by Nadine Mutas
Until he showed up at the Murray mansion where she stayed. Oh, he was subtle, hiding mostly in the shadows, but every now and then…she saw him. Without a doubt because he let her see him. And of all the males to which her body could have the reaction she was yearning for, it had to be him. Like some cruel twist of fate.
She should be scared of him. Not…feel heat prickling in places she’d barely begun to reclaim with her own touch.
Closing her eyes briefly, she shook her head. She had to be more messed up than everybody thought.
Arawn stopped in front of a door and swung it open, gesturing inside. “Your room.”
She had to walk right by him to get in there, so close that his body heat brushed her like a caress. Goosebumps rose on her arms…and tightened her nipples.
Gods, just kill me now. It would be a mercy.
This couldn’t be happening. She couldn’t react to him this way. Anyone but him.
Her cheeks and ears burned, and she crossed her arms in front of her chest as she assessed the room. Bigger than the one she’d occupied at the Murray mansion, and that was saying something. Like most of the rooms she’d seen so far in this underground lair, this one, too, had curving walls featuring tree roots that were decorative in their pattern, swirling in artful whorls that defied natural development. A huge bed with a frame carved from dark wood stood against the far wall, an armoire took up another one, and the wall to her right had a door leading to what she presumed was an en suite bathroom. Crystals glowed in the walls.
No windows.
The air rushed out of her. A room with no windows. Her heart raced. Dread curdled in her belly, like a fizzy tablet of fear had been dropped into her stomach and now quickly dissolved and poisoned her.
“Is there a problem?”
The deep bass of Arawn’s voice barely reached her over the thumping of her own heart. She curled her hands to fists, hugged herself tighter, and managed to look away from those windowless walls threatening to close in around her.
Lucía was staring at her with a glint in her eyes Maeve knew all too well. She’d seen it countless times on Merle, on Lily, Hazel, Basil, Rhun, and every other damn person who was privy to her ordeal. Every time Maeve so much as trembled, they’d get that look.
Pity.
For what she’d been through. For how broken she was. For all the things she couldn’t do anymore—like sleep in a room without windows—because it reminded her too much of that one in the warehouse, where the only light had been a lone bulb swinging above her bed, and it felt like she might as well have been buried six feet under for how removed it was from the world.
She was shaking now. Sweating. That fizzy tablet in her stomach foamed and wanted to spill over into the rest of her body.
“Would you like another room?” Arawn’s voice was rough silk over her senses.
She opened her mouth to say yes. Closed it again. Swallowed. Fought the dizziness creeping up on her. She should just tell him.
But then he’d know exactly how fractured she really was. How crazy. He’d smile at her weakness, wouldn’t he? Or worse…he’d pity her, too. She couldn’t even look at him. Didn’t want to know whether his face of harsh angles and rough beauty bore the same expression that greeted her on others whenever she stumbled while trying to navigate the wounds in her mind and body.
It’s just a room, godsdammit.
Her blood heated, and she pressed her lips together, breathing in through her nose. She was sick and tired of pity, of being coddled and treated like a cracked vase that could shatter at the slightest vibration. Sick and tired of being controlled by her fear, and like hell would she let Arawn see her this weak.
Anger. Anger was good. It helped push back the panic beating under her skin. Helped her clear her throat and say, “No. This is just fine.”
Lucía frowned and stirred as if to speak, but Arawn made a subtle gesture, and she held her tongue.
“Good,” Arawn said. “Take today to rest and explore, if you wish, and tomorrow we will start looking into the spell binding your magic. If you need anything, ask Lucía and she will make sure you receive it. She will stay close to you.”
“I’m free to…explore?” She raised a brow.
The smile sneaking onto his face was positively feline. “My secrets keep themselves. Wander around however you please, as long as Lucía is with you.”
He turned to leave.
“There’s one thing,” Maeve said, her voice wavering over her thundering heartbeat.
Arawn halted, dark power whispering about his shoulders.
“I had a duffel bag. But I had to leave it at the lake when we came here. Is it possible to—”
“Look in the bathroom,” he said, and walked out.
Maeve blinked, then padded over to the en suite room which indeed featured a fully modern bath. And her duffel bag sat on the counter.
“Gods, he can be so dramatic,” Lucía sighed from the doorway.
Maeve turned to her. “How…?” She gestured at the duffel.
Lucía shrugged. “He’s telepathic, you know. Probably sent someone out to check the lake and bring back any luggage.”
“That’s…almost thoughtful.”
“He’s not a monster,” Lucía said quietly.
Maeve bit her tongue to hold back her reply. Instead she swallowed and said, “I’d like to take a shower and change.”
“Say no more.” Lucía smiled and held up her hands, backing away. “I’ll be in the room right next to yours, to your left. Knock if you want to take a walk later. Oh, and if you’re hungry, we’ll grab something to eat.”
The door clicked shut behind Lucía. Maeve waited a few seconds, then walked over to the door and locked it. She didn’t have any illusions about it keeping out Arawn or Lucía if they wished to enter, but still…
She rushed to the duffel bag, zipped it open and rummaged through it until she found her cell phone. Yes. Her heart fell when she turned it on—no reception. Of course. Would have been too easy to be able to send a text or make a quick call. The display showed what the phone received before the signal was cut off—several missed calls and text messages, from Merle, Lily, and Anjali. Her best friend had also texted her back in response to the message Maeve sent her right before they stopped at the lake.
Maeve had said her goodbye to Anjali in that message, like she did to the others in the note she left at the Murrays, not knowing what awaited her once she went to Arawn’s. Maybe that was a bit fatalistic in retrospect, but she honestly couldn’t have known the Demon Lord would treat her with anything akin to civility.
In any case, Anjali’s response was a many-worded “don’t you dare do that, Maeve MacKenna,” just as Maeve expected. Which was why she sent a text instead of calling. Any protest and well-intentioned guilt-tripping would have only made her departure harder. But it wouldn’t have kept her from going.
Well, even though she was still in one piece and surprisingly free to move, she had no means to contact Merle and the others to let them know. They had to be going crazy with worry about her well-being. Maybe she could ask Lucía for a way to get word to Merle. Unless she wasn’t allowed contact with the outside world…
It couldn’t hurt to ask. It was the least she could do to alleviate everybody’s fear and concern.
She turned the shower on and quickly stripped out of her half-dried clothes. Didn’t look in the mirror, didn’t glance down her body. Feeling those scars when she scrubbed herself clean—always fast and efficiently, not lingering on this body that had given her so much pain—was difficult enough. She didn’t need the additional visual reminder of an already indelible experience.
Not when she saw it reflected in the shock and pity on the faces of everyone she met.
Chapter 5
Dry leaves crunched under Arawn’s paws as he ran, his tongue hanging out. The air had a bite to it here, a welcome chill to balance his heated body. Light rain pattered on his black fur, and the forest smelled of wate
r-kissed earth and sighing plants.
A run was just what he needed to restore his thoughts to order and banish the memory of amber-gray eyes and red hair sticking to rosy skin. At least for a little while. So he could focus on other matters again.
Sire.
He didn’t slow down at the mental voice of Deimos, kept running over the leaf-strewn forest floor. Tell me.
There is something you should look at, his second replied. Right outside the northern border. Near the gnome colony.
I will be there in a few minutes. He didn’t question whether the issue was important enough for him to investigate personally. Deimos had decades of experience managing the day-to-day business and administrative tasks of keeping Arawn’s growing empire running smoothly. If his second asked him to come, it would be something significant.
He ran to the next opening amid the trees, leapt off a boulder, and changed mid-jump from his wolf form to a large, black eagle. A few powerful beats of his wings later he soared above the forest sprawling over hills and mountain ridges, the rough, untamed beauty of the Cascades in his territory. Most of it was untouched by human taint, Arawn’s magic being a powerful repellent to the people living nearby. Other parts of his dominion included human settlements, but this stretch was the pure wilderness of the Pacific Northwest, and, much like the fae sanctuaries, it was protected against human interference by strong magical wards. On maps it appeared as a national park that, for some reason, no one ever wanted to visit.
Nearing the northern border, he began his descent and spotted Deimos by the side of a creek. Arawn landed on the moss- and fern-covered ground a few feet from his second and shifted to his human form. A dryad peeled herself out of a nearby tree and brought him a pair of flowing black pants, one of many he liked to keep stored all over his territory for moments such as this. The tree nymph bowed low and retreated while he pulled on the pants, then turned to Deimos.
His second inclined his head in greeting. “Over there.”
Arawn followed him, his nose twitching at the metallic scent drifting over on a breeze. Blood. Someone—or something—recently made a kill. A human kill. Unsanctioned as it was.
Granted, his territory ended here, and with it Arawn’s jurisdiction, but few dared to spill human blood so close to his dominion. Killings tended to draw attention from human authorities, and having to deter their focus was aggravating. Cleaning up the mess even more so.
But Deimos wouldn’t have called him here if this was a simple kill by rogue demons.
The smell of blood now hung heavy in the air, only dampened a little by the feather-light rain. He stepped onto the clearing behind Deimos and halted. The swaying was the first thing he noted. Stirred by the wind, the bodies swung slightly to and fro, suspended from the rope around their necks.
No. Not rope.
He prowled closer, stepping carefully so he wouldn’t disturb evidence, and studied the scene more thoroughly.
The two dead humans were hung from the tree—by their own intestines. He tilted his head. Interesting. Wasn’t the colon usually too soft to hold a body’s weight? Another step closer. Ah. The intestines had been looped and braided several times to make them strong enough.
Both humans—a man and a woman in hiking gear—had bloody holes where their eyes should be, and their arms ended in sawed-off stumps instead of their hands. He glanced down to the ground below the bodies, where the severed hands of both victims were arranged with their palms up, cupping the gouged-out eyeballs.
Naturally, the bellies of the two bodies gaped open where the guts had been extracted. He peered into the wounds.
“Have any other organs been removed?” he asked Deimos.
“No.”
“Feeding injuries?”
“None.”
“What about blood loss antemortem?”
“Only due to the wounds, as far as we could tell. I had Sofia take a cursory look at the bodies.” The lynx shifter worked as a coroner in a nearby human town, her senses sharp, and her experience handy when it came to analyzing sticky situations for Arawn. “According to her, cause of death seems to be the disembowelment and related blood loss. And it wasn’t taken.” He nodded at the dark stains beneath the dead. Blood crusted the grass and moss, enough to account for the fatal loss.
“The killer did not feed,” Arawn mused. Which ruled out the most common reason for killing humans. He stalked around the hanging bodies, drew in air and sampled the scents. “What do you smell?”
“Besides blood, gore, and feces?” Deimos curled his lip, shook his head. “No demon signature, not from what I can pick up. No shifter either.”
Arawn closed his eyes, spread his senses, tasting the magic lingering in the air. “No fae.”
“I was wondering if this might simply be the work of a human killer.”
Certainly humans were more than capable of bloody slaughter like this. But… “I am not picking up another human scent.”
Deimos sniffed and sighed. “Yeah. Me neither.”
Underneath the different smells drenching the area, there was something, though… He couldn’t quite pin it down. The faint trace wanted to jog a piece of his memory, but it was like tugging at a thread sticking out of a hopeless tangle of yarn. For someone who’d seen the dawn of time, had collected more memories than the largest human library could hold, trying to sort through this maze of knowledge and impressions could prove irritatingly difficult. Sometimes it took him weeks to unearth a single memory from the vaults of his mind.
He tucked the scent trace away, to be worked on in the background while he attended to other things. His focus landed on the arrangement of hands and eyes again.
“What do you make of this?” he asked Deimos.
“It’s a statement.”
“Obviously.” But of what?
Deimos rubbed his neck. “I could come up with a dozen clichés about what eyes and hands stand for, but unless we know more of the specific context of these killings…” He shrugged. “It could mean something. It might not mean anything.”
Yes, given the myriad ways in which madness worked, this could simply be deranged, senseless violence. Or it could be a carefully crafted message.
Arawn studied the scene again, then the area. “I assume you did a sweep for any other tracks or traces.”
“No signs of a vehicle, but we found hints that someone covered their tracks coming and going. Nothing beyond that, and even those few hints aren’t enough to follow.”
“If this was not for feeding,” Arawn said, his voice echoing the deadly quiet he felt inside, “and yet it was dropped this close to my border…”
Deimos eyed him. “I haven’t heard a peep from the demon clans or the shifter packs. They’re all lying low, and word is no one has any desire to fuck with you, especially after Anselm.”
As well they shouldn’t. Some of them had become annoyingly uppity in recent times, making a display of power necessary. So when a clan of demons thought it wise to kill one of Arawn’s enforcers without provocation, he reminded them why his people were considered untouchable among otherworld creatures. Echoes of the nightmares he unleashed upon them carried on whispers to the nooks and crannies of the community, and the subsequent hush of newfound respect for those who belonged to the Demon Lord was barely enough to calm Arawn’s anger.
And if the usual suspects of discord in the area were still impressed by his recent show of force, it raised the question of who was insolent enough to provoke Arawn’s ire with this kind of slaughter on his doorstep. If this was, indeed, meant as a threat or intimidation—the notion almost laughable—any opponent worth their salt would not have hidden their tracks. As an overture to war, it was pathetic.
That aside, killing humans as a way to get to him was…curious. Not to mention weak. They were the easiest to kill, no challenge whatsoever. A targeted assassination of Arawn’s favor-bound creatures, on the other hand, would make for a stronger impression.
“Have Sofia do a full
autopsy on the bodies,” he ordered Deimos, “and dispose of the humans when she is done. Get the area cleaned up, and interview the gnome colony. Ask them what, if anything, they have seen, and make sure to follow any other creature’s scent you find and interrogate them as well. I want to know who has been here recently and what they may have noticed. Pay special attention to the fairies, gnomes, and dryads.”
In a living, breathing forest like this, someone was always around. It was highly unlikely the killer could have come and gone without at least one otherworld creature seeing them.
“Will do, sire.”
“And keep your ear to the ground for any buzz in the otherworld community. Maybe no one telegraphed this move beforehand, but it is possible someone may claim it now.” Although to boast about it in conversations, but not to the face of the Demon Lord would say a lot about the perpetrator’s integrity. Or lack thereof.
He sneered at the bloody display in front of him. The least one could do was own up to one’s kills, especially if they were meant as some sort of message.
He pulled off his pants, flung them at a nearby tree to be picked up by a dryad later, and changed into a giant black bear, his sense of smell strongest in this form. Nose on the ground, he tracked around the clearing, noting and archiving every single scent trace, to be sure.
That one elusive thread…
Stopping at a spot where the mysterious aroma was a bit more discernible, he drew in several tasting breaths.
“Got something?” Deimos asked.
I am not sure, he replied mentally. I cannot place this one, but I have smelled it before.
And he almost, almost remembered… But every time he thought he could grasp that particular memory, it slipped through his fingers like smoke.
I will keep pondering this scent, he told Deimos. Reinforce border security and send out word to our people outside the territory to be on alert. Tell them to retreat to my lands in case of any more obvious threats.
Many of Arawn’s creatures lived within his dominion, but he’d long ago started spreading a wider net of resources, informants, and the favor-bound outside the boundaries of his territory proper.
