Unless, of course, the boy had a demon gift for compulsion, and directed attention away from her.
The woman finished with the customer and turned to her son, as if by ignoring Creed’s presence she would somehow avert an unpleasant confrontation. While she pretended not to notice him, Creed was well aware of her sidelong scrutiny.
And what she saw.
He was not unprepossessing. Most women found the vibrant contrast between his golden skin and unusual, crystalline blue eyes attractive. In the past he had shaved his head because his black hair, which had a tendency to curl, had made his physical resemblance to Raven too obvious, and he had not wanted others to suspect they shared a father. If they had, they might also have begun to wonder who—or what—that father had been.
After the departure of the demons, however, Creed’s scalp had gone naturally smooth. The flaming tattoo that now covered his back and shoulders had also emerged, although he had no idea what its purpose was or if it held any demonic significance. He had no one to ask.
The woman ran a palm down the front of the tidy apron that covered her simple dress, smoothing imaginary wrinkles from the heavy fabric, an action that betrayed her nervousness at his presence. Women usually loved Creed, and while under other circumstances he was not above using that attraction to his advantage, normally he would not be passing judgment on one of their children. Most mothers placed their child’s welfare above everything else.
But not all of them did so. His own had not. And this mother’s child, too, was half demon.
“Where have you been?” she asked the boy. “I expected you here to help me an hour ago.” Her tone held reproof and anxiety, as well as an undercurrent of unmistakable affection. Soft green eyes darted from the masculine hand on her son’s shoulder to Creed’s face. “He’s a better salesman than me,” she added, with pleading in those eyes as if she already knew without being told what was at stake. “I need him.”
A gift for compulsion would indeed benefit her sales and keep them both from starvation. Creed’s gut tightened. There was no husband or master. Not that he could discern. Without the boy, this woman’s fate would be uncertain and undoubtedly hopeless. Condemning one would mean a death sentence for them both.
Since Creed sensed nothing but truth in either of them, he saw no pressing reason to remove the boy from his mother. The only fear in her was for her son, and of Creed.
He released his prisoner. “I don’t doubt your son is good at sales,” he said. “He seems less inclined to use his skills of persuasion to avoid trouble. You might want to impress upon him the advantages of walking away from a fight rather than diving in without careful consideration for the consequences. No one willingly draws the attention of Godseekers.”
“Thank you,” the woman whispered, her green eyes filling with tears of gratitude and relief.
Creed walked away without further comment, confident the implicit warning he had delivered was enough. He threaded his way through a crowd that paid him little attention even though he dwarfed most other men. One of an assassin’s greatest attributes was an ability to move about unnoticed, and Creed, thanks to his demon father, was better at it than most.
He finally located the jail on a narrow street backing the temple. It was flanked by green-fingered desert palms and a faded mercantile. He climbed three stone steps and entered the low building. Inside, the high, narrow windows positioned beneath the ceiling beams offered interior lighting while protecting the room from the worst of the dry desert heat.
A tall man, seated in a straight-backed chair, bent forward over a heavy oak desk. He coughed into a crumpled handkerchief, his bony shoulders shaking. His face was as gray as the walls. The rattling cough, combined with the unhealthy pallor to his flesh, suggested the odds were good that he was also dying.
Creed waited in silence until the coughing fit subsided.
“I’m looking for the sheriff,” he said.
The man mopped at his mouth with the handkerchief. Although reflecting ill health, his gaze was intelligent and thoughtful, as if he had not yet given up on living. He tapped the badge on his chest, then extended a hand. “You found him. The name’s Fledge.”
Creed took the offered hand, shaking it as he introduced himself. “I represent the Temple of Immortal Right and the Godseekers. I was told you might have information regarding several children who have gone missing in recent months.”
Sheriff Fledge tipped back in his chair. “Why would an assassin be interested in a few missing children?”
“It’s not the children who interest me as much as the circumstances in which they’re rumored to have disappeared.”
Fledge hooked a chair near the desk with the toe of his boot and flipped it around, then gestured for Creed to take a seat. Creed dragged the chair to the far corner of the desk so that his back faced a wall, not the door. A slight grin crossed the sheriff’s thin face as he noted the action.
“I don’t have much hard information,” Fledge said. “Besides, there are all kinds of rumors flying these days.”
“Such as?”
The good-natured smile faded. “The kind that says those children are spawn. That there’s a whore hiding in the Godseeker Mountains who’s one of them, too. That maybe the Demon Slayer is to blame for them by taking up with a demon when he should have been protecting people from her kind instead. He’s abandoned us, leaving his work half done.”
The sheriff had strong opinions.
Creed could ignore his use of the term whore. It was not meant with any disrespect, only as a distinction. Women, owned by men and used as they pleased, were one of three things—wives, daughters, or whores.
But Creed disliked the term spawn when used by a mortal. It was a slur against all half demons—and an intentional one.
He especially did not like hearing it associated with Raven, who was the “whore” on the mountain Fledge mentioned. She and Blade had begun a new settlement in one of the many abandoned mining towns, where they welcomed any half demons who wished to live in peace.
Once he stripped off the prejudice, he sifted through everything Fledge had said for what was important. The sheriff had heard rumors that those missing children were spawn. The last time Creed had seen Willow, she’d had a misshapen and feral demon child in her company. The memory of that pitiful creature, and how she had used it, haunted him.
Perhaps Raven was not the whore Fledge referred to after all. Creed had assumed that feral child was Willow’s. It was possible he’d been mistaken about that. The thought of her raising children made his blood run cold.
“So you’ve heard of a woman hiding in the mountains who might be spawn, and blame the Demon Slayer, who’s reported to be in the Borderlands, for her existence,” Creed said. “It doesn’t sound to me as if either of them could be held responsible for children who’ve gone missing in the area around Desert’s End.”
The sheriff’s gray face reflected his agreement before another coughing spasm overtook him. By the time he recovered, his whole body was trembling.
“If you’re wanting someone to hold responsible for their disappearance, maybe you should disregard the rumors and consider slave traders instead. The man to discuss that with lives about three miles out of town on a kyson ranch.” The sheriff paused again to catch his breath. The rattling sound in his chest filled the silence of the empty jail. “He sold his whore’s son to them about a year ago, and he would have driven a hard bargain. Maybe this season the slavers decided to bypass him and save money.”
That was a reasonable assumption, and one worth checking. Creed got directions to the ranch.
As he rose to go, the sheriff stopped him.
“If it turns out slavers aren’t responsible, have you asked yourself what else might have happened to them?” The sheriff leaned forward, steadying himself against his desk. “What if they were abandoned, and for good reason?”
So the sheriff, too, thought the children were spawn.
Creed und
erstood people’s fear. But half demons were not entirely to blame for the changes taking place. No longer under the rule of the immortals—goddess or demon—the world had no true law anymore. As far as Creed was concerned, people could choose to make a better place of it or a worse one. What was guaranteed was that it would not be the same. And if mortals were to coexist with half demons, a new path needed to be blazed.
Creed believed he had an obligation to help make that happen. He had a sworn duty to the Godseekers, but an inherent responsibility to others like himself. No matter what the world wished to think, he and his kind were mortals too.
“Whether it was slavers who took them or they were abandoned,” Creed said, “what I do know is that those missing children deserve justice, the same as anybody else.”
…
Nieve pressed both palms to her tired back as she stretched out the cramps she’d acquired from bending over all day, planting seeds in the kitchen’s vegetable garden. Every bone in her body called her by name.
The ranch had been her home for the past four years. It stretched for miles beneath a seamless roof of royal-blue sky. An impressive herd of long-haired, mammoth beef kyson roamed wild in the blowing grasses and scrub brush littering these farthest edges of the demon desert, where the animals would forage and fatten until roundup in the fall.
The unpredictability of the kyson made it unsafe for Nieve to wander too far from the protective fencing of the compound surrounding the house. The beasts were as ill-tempered as their owner, Bear, and she feared them both equally.
Wolven, another threat, had been heard howling the past three nights. A cross between an old world mountain lion and a wolf, they were the result of an unsuccessful attempt by mortals long ago to protect the desert region against the invasion of demons. Instead, wolven became the scourge of farmers and travelers. And slaves.
Bear had ridden out early that morning to check on his herd. While adult kyson had little to fear from them, calves and yearlings were a different matter. The horns and thick frontal skull bones that kyson used for defense did not fully develop until their second season, leaving their young vulnerable to wolven fangs and claws.
Despite a dull ache of loneliness she could never quite escape, Nieve preferred these hours of solitude. In another lifetime, before her world had been turned to blackened ruins by a demon who had professed to love her, her days had been filled with light and laughter.
Demons might be gone from the world now, but it would be a long time—if ever—before she lost her fear of them. And while she had given up on hating Bear a long time ago, she would never lose her fear of him.
She stared across the desert foothills to the jagged moun-tains with emptiness gnawing at the raw edges of her heart. She could not shake the belief that she had lost something of inexplicable and infinite value. Yet no matter how hard she tried, she could not recall what it was. At night she dreamed of it, but in the morning the dreams were gone, leaving seeds of discontent and sorrow sown in their wake.
Nieve shook herself. The sun was beginning to set and Bear would return soon. When he did he would want his dinner on the table, and the bruises from the last beating she’d received were not yet faded.
She turned to the low, sprawling log house and saw a stranger, larger even than Bear, striding toward her. Alarm rippled up her sore spine. At first, with the last of the day’s light at his back, she could not see much about him other than his outline, but it was the stealth of his approach that truly frightened her.
It made her think of demons.
He stopped a discreet and reassuring distance away. She had a better view of him now, and the small trowel poking from the hand-harrowed dirt at her feet seemed an inadequate weapon when she compared her slight size to his.
With wide shoulders and long, lean legs, he wore typical desert clothing—a homespun cotton shirt and neckerchief, thick denim trousers tucked into knee-high leather boots, and an oiled canvas duster. He wore no hat, and his shaved head was as bronzed as his face. The golden hue of his skin made the mesmerizing blue of his eyes even more vibrant and compelling. Kindness and good humor radiated from him. She could not look away.
She blinked several times to dispel the unexpected, hypnotic appeal. The harmlessness he transmitted no doubt served as a lure to calm most people’s fears, but served to increase her suspicions. Nieve was not an innocent and impressionable child. She knew danger when she saw it. She tore her eyes from his to fix her attention on his hands and any threatening movements he might make toward her.
“I’m sorry,” the giant said, the gentleness in his voice matching the kindness of his eyes, at odds with the rest of him. Those strong, agile-looking hands remained motionless, however, and he maintained a discreet distance. “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
A pulse thrummed in Nieve’s throat, and she fought an urge to run. If she’d thought it would do her any good, she would have.
“No?” she asked, her unsteady voice betraying her nervousness. “Then why approach me on foot? Where is your hross?”
Those beautiful blue eyes beamed benign innocence at her from his too-handsome face. “Beside the stable.”
He’d been spying on both her and the ranch and had seen she was alone. That made her even more afraid.
He realized it too, and his expression changed again, this time to sympathetic understanding. “I swear I’m no threat to you.”
That might well be true enough. But since Nieve could not recall the last time anyone had been deliberately kind to her, suspicion ran deep. She’d taken great pains to ensure she did not attract undue notice from men. The few she came in contact with on the ranch rarely spared her a single glance, let alone two. She sensed that this one, however, saw past her dowdy, shapeless dress and the faded black neckerchief covering her white-blond hair.
“I’m looking for a man named Bear,” the stranger con-tinued. “I was told he might have some information I need.” He considered the purple-streaked horizon. “If possible, I’d like a place to stay for the night, too. I saw wolven tracks on my way out here, and my hross is nervous.”
Nieve inched toward the house, ready to bolt if her knees would allow it. “My master will be back at any minute,” she said. “You can wait in the yard by the stable if you wish to speak with him.”
The stranger did not make any move to follow her. He simply watched with observant eyes, very quietly. When she was close enough to the kitchen door to make a run for it, she turned and dashed inside. She slammed the door shut behind her, then dropped the wooden bar that locked it into its brackets. Her heart hammered beneath her ribs the entire time.
Coward.
She pressed her back against the solid door, and closing her eyes, tried to steady her uneven breathing. Her trembling knees gave out, and she slid the door’s length to the floor.
Whoever the unsettling stranger was, he was Bear’s problem now.
Chapter Two
Creed did not so much as twitch a facial muscle as he watched the woman vanish inside the sprawling log house.
The fear in her eyes had astonished him. It left him feeling dirty, as if she had somehow read his carefully guarded thoughts regarding her. Underneath the plain clothing, and despite her thinness of frame, she was startlingly and undeniably beautiful. Brilliant green eyes alone, enormous in a waifish face, were enough to mark her appearance as extraordinary and render him nearly speechless. That white-blond hair was another. Creed had been forced to work hard to keep from staring at her.
He frowned at the closed door. Perhaps he had not worked hard enough. Or it was possible the woman had been so beaten down by the life she led here that she was incapable of trust.
If the latter was the cause of her fear, there was no hope for her. A woman needed to be strong-willed in order to survive a harsh world. He could not make this one his problem. She was another man’s property. He would get the information on the missing children he came for and get out. He could not right all of the
wrongs in this world single-handed.
Creed went to wait in the yard in front of the stable with his hross, as he had been instructed.
It was not long before a man on a sand swift—a large, ugly, lizard-like beast—rode at a lazy pace toward the ranch. Distance out here could prove deceptive, and it was almost an hour before the man entered through the ranch’s gates. By then the sun had already set.
The old man proved to be as large and ugly as his mount, and equally irritable. Shaggy gray hair touched mammoth, stooped shoulders. Much of his muscle had gone to fat with age, but Creed suspected what was left remained formidable enough. Black brows met over a hawk nose, and equally black eyes scowled as he brought the sand swift to a halt too close to Creed’s already agitated hross. The hross shied away from the long, razor-sharp tongue that lashed at it, and only Creed’s firm hand on its reins kept it from bolting.
If this was Bear, then he had been aptly named.
“The sun has gone down,” the man said to him. “Whoever you are, you should have been on your way hours ago if you expected to avoid wolven. The sons of whores have killed and eaten six of my best calves.”
That explained some of the ill temper.
The dead calves could only be partly to blame for this man’s demeanor. Anyone who could sell his own child into slavery would have little or no natural softness to him. Creed suppressed a flicker of pity for the tiny woman who had locked herself in the house. She stood no chance of survival against this rough-worn man. She would be dead in a few years, either by his hand or her own.
Since there would be no offer of hospitality for the night Creed would ask his questions and be gone. Wolven did not frighten him, and he would rather not involve himself in private matters that did not concern the Godseekers.
The Demon Creed (A Demon Outlaws Novel) (Entangled Edge) Page 2