Page 152 of Song of Her Siren

He grasped my face, his lips crashing down on mine for one explosive, desperate kiss. He pulled back, whispering against my skin. “You have my love and my fire until we burn into embers on the wind.”

I peered into his eyes through a veil of tears. “Then let’s see how many demons we can burn with us.”

I turned toward the advancing shadows and unleashed the might of my magic, striking them with wind and waves, causing the shadows to bobble through the air like untethered sails and the ships to smash and splinter upon the shore. I only prayed it would be enough to keep our child safe.

* * *

Gordin

GORDIN WASN’T LOOKINGforward to this meeting with the nephilim known by his familiar name as Damas. But it had to be done. Damas would be the perfect distraction while his naval forces attacked from the northeast. The witches would be too busy fighting off the winged giant to notice Gordin’s shadow army approaching. And the army was his, not his mistress’s, for he’d turned and trained the human corpses, not her. They answered to him as their master. They were his creatures in every sense. So were the undead giants and demon Terrae. In fact, every battalion, except for the demonlings, had been created and controlled by him.

Gordin no longer trusted his mistress to keep his armies safe. This world war that she’d instigated had caught the attention of The Darkness. If it was true that the demon king had come to the Fae world, they were all doomed, surviving on borrowed time until they were forced to return to their hellish existence.

The demon known as Damas wasn’t hard to find. Gordin simply followed the sounds of his blubbery sobs while he hunched over the body of the wyvern known as Shamadi. It was obvious the wyvern’s body had finally decomposed past the point of repair and Shamadi was no more.

Disgusted by his display of hysterics, Gordin hovered over Damas with a sneer. “Get up.” He kicked the corpse king’s side. “We have brought you a body.”

Damas looked up at Gordin with wide, bloodshot eyes while rotting skin flaked off his forehead. No doubt his tears had dried up, along with his blood, which meant he had hours left in that body.

He hiccupped. “What is it?”

“A centaur.” Gordin whistled for the demonlings. “He’s strong.” He braced himself as the ground shook beneath his feet until the earth split open.

Damas shrieked like a little girl, running behind Gordin as the demonlings carried in the centaur, who was barely breathing, thanks to the poison the spiders had injected into his veins. Any moment, and the centaur would die, which was exactly what Gordin wanted, for the siren couldn’t control the living dead with her voice.

Damas rubbed his chin, frowning at the body with the torso, chest, face, and arms of a Fae and the four hooved legs of a horse. “He’s no king.”

Gordin let out a string of curses. How he loathed nephilim, creatures with far more brawn than brains. “He is king of the centaurs, and his body is far stronger than the one you’re in now.”

When Damas made a face, Gordin had had enough. He slipped his sword out of its scabbard, the ring of steel cutting through the air, and promptly sliced off Damas’s arm.

Ahhh!The corpse king fell with a howl as black blood oozed onto the ground.

“Next comes your head if you don’t cooperate.” Gordin made a face while scanning the wreckage for something to clean off his sword. “You will assume your new body, and then you will shift into a nephilim. Our mistress has a job for you.”

Part Three

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