My Demon Warlord

by Carolyn Jewel

  She leaned toward him, and her poise turned him on the way it always did. She was completely confident about dealing with him when the pull of their magic vibrated between them like it was alive. “The idea is that you and I would get along better if we had normal sex. We could get all that out of the way. Without any of that other. . .” She waved a hand. “Just. . . sex.”

  With a deliberation intended to annoy her, he ate a piece of shortbread and then another. “You mean boring sex?”

  Annoyance flickered across her face, and she focused on the shelf of glass vases arranged on one wall. “Maybe if we did, we’d stop being so tense when we’re together. Just, you know, have sex when I’m not all having trouble. You too. Are you telling me you haven’t wondered what that would be like?”

  “I’m always messed-up.” He poured more whisky into his glass. He wished he could get drunk.

  “You’re being unnecessarily difficult.”

  “I think I’m being exactly the right amount of difficult.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes.” Her attention was fully on him, and that was something, having her looking at him like that—those soft eyes, that beautiful face. “Well?”

  “No, Kynan. You know that’s dangerous.”

  “Think of the power.” He leaned closer. “Mine and yours, twinned.” Her pupils widened, and for a deathless moment he thought she might say yes. The thrum of arousal started up, connecting them even tighter. “You’re the only one I’d ever make that offer to. I’d give you full access.” He was close enough to brush his lips over hers, so he did. She didn’t pull away. With his mouth hovering over hers, he said, “Not just you belonging to me, Maddy.” He brushed a finger over her temple. “I’d belong to you, too.”

  Her eyes closed, and his mind and emotions suspended in the silence. Then she pulled away and frowned at him with one of her intense looks. The kind he saw all the time when she was thinking hard about something. “We can’t.” She shook her head. “We can’t be like that.”

  “Then what you’re calling making love is really just fucking.” He looked at her straight on. “Maybe I don’t feel like having sex with you just because you formed a committee to decide what I should do. I guarantee none of you knew about the risks for me.” He stood. He was legitimately upset now. “I have a blood-bound promise to fucking Nikodemus about you. You’re asking me to put that at risk.”

  Her eyes got big. He refused to care about how her eyes made her come alive to him. “It’s just sex, Kynan.”

  “It’s never just sex with you. Never.” He fought to keep his voice level and lost the battle. “You have no idea.” His dead sworn shouted objections. If he said things he shouldn’t, if that got her off this subject, then good. Never mind the collateral damage. “Not one fucking idea what I deal with every minute of every day. As long as those bonds are like this, we can’t be normal. There is not one chance in hell of normal sex for us. We are fucked, Winters. Both of us.”

  She withdrew. Shut down. “A simple no would suffice.”

  “No.”

  “Thank you.” She unfurled her legs and put her feet on the floor. “I appreciate you listening to me.”

  He grabbed his whisky, took a long drink and stood there staring at her. The more he thought about her asking him for sex like it was no big deal, the more pissed off he got. “Maybe fucked-up sex is the only sex I want with you. Did you think of that? Maybe that’s the only sex I like.”

  She leaned back. “I got it the first time.”

  “I don’t need a pity fuck, either. There’s plenty of humans willing and able.”

  Her reply was sharp enough to cut. “I wasn’t offering one.”

  In for the kill. “You don’t need one, either.”

  “Please. That’s enough.” She held up both hands. Her white top was extra bright against the red leather of the couch. “That isn’t what I meant. I’m sorry I came across so badly.” Here it was. Winters as hard-assed negotiator. From everything he’d heard, she was an absolute beast in the deals she conducted for Nikodemus. “We don’t get along, and we should. You’re fine with Emily. In fact I think she’s still in love with you.”

  “No, she isn’t.”

  “You get along with Addison.”

  “Not your business.” No way did he want to talk about Emily or Addison, both human. Both with magic. Both good for him in different ways. His kind procreated with humans. The kin were driven to connections with humans. In the days before the wars and rules about behavior, the demonkind had developed a symbiotic existence—humans in those times called it parasitic, despotic, or whatever the local idiom was for evil personified. Whatever. His kind and her kind. The potential for pleasure wrapped up in power made existence sweet.

  “It shouldn’t be this hard, us getting along.” She put her hands on her hips. “You can deal with everybody except me. I would like for that to stop. I don’t think that’s so much to ask.”

  He waited until he had himself under control, but the minute he started talking he screwed up. “I’m not tied to anyone else the way I am to you.”

  “Those bonds are hardly ever a problem.”

  “For you.”

  She gave him a narrow look, suspicious. “Explain that.”

  All of it came out, and he didn’t have the right words. Only the ones that flowed out of him seared by anger and frustration. They were bound by magical bonds he was prohibited from allowing to close. That had unpleasant consequences for him. “You’re the one who fucks me up every goddamned minute of every goddamned day. Not Emily. Not Addison. You.”

  “Thank you for that helpful clarification.”

  “It’s about time you saw things from my perspective.”

  As she stalked past him, he held out the Macallan. She gave him a venomous look. “I bought it for you.”

  “I don’t like Macallan.”

  She stopped dead, and this time she was so wooden he knew he’d hurt her. Ice coated every word of her reply. “That is a lie.”

  “The only thing you know about me is what I like when I’m fucking you.” He retreated into the cold comfort of his sworn.

  “Emily mentioned it a couple of years ago.”

  “It’s not my favorite anymore.” He braced himself, because he recognized the look in her eyes.

  She spoke crisply. “Fuck you, Kynan.”

  He watched her leave, spine straight, moving quickly. It was better this way. It really was.

  CHAPTER 2

  Seven months after the Macallan incident, Kynan parked five streets away from Winters’ house in the East Bay city of Kensington. He wasn’t looking forward to seeing her for first time since she’d given him a thousand-dollar bottle of whisky, and he’d turned down her offer of normal sex. Normal sex, when they could live in a world of exquisite pain.

  Nikodemus refused to let him out of his obligation to work with her newbie witches and mages. Everybody had to take a turn, so if he got off, everyone else would be asking to get out of the drudgery, too. The general feeling, never expressed to Winters except by accident, was that 99.97 percent of her newbies had little to no talent, and that she spent way too much time talking about missing witches.

  So. Here he was. Like it or not, he had to deal with it. He got out of the car and headed for her house. She lived in the hilly part of the city, a community nestled right up against the university town of Berkeley. There were bad and good things about her living here instead of in San Francisco. There was too much cover for someone who wanted to set up an ambush. On the other hand, there wasn’t much street traffic and not as many people per square mile as, say, closer to the Cal Berkeley campus. That meant less potential for the kind of interference caused by too many humans.

  A few wispy clouds floated in the blue sky. Seventy-five degrees was cooler than he liked, but with hardly any breeze, this was the local weather sweet spot between the departure of the morning fog and its afternoon return. Not that the weather mattered. He did not a
nticipate this would be a fun day for either of them.

  Nobody disagreed that the magekind’s practice of abandoning kids who failed the early test for magical ability was a heinous thing or that some of those kids actually were magic users. But they weren’t disproportionately missing the way Winters insisted when she got off on one of her tangents.

  So, just fucking fantastic. He had to pretend he was all serious about helping humans with a thimbleful of magic when his time would be better spent working with newly-freed demonkind who had, demonstrably, been harmed and could be helped.

  Three hilly blocks from his destination he stopped dead. His upper chest vibrated. Not enough to be a full-on warning, but not right, either. His enslavement to Magellan had taught him never to ignore subtle reactions like this. Centuries ago, he’d underestimated the significance of humans developing magic. While he’d believed human magic users were a threat, he’d never thought they were an immediate one. There hadn’t been enough of them to matter, or so he’d thought.

  In hindsight, he should have paid more attention to their growing numbers. Their mood, their anger, and their resentments at the way they were treated. Prey. Objects to amuse. Conduits for the uses of magic during sex. He should have believed the first of the rumors about humans killing demons for reasons other than self-defense.

  He started walking again. Now he had all the proper respect for humans who used magic. He believed the worst of every single one of them until they proved, by blood-bound oath, that they were safe. A car turned the corner from the slope behind him, heading downhill. His alertness cranked to high, but the occupants of the vehicle were normal humans. All the same, a whisper of ice slid down his spine, which was odd. Vanilla humans shouldn’t set him off.

  He kept moving. So did the car.

  Behind him, he heard the electric whir of the car window lowering. Magekind had been known to use innocent humans as a diversion. He glanced at the car and cast wide with his senses.

  Girly laughter floated from the open windows, front and rear on the side that faced him. He looked up and down the street, holding killing power just in case. Two young women hung out the backseat window, university age and dangerously stupid since they were staring at him. If it hadn’t been against the rules, he would have killed them just to be safe. No one would have ever found how or why they’d vanished.

  Fucking rules. He spun his mind out wider, searching for anything out of place or just not right. There. Something. The glimmer of magic slipped away as the car came even with him and slowed. This was a problem he didn’t want right now.

  The females were attractive. Amid more giggles, one of them yelled a phone number at him. He lifted a hand, smiled, and kept walking. More laughter rolled from the car, following him down the street until he turned a corner and took himself out of their line of sight. The car continued downhill until it was out of sight. He remained tense and suspicious.

  His uneasiness stayed with him even when he decided they weren’t coming back. Now he was hyperalert, and something was still wrong. He just didn’t know what yet. He stopped twenty feet from Winters’ house as every instinct he possessed told him to expect danger. Not one reaction, but a hundred tiny sensations that weren’t what they should be. Wrongness floated in the air, seeped up from the ground, twisted and pulled molecules out of alignment.

  He didn’t go the rest of the way to her house. There was nothing objectively wrong, yet his chest stayed too tight. Being near Winters always made him more sensitive to normal fluctuations in magic, but that wasn’t it. His issues with Winters were different. This wasn’t normal or random or anything like all right.

  The acrid scent of old magic floated in the air, and with it came the bitter tang of stronger, more recent magic. Human magic. Purposeful, targeted, and not the work of the dabbler who lived down the block.

  After their last encounter, Winters probably hated him more than ever, but no matter how much she hated him, and she hated him plenty, she’d warn him if there were magehelds nearby. Magehelds were demons enslaved to human magic users. Their enslavement prevented free kin like him from sensing them while a mage or a witch reacted to demons whether they were free or enslaved. He checked his phone in case he’d missed a warning text from her. Or anyone. He hadn’t.

  His chest got tight, and the triad of bonds he kept locked away pulsed against their restraints, enough that he had to worry about Winters feeling something on her end. His sworn sent up the usual pleas for him to close the bonds—which wasn’t going to happen.

  He surveyed her house and the immediate neighborhood with more caution. The protective wards he’d set after the attack on her a couple years ago were still in place, so it wasn’t like some coven or cabal member was hanging around, hoping to start a war. Someone in the house, then?

  Every so often, one of Winters’ pet projects turned out to have more magic than anyone expected. Not long ago, an unassuming, uninteresting, almost-no-power-at-all street witch had turned out to have the kind of magic other magekind killed for. Literally. Maybe Winters had found another one like that. If so, whoever it was, whatever his or her twisted gift happened to be, the talent unsettled bonds he didn’t want affected.

  He strolled past her house and cast a broader assessment the way he had earlier. He isolated his affinity for Winters, then got a bead on the others inside—five of them, all magekind to some degree—and set them aside to concentrate on what was left over.

  Background noise fell away with the deepening of his perceptions. The world came into sharper focus, and instinct pulled at him, whispered to him, all of it echoed by his sworn in languages nobody spoke anymore.

  Close the bonds now.

  Kill the magic users.

  Avenge us.

  He’d gone centuries without new sworn, so you would have thought he’d be used to the longing and the isolation of all those lives. He wasn’t. He never would be. They were a constant reminder of his failure.

  The human dabbler who lived down the street wasn’t doing anything with her magic. No worries there. She was sixty, and she’d never, in all the time the kin had been coming here, managed any magic other than a garden that thrived no matter what or amusing neighbors and visitors with what they all thought was sleight of hand. One time the old lady had been in her yard when he came to see Winters, and she’d shown him one of her tricks. It really was magic, and she’d had no idea.

  None of the collection of misfits in Winters’ house tweaked him, yet the sense of that something was off persisted. He didn’t like not knowing. Too many kin had died or lost their freedom because they hadn’t been paranoid enough, and the fact was, he was compromised because of his bonds with Winters.

  He walked a couple of blocks past her house to test whether what he was feeling had a boundary. There was one, just not the way he’d expected. With every step he took, his feeling of something isn’t right increased. Interesting. Instead of diminishing away from Winters’ house, the sensation thickened—blowing his working theory to hell.

  Another block farther, and bitter air coated the back of his throat. A sure sign of active magekind magic. He did a quick check to ensure he was unobserved before he shifted to a form humans would mistake for a large dog. In this manifestation, his magic became indistinguishable from his physical container. Humans would see what they expected to see: somebody’s mastiff off leash.

  The problem clarified immediately. There was a boundary to the magic, and he stood in the thickest of the residue left behind by magekind. He backtracked five steps and ended up in range of the wards he’d set around Winters’ house. The concentration of magic diminished. Five steps in the opposite direction, and he was out of range of his wards and smack in the middle of magic that shouldn’t be there.

  No question, one of the magekind had found the limit of Kynan’s wards and positioned himself just outside that perimeter where the natural dips and valleys of the geography hid the residue from anyone who wasn’t paranoid enough. Unless Wi
nters or one of the kin walked this way—and why would they?—they’d never notice.

  A skilled tracker could follow and examine magical scat that was years old and still acquire information about who had used what magic and what the effects had been. Fresher magic gave up even more information. He nosed around. This shit here wasn’t even an hour old.

  Still in his canine form, he studied the signatures. The center of his chest thrummed in a way that did not fit with the obvious explanation of a mage or witch of only middling power. He was reacting as if the mage were someone more adept.

  According to the tracks, the mage who’d been here was nothing to worry about. An apprentice assigned to shit work like standing around spying on—who? A bunch of vanilla humans? How were they keeping tabs on Winters from this far away? He suspected his lurker was a mage, not a witch, but he had no solid evidence for that conclusion. So far, he’d not uncovered anything that let him reconstruct voices. Maybe because there hadn’t been any talking. That showed some paranoia. Mages keeping silent because they knew a demon of sufficient power could reconstruct their conversations. Not just surveillance in that case.

  The surface evidence said this was no big deal, and he should stop wasting his time when he was supposed to be with Winters. Except he didn’t trust what he was seeing. Paranoia paid. Paranoia kept you alive and free.

  He pushed himself into the residue, and initially all was as it ought to be. Nothing here but apprentice-level magic. One mage of mediocre abilities had been here. Except his visualization of him was inconsistent. The reconstructed image kept losing cohesion. The man’s features shifted, then doubled, then tripled. Residue this fresh shouldn’t be so fragile or volatile.