Page 3 of The Demon's Delight
My adrenaline surged as footsteps echoed up the stairs. “Unchain me, please? I shouldn’t be here. They took me, and my aunt is?—”
“You sleeping, girl?” Ignus’s voice rumbled from the other side of the door.
The demon frowned and reached for the chain. “Who is that?”
“My captor. Hurry. Please, I have to leave this house. I need to get back to my aunt.” Frantic, I tried to help him by pulling the slack tight, my feet dangling off the bed. The little spell book I’d lifted from the councilman’s pocket fell to the floor, landing flat, open to the instructions I’d followed to draw the summoning circle.
The demon glanced at it as he tried to break the chains by sheer force of will. “I don’t want to hurt you,” he apologized, trying to pry the leg shackles apart by pushing his fingers between the iron and my ankle, then attempting to break one of the chain links with leverage from a dagger he pulled from a sheath at his back.
“I don’t care if you do, please just get me out.” I was already plenty bruised and battered, a few more injuries wouldn’t make a bit of difference.
The steps approached the door. The demon stood, smoothly pocketing the spell book as he straightened up. He took up a defensive stance in front of me, a dagger gripped loosely out in front of his body. As I kicked my feet out, the stretched chain caught the leg of my small side table. I watched in horror as the table tilted, and the flask that my captor loved to leave just at the edge of my reach tipped. It hit the floor, spilling water across the circle. The demon hastily grabbed it up, but it was too late. The ash marks disappeared along with my hope of escaping.
“No. Wait!” A look of distress crossed the demon’s face. “Where are we?”
“Olinbourg.”
“I’ll—” He reached out a hand as he vanished. One moment he was there, standing in front of me, and the next he was gone.
Disappointment crushed through me. For a moment, I’d actually believed I could get out of this house, away from this cruel situation. Then I’d acted in clumsy haste and ruined everything.
I swallowed a sob as I tossed my thin blanket to the floor and scrubbed with it. I hated to abuse my only covering by getting it wet, not to mention having to soak up my wasted ration of water, but there could be no evidence of what I’d done. I was almost certainly already facing punishment for making so much noise.
I’d barely gotten back onto the bed when my door slammed open, the knob coming to rest in a groove carved deeply into the plaster of the wall.
Ignus, a teamster at the grain milling warehouse by trade and a bully by nature, loomed large in the frame. His undershirt was stained, his body rank as usual with sweat and cheap booze.
He assessed me in bed, eyes traveling the rest of the room, a deep scowl on his face. “You talking to yourself, Jane?”
There was no safe answer with him, so I just pressed my lips together and shook my head.
He let out a crass belch that made my empty stomach turn. “You know what day it is.” As if I could forget. As if I hadn’t been measuring the weeks by research days for the past few months.
I carefully stood, lifting one foot at a time so he could replace one set of leg irons for another. Begrudgingly, I also allowed him to force the crude leather strap into my mouth. It was an improvement over the previous muzzles, at least. A length of rope pulled my wrists together at my back. When I’d first arrived, I’d tried using the ropes and chains as a weapon against him. I was no longer strong enough for that.
Ignus reached out a hand and clapped it painfully to my shoulder, leading me from the room. Every cell in my body cried out for a weapon. Intervention. Anything. I glanced longingly at the faint ash smear on the floor.
I whimpered, barely a breath of complaint, but my captor took this as a personal affront. He laughed and tightened his grip on my bony shoulder.
“You know whining won’t help you.”
Ignus led me down to the dark, wood-paneled den he did his after-hours business out of. The air on the main floor always smelled like old cigar smoke and felt heavy, like even the room couldn’t process the horrors it saw.
My job was simple most of the time. Cure someone’s aunt or granny of her joint pains. Take away the cough a merchant couldn’t shake. Fix the ailments of anyone who could afford to pay Ignus to abuse my gift. I was an annoying but mandatory accessory to the process.
But research days… they were different. I hated research days with twice the venom as regular ones.
The men gathered in the den were there to study me instead of watching as I healed people who had paid for the privilege of such a gift. I was more certain than ever that I wasn’t even human to them, except the parts of me that were obviously female.
They’d all looked, too. Most of them for too long, too often.
The first and only time one of the men had actually touched me in a way I didn’t care for, I’d bitten off the tip of his finger. I’d been soundly punished for my reaction, then fitted for the muzzle. But they were all much more careful about where they put their hands after that.
Ignus shoved me through the doorway of the den where four of the usual six other men were already waiting. “Go on.”
I hesitated. In addition to the two missing men, the room was not arranged like it normally was. Instead of being in the middle of the room, the big table was pushed into the corner, all the chairs stacked on top of it. A simple wooden stool was the only seat, placed in front of the fireplace atop a patchwork of heavy cloths. I glanced at Ignus, eyebrows drawn together in question.
“Sit,” he insisted, roughly shoving me again.
