Page 16 of The Demigod

“And if she’s bound by magic?”

“We cross that bridge when we get to it,” I said. Even if I’d been wondering the same thing since the very beginning. Secretly, I was kind of hoping my sister could tell me what to do once I found her. Even if she couldn’t speak, I figured I could just ask her a million questions until one seemed to get some sort of reaction out of her.

“You have no fucking idea what you’re doing, do you, sweetness?” Daemon asked.

I turned, finding him watching me with a light in his eyes.

“No,” I admitted.

“Well,” he said, lips curving up. “It’s lucky for you that no one would ever accuse me of making smart decisions. Let’s find us a goddess.”

CHAPTER FIVE

Daemon

What can I say? I had nothing else to do with my immortal life. Might as well help the pretty girl find her sister.

And, hell, in the process, I might just gain the favor of the rest of the demons who expected very little of me.

Though I had to admit that the biggest motivation was to get to spend a little more time with my shadow girl.

If you were going to subject yourself to endless torture, there better as fuck be a pretty girl involved.

By the time we got the half-dead human back to civilization and made our way back to the estate, though, the sun was starting to cast little golden threads across the sky.

“I have to put you back,” Nox said, regret clear in her voice.

I couldn’t claim to fully understand her empathy. I’d have to have a soul for that. But, given my nature, I believed that only those who deserved punishment should be on the receiving end of torture.

And, sure, one could argue that all you had to do was look at humankind and their deplorable treatment of those who looked, lived, loved, or prayed differently than them to believe they were all pretty wicked in their own way.

But if a human was going to be damn near eviscerated, they better have done something equally as brutal in their lives to warrant it.

I didn’t want to tell shadow girl that the man had a pretty low chance of survival. And, hell, who knew? Humans could be pretty tough at times. Better not to fuck with her spirit when she was clearly just trying to do good.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her, shrugging. I would be. It was going to suck. But I wasn’t going to die. “You should go get some rest,” I added as we moved through the woods.

The shadows under her eyes looked purple against her pale skin. The whites of her eyes were red, and her lids were heavy.

“I will,” she said, but there was a false note in her voice.

We fell into a companionable silence as we walked back toward the estate, listening to the cooing of the morning birds waking up to greet the day.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What?”

“This. Risking yourself to save the humans, to find your sister. Why are you doing it? You could just go into hiding somewhere.”

“Could I?” she asked. “I mean, this is just the beginning. Once all of the gods are up and trying to take back the sky, land, and sea, there will be nowhere to hide. Certainly not if you live much longer than a mortal.”

“Besides,” she said after a moment, “each time in history when there was something big and bad going on, there were always the good guys doing their best to fix things, to save people. I want to be on the right side of history. What’s the point in being partially immortal if all I do is serve myself?”

“That is noble,” I decided, admiring that even if I couldn’t necessarily relate. I liked humans. Especially human women. Their mortality made them—as a whole—kinder, braver, and more empathetic.

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