Demon Sworn: A Reverse Harem Paranormal Romance (The Witch's Rebels Book 3)

by Sarah Piper

  Still, none of the creatures moved. Fiona certainly had her work cut out for her.

  “Do you know where he’s keeping the witches?” I asked, tucking the keycards back into my pocket. “I’ll free them, then we’ll reconvene here and figure out how to get everyone the fuck out of this place.”

  Fiona nodded. “They’re all on C-block.”

  I pulled up the map on her comms device, hoping like hell my trust hadn’t been misplaced. “Show me.”

  Nine

  Gray

  That monster could move.

  While Jonathan watched on impassively from the other side of the rift, I bolted into the forest, dodging between felled trees and hopping over crevices, trying to outrun the beast chasing me.

  It was the size of an SUV with the body shape of a lion, two dragon-like heads, and a spiked tail that looked like it could do some serious damage to my skull. The only thing saving me was the fact that it was too big to fit between some of the trees, so it couldn’t always keep up with me. But no matter how hard I ran, the thing showed no signs of tiring, always waiting for me on the other side.

  With nowhere else to hide, I circled back toward the lake, hoping like hell the beast couldn’t swim.

  I dove straight in and swam for the center. When I got to what I assumed was the deepest part, I bobbed up out of the water and whipped around to look for signs of my would-be attacker.

  He paced the shoreline, as if he were trying to decide on the best way in. Razor-sharp claws glinted on all four of his giant paws, leaving deep holes in the muddy embankment wherever he stepped.

  Please don’t swim… please don’t swim…

  Still watching me, he stopped pacing and reared up on his hind legs, letting loose a violent roar that left ripples in the lake and reverberated through my chest.

  When the awful sound finally stopped, he crashed back down onto his front paws.

  And—poof!—the entire lake evaporated.

  Without warning, I fell a good twenty feet, landing on my ass on the lake’s muddy bottom.

  It knocked the wind out of me, but that fall… it should’ve killed me. At the very least, it should’ve broken most of the bones in my body.

  Instead, it just made everything hurt.

  I scrambled to my feet, struggling against the slippery mud. Pain echoed through my bones.

  Now I was completely screwed. I was twenty feet deep in a pit with walls made out of mud, and the animal was already making his way toward me with ease.

  As soon as he reached the bottom of the former lake, he charged at me once again, faster than lightning.

  I had no time to react. He was on me in a heartbeat, knocking me flat on my back, pinning me down as each one of his demonic heads sank their sharp, filthy teeth into my shoulders, piercing my flesh down to the bone.

  A shock of the most terrible pain I’d ever felt shot through my body, burning an agonizing path from my shoulders to my fingers, then down my back.

  I couldn’t scream. I couldn’t cry. I couldn’t even breathe.

  I wanted to curl into a ball and die. As long as the burning stopped, I didn’t care.

  But deep inside me, a glimmer of my magic sparked to life, temporarily breaking through the haze of pain.

  Fight, Gray. Fight!

  I seized on it, coaxing the magic to life with sheer will. My palms warmed as the magic gathered strength, and once again I drew power from the earth, feeling it soak into me everywhere my body touched the muddy ground.

  Ignoring the pain in my arms, I slammed my palms into the beast’s heads, unleashing all of that power.

  Bright blue light exploded around us.

  The beast recoiled, skittering off of me and hissing in pain, his heads trapped in twin bubbles of light. He tried to shake free, but the harder he fought, the more the magic seemed to disorient him.

  I crawled over to the edge and climbed up the embankment, slipping with every step, but desperate to get away before the magic wore off. My arms were throbbing again, but I couldn’t stop. Couldn’t look back.

  I was struggling to reach the top when a black-gloved hand thrust out above my head, offering help.

  I took it without thinking, allowing the stranger to haul me up. My shoulders burned with the effort of holding on, but I gritted my teeth and scrambled up the last part of the muddy embankment, grateful for the rescue just the same.

  He gave one last tug, and I was out. I landed on my back on the grass, trembling and spent. For several heartbeats, I stared up at the sky, now violet with orange sherbet clouds, and tried to catch my breath.

  “Thank you,” I finally managed.

  A hooded figure loomed over me, all darkness and shadow…

  Except for those otherworldly electric blue eyes.

  Ten

  Gray

  “Liam!” His name caught in my throat, emotion choking off my words. Ignoring the pain in my body, I got to my feet and wrapped my arms around his neck, burying my face in his shadowy black robes.

  He was back in his Death form, but I didn’t care. I had never been so happy to see him.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever see you again. I thought…” I couldn’t get the words out. My heart was hammering, filled with a strange mixture of shock and relief and joy.

  After what felt like an eternity, I released my hold on him and took a step back, looking up into those luminous eyes. The realm had shifted again—or we were somehow in a new place—the lake vanishing and the forest turning into a meadow carpeted in blue and silver grass. It seemed like Jonathan and the two-headed beast were gone, but I didn’t dare break my gaze away from Liam to find out.

  How long had it been since I’d last seen him—since that brief glimpse in my realm before Jonathan hauled me back into the caves? Weeks? A month?

  “How did you find me?” I asked.

  Liam was stone-still. He hadn’t said a word.

  And, I realized now, he hadn’t hugged me back. Hadn’t shown a single sign that he was happy or relieved to see me.

  “Liam?” I whispered, my heart hammering for an entirely different reason now. Had something happened to the guys? To Haley and Reva and the others? “What… what happened?”

  A frosty breeze kissed my face, my breath turning into white fog.

  “What have you done, Shadowborn?” Liam asked plainly. His voice was dead calm; more than the sudden chill in the air, that utter lack of emotion sent a shiver down my spine.

  All traces of Liam—of his humanity—were gone, and when he reached up and wrapped his hands around my upper arms, my blood turned icy cold.

  “What,” he repeated, “have you done?”

  He was talking about Jonathan’s soul, I realized. About how I’d condemned myself to this fate, even after all the warnings he’d given me the night I’d tried to banish Travis.

  “I had to do something!” I said. “I couldn’t just let him torture and kill—”

  “And banishing yourself to an eternity here was the best option you could come up with? All your magic, all your training, all your instincts… and this?” He glanced out across the realm. “This is the path you choose?”

  “You think I wanted this?” I jerked free of his grasp, anger turning my blood from cold to hot once again. “I was a prisoner, Liam. In every sense of the word. So I saw an opening and I took it.”

  “It was reckless. Foolish. It was—”

  “The only way I could get Jonathan out of that prison and save my friends.”

  His eyes blazed, his icy, stoic demeanor finally shattering. I hated fighting with him, but I’d take that over the nothingness any day of the week.

  “And now he is here, trapped as you are trapped. You have banished him, but not destroyed him. As long as you are both here, he will hunt you. Eternally. And each time you’re caught, you will be forced to relive his cruel torments. Endlessly.”

  “And each time he’s caught, he will relive mine.”

  Liam was impassive once again.<
br />
  “I made him, Liam,” I went on, the words leaving a path of fire in my throat, burning as only the most difficult truths could. “Just as he made me. This was the only way.”

  Jonathan and I had been in love once. Then, he’d tried to kill me. He spent the rest of his life hunting me down, dreaming of my death, dreaming of stealing my power. That more than anything was his life’s work, his ultimate quest. It shaped the boy he used to be into the man he ultimately became.

  And me? I spent the rest of my life fearing the day he’d come for me. The day he’d hurt more people that I love. The day he’d make good on that age-old promise.

  When I find you, I will burn you.

  If we’d never crossed paths as teenagers, how different would our lives have become?

  “I couldn’t leave him there to wreak havoc on my friends,” I said. “On anyone. They don’t deserve that.”

  Liam’s eyes softened just a fraction. “You no more made him than I made this place. He exists, Gray. He made choices, just as you made choices.”

  “Choices you obviously don’t agree with.”

  “Gray…” Liam sighed and turned his back on me, igniting a flicker of shame in my chest. Was he that disappointed and angry that he couldn’t even look me in the eye?

  “You are never leaving this place,” he continued. “All of those friends you were so desperate to help? They will have to find a way to go on without you now. You have no future. No fate. No destiny. Only this.” He swept an arm out before him, indicating the vast, endless hills, now glittering beneath the light of two moons. It was eerily beautiful, like the vines and flowers I’d seen in the crevasse.

  There were no monsters in sight.

  “Is it really so terrible?” I took a step closer to him, but a sharp bite of pain in my foot stopped me.

  I lifted it to take a look. Blood soaked through the fabric I’d wrapped around it.

  “Not at all terrible,” Liam said sarcastically, finally turning to face me again. “Especially if you enjoy long walks in the moonlight through meadows of razor-sharp grass.”

  My eyes widened. I tried not to move.

  “Nothing is what it seems here, Gray. You can’t trust anything or anyone you encounter.”

  Yeah, I was starting to figure that out.

  “Why does it keep changing?” I asked. “What happened to the lake pit? Before that, I was trapped in some kind of volcanic wasteland for weeks.” I told him about the fire demons, the smoke, how the lake initially healed my wounds.

  “The Shadowrealm comprises many different worlds. No, not all of them are terrible. Some are quite peaceful, even restorative. An unburdened soul could travel to her final destination rather pleasantly, lingering in beautiful places as she pleased, healing the spiritual wounds she’d endured in life. Others, however, encounter all manner of demons, monsters, fears, nightmares, regrets—not to mention the physical challenges of landscapes like this. If they fail those challenges, if they refuse to fight those battles, if they give up without trying, if they allow the realm to destroy the last spark of their humanity, they end up in what your kind refers to as hell, though that is really just another realm, like so many in our universe.”

  A stone bridge appeared before us, and the sharp grass beneath it dropped away, revealing a dark blue river dotted with lotus blossoms. Liam gestured for me to step onto the bridge, and he followed close behind.

  When I turned to look at him again, he was back in his human form, dressed in jeans and a soft-looking flannel, his blond hair flopping into his eyes. My heart kicked up a notch at the sight, but the rest of my body relaxed. He was much easier to talk to as Liam.

  “Hi,” I said, my voice strangely shy.

  “Hello.” Liam chuckled softly, and my stomach did a little flip.

  Had his laugh always sounded so warm? So comforting? I wanted to hear it again, but the moment passed.

  He looked away and continued along the bridge ahead of me.

  Overheard, two moons merged into one, its light glimmering on the calm river beneath the bridge. Crickets sang in the distance, and a warm, gentle breeze stirred the trees that had cropped up around us.

  The cut on my foot seemed to have healed, and I realized my shoulders no longer ached.

  “My wounds are gone,” I said.

  “Yes, the realm has given you a gift. Be grateful, but wary.”

  We continued to the center of the bridge, then stopped to watch the river drift past below, the lotus blooms floating like little boats. The air was thick with the scent of jasmine and fresh mud.

  “Sophie…” I began, but couldn’t bring myself to ask the question.

  Liam seemed to understand anyway. “Sophie passed through this realm as she was intended to do.”

  “I thought I saw her.”

  “Yes. She’s always with you.” He pressed his hand to my heart, and my skin warmed at his touch. “Here.”

  “Did she have to fight those… things? The fire demons? Or that two-headed beast?”

  “No.” Liam laced his fingers through mine and gently urged me across the rest of the stone bridge. The human warmth of his touch sent little sparks skittering up my arm, making me feel fizzy.

  I wondered if he felt it too.

  The river faded from sight as we walked, and by the time we reached the other side, it had vanished completely, replaced with large, flat-topped boulders. There were no trees now, just a field of big rocks.

  At least they didn’t look sharp or on fire.

  We started making our way across the boulder field, the moon still bright overhead, illuminating our steps.

  “Where are we going?” I asked as Liam helped me scramble up one of the larger boulders.

  “I don’t know. The realm will reveal that as you travel. I cannot influence or alter that for you, nor can I bring you home.”

  I nodded. I’d known that going into this. Right now, I was just grateful for his company.

  “How will I know what my path is if everything keeps changing?” I asked.

  It was a few moments before Liam spoke again, and when he did, his voice was heavy with regret. “You broke the natural order and came here outside the confines of your natural death. As such, while you may see glimpses of your intended path, it no longer exists as an unbroken route. You are a wanderer here, Gray. You will continue to face demons both within and without, and you will experience joys beyond your comprehension, only to have them cruelly snatched away. You will be chased and tormented and tested beyond your limits. You will be healed, only to face the same cruel brutality once again. And in the end, it will lead you nowhere.”

  I nodded again, swallowing the lump in my throat. It was done. There was no point crying over it, no point looking for loopholes. In this horrible in-between, I could bruise, I could break, and I could suffer. But I could never be killed.

  So whatever this place had in store for me, I had to face it. That was the deal I’d signed up for when I hijacked Jonathan’s soul.

  “And Jonathan?” I asked.

  “He is in a similar predicament. I suspect your paths will cross often. I suspect…” Liam trailed off, his face crumpling. When he met my eyes, his own were haunted, as though my current predicament was his decision. His punishment for me. “I’m so sorry, Gray.”

  I reached up and swept the fall of hair from his eyes, sliding my hand down to his chest. His human heart beat strong and steady, and I pressed my palm against it, trying to memorize the rhythm. “It’s not your fault. I made this choice. I knew the consequences. You didn’t—”

  “And therein lies the problem, Gray Desario. I didn’t.” He grabbed my hand, bringing it to his lips and pressing a kiss to my fingers, a quick but surprisingly passionate gesture that totally took me off guard. “There was so much more I could’ve shown you, explained to you, guided you through, but I didn’t. I’ve existed as long as the very spark of life itself, yet for this one task, I simply… ran out of time.”

  �
�It’s not your fault,” I repeated, but Liam seemed to be beating himself up pretty hard. Squeezing his hand, I said, “I’m just glad you’re here now. How did you even find me?”

  “Your magic signature. I’ve been trying to locate you ever since Darius told me you’d been taken, but this is the first I’ve sensed your power. Other than your all-too-brief appearance in your realm when you told me you’d been taken to Raven’s Cape, there has been no sign of you until now.”

  My eyes widened. I wasn’t sure he’d even gotten my message—Jonathan had yanked me back out of my realm almost as soon as I’d arrived, and I hadn’t been able to return.

  “Did you tell the guys about Raven’s Cape?” I asked hopefully. “Did they get Asher? Is everyone okay?”

  “Unfortunately, I have not been in touch with anyone since I learned of your disappearance.” Liam lowered his eyes. “There hasn’t been time, Gray. On the material plane, only a few hours have passed since I saw you in your realm.”

  “But… What?” My mind spun, trying to make sense of his words. I was terrified to ask the next question, but I had to know. “How… How long have I been gone?”

  “In linear time, you were taken by Jonathan approximately two days ago.”

  A strangled gasp was all I could manage. Two days? How was that possible when I’d already been wandering this place for… God, it’d felt like weeks.

  “Time moves differently here, Gray,” Liam explained. “That is yet another challenge you must face. You may experience the progression of seasons in a single afternoon. Your body may age thirty years in a heartbeat. Then again, you may age backward until you are a toddler, only to relive the entire experience forward again.”

  I nodded slowly, the full impact of what I’d done finally starting to settle in.

  “Is it always like that for you?” I asked. “Traveling back and forth? How do you keep the time straight?”

  “Generally, I don’t. I hadn’t a need for it. Not until you came into my awareness.” He smiled softly, cupping my face with his hand. Despite his smile, sadness lingered in his eyes. “Understand, Gray—my life, for lack of a better phrase, is not meant to move linearly. It is only humans who experience time as a straight line of befores, durings, and afters, and that’s not even real. Humans disassociated from their natural ability to perceive alternate realities and created the construct of time to bring order to a natural chaos they found too frightening to accept.”