Page 55 of The Demigod

“Fucking not the time,” he said as I felt a familiar tightening in my core. But his voice was a mix of amused and frustrated. Like he wanted nothing more than to stop and ease some of the growing ache.

“I can’t help it,” I confessed, snuggling into him, loving the way his arms instinctively tightened.

I wanted the ground to grow solid again, so Daemon could slam me back against one of the lovely trees around us, strip off my pants, and surge inside me.

I never imagined having a fantasy for fucking in the Underworld. But there was no stopping it, either.

Somewhere behind us, a sound started that had a shiver moving down my spine.

A growling.

A growling in theUnderworld.

I mean, sure, maybe it was just another flesh-eating demon. But it could also be, you know, a freaking three-headed demon dog.

A growl moved through Daemon in response, and I could feel his talons elongating, biting into my flesh.

Which, yeah, wasn’t helping the whole attraction thing.

I, apparently, had a thing for his wicked side.

“Wrap me up,” Daemon said, pressing the shirt with the poppies between us as I turned in his arms, wrapping my arms and legs around him just before he jumped up, grabbing the lower limb of the tree and hauling us up.

I didn’t mean to look down.

But with my head over his shoulder, there was really nowhere else to look.

There, lunging up at us from the ground, was Cerberus. The three-headed dog. And each one of those heads had a mouth full of razor-sharp, impossibly long teeth. And each of those jaws was snapping at us, hot saliva flying from their canines, burning anything it touched.

“Daemon!” I shrieked, clutching him tighter.

He said nothing, just hauled us up onto the next branch, then the next.

My belly was flip-flopping as Cerberus kept leaping, jumping impossibly high. High enough that I could feel the heat of his breath, could smell the strange, burning scent of his body.

There was a growing tension in Daemon’s body that had my nerves jangling together, worrying we were out of tree, that we weren’t going to get out of here. That by trying to do good for the humans, I would end up tortured for eternity by demons.

“This is the part where, if I could pray, I would,” Daemon said.

Then, before I could let the anxiety surge through me, he was leaping, propelling us through the air.

We landed hard on a narrow, crumbling ledge just below the hole that fed up through the Hellmouth.

“Can he follow us?” I asked as Daemon tried to reach toward the hole.

“I don’t think so,” he told me. “But we’re just gonna run like hell back to the car, just in case.”

With that, he jumped.

I could feel the tension in all of his muscles as he dragged not only his but my weight through the hole.

Sweat was soaking through his shirt, the scent of—something smoky and pleasant, like a campfire—making that desire ratchet back up as he ran through the tunnel toward the mouth of it.

The cold nipped at my skin when we finally broke through to the human plane.

But we didn’t dare stop.

Not even to fetch my jacket we’d discarded before heading down to the Underworld.

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