The pressure in the room shook slightly, and Coal glitched in like the girl from The Grudge. Way to be stealthy about it, asshole.
“They’re in another room.” He pointed to a small opening, concealed by shadows as if I were an idiot and should have seen it. I guess I was taking too long for his liking.
“I hadn’t gotten there yet, jerk,” my voice came from nowhere and echoed around the room. He made eyes at me, but without anyone stare at, he just looked like a weirdo talking to a dark wall.
“Why are you being so cryptic? You’ve never been cautious before. Why start now?” He was right, I was usually very cocky when hunting, but this place gave me a weird vibe. Why couldn’t I sense the fear? Four women and a serial killer, the site should’ve been overflowing with the delicious scent. Something felt wrong about all of it.
Coal dropped to his knees to crawl.
“Wait.” I wasn’t sure why I cared, but I was a little edgy. “I can’t sense the fear. Something doesn’t feel right about this.” My full form took shape behind him as I whispered.
“They’re in the next room.”
“It doesn’t matter. I can normally smell fear from blocks away.”
“Are you scared?” he taunted.
“No.” It was true. I wasn’t scared, just hesitant as I jerked my head back.
And as much as I hated to admit it, I didn’t want to see him get hurt, but I wouldn’t tell him that.
I narrowed my eyes and put on my battle face. He waited patiently, like he had all day.
“For fuck’s sake, let's just get on with it.”
I shifted into shadow and slipped through the hole in the wall at the same time he did. We appeared on the other side together. I was slightly astonished that he even made it through.
This room was much larger but created in the same manner as the smaller chamber. It must have taken weeks of dedication to hollow out the earth in this way. It was bigger than my apartment, and Coal was able to stand without ducking. Thousands of candles burned along the walls, lighting the cave. Only true creeps and killers would have taken the time to create the space. This guy was going to be a real treat, and I couldn’t wait to dive in.
In the center, four women were hunched over, naked. They were sitting on bare knees, backs together in a circle with their hands tied between them and a bundle of rope holding them all to one another. Blood was caked in their blonde hair, dried to their fair skin, and flaking––each one a clone of the next with slight deviations. Black leather gags with open rings caused drool to flow from their mouths. Candle wax hardened mid drip down their chests and backs. Bruises covered nearly every inch of their bodies, and lashes from a whip left welts with no real pattern. Like the person wielding it had no clue what they were hitting or didn’t care.
Coal dove in headfirst and started removing the gags from their mouths. The first woman shied away from him, whimpering, but he lifted her face to him with a gentle touch.
“Just here to help,” he promised gallantly. He was so in his element, and I almost admired him for his tenderness. Almost.
The girl nodded as sobs overcame her, and she collapsed in his arms. He worked to untie the bundle of knots that connected their hands, then glanced at me. “Are you going to help?”
“No, no, I think you’ve… ” My words drifted off when the most disgusted look twisted his features, and his nostrils flared. I could guarantee at that moment, he was thinking of what Onyx would have done. “Okay, okay,” I said and drew in my shadows until I looked human again. The women gasped, jerking back. “Don’t worry, I won’t hurt you.” I couldn’t lie to them, though, screw Coal and his guilt trips. “At least I’ll try not to.”
Coal growled without making eye contact. He freed the second woman as I went to work on the two others. They fell in a heap, crying, their emaciated bodies unable to support them from the waves of emotion coming over them. I slowly inched myself back when one tried to hug me as she thanked me. I sat still when her hands made contact.
“Okay, there will be no more of that.” I placed my hands on her fragile shoulders and moved her back as if she were diseased. I swallowed tightly against the stench rolling off of her. Coal tapped the woman’s shoulder and peeled her off of me. I sagged, glad that nonsense was over.
The women made their way across the span of the large room, led by only the candlelight. Coal’s eyes met mine in approval. I just snarled. Being kind to people was not in my wheelhouse.
I wanted to collect the fear of the man responsible and kill him with it. Possibly tap into the women but I was sure Coal wouldn’t let that happen. I wasn’t going to kill them, I think. I was just starving and needed all the strength I could get. They’d been suffering this long. What would a little more time hurt?
Feeling a little anxious and empty, I searched the room. Nothing. No more openings or outlets, other than the way we came in. No people that I could see or sense. It wasn’t until I checked the ceiling and realized that I was standing directly beneath a summoning bowl, permanently etched into the ceiling. Shit.
This perv was sacrificing these women to a demon. That’s why I couldn’t smell their fear. There was so much magic in the room it was clouding the air. I just hadn’t noticed it.
“Shay, get out of there!” Coal hollered as the women broke off into a cacophony of screams. The exit sealed, locking one of the blondes in the small gap in the wall. She wailed, her legs flailing as she struggled to get out. A glowing blue circle took shape at my feet, cracking and sizzling as it created a floor-to-ceiling barricade.
“Thanks for the heads up,” I said, voice heavy with sarcasm. Out of the corner of the room, a man appeared, holding a book. His pale skin hugged the skeleton within, cheeks gaunt, and his eyes glazed over. The candles weren’t for lighting, only for torture. The man wasn’t seeing a thing out of those marbles.
He began chanting in Latin, repeating the phrase over and over again. Lucifer and his cronies. He was summoning the demon, and it wasn’t the women that would be his sacrifice, but me.
I groaned. Why did shit have to get weird? I just wanted to feed and go home. I didn’t have time for this shit or the know-how to get myself out of the situation.
I summoned the shadows. They quickly engulfed the chamber in a rage, swirling around me and blotting out my surroundings. They drained what little reserve I had built up just as fast. Lightning zapped from the ceiling, and a long-winded cackle sounded in the cage before me.
My shadows hissed and screeched, piercing my ears. They slammed against the invisible barrier, trying to scatter but couldn’t get anywhere. Coal dropped to his knees. A gray substance was pouring from his ears as he roared. The women stilled, falling flat to the ground and covering their ears with their hands. They scrunched their eyes shut. I willed the shadows to settle, but they continued their frenzy to escape.
The air in the chamber evaporated as lightning exploded. A blue tornado whizzed around the cage, then positioned itself directly in front of me. A slimy green creature with wings like a bat appeared before me. Ew, ew, I hated bats. He stretched and yawned as if he had just crawled out of a cocoon. Rotten eggs and fart permeated the air, gagging me.
Yuck. Demons were gross.
I’d never seen one in person. Why did people summon these things? They made Daddy’s Cerberus look like the family pet.
Without hesitation, I lashed out, whipping and striking with my shadows in search of something to latch on to. My first mistake: diving into its mind. The skeletons in its closest grabbed on to mine, melding with them. The things it had done were incorrigible, even to my standards. I gasped for breath, trying my best to push the fear it induced to the side. After all, that's all it was, visions of my loneliness. They weren’t real, right?
I dropped to my knees, my heart racing out of my chest. Panic gripped me, the shadows of the souls he tortured too much to bear. He was working me the same way I worked a soul, only I didn’t have much to give.
Like th
e coward I so clearly had become, I searched the room for Coal. He was fighting his way through the best he could, like the warrior he was.
Its blue mist turned my shadows to gray, and then they turned to dust. I screamed in agony as pain coursed through me. What the hell was happening to me? I knew nothing about demons because I had never encountered one before, but it certainly knew how to work me.
And that pissed me off. I didn’t like to be toyed with.
“Coal, I’m a little out of my element here. I have no idea how to kill a demon,” I ground out through the pain.
Coal’s roar came to an end, and the cave started crumbling. Rocks wiggled loose and fell to the floor. I glanced up and noticed the bowl had gaps. Sweet baby Jesus, he was a genius. Score one for Coal on the keeping the statue around list.
The barrier broke, and with it my mangled shadows ripped through the room, immediately siphoning the fear from everyone they swept across.
My power surged as the sweet scent flooded my senses. I greedily pulled it all in, no shits given if I was hurting anyone. My lashes fluttered, and my eyes rolled back in my head. I was so starved it was nearly orgasmic as the images rushed through my brain like a raft in the rapids, their fear nourishment to my shadows.
I felt refreshed and hungry for more, but now I was just pissed. Rage clouded my judgment, and I pulled from the shadows. The women screamed, snot poured out of their noses from fresh tears as their fears came to life. The creep dropped to his knees as well, gasping for air as I fed, fueling my shadows. The demon threw its head back and cackled, cracking its bones as if it were just warming up.
I was just about to call its bluff and wrap it in a funnel of shadows when I felt the pull, the draining of my power. I jerked to a stop and searched the room until I found Coal. His skin was dark, in his true form, his body charging with energy.
“I can’t kill this thing if you’re feeding too,” I yelled over the siren of shadows as the demon’s mist chased mine—a formidable opponent.
But I didn’t much enjoy being put in my place.
“You can’t kill him anyway, not without killing everyone in this room.” Coal grunted, struggling to consume the overflow of shadow in the room.
“That’s kind of the point, Coal.”
He sagged forward, fighting the supercharge effect I had crowding us. “No, they don’t deserve to die. Not after what they’ve been through. There are other ways to kill a demon without killing innocent people.”
I huffed. Damn him and his need to keep humans alive. It was annoying.
The pleading look in his eye etched away at my rage. For some reason, way down deep, tucked away in the blackness of my heart, his opinion mattered. I didn’t have to question what Onyx would have done. She would have saved the women and gotten the hell out of the cave.
Talk about embarrassing.
“What’s the matter, Shadow?” the demon laughed. Its breath stunk of rot and infection. The putrid smell was perhaps the most horrid thing I’d ever encountered and left me wishing it hadn’t opened its mouth. I fought the vomit at the back of my throat.
The women cried, circled around Coal as he stared at me, waiting to see what decision I would make. Forget him. I kept feeding as the women cried out, fueling my rage. The crease between his brows deepened, and his freaky white eyes flashed.
Fucking A.
I cracked. I couldn’t do it. The way he was looking at me, expecting me to give in and save the day, was too much. I would never be the hero. It wasn’t in my genetics. Still, I couldn’t ignore the way he made me feel, pissed off and angry mostly. But he added other emotions to the list. Feelings I had never felt before in my long life. No one had ever shown me an ounce of care, until Coal. It may be small, but he wanted to change me, even if I refused to give in, showing that he cared. The passion he held for doing the right thing, for saving lives instead of ending them was gross at best, but his opinion was starting to matter.
Even just a little bit.
Daddy certainly wouldn’t like it, I determined. Despite what Chronos said, Daddy liked having all the souls to torture.
That was when I made the call. He wouldn’t get these four, only the creep.
“The magic is gone, get the hell out of here,” I yelled. He nodded and broke his hold on my shadow as he touched a limb to each of the women and vanished.
The demon’s mist was too much. It invaded my mind. Without the fear of the women to draw on, I stood no chance. I fell to my knees as my loneliness crept back in. It was awful, pure agony, and it wasn’t settling well with me.
Sweat peppered my skin, and my body started trembling. I tried to unscramble my brain long enough to think of a way out. With its hold on my shadows, I couldn’t use them to zap myself from the room.
I had obviously met my match, and it made me wonder why Lucifer hadn’t taken over yet. Other than me, Daddy had nothing on the power of a demon. I grossly misunderstood them. Even the daemons didn’t compare to this.
A heavy, cold hand touched my shoulder, and in an instant, I was back in my apartment. I sighed and let myself fall flat on the dingy carpet. It may have been disgusting, but it was a hell of a lot better than dancing with a demon.
My ego deflated.
“Are you alright?” Coal panted next to me.
“Fuck off.” I jerked myself to my feet and stormed off into my room. I locked the door behind me and leaned my back against it.
I was shaken to the core.
Never had I before experienced genuine fear, aside from Coal’s invasion. And unlike Coal, it was devastatingly evident that the demon could kill me.
I was stripped of what I knew––exposed and vulnerable. Raw. Embarrassed. It had happened way too many times this week for my liking, and Coal was going to take the brunt of it because I needed to take my frustration out on someone. He didn’t deserve it; he was only doing the right thing. I knew that, but I refused to acknowledge that fact. I wanted to sulk in the corner and lick my wounded ego.
“You’re acting like a child,” Coal’s muffled voice sounded behind the door. I was so not in the mood. I wished he would just leave me alone.
“Go away, Coal. I’m not in the mood to deal with you.”
“Funny, because I’m very rarely in the mood to deal with you. Yet here I am.” I wished I had left the door open long enough for him to see me glower at his words.
“Then leave!” I yelled. “Nothing is keeping you here.” His heavy sigh was loud right outside of my door.
“You’re just upset because you’re starting to realize that you're not the strongest thing out there anymore, and it's messing with you. All the more reason I am staying. You need my help, and I’m going to help you. You’re not alone, Shay.”
Damn it.
He called my bluff. There was no use hiding in my room. Whether I liked it or not, things were changing, I was changing, and I had someone to call me out on my shit.
I growled in frustration, pushed off the doorframe, and whipped the door open. He was so tall I couldn’t see his head, and he couldn’t see my scowl. He bent down. “You let those women live.” A smugness gleamed in his eyes, and I half expected him to puff his chest out.
“Don’t get used to it,” I said, as I crossed my arms over my chest and shifted to lean on my right foot. “Can you move, please? You’re taking up the entire doorframe.”
He held up his hands in surrender and turned his obscenely large body to the side so I could slip past. His chuckle rolled through the apartment as I stalked away.
A part of me couldn’t help but be proud of myself. It sort of felt good to see him look at me with satisfaction, not dread, even if my deciding factor was that it would piss Daddy off to see the change in me. I wasn’t totally reformed, but small modifications broke habits. Maybe I could change, make up for some of things I’d done, and bring back a bit of honor to the memory of the beautiful woman whose face I was given. Maybe one day Coal would look at me and not see my past but instead t
he person I could be.
My inner bitch snickered, and if it wouldn’t hurt, I would have smacked that hoe in the face.
Ugh.
13
Twisting my hair up in a towel, I wrapped my naked, flushed body in another and left my bathroom. “I don’t know about this demon shi—” I yelled to Coal, my words cutting off as I slammed into him.
My forehead bounced off of his abs, and the towel around my hair went flying. The momentum sent little droplets flying from the tips of my orange hair. I wasn’t expecting him to be standing in my bedroom right outside of my bathroom door.
I yanked my hand up to snatch the cloth out of the air but instead only managed to smack him right in the dick. He wheezed, and his hand flew to his groin. His lips peeled from his teeth, and he inhaled. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Thanks for the apology,” he murmured dryly as he rubbed himself. My eyes glued to his movements, and my tongue snuck out to lick my lips. I blinked rapidly to bring myself back to reality.
“You’re the one standing there like a creeper.”
“I could literally stand by the front door and still be just as close,” he argued. I shot him a pointed look and planted my fists on my hips. “You kept trying to talk to me, and I figured rather than yelling about demons in an apartment on the second floor with the balcony door open, I’d come in here and talk to you since you insist on not waiting until you are through with your shower.”
“Right,” I avoided his eyes. I hated it when he was right.
“Now, will you please apologize to my penis? Not only have you ridiculed it and told it you don’t like it even though it is above average, but you have also now bludgeoned it.” I cracked a smile and bent down like I was going to kiss it. He eyed me speculatively. As my lips were almost to it, plot twist, I tapped it right on the head and told it what a good little boy it was and how sorry I was that I had hurt its feelings. Coal growled and jumped back from the assault. “That’s fucked up.”
Pawns Daughters of The Underworld Book 1 Page 12
