Page 33 of Tempest Blazing
I tracked Tess across the café like prey I had no intention of hunting… at the moment.
Force of habit—my eyes cataloged every micro-expression, every shift in posture, the way her fingers drummed against her thigh when she was nervous. A decade of reading people had made it automatic, but with Tess it felt different. Sharper. Like my senses were tuned to a frequency I didn't recognize.
She sat across from Garanth Kreel, and every instinct I'd honed screamedwrong. The demon leaned forward, that trademark smirk stretching across his features, and I watched Tess go still. Not calm—still. The kind of stillness that came right before a predator struck.
My jaw clenched.
I'd been around beautiful women my entire life. Hell, I was an incubus—attraction was literally my nature. But this wasn't that. This was something else entirely, something that made my chest tight and my control slip in ways that should've concerned me more than they did.
Maybe it was because she was human, like my mother had been. Vulnerable in a world that chewed up the innocent and spat out the bones. Maybe it was her dragon bond—the strategic part ofmy brain whispered that being close to the first human Dragon Rider could open doors, create opportunities.
But that felt like bullshit even as I thought it.
No, there was something about Tess Whittaker that cut straight through every defense I'd built. The way she looked at the world like she was trying to solve a puzzle no one else could see. The way her energy hummed—not just magical, butalivein a way that made my incubus side purr with interest while the rest of me wanted to wrap her in protective barriers and hide her from everything dangerous in this world.
Starting with the demon sitting across from her.
Garanth reached into his jacket, and my muscles coiled. Whatever he pulled out, it wouldn't be good. Demons like him didn't do social calls—they collected debts, delivered threats, or worse.
A coin. Small, dark, unremarkable except for the way it seemed to drink in the light around it.
Every nerve in my body fired at once.
The thing hummedwrong—like static wrapped in rot, like something that had been touched by places it shouldn't have been. I started to rise, my chair scraping against the floor, but Garanth was already sliding it across the table toward Tess.
"Don't—" The warning died in my throat as her fingers twitched toward it.
Professional training screamed through my head:Enchanted object. Unknown origin. Hostile intent probable.But my body was already moving, pushing through the space between tables, knowing I was too far away, too slow.
Her skin brushed the metal.
The airimploded.
Reality folded in on itself with a sound like breaking glass and tearing fabric. Light bent inward, pulling everything toward a point that shouldn't exist, and then—
Tess was gone.
Just... gone.
My energy surged through me like a live wire, demanding release I couldn't give it. The incubus side of my nature clawed at the absence of her presence, leaving me raw and aching. I lunged toward the empty space where she'd been sitting. Customers scattered, shouting, but their voices sounded muffled and distant. All I could hear was the echo of that sickening crack, the way the world had twisted around her and swallowed her whole.
I dropped to my knees where she'd been, palm pressed flat against the floor. Still warm. The wood held the ghost of her presence—that bright, chaotic energy that made my incubus side want to feed and my human side want to protect.
Panic clawed up from my gut, but I shoved it down. Over ten years of military and security training didn't just disappear because the stakes had gotten personal. I forced myself to move methodically—scanning for sigils etched into the wood, burn marks on the table, any trace of magical residue that could point me in the right direction.
A crushed napkin caught my eye, soaked with coffee that still steamed. I knelt beside it, and Garanth's scent hit me like a physical blow—sulfur and malice and something older, darker. Demoncraft.
I closed my eyes and extended my senses, probing for traces of the portal's signature. Cold. Brittle. Layered with power that feltancient and wrong. And underneath it all, a familiar thread of corruption that made my stomach clench with recognition.
A powerful demon. One I'd tangled with before.
The magical signature was subtle but unmistakable—I'd felt it before, three years ago when PRISM sent me undercover to investigate his trafficking operations. That mission had ended with two agents dead and the demon vanishing into the wind, but not before I'd gotten close enough to memorize the particular way his magic tasted. Like ash and broken promises.
My mind conjured images I couldn't stop—Tess trapped in some nightmare realm, her soft human flesh torn by claws designed for torment. Demons didn't just kill. They savored fear, fed on screams, broke minds before they broke bodies. What would they do to someone like her? Someone untrained, defenseless… human?
How the hell did this happen?
I was supposed to be watching her. Protecting her. Ten years in security, and I'd let her get snatched right in front of me because I'd been too busy cataloging the way her hair caught the light to notice the threat sitting three feet away.
