Page 52 of Tales of a Deadly Devotion
Only no blow came. A worse fate – a smug voyav crouched before me.
‘Feel better, darling?’ A dry laugh slipped from their lips, elbows on their knees, blades loose in their grasp between their legs. A mocking gargoyle.
‘Smug bastard,’ I panted. Rage still simmering too closely to the surface in me. Mostly at myself. That wild Kysillian part of me wanting the fight. Wanting it to hurt so I’d feel something other than this guilt.
‘We can tell dear Gideon you’re not at risk from blood madness at least,’ they answered, sheathing their blades once more. ‘Since neither of the Blackthorn boys were brave enough to test it themselves.’
Those words nestled sourly in my gut, pausing me as I tried to get back to my feet.
Blood madness. Inability to control chaos magic. I could take the whole house down. Incinerate it with the barest flick of a finger, and myself with it.
Thean had been testing me and I’d tumbled into their trap so easily. Another concocted scheme of theirs. But they’d revealed something in their persistence to help.
‘Emmaline asked you to keep him safe,’ I repeated their own words back to them, only now I understood the truth in them. ‘Did she mean from this?’
From Varin. From the power of that darkness. From the Old Gods beneath. From all of it.
Thean’s jaw tightened, eyes glinting with an emotion I knew they’d never express with words. ‘Once again, darling, you’re cleverer than I’d like.’
My lips parted wanting to know more, when a strangesensation rippled over my skin, a fluttering from the stone at my chest and a sharp pain from the bite at my neck, as the house clattered the sideboard cupboards loudly.
Thean jolted to their feet as if they felt it too.
Then William’s cry echoed down the hallway.
Chapter Sixteen
Kat
‘Fucking saints!’ came the echoed scream, the house’s doors slamming as I darted into the hall the same moment Thean did. Tumbling into the wood panelling as I used it to push myself further down the hall just in time just to see William appear at the other end, hands over his horns as he ducked low. Diving to slide across the tiled entryway.
I skidded to a halt. Thean slamming into my back.
A dark fiend came scuttling around the corner at the other end of the hallway. Its bony body made of dark grey smoke with glowing red eyes and lethal, long, gleaming talons. It screeched, flapping two thin pairs of beetle-like wings. In moments it formed into pallid grey flesh instead of smoke, covered in markings. Archaic rune-like carvings on its body as if it had freed itself from an ancient text and imprinted the words on itself during its escape.
It was unlike any fiend I’d seen before.
I felt the house groan as it swung one of the high beams down, swatting the beast into the wall with a crack of plaster. It screamed, claws cutting through the wood to free itself. I saw the darkening at the corners of the hall as shadows gathered, felt the brutality of Emrys’s magic. Cold and vicious. The dark creature recoiling as if sensing his threat. Too late.
A long shard of Emrys’s summoning shot past mine and Thean’s stunned forms. Burying itself in the creature’s chest as it fell and curled into itself with a screech. William let out another panicked shriek. Scrambling across the tiles towards us.
‘Gideon!’ Emrys barked from where he’d appeared from a doorway just down the hall, eyes jet-black and shadows crawling up his forearms.
Only I didn’t hesitate to finish the job as I sent my power rippling down the blade in my grasp, waiting until the fiend leered and screeched, neck extended.
One swift fury-fuelled turn. Fast enough to miss its claws as I cut off the fiend’s head, spraying the hallway with thick black blood. A loud squelch as the remains hit the tiled floor. A sizzle; dark smoke curling along the length of my blade.
Silence consumed the hall only to be broken by the pleased creak of the house, and then the shocked gasp of Alma as she rushed up from the kitchen stairs to my left. Wiping her flour covered hands on an apron.
‘Bloody bastard,’ William panted as Alma knelt to help him up, checking him for injury.
‘Does nobody know the fucking meaning in—’ Gideon came to a skidding halt on the stairs landing above us. Lips still parted in the beginning of whatever lecture he was about to give, a pair of spectacles perched on the end of his nose as he took in the chaos and now the reek of demonic blood below.
‘Bravo, darling.’ Thean gave a slow clap as they slouched against the staircase banister. ‘Gideon, you should recommend decapitation to all your patients. It seems to have cured dear Kat marvellously.’
‘That’s a blood seeker,’ Gideon replied sharply, ignoring Thean as he came down the stairs. Pulling his glasses off as if he didn’t trust them.
‘A salvek,’ Emrys agreed darkly as he examined the remains with a cold expression, suddenly at my side. Then his dark gaze found my own, ran over the entirety of me. It was then I remembered I was only in my slip, worse for wear since Thean’s impromptu sparring session.
