Page 84 of Inflamed By an Incubus

Rosalind kept calling Archer that term, one Evelyn had never heard before, and whenever she said it, she spat it like it was a curse. Was a Crow different to a regular magic user? More powerful?

More dangerous?

Evelyn couldn’t scrub that image of Archer when he had been hit by the spell from her mind. It was seared there, kept replaying itself, and every time it did, she noticed something a little more.

That look he had given her.

Pained. Regretful. Wounded.

She wanted to believe he was sorry for the things he had done and that the thing he had wanted to say to her before Fenix had appeared had been an apology. She wanted to believe he wasn’t evil like Fenix and the others made him out to be.

That however he had felt when they had met, it had changed over the years.

Bloomed into a real friendship.

“Aryanna has to be in the London HQ. It must be the reason he’s there.” Fenix shifted his focus back to Evelyn, his eyebrows knitting to narrow his eyes as she snapped herself out of thoughts of Archer.

That look he gave her said he wanted to ask what she had been thinking about and she braced herself for it, steeled her heart and shored up her defences because if he knew she had been thinking of Archer as a friend, he would be angry with her, but she couldn’t help it.

Archer had been her friend.

He had saved her life.

More than once.

And he had brought her back from death.

She couldn’t just cast aside the years of friendship they had shared and she wouldn’t believe they had been a lie, not until she heard it from Archer himself.

Fenix huffed and she swore she could feel him shaking off his urge to demand to know what she was thinking.

“You have to help us.” His gaze implored her to do just that. “We need to get to her first. It’s the only way to stop both Archer and Archangel.”

Evelyn held his gaze, unsure of what to do and who to trust now. She was sure of something though. She looked over her shoulder at Mackenzie, that familiar warmth filling her the moment their eyes met, together with something else. Anger. The reason she hadn’t been able to let the fact Archangel was documenting so many portals go was that it angered her. She knew in her gut what Archangel were doing. Fenix was right about it. Archangel had Aryanna, a sorceress who could cast powerful curses, and they were seeking the locations of every portal in this world.

They meant to close them and then cast a curse upon the immortals.

And that made her want to rage, to burn the hunter organisation to the ground.

They were no better than the blood mages.

Hunting and trapping entire species. Using them against their will. Killing them.

She looked into Fenix’s eyes as resolve flowed through her, as the need to fight rose within her, and this time she embraced it.

“What do you need me to do?”

Chapter 25

“No, you’re not listening to me. You need to concentrate.” Mackenzie’s tone had an edge as sharp as a blade as the fiery redhead threw her hands up in the air and pivoted away from Evelyn to stalk a short distance across the lawn of Fenix’s mansion.

“I am concentrating!” Evelyn snapped back at her.

She wasn’t.

She had been finding it hard to focus since Fenix had spoken to Rosalind and Vail about something and had teleported away. Her mind was running amuck, hurling images of Fenix with another woman at her, their bare sweat-slicked bodies straining in unison. It was hard to shake that vision of him as it poisoned her mind and set her body aflame with rage that burned so hot she wished she could do what Mackenzie was trying to teach her.

Teleport.

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