusted off his pants.
Chest heaving, I stood firm, throwing out my best “confident witch with an endless supply of magic at her disposal” vibes.
“Nice eyepatch, me hearty,” I said.
Generally, in our previous encounters, Malik had presented a veneer of civilized behavior. That had been ripped away, leaving an ancient cunning in his left eye, his right now a mass of scar tissue under a black eyepatch.
The marid trained a tender smile on me. “I appreciate desperate times called for you to take over this body, habibi, but I’m here now. I found you. You don’t need to broadcast like this.”
I froze, my heart thundering against my ribs. Whoa. I’d really entranced him with my confident witch act. This was awkward.
“Habibi? Lila?” He stroked my cheek. “Lilith, what’s wrong?”
“I’m not her.” I pushed his hands off me and stumbled back, fighting to get air into my lungs. “I’m not!”
“It’s alright, there’s no one here but me. You don’t have to keep pretending.” Malik caught my wrist and hauled me toward him. Holding me still, he kissed me.
Desire swamped me, hot and syrupy, but it wasn’t mine. An echo of something I’d once known. Once craved.
I broke the kiss and slapped him.
For a moment, Malik did nothing, just stood there shocked. Then his brow furrowed and he rubbed his cheek, that familiar, endlessly calculating mask back in place. The strange new warmth in his eye was gone, replaced with something more distant and much more sinister.
I fired up the electricity on my still-raised hand. “Touch me again and I’ll kill you.”
“I vote for death now,” Rohan said, stepping out of the shadows. “But we can play this your way.”
Chapter 3
Emo was a cute affectation no longer in this man’s repertoire. After being haunted by dark magic, Rohan’s features glinted harsh in the moonlight and his normally gold eyes were tinged with black threads, their depths frozen into fathomless pools. His body was leaner, sharper, and his clothes hung off a frame forged with a ruthless determination to survive. My boyfriend had gone into the flames and emerged a deadly blade.
Snowflake had left the building.
He planted himself at my shoulder, having my back as always, but didn’t touch me.
As much as I yearned to, I didn’t reach out and smooth away the purple circles under his eyes or kiss him until his stony expression cracked and he put his arms around me, burying his face in my hair. I got the impression that one tender gesture would send him fleeing and I’d lose him to the shadows for good.
Malik watched us with his one eye that assessed everything. He tipped his head at Rohan. “My mistake. I failed to realize that was petal in there.” He spoke in a curiously flat voice, rubbing one wrist that bore more of the same ugly, red scar tissue. “I imagine now would be as good as ever to tell me how you killed Lilith.”
Rohan shifted his weight, coiled and ready to spring.
I touched his shoulder. It was supposed to be a quick touch, but I couldn’t bring myself to move my fingers away from the play of warm skin over muscle through the soft cotton of his shirt.
Ro allowed it for a handful of seconds, staring at the point of contact with a stricken expression, before he wiped it clean in favor of a predatory focus on Malik and stepped away.
“We were imprisoned in the Tomb of Endless Night.” I pulled the filthy cuffs of my DSI shirt over my hands, balling my fists at the memory of the soul-entrenching darkness. Li
lith had been with me, inside me at first, then nothing. The rest of my time in the Tomb, all of my captivity and torture, I hadn’t been able to determine if I was truly alone. Now I knew. She was gone. I was relieved and grateful.
And guilty.
“I heard. Quite the tale,” the marid said. He would have sounded light and flippant had it not been for the tiny catch in his voice. “Funny thing. Lila was never one for sacrifices and yet here you are.”
“Our situation was… complicated.”
Rohan snorted.
I shot him a warning glance. Demon or not, Malik had just lost the person he’d loved, while I had just found mine. A little compassion wouldn’t kill me. “Do you want to know?”
Malik’s shoulders tensed, but he nodded. I forced myself to stay steady in the force of that inhuman stare.
“This is just what I suspect but—”
He waved a hand at me to get on with it.
“We were in the compound. Lilith was trying to get free from me, but couldn’t, and because our magic was so tangled up, she couldn’t become fully corporeal either. When I died…” I glanced at Rohan, but his expression gave nothing away. “She kickstarted my heart and got the Tomb door open a fraction. It must have drained her to bring me back to life under those conditions. Then Rabbi Mandelbaum sealed me in for a good long while and I think that finished her off. Dark magic was all that had been holding her together and now it was nulled. You’re wrong, Malik. She gave me the ultimate sacrifice. Her last words to me were ‘If you’re alive, I stay alive.’ This was her legacy to me.”
Even in the depths of my hot mess days, my moral compass had been intact. Later, I’d hunted demons and stayed on the right side of the line between good and evil. With Lilith’s death, I’d rubbed that line out. It wasn’t like there were a lot of self-made immortals running around. Lilith definitely hadn’t been good, but she hadn’t been all bad either. And now, whether or not I’d intended it, she was gone.
Malik covered his face, his shoulders shaking. Shit, I’d broken him.
Did one hug the unholy spawn they intended to kill at some point? Brotherhood etiquette was murky on so many points.
He let out deep peals of laughter, wiping a finger under his eye like he’d heard the best joke ever.
“Something funny?” Rohan asked.
“Since you asked? Yes.” Malik’s smile held a cruel edge. “I hate to disabuse you of your little fantasy, but Lilith wasn’t giving you a gift. Those words were a curse.”
I went still.
“To possess that much magic,” he said, “is to live with a target on your back. Lilith resented that, but she knew it all too well, and now you will, too. Magic-wise, you register as her with no trace of you.”
“So that’s what you meant when you said I was ‘broadcasting’ as her?”
“Loud and clear. Yet given what I saw of the fight, you only have a fraction of her power. Good luck, especially since Satan is coming for you.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh my God, did you actually just say that? If you’re gonna make a threat, put some thought into it. Aren’t you supposed to be some ancient and super scary marid? Where’s your game, dude?”
Rohan exhaled, face granite. “Satan is real, Nava.”
I stopped laughing. As disconcerting as this whole Satan situation was, I was more upset about Rohan not calling me Sparky.
“This was not in that Demons for Dummies book.” I stomped my foot. “I’ve never even met the Prince of Darkness. I’m nowhere close to the Rasha who’s killed the most of his demons. Plus, I’m working really hard to throw a crimp in Mandelbaum’s plans to bind his little fuckers, for which he could show a modicum of gratitude.”
Malik laughed. Not a light joy, a dark resignation. “And what on earth makes you assume that he cares?”
Rohan clapped him on the shoulder, black magic sparking randomly off Ro’s skin with the touch. His eyes flared black.
I tried to squelch my gasp, but from the muscle that twitched in Ro’s jaw, I wasn’t successful.
“You’ll have to give us more than that,” my boyfriend said in that same cobra fashion that Malik had used on the other demon.
Malik plucked Rohan’s hand off him.
The air grew so brittle I could snap it, the loaded silence the only glue holding it together.
A rat scuttled out of a crinkled potato chip bag, a chip in its mouth, and scurried away down the hill. Smart rodent.
I stepped between them. “If Satan finds me, he’ll think I’m Lilith. I can bluff him with her power.”
Malik gazed evenly at me.
Damn it! “He’s coming for me because he thinks I am Lilith. Why?”
The demon rocked from one heel to the other like the weight of the decision to tell me had acquired physical mass. “Only because he wants to breed her. You know, create a line of super-demons. These irksome wards never did pose the same problem for her offspring as they do for the rest of us. In addition to that very tantalizing perk, her progeny also tend to be faster, stronger, and wield more powerful magic. It ought to come as no surprise that Satan will rape you until he has his demons and his succession is assured.” He mock-frowned. The bastard was enjoying this. “Do you have a way to prepare for that? No?”
Berserker fireworks exploded in my brain and the world swung sideways. I stuck out my hands for balance, but this insanity had momentum and a dizzying vertigo, and I swayed precariously.
Mandelbaum had treated me as insignificant from day one and now Satan himself intended to render me down to a single magic part against my will, using me to further unspeakable evil?
Rohan reached for me, then dropped his hands to his side. “Who’s acting as Satan now? Which demon’s on the throne?”
“Hang on,” I interrupted. “Satan isn’t a single demon? It’s a title? Like the Dread Pirate Roberts?” Laughter tinged with madness burst out of me. “Satan wants to ensure his lineage retains the monarchy,” I said between cackles. “Is there a coronation with a nice aged blood of virgin and a crown made of intestines and human eyeballs? Or is it more of a fascist dictatorship?”
“How unfortunate. She’s cracked already,” Malik said.
Rohan threw a quick, assessing glance over me, then returned to grilling Malik. “What’s your role in all this?”
“I was charged with bringing Lila back.” The marid’s fingers flitted to his eyepatch before he thrust his hand into his pocket. “I refused initially, but we came to a compromise. I would talk her into it.”
“As appealing as spending eternity being dicked in non-consensual sex for spawn breeding sounds, I decline the offer on Lilith’s behalf,” I said. “Take that back to your master.”
Malik flickered into his flame essence for a second, before asserting his human form once more. “I bow to no master, but he won’t take ‘no’ for an answer. You’ll learn that soon enough.”
My face stayed blank, my body language remained calm, yet inside I quaked at those words. “You want him to pervert her magic like this?”
“What I want is of no consequence,” he said, but did not meet my eyes.
My entire body was sheathed in silver magic before he’d finished his sentence. Next to me, Rohan had extended every blade on his body. “Then you’ll have to kill me to take me.”
“Possibly. But not tonight. As usual, our interaction has been enlightening, if not entertaining.” The demon walked into the darkness. “We’ll see each other soon.”
“Malik,” I called out softly after him. “I’m sorry. About Lilith.”
He threw his head back to the sky. For a moment, in the indigo glow of the night clouds against the tangled silhouettes of branches, his face was so unguarded he could have passed for mortal. But then I blinked and the shadows swallowed him and he was gone.
And then there were two.
I planted my hands on my hips and, fully healed and full of adrenaline, glared at Rohan. I was reeling and I wasn’t about to contend with an
idiot boyfriend who believed some puny dark magic aftereffects were going to phase me. “Are those fireworks of yours practical or just for funsies?”
“It hasn’t burned itself out of me yet.” Ro said. “But I can’t use it.”
“Excellent. Then I get to keep the title of ‘only person in this relationship who almost went nuclear with dark magic.’”
“How can you joke? What if I’m forever changed? What good am I like this?”
I leered at him. “You look pretty good to me.”
“Nava.”
“Rohan. I don’t see a problem here. You’re not contagious, you’re just a bit sparkier than I am right now. And if you’re worried about some darkness or whatever in you? Please. With all your personal demons when I first met you, it was a wonder you didn’t sprout wings and horns sooner. Hey, did you know you can’t spell ‘demon’ without ‘emo?’ I really think we’re hitting some key insights into your psyche.”
He did not grin back. Not at first. But this was Ro and this was me and under the force of my adorable nature, I broke him and he laughed.
“You’re something else,” he said.
“Feel free to be specific and heavy-handed with the positive adjectives, but yeah, I am.”
His eyes warmed, their abyssal depths cracking and melting away.
My breath caught.
Snowflake.
“I thought I’d lost you.” Rohan brushed my cheek with a faint tremble. “Tell me I’m not imagining this.”
I nuzzled into his palm. “Buddy, if you dreamed up our big reunion starring a demon attack, Malik, and me being bred by Satan like a broodmare, we’re going to have words.”
“I’m sure I can come up with something better than that.”
Butterflies swooped in my stomach. “Talk is cheap, Snowflake.”
His hands bracketed my face, his heartbeat thrumming through his wrists in a thundering tempo that echoed in my blood. The ache in my chest was a tight pinch; I was so scared I’d wake up and find this was just another illusion I’d conjured to feel safe.
I leaned in toward him—and stumbled forward into empty air as arms that were not mine wrapped around my boyfriend, lifting him off the ground and swinging him around.
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 149