Page 128 of Devilish Ink

Rian had always been the smallest of us boys. Or at least, that was how my father wanted me to see him.

But I could feel in his fingers and see in his eyes that I wasn’t going to escape without giving him answers.

“Where are you going?” he demanded.

My brother looked older than I’d ever seen him. He was no longer the scared little boy in the barn, begging me not to leave him alone. He was a man. He deserved to know, not to be shielded.

“I’m going to get her back.”

“How?” he asked, his voice going dark.

My stomach flip-flopped. He might be a man, but Rian was still my baby brother. I couldn’t protect him then, but I could protect him now.

He didn’t need to get involved. Blood was being shed that night.

But there was no reason it needed to stain both of our hands.

“Go home, Rian,” I said carefully, infusing my voice with meaning. “Go back to bed. Youdon’twant to be a part of this.”

There. I’d released him from the duty that he’d felt obliged to.

I tried to pull my arm free from Rian’s grip. But he held me tight.

“No,” he said in a firm voice. “I’m a part of this. I’m coming.”

I shifted my jaw.

Rian never liked the slaughtering of the animals on the farm. He didn’t have it in him, that ruthlessness. That savage instinct. That deep, unspoken craving for it.Blood.

He was better. He was always better. Than me. Than Alan. Than Da. Than all of us.

“It’s going to get…messy,” I warned him.

“For Ry?” Rian’s eyes turned cruel, for a moment I saw a flash of our dead father in them. “I can domessy.”

Suddenly it felt like he was gripping my arm not like an enemy, but like a brother.

I nodded. “Let’s go.”

I would find Ryleigh. Even if I had to burn the world down to get her.

I only hoped I wasn’t too late.

RY

“Do you like my playroom?”

The shadows distended and out stepped Balor, the overhead light cutting across his features with dark shadows making him look almost supernatural.

He grinned. “I built it just foryou.”

In Irish mythology, Balor was the leader of a race of evil creatures that came up from out of the ground and under the water to attack the innocent.

He was always described as monstrous, sometimes with one eye like a cyclops, sometimes several eyes with petrifying abilities if you were unlucky enough to be caught in his stare.

In the warehouse, Balor’s gaze was pinned to me and fear turned my body into stone as if the myth was real.

The only thing that broke the spell was the flash of metal in his hand.

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