To Enthrall the Demon Lord

by Nadine Mutas

  Maeve glanced up as he walked closer, her expression shuttered. Exhaustion lined her face, as if she hadn’t slept. He hadn’t sensed an outbreak from her during the night, so whatever kept her awake wasn’t enough to ignite her innate fire at least. Yet it was enough to rake claws over his nerves, knowing she was struggling.

  “Are you here for more spellwork study?” she asked, reservations in her tone. Gone was the easy familiarity, the budding affection in the way she looked at him.

  He wanted it back.

  “That,” he said, “and more.”

  She closed her book but didn’t rise to her feet, remained sitting with the griffin at her back as if lounging on a throne of primal power. It made her look like a queen of fire and fury, and he liked the sight of it so much he wanted to have it immortalized on canvas.

  Memorizing every detail of the scene so he could later mentally send the image to the artist he’d commission for the painting, he put his hands in the pockets of his dress pants. “I have been pondering parts of our conversation last night.”

  Something shifted in those eyes of smoke-kissed flames. “Me too.”

  “Since we were interrupted, I want to get a few things straight.”

  She pressed her lips together.

  “I do not care for humans,” he went on. “And you cannot hope to awaken in me an appreciation for something I have dismissed for all of my long-lived life. I come from a different time, a different…place, and I will not be able to break with a way of thinking I have cultivated over the course of millennia.”

  Maeve winced at the last word, at the hint of just how long Arawn had been around already. But it drove home a point she’d come to on her own since last night.

  “I know,” she said to him. “And I understand.”

  Despite her knowledge of how he’d been shaped by an existence on the upper end of the food chain, looking down at a race that had to be as inconsequential to him as ants were to her, she was…disappointed, above all else. And it was silly. She should have known better.

  She’d simply seen so many other surprisingly different sides of him since she arrived here that she forgot just what—who—he was, always had been, the gentleness and playful sensuality he’d shown her notwithstanding. In this, in the way he regarded humans as dispensable, he was every bit the ruthless, callous Demon Lord his reputation made him out to be.

  And she didn’t know if she could see past that.

  Her heart ached at the thought of pulling back from him, had pained her all through the night, keeping her awake for most of it, alternating with slivers of memories that haunted her. Though thankfully not strong enough to shove her into fiery panic, those blinks of images and sensations of her time in the warehouse had robbed her of sleep for long hours.

  The talk with Tashia was transformative, had started to lift a weight on her chest she hadn’t realized dragged her down until it began to vanish, but the conversation with the female demon also pulled up more memories, yet again opening wounds that had barely scabbed over.

  It was necessary, she knew, because those wounds would not have healed properly—not when they were still infected. She hadn’t drawn out the poison during those months she’d attempted to self-heal, had pretended it would simply…go away. Instead, her mental injuries had festered.

  “I will likely never care for humans,” Arawn said, pulling her out of her thoughts.

  She was about to say, I know, and I can’t expect you to, when he spoke again.

  “However”—his eyes held her spellbound—“I respect the fact that you do.”

  Her breath stalled.

  “And I will make sure the griffin preys only on animals from here on out.”

  Heart thudding fast after it skipped a beat, she stared at him. “You can do that?”

  “It listens to me.” A look out of darkly glinting eyes. “Seeing as I am the horse whisperer of beasts.”

  Her world brightened in a storm of emotions, and she knew, right then and there, that she would have seen past it if it meant she got to keep seeing this side of him, as well as the teasing lightness and deadpan banter he was capable of. If she got to be the one he joked with this way.

  “I’m glad,” she said, clearing her throat. “And I admit to being a tad hypocritical.”

  He raised a brow.

  “I like Griffin.” She petted the feathers on the beast’s front legs. “And knowing he might snack on people didn’t make me push him away.” Lowering her eyes, she added, “So why should I do that to you, when I like you a lot more than him?”

  Arawn’s power thrummed in the air, a physical thing, an energetic caress for her senses. When tendrils of his magic touched her, the touch felt proprietary, staking a claim she had neither the strength nor the skill to refute. Nor the desire.

  Welcoming his touch—and craving the physical one as well—she stood up, started toward him but stopped short with a frown. “Wait. Just to get this clear—you don’t snack on people, do you?”

  Molten desire in his eyes. “There is one I plan to make an exception.”

  She shouldn’t still flush with heat at his teasing, yet here she was, getting all hot and bothered by a few targeted words…which resurrected a number of blushworthy sequences from her dream. Unable to withstand the unadulterated force of his gaze, she glanced down as she walked up to him, grazing her fingers over the buttons on his dark purple shirt.

  “Last night,” he murmured, running his thumb over her cheek, “you asked me what I am.”

  She went motionless, her breath trapped in her throat. Daring a look up, she drew out the one syllable in a cautious tone. “Yes.”

  “Remember when,” he went on while he drew a finger around her ear, making her shiver just right, “I told you that I was around when the Powers That Be forced the beasts to sleep?”

  She nodded, her pulse ticking fast.

  “There were those among the gods”—his fingers glided down her neck, sending prickling waves of pleasure down her spine—“who were not in favor of it. Some were in opposition because they despised humans, some because they cared more for the beasts, and wanted them to remain free.”

  Dizziness grasped her mind with chilled, tingling fingers, her knees going weak. She held herself upright by clutching at his shirt.

  “There was a coup,” he continued, and laid his hands on her upper arms—lightly. Preparing to steady her should her knees give in after all? “A sneak assault by those who favored humankind. They smote the ones in opposition, made them fall. When they crashed onto mortal lands, their powers scattered, leaving them human in strength but for their immortality.”

  She wasn’t sure she was breathing anymore. Where did the air go?

  “It took centuries”—his thumbs stroked over her shoulders—“to reclaim the first pieces of scattered magic. Many hundred more to gather enough to become a power once again.” His eyes harbored age-old knowledge and unrelenting patience, and now she knew exactly why. “I have almost regained full strength.”

  “Oh, my gods,” she whispered. “You’re a god.”

  Chapter 25

  “Fallen,” Arawn said, watching her reaction closely, his magic on a tight leash. “But yes, cut from the same cloth as those whom witchkind calls the Powers That Be.”

  Her breathing flattened out, and her eyes glazed over. Not a full-on panic attack from what he could tell—at least not like those brought on by her trauma—but enough of a visible rush of uncontrollable emotions, among them likely shock, that she swayed in his hold.

  “I kissed a god,” she rasped.

  “And you ground on his lap as well.” He gave her a smile intended to distract her with sensual promise. “That was…divine.”

  She blinked, shook her head as if coming to, her eyes turning sharp again, flicking to his face.

  “Having you warm and loose and willing on top of me,” he said with calculated precision underneath his intimate murmur, “felt heavenly.”

  She c
losed her eyes, the corners of her mouth twitching up. “Stop it.”

  “Tasting you,” he continued, a wicked sense of play infusing his blood, “was like paradise.”

  Her shoulders shook as she buried her face in her hands. “Oh, gods.”

  “Just one. Me.”

  Her laughter, when it broke from her, stole his breath. Light and lovely and daringly infectious in its mirth, it dispelled all his thoughts save one—

  “I did not know,” he said quietly, his heart gone still, “how much I needed your laughter until I heard it.”

  On a gasp, she met his eyes, hers grown wide, liquid amber striated by gray.

  He traced her lips with his thumb. “I would rend the world to keep your laughter in my life.” Dark, dark conviction behind every word. “To keep you safe enough to laugh.”

  “I’d rather,” she whispered, “you keep the world to keep me.”

  He studied her face for a moment, the solemn fire in her eyes, the determined set of her brows. Nodding once, he said, “As you wish.”

  She swallowed, and he allowed himself the luxury of tracing the movement of her muscles with his fingers.

  “I want to lick you here,” he muttered, his attention on the creamy skin of her neck. Catching her gaze, he clarified, “For starters.”

  She inhaled sharply, but her scent stayed free of fear—instead it was drenched in the musk of her arousal. “So do it.”

  Body tightening, he bent down—the difference in their heights making this an interesting exercise—and kept his senses aware of her tells as he kissed the curve of the neck she bared to him, her head tilted to the side. Her breathing sped up, but he didn’t sense her mind slipping into her past. He licked a slow path up her throat, and she shivered, her lips parting on a soft sound of pleasure.

  Lips he was going to taste again. Power curling underneath his skin, he kissed his way to her chin, paused briefly to let her catch her breath, gather her senses, and then indicate she was ready to take more.

  “Stay here,” he murmured before he gently cupped the back of her head with one hand and took her mouth in a kiss that was but a sample of the wildness lurking behind his calm.

  She grabbed his shirt again, melted against him—and stayed, indeed, in the here and now, with him. He rewarded her with a curling caress of his powers…over her breasts.

  Gasping, she broke the kiss, only to look at him out of heavy-lidded eyes, her cheeks dusted rose. “Do that again.”

  So he did…with his hand.

  Electric shocks of pleasure arced through her body at his touch, her nipples tightening under her sweater and bra. His eyes riveted on her face, he ran the back of his hand over her other breast too, the intensity of his attention nearly as intoxicating as his caress.

  The desire to feel his hand on her bare skin instead of through layers of clothes was a full-body ache, yet she had to pace herself. The specter of her nightmares loomed just behind a thin barrier of sheer will and grit, its strength still untested. Every second she remained in control of her body and her mind was a hard-won victory over the terror meant to break her.

  Closing her eyes, she curled her hands, still holding his shirt. She wanted to enjoy this with him, wanted to relish his touch and trust him with her body without always waiting for the other shoe to drop, without having to keep one eye open and her senses alert so as not trip and tumble into the pitfalls of her mind. Dammit, she wanted her untroubled sex life back!

  He clucked his tongue. “While I do want you to tremble at my touch, I was hoping you would do so for a reason other than anger.”

  She focused back on him. “Not at you. I’m not angry at you.”

  “I know.” He stroked a finger along the neckline of her sweater. “In general, anger is good, but not when you direct it at yourself.” Eyes that were far too perceptive studied her face. “Not in this.”

  Grinding her teeth, she looked away, blew out a breath, and nodded. “I just want myself back.”

  “It will happen—in time.”

  Amusement bubbled in her chest at his play on their shared promise. “I feel like we should start a list.”

  “I already have one.”

  She raised her brows.

  An insouciant shrug. “Or two.”

  Her quiet amusement broke free when she gave him a wink. “Then I guess I better catch up.”

  “We should compare notes when you are done.”

  Such dry humor in his tone, and yet…something dark lurked behind his voice, his eyes, and without knowing how, she sensed it had nothing to do with her. This was something else, well hidden except for that knowing inside her…as if their bond, maybe, clued her in to another layer of his emotions.

  “What’s troubling you?” she asked.

  Surprise flashed over his face for a millisecond, before he was in full control again.

  When he opened his mouth to give her an undoubtedly evasive answer, she grabbed his shirt tighter, pulled herself up on her toes and said, “Tell me.”

  He looked down at her hands, then met her eyes again, a smirk playing about his mouth. “Do I have to worry about scorch marks on my favorite shirt, Wildfire?”

  “Only if you keep being evasive.”

  Pure appreciation glinted in his eyes before his expression sobered. “There have been a series of attacks on my territory.”

  She blinked, smoothed her hands out over his shirt, over the taut muscles beneath. “And it’s serious.” It wouldn’t upset him like this if it was a run-of-the-mill border issue.

  “It is also curious.”

  She gave him a look.

  “In a deranged sort of way,” he amended.

  “How so?”

  What he told her next, of piles of butchered humans with a strange pattern of displaced organs—the latest of which he’d apparently found just this morning—turned her stomach, but she held it in. He trusted her with this information, even the gruesome details, displaying a belief in her strength to take it in, and she wouldn’t dishonor that belief by puking on his shoes.

  “I suspect,” he said, “this is the work of one of us who fell.”

  Her heart stumbled. “Another god?”

  He nodded, old memories shifting in the shadowed green of his eyes. “In all the millennia since the fall, I have never encountered one of the others. We were likely spread too far, the world hard to travel until more recent times. It is possible, however, that they have been gathering their powers back as I have, and one of them managed to find me.”

  “And you think they’re a threat?”

  “We did not all see eye to eye.” He shrugged. “Some of us disliked each other as much as the Powers That Be. And if the one here was friendly toward me, they could have simply come to see me.”

  She frowned, tapped her fingers on his chest. “But you said it was weird they would kill humans to threaten you.”

  He inclined his head, conceding her point.

  “What if those kills aren’t meant as a threat?”

  His look sharpened. “Elaborate.”

  “Well,” she said, feeling a bit silly to bring it up, “this morning when I opened the door, there was a dead rabbit on the veranda.”

  Narrowing his eyes, he grew preternaturally still.

  “Relax.” She stroked down his sides. “It turned out the bobcat put it there—it caught and killed it for me.”

  “As a gift,” he murmured.

  “Yeah. Cats pull that sort of thing all the time. A gruesome way to show appreciation, I guess, but it makes sense for predators. And you guys…you’re like…”

  “…the apex predators of the world.”

  She nodded. “I’d say there’s a good chance someone is trying to say hello in a super-creepy godlike way.”

  Chapter 26

  Having left Maeve with the griffin after another round of spellwork study—he’d carefully taken down the first layer of the spell now he was certain it wouldn’t cause immediate decay of the entire structu
re—and a lingering kiss that rendered her breathless for all the right reasons, Arawn took to the skies in the form of a huge eagle. He had some pondering to do.

  Maeve’s theory was like the missing puzzle piece that had kept him from seeing the big picture, and he brooded over the fact he hadn’t come to that realization himself. He should have. There was no excuse for his lack of focus here, except, perhaps, that he’d been distracted by his consuming fascination with a certain witch with copper-colored lashes.

  Now, though, with all the hints gathered and laid out on the table, he saw it clearly, knew there was only one of the other fallen who would play this sort of game. And that elusive scent, the faint trace of age-old magic he’d picked up and couldn’t quite place, made sense now. Put together—finally—with the correct memory of the one they belonged to, they pointed him to the most probable location of his long-lost peer.

  Leaving the airspace over his dominion, he made for Mt. Hood.

  The snow-covered peak of the dormant volcano rose above the surrounding lush green of the Oregon wilderness like a lone guardian of old. Circling over the mountain on air currents for a few moments, he banked, followed the pull of the magic he could trace now he knew on whom to focus. He spotted the figure on one of the upper slopes of the volcano.

  He touched down in a measured landing yards away from his target, pulled on the pants and boots he’d easily carried in his eagle’s claws. The cold wouldn’t bite at him, his body generating enough heat he could take a stroll through wintry Alaska and not even shiver, but the boots in particular were handy on uneven terrain.

  Gaze fixed on the figure standing on the snowy blanket over a jagged edge of the slope, he approached. “You always did like mountains.”

  Eyes of thunder and lightning met his own as the male turned, a slow smile spreading on a face many would describe as hauntingly beautiful, in a broken way. “Hello, brother.”

  “Velez.” He inclined his head.

  “It is good to see you again.” Piercing intelligence in his regard, edged with a feral playfulness. “Though I must admit I had hoped you would decipher my gifts of greeting much sooner.”