I remembered the last time I’d seen the Mahati feed. “You killed people?”
“Only the old and weak,” he replied, as though discussing a lame deer in the woods. “It was quick, clean.”
Zee grunted. “Moment for peace, Ha’an. Need to speak with our Queen.”
The Mahati lord bowed his head and backed away. I stopped him, with a brush of my fingers against his arm. “Who are those women out there, and why aren’t they frightened?”
“Lord K’ra’an left them here,” he replied, in a voice that was a little too careful. “No one ever fears him. Until it is too late.”
Ha’an held my gaze a moment longer, as if making sure I understood. When I nodded, he turned without another word and strode away, long fingers flexing through the air, that silver chain around his waist chiming, delicately. I watched him, then leaned back on the rail, staring at the boys. Zee met my gaze, but Raw and Aaz studied their claws. Dek and Mal were too quiet on my shoulders.
“Will not apologize,” Zee muttered.
“I don’t want an apology,” I shot back. “I want to know how you’re planning on controlling a bunch of baby-eating demon lords.”
He dragged claws over his round belly. “Will do what it takes, Maxine. Must be cold. Must survive.”
“Like Lord Draean survived?”
“No,” Zee spat, and held out his hand. I hesitated, and set my left palm flat against his. Human flesh, pressed against demon. Fingers and claws. Though I had held his hand many times before, the differences, in that moment, seemed stark and cold.
“Forgive us,” Zee whispered, and his claws closed, biting into my flesh, drawing blood. I grunted, but did not pull away.
Behind him, out of sight on the other side of the veranda, I heard voices. Deep, masculine, slithering through the air and across my spine. Raw and Aaz stiffened and turned to face in that direction.
“Maxine.” Zee drew my attention back to him. “Are we of one heart?”
I felt sick to my stomach. “Why are you asking me?”
“Matters. Life or death. Yes or no.” He pulled me closer, staring into my eyes with an urgency that frightened me as much as those voices. “One heart, or five?”
“One,” I said, confused and uneasy. “It’s always been one.”
Zee closed his eyes. On my shoulders, Dek and Mal trembled. So did I. I felt very strange, at that moment: light-headed, skin prickling, short of breath. My armor tingled, growing warm.
When Zee leaned in and licked the blood off my hand, I couldn’t move. I couldn’t move even when Raw and Aaz took his place, their long black tongues rough upon my skin. Mal uncoiled, slithering down my arm, licking the cuts. Finally, Dek . . . though he showed the greatest reluctance.
Deep inside the darkness stirred, a slow swell beneath my soul. When I tried to push it down, my will slid over it, slippery as ice. I tried again and again, but it was futile. I could not touch that power, not even to control it.
I heard a sigh inside my mind, a whisper without words.
And then my bond with Grant flickered, and was joined with . . . something else.
A heaviness, like iron weights hanging from the bottoms of my ribs. Not dragging me down, but anchoring me. Rooting my body to the earth, to each heartbeat, as if I were some . . . unmovable giant.
But the anchor disappeared as five pulses surrounded my heart—literal pulses, as though five claws were tapping the inside of my chest, creating five separate rhythms that flooded me, threaded through me, each one harboring a wild roar of emotion that I was utterly unprepared to experience. I lost myself for a moment, swept away, tumbling down a hole made of impossible hunger and concern, and frustration.
I took a deep breath, blinking hard as my vision blurred. “What have you done to me?” I could barely speak, and those words sounded like gibberish on my suddenly thick tongue.
“No time,” Zee whispered, pulling me close. “Forgive us.”
“You already said that,” I muttered, trying to regain my balance. I felt sick, but he was right: There was no time for that because I glimpsed movement at the other end of the veranda.
The demon lords had come.
CHAPTER 18
“LIFE is no better than a game of cards,” my mother once said. “The hand you’re dealt is fate. The way you play it is free will.”
I was sixteen when she spoke those words. It was near sunset, golden light diffuse and warm. We stood on a hill overlooking Roncinha, one of the largest slums in Rio de Janeiro. It resembled a teetering, steaming pile of matchboxes, stacked and glued together, painted with the occasional splash of bright green and blue.
We’d only been in Brazil a week. My mother had never explored much of South America, and had decided, seemingly on a whim, to take us down there—crawling through the jungle, riding motorboats up brown rivers, exploring lost temples, listening to live bands on sweaty nights while eating hot feijoada.
“Lots of people will tell you, baby, that you have no choices. Sometimes you’ll tell yourself the same thing. Your back will be to the wall, and you won’t know what to do.” My mother looked me dead in the eyes. “When that happens, stop. Stop and breathe. You always have a choice. Maybe not an easy one, but you can play the cards, baby. It’s your hand. No one else will know what you do.”
“Some hands can’t be won,” I remembered saying to her.
“Well, then,” she said, smiling, looking away at that last light burning over the mountains. “You take out the other players.”
I’D learned, from a young age, to be wary of the little things in life. A tiny spider could kill with a bite. A small knife could cut a throat. A demon the size of a child could punch a hole through a man’s body with one blow.
Unfortunately, it wasn’t just size—but also the ordinariness of a thing that could mask the most danger.
So when I saw that one of the demon lords was no taller than me and looked perfectly human, I pegged him for the one who would be the most trouble. The one who would try to kill me first.
He led the way, with the sort of confidence I usually associated with businessmen at power lunches, swaggering around with cell phones in one hand, and fist-bumping golf buddies with the other. He even wore a suit, gray as a tombstone, and had muddy blond hair, muddy brown eyes, and lips that were a little too red—matching the color of his ruddy cheeks.
He scared me. But he also made me angry. I wanted to kill him. I really did. That sudden, visceral hatred came from five sources, five wild heartbeats, flooding through me like a spilled barrel of boiling water: clean, hot, and overwhelming. I latched onto that anger, though. It was better than fear.
“Lord Draean,” Zee rasped.
The demon smiled: all teeth, brilliant and white, and sharp. “How sweet to hear your voice, my King.”
Sweet like poison, I thought; his lie so obvious, so condescending, it was the same as a challenge. I felt the challenge, in my bones. In those five heartbeats, strumming against my ribs.
Then, the demon looked at me. Something cold and black slipped into his gaze—so devastating, so filled with raw hunger and loathing, that if I’d been anyone else—lived a gentler life by any degree—I might have fallen on my knees. Instead, my soul braced itself, and inside me the darkness rose, and though I could not touch it in that moment, it felt cleaner and better than the rot of the creature staring back at me.
“Sweet,” said the demon, drawing out that word with a sucking sound. “But not as sweet as this creature. Tell me, Zee’akka . . . is she good enough to fuck?”
Raw and Aaz snarled. I stepped forward, right hand flexing. “You couldn’t handle me, you piece of shit.”
Lord Draean stared, and again, I felt the power behind those eyes, power hidden in his human flesh: a penetrating strength immense and barely controlled, and burning with madness and fury.
A laugh escaped him, pricking the air as though his voice were made of needles.
“Lord Ha’an squealed a story about
a Queen,” he murmured. “Grunting a little tale about a human woman with a grip around our Reaper Kings. I did not believe him. I still do not. You are thunder, and nothing else. A woman who will be fucked, and nothing else.”
Dek and Mal hissed. I smiled. “Then come fuck me. And we’ll see, won’t we?”
I spoke those words with an unfamiliar viciousness that made me feel too good. I could taste the barely suppressed rage in each syllable and breath, and I craved the cruelty of a fight with this demon. I wanted to make him scream with pain.
I wanted to feed from his pain.
Rage flickered through Draean’s face, and something moved, something hideous that flowed just beneath his skin.
I saw it, a round object pushing up, distorting his cheek, then making his right eyeball bulge out as it passed upward like a golf ball traveling through the vein on his forehead. Bone cracked. Blood seeped from his nostrils and ears. I had the horrible feeling I might see a man’s head explode.
Zee bared his teeth. “Come, Draean. Fight us. Not our Queen.”
“No, fight me.” I curled my right hand into a fist. “Let me humiliate you.”
Lord Draean lurched forward, but was grabbed by the demon standing behind him. Tall, lean, humanoid: two arms, two legs, standing upright and clothed in a loose, clinging material that looked like black silk. Triangular gemstones resembling massive rubies had been embedded in his muscular chest; and his skin was the color of cherries, a dark, bleeding red.
The demon’s face was both masculine and beautiful. Hauntingly so. I could not say how or why, just that staring at him, once I started—drinking in his presence, once I noticed him—seemed like the only thing worth doing. Except I knew better and kept telling myself that—again and again, until all I felt when I looked at him was cold distance.
“Let go, K’ra’an,” rasped Draean.
“Calm yourself,” murmured the handsome demon, giving the boys and me an assessing look. “I do not think you want to fight that woman.”
“Let them battle,” growled the last unfamiliar lord, crouched on all fours with his spiked tail lashing the air. Massive pads of metallic armor rubbed against a long, muscular back, and a helmet covered part of his face, revealing leonine features and ice blue eyes. He resembled a cat, or wolf—maybe a combination of both—and was huge, maybe six feet tall at the shoulder and more than twelve feet long from nose to tail. Tiny hooked claws covered his legs, jutting from beneath his sleek steel gray fur.
“Oanu,” murmured Lord Ha’an, bringing up the rear. “Do not goad Draean.”
The demon flashed him a toothy grin and settled back on his massive haunches. “I goad him because I think she might win.”
Lord Draean gave him a hateful look. “For that, I will go into your territory and steal your Osul to be my slaves.”
Oanu spat at him. “We will kill you first.”
“Not if we own your bodies.”
Zee slammed his fist into the ground, punching through solid stone and making a crater large enough for me to stick my leg into. I felt the impact, not just in my feet but in my chest. An emotional collision: a spike of rage, seething and terrible, and hungry.
Not my rage. Not mine.
My left hand stung. I clenched it into a fist, a different kind of unease filling me—one that had nothing to do with those demon lords.
“Fight us,” Zee snapped. “Fight us, if must. But not each other. Never survive without each other.”
Lord K’ra’an rolled his wrists in a delicate motion, gliding sideways across the veranda. Black silk hissed against his skin, and the gems embedded in his chest gleamed.
“You made this speech before,” he said. “I was a child when my father pledged his blood to you . . . and when he died and passed his bond to me, you said those same words. After all these years, I thought perhaps you might have . . . composed something different.”
“Truth never changes,” Zee retorted, digging his claws into the stone. “Truth, then. Truth now. Will prove ourselves, if must. But to you, each other, must be honor. Clans not fight clans. Lost too much already to lose to each other.”
Oanu grunted and glanced at Ha’an, who did not seem to notice. He was too busy watching Lord Draean, whose face was even redder, the golf ball–sized lump moving through his throat into his chest. Blood continued trickling from his nose, and the crotch of his gray slacks was stained red, as well. I didn’t want to think about what was happening inside that body to make it bleed from all its orifices.
“Are you proposing peace?” he asked, incredulous, as blood tricked over his lips and ran down his chin. “Or are you asking for the same promise we gave you, all those years ago?”
“Asking for faith,” Zee told him, as Raw and Aaz moved sideways, flanking me. “Asking for trust.”
Lord K’ra’an shook his head. Lord Draean laughed outright, blood spitting from his mouth, pouring faster from his ears and nose. His face was a mess of blood, and the stain in his pants spread down his leg.
“We pledged ourselves to you because we were at war,” he said with disdain. “When the war was over, we could not break our pledge . . . but we hunted, and we conquered, and so our bondage was tolerable. Now? Where is the war?”
“There is none,” added Lord K’ra’an. “We are free, Zee’akka. We are free of you and your brothers.”
“Free?” Zee bared his teeth in a terrible smile. “Too stupid to be free. Will fight, will feed, and then?”
“War and conquer. You taught us that.”
“Conquer who? Other clans? War each other? And when Aetar come, who will fight them? Will you stand alone?”
“You lost to the Aetar,” said K’ra’an, his elegant hands still making those delicate motions. He only had four fingers, each one tipped with hooked claws. “You lost, and we were all imprisoned. You will lose again. Our faith is already gone.”
“Not mine,” said Lord Ha’an, stepping forward. “I believe.”
“You would. You and the Lady Whore, wherever she’s hiding now.” Draean’s lip curled, and he gave all the boys a challenging look. “Maybe there should be a king again, but not you five. You had your time. We gave you everything, and you lost. You even lost your power. You are no longer the Vessels. I can feel it.”
“Can you?” Zee asked in a deadly soft voice.
Draean tugged on his bloodstained suit, his smile pure cold menace. “I’ll prove it by taking your human woman for my own. I will fuck her from the inside out and make you watch.”
Like hell you will, I thought, and suffered a blast of rage so pure and hot, I thought my innards would catch on fire. Raw and Aaz tore spikes from their own backs, holding them like spears. Zee snarled, digging his claws into the veranda stone.
“You will not touch her,” he rasped—and a strange sensation sank through me, as though a hand was reaching into my body, pulling on the shadow entity coiled deep beneath my soul. I could not stop it. I tried, with all my strength, battling that inexorable draw of power and darkness.
You cannot fight this, came that whisper. You gave your Kings a hand inside your heart. They own you now. You are their weapon, just as they were yours. Your heart, guided by their hearts.
Confusion hit me, then horror. I tried to speak, but my body refused to listen. My body refused me everything. I just stood there, face impassive, eyes dull, screaming on the inside. Before, in the past, I had found myself unable to stop that darkness from possessing my body . . . but this time was different.
It was not the dark entity that possessed me.
It was the boys.
I was powerless and oddly removed, too. As if I were not in my own skin but hanging back at a distance, feeling the boys draw the darkness from me like a megaton tsunami, forcing it down a narrow path into a vein twisted with shadows gushing from my body . . . into their five hearts.
And all I could think was, You little bastards tricked me.
Zee, Raw, and Aaz shuddered, eyes fluttering shut. Dek a
nd Mal crooned on my shoulders, trembling with pleasure. It was all I could do not to tremble alongside them. I knew what they were feeling, and not only because I had ridden that same wave of power.
I could feel their hearts.
Whatever they had done, their emotions were now mine. I wondered if this was what they had felt for the last ten thousand years: the heart of their Hunter, beating and loving and hating, like a ghost inside their chests. Confusing them, making them wonder if what they felt was real or someone else. Forcing them to pick apart their own hearts to be sure.
Eventually wearing them down, so that it didn’t matter anymore if what they felt was real. It was all the same. Just one heart.
What they felt now was ecstasy. Rapture. Pleasure that bordered on agony.
I was in agony.
They will never let this go, whispered the darkness. As much as they hated us, they loved our power.
So we will let them play again at Kings. For now.
For now, while it amuses us.
Keep your fucking power, I snarled in my mind—but the darkness rested in my throat like the promise of a song, and I started to laugh. It was not my laughter. I was only a passenger, unable to stop that fierce wild sound from spilling out of my mouth—a sound shaped like a tongue tasting the air.
I scented anger and unease from the demon lords. I scented jealousy.
Zee and the others started laughing, as well: sharp, rasping sounds, like a chain saw born from a giggle. It sounded insane. It sounded like the boys were on the edge of doing something crazy. Which they totally were. I knew what that darkness could do to me. I remembered every death and act of destruction I’d caused while under its influence. I remembered the joy I’d taken in that death. Pure, beautiful joy.
I had resisted, though. I had fought back.
The boys had no intention of doing the same.
“Draean,” whispered Zee.
Lord Draean slopped with blood, watching him with hard, bulging eyes. Five minutes before, he had been slightly overweight. Now his skin sagged, as though all the fat had been sucked out of his body. He had trouble standing, leaning over as if he was about to collapse.
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