by Logan Jacobs
If I could, I’d tear his head from his rotting torso one day for forging us into these festering messes.
But there was something else burning lower down in my gut, and I felt like it tied me to Ashe in a way I’d never experienced before. Not from this side of things, anyway.
Ashe and I had both broken free of the Dark King, and tonight, she’d turned straight to me and trusted me to take her, punish her, and basically do anything I needed with her. This made her feel content, and I’d felt for myself how much she loved it.
I honestly loved it, too.
I pulled my lips from hers so I could look into Ashe’s pink eyes, and she still had a hopeful glint about her.
“Obey me, then,” I offered without a second thought.
Ashe’s demon eyes lit up. “You’d really do that? You’d be my king and master here?”
“If that’s what you need,” I replied. “I told you earlier that I’d make sure you had everything you needed up here, and I meant it, but I won’t treat you how the Lord Captains treated us. I’ll be a different kind of master, and one you can trust.”
The demon woman purred with gratitude as she pounced on me, and I chuckled as I found myself pinned under her silver body with her sweet tongue roving my mouth. The two of us bit and licked at each other as her purrs tickled my lips, but just as I was entertaining the idea of kissing the little fiend elsewhere, I smelled something in the air.
It was strange, and faint, but it made my gut clench, and I cupped Ashe’s bare ass to slide her off of me.
“Hold on a second,” I muttered against her lips.
“What is it?” Ashe asked.
“I don’t know,” I replied and got up from the bed. “Just caught a scent.”
“I love a man who’s always willing to hunt,” Ashe purred from her place on the bed. “It’s a beautiful sight to witness.”
I stifled a chuckle as I sent a wink over my shoulder, and the demon woman openly admired my naked form while I headed toward the window.
I couldn’t get the scent of her lust out of my nose or head, especially now that she was under my command, but my gut was still tightly knotted. My hackles rose the closer I came to the dirty windowpane, and my demon senses started to fester under my skin.
The strange scent was stronger over here, and I stooped to peer out through the one clean corner of the glass.
“Atticus?” Ashe said as she probably smelled my tension.
Then I heard her coming over to join me, but something else held my undivided attention now.
From the dark alleyway opposite the inn, the telltale sign of gold, glowing eyes illuminated the shadowy space. I couldn’t see who exactly those eyes belonged to, but even the glass and the space between us wasn’t enough to hide the potent scent of pure, holy evil that wafted from the street below.
“Shit,” I whispered.
“Who's out there?” Ashe breathed as she stayed back out of sight. “I can smell them, but I don’t recognize the scent.”
“It’s the Blessed,” I growled. “They’ve already found us.”
Chapter 6
“What?” Ashe gasped, and she dropped to her knees to crawl closer to the window. “Are you sure?”
“Positive,” I confirmed, but then one of the beings with the glowing golden eyes stepped out of the shadows, and both of us went silent.
He was a human man, and I immediately noted the burly build of his body and the rugged look of his face and clothes. His brown leather jacket was stained and tattered as it strained around his broad chest and arms, and his rough pants and leather boots were just as well-worn.
From where I watched, I could only see two swords on his belt, but both of them had glowing golden gems embedded in the blades.
This rugged bastard was blessed with angel magic, from his entire physical being straight to the tips of his blades, and I knew what this meant.
They’d fight as hard and as fast as the angels, and as I counted the nine other pairs of golden eyes lurking in the shadows, I knew Ashe and I were fucked.
“You’re sure that’s the Blessed?” the demon woman whispered. “I’ve never encountered them before.”
“That’s them, alright,” I growled. “The eyes and weapons are a dead giveaway. My guess is the deacon who saw us earlier put the target out on us, and the Church called in their holy hunters. Fuck.”
“Not good for us.” The silver-haired beauty let out a groan as she ran one hand down her face.
Demons were a hell of a force to come up against, and the Blessed were just as bad. They wielded their holy powers with a vengeance, and once they got hold of someone, there was no courtesy like redemption.
There was only the ultimate death, and the utter end of existence.
Even for a demon.
I carefully looked out the window again and saw that the men hadn’t moved another inch. If they had only been ordered to keep a watchful eye on our movements, then they wouldn’t have made themselves so noticeable in the dead of the night, so I knew they would attack soon.
“What do we do, Atticus?” Ashe asked with her voice barely a whisper.
“I’m still trying to sort that one out,” I replied.
“Do you have weapons?” she queried. “Can we fight them off?”
“I do,” I said as I pointed over to my new weapons. “But nothing that’ll take on this many of those holy fuckers. There’s at least ten of them out there, and we can’t expose our powers to them. Not if we want to live to see another night in this world.”
“Well, we can’t have them tracking us,” Ashe hissed as we moved to grab our abandoned clothes from the floor.
“We’ll slip out of here and try to shake them off our tails for now.” I slipped my pants over my legs, and then I dragged my shirt and jacket on while Ashe wiggled into her corset dress. I helped her tighten the ties at her back.
Once we were dressed, and I collected the two weapons we had available to us, we snuck out of the room and ran through the corridor with Ashe in the lead.
“Atticus, over here,” she whispered once she’d reached the far wall.
Ashe stood in front of a window that was murky like the one in room seven, but smaller and slightly thinner with no latch to open it. The ledge was a story above the alley out back, but there were no yellow eyes down there, at least.
“We can jump from here,” she decided.
I used my elbow to smash the glass free from the window frame. The tiny shards of glass fell onto the street below and shattered into miniscule pieces. If the Blessed hadn’t been aware of our movements already, then the smashing of the glass was sure to alert them, but we could move just as fast as they could.
“Here, keep a hold of this,” I said as I handed Ashe the glaive. “Okay, go.”
Ashe grabbed onto the wooden frame and then hitched her leg up and over the window. She made the entire thing look easy, especially in such a tight corset dress.
“Looks clear.” She peered down at whatever laid below us, tucked the glaive under one arm, and then she jumped. The fall wasn’t far for a demon, so she stuck the landing perfectly like the jump hadn’t been more than a light hop.
I followed Ashe’s example, and I tucked my flail into my belt before I grabbed onto the sides of the frame. As expected, the space was far smaller for a demon my size, and I felt the wood rub against my back and thighs as I curled my body through the opening. As soon as I had both feet past the threshold, I made the jump and landed right beside my fiendish goddess.
Then we sprinted behind the inn and the other buildings that sat alongside it.
I checked the other alleyways every time we passed one, but thankfully, no glowing golden eyes were seen. The mundane sounds of the beings who took over the Shadow Quarters filled my ears as we sprinted past their homes, and I listened to their music, laughter, and the occasional snort and snarl whipping past. I also made out the panting of my breathing, and the way our feet pounded against the stone and mud as we ran faster tha
n any mortals could.
After several minutes, we’d reached a part of this quarter I was still to investigate, but we continued to follow our senses and stuck to the backs of buildings and alleys.
A sense of urgency filled my body as we ran. Not only did we have the Lord Captains plotting their next move to catch us, but now these holy fuckers had been sent to rid us of our lives.
Fortunately, the Blessed smelled awful in the holiest way, and I could now track when they were near. If the scent ever became too strong, we’d just have to turn and run in the other direction until we found a better solution.
Hopefully.
The Blessed were just as cunning as demons, and I wouldn’t put it past them to catch us off guard one of these days.
What mattered most, though, was that they never discovered what our hell powers were. Any magic our voids had embedded in us, the angels could counter just as effectively, and the less the Blessed knew about our true abilities, the better. It meant they couldn’t seek the help of the angels to gain even more powers and definitively wipe us out.
We dodged the low branches and the other obstacles in our way, but we continued to run as far as Rengfri would allow us. We finally came to a halt on a set of some stone steps deep within the Shadow Quarters, and the Blessed hadn’t followed us this far, so we took the opportunity to think for a minute.
It was noticeable that we made it further into the darker side of the Shadow Quarters, and evil cackles and snarls met my ears along with a mix of sinful smells that grew stronger in this area.
The ruins of some abandoned buildings were up ahead, and we traveled toward the stone walls. They were overgrown by a swarm of deep-green moss that trickled through every crack in the stones. One wall had crumbled to the ground, and the others surrounding it weren’t far off from doing the same thing.
The moon was high in the sky, and the air had become colder and harsher, so a prickly feeling ran across my exposed skin. I welcomed the chill of the breeze, and I let it cool my temper as I thought about the holy hunters we now had on our trail.
“Let’s try through there,” I said as I pointed through the ruins.
“Do you know what all of this is?” Ashe asked.
“No, but it could be a place to lay low until we know for certain that the Blessed have gone,” I replied.
The ruins were much larger than they appeared from the alley, and it now looked as though the shell of the ancient building was once a palace, or maybe even a church.
The last thing we needed was to come across another holy dwelling in this city.
The ruins had the remains of oval archways, giant cutouts in the walls that must have been windows, and solid slabs of rock placed in the center of the ground. The rocks had been chiseled into perfect, circular rounds, and a smaller rock on top of each slab held more intricate details, like it was a symbol for something. Unfortunately, the many years since the palace had been at its full glory wore away the majority of the details. It gave me very little to work with, and I couldn’t guess what exactly used to stand here.
“Oh, look!” Ashe called from her spot deeper inside the ruins. She pointed a slender finger toward the ground, and it wasn’t until I reached her that I saw what exactly she’d found.
Set up in the center of the stone floor was a mosaic. The tiles of the image were a variety of sizes, and they were all different shades of orange, blue, white, and green. A large crack in the middle of the mosaic distorted the tangled picture, but even with the slice through the center, I still knew what it was, and who it represented.
The tiny tiles made up a face which looked human at first glance. Wild, orange, curly hair surrounded the face, and mixed in the middle of the curls were five menacing serpents. The serpents’ fangs were bared, and their forked tongues seemed to be tasting the imaginary air around them. The mosaic gave me a completely different idea of the ruins we stood in, and even though it appeared empty, I knew someone, or something, still resided in the area.
A creature who was known to greatly resemble the image on the mosaic.
“Let’s keep moving,” I decided.
Ashe nodded her head in response to my decision and climbed the half-wall to her left. She heaved herself up high enough to see over the top, but then she dropped back down only a second later.
“This way’s a dead end, it just leads into the forest,” she said as she brushed back a loose strand of silver hair that had fallen in front of her face. “We’ll need to go back the way we came and try another path.”
“Yeah, the farther from the forest, the better,” I agreed.
We retraced our steps out of the ruins, but before I had the chance to think about where to go from there, a crash echoed through the thin alleyway ahead.
“What are you doing here?” a harsh, female voice hissed from the shadows.
“Nothing that concerns you,” I growled.
“Oh, but it does.” The female’s tongue got caught on every “s” she spoke, and the resulting hiss was how I imagined a snake would talk. “You see, this is our home.”
Three gorgon women walked out of the shadows. Their scaly, pale green skin shone in the moonlight, and all three of them stood at least a head taller than me. Their bodies were slim, and scraps of fabric barely covered their nipples, but that didn’t seem to bother these women. Like the face in the mosaic, these women all had wild, curly hair that billowed out around their faces, and each one bore the same pair of piercing blue eyes.
I was still a demon beneath my human form, so I wasn’t sure if their eye contact could end my life right now, but I made sure not to hold their gaze, just in case.
I had encountered gorgons on the surface world before, but this was the first time I’d seen them standing on two feet. Other times, they’d only ever been in their secondary form, and I remembered how their bodies coiled into a giant serpent from the waist down. Their fangs had grown longer and sharper, but their blue eyes stayed exactly the same, and no matter what form they took, gorgons could turn any mortal creature into stone if they only held direct eye contact.
Gorgons were also incredibly protective of their land and history, and they preferred to keep to themselves. Now, we’d been found in their home, and this wasn’t something they would take lightly.
“We’ll be on our way,” I calmly told the three gorgon women.
The ripe smell of their violent appetites rippled from all three of them, and I would have loved to feel the pressure in my hands as their necks snapped, or to see Ashe claw out their jugulars with her deadly talons. The urge to end the evil creatures right here almost became too much to bear, but I had enough on my plate already, and I could return to the gorgons later if I wanted to.
I turned to leave, but a slim green arm shot out in front of me.
The gorgon slid in between me and the ruined wall beside me, and I felt the strength of the glare she forced onto me.
“Not so fast,” the gorgon snarled. Her voice was smooth and somewhat melodic despite the hiss of her tongue. “Tell me why you are here.”
“We were looking for a place to hide for a bit, and we didn’t realize this place was already taken,” I said honestly.
“This place is ours, and it is no place for the likes of you,” she hissed. “You must go, but if you dare step past these walls again, you’ll join the other trespassers.”
The gorgon pointed a long, scaled finger beyond my head, and when I turned to look, I noticed an area that resembled a makeshift graveyard. A line of stone statues was placed along a half-ruined wall, and each one was a different species. They all bore the same look of pain and terror on their rigid faces, and from the state they were in, it was clear some had been here longer than the others. One elven statue at the far end of the display looked brand new, like the victim’s body had only solidified a day ago.
“We said we’re leaving, bitch,” Ashe huffed.
The women didn’t seem to appreciate the annoyance of my partner, and all three of
them quickly crowded around her. Their svelte bodies towered over the demon woman, and I caught the gleam of their fangs that slipped past their lips.
“What did you say?” the gorgon in the middle demanded. She must have been the leader of this group.
“I said we’re leaving, bitch,” Ashe retorted, and I heard the hint of her demon voice beginning to fester in her throat.
I had to grin. These gorgons had no idea who they were fucking with.
The curled messes of the gorgons’ hair began to shake as the strands transformed into black serpents. The tiny, yet mighty, mouths of the snakes widened to reveal the teeth inside. Each snake had their eyes firmly directed toward Ashe, and the black bodies coiled into a spring as if they were about to strike.
At the same time the snakes sent off their warnings, the women all brought out blades they’d had tucked into the back of their outfits.
My grin faded a bit.
I knew from the complex designs etched into the weapons that these were onyx blades, but there was a subtle difference. Onyx blades were typically black, but these shone a light blue in color. The weapons looked to be infused with some kind of magic, and it worried me slightly that I didn’t exactly know the secret behind the blue sheen.
Then the leader of the gorgon group raised her weapon, and she angled the tip of the blade in line with Ashe’s cheek. The other women held them to the side, as if they were waiting on their next command, but they wouldn’t even get that far.
I hadn’t intended to kill these women just yet, but the second their ringleader raised her blade at Ashe, I saw red. I no longer cared about the gorgons’ history and the powers they held.
I’d slaughter all these snaky bitches for even thinking of cutting my woman.
I could tell by Ashe’s calm smirk that she was prepared to murder, but when she saw me slowly stalking forward behind the gorgons’ backs, she smiled even wider.
The gorgons hadn’t paid me any attention, and this gave me the opportunity to grip the handle of the flail that hung from my belt.
I swiftly freed the weapon before I swung it out wide, and the steel striking head connected with the lead gorgon’s arm.
