A green-blue haze shimmered in the air around it, then moved to envelop her, too. I am yours to command.
The submissive words shook her. They could not have been meant for her. She did not take life. Any life.
She might have demon blood in her but she was not a monster, and she would not become one. An echo of her mother’s voice overrode any urgings of her demon instincts. You control your anger. It doesn’t control you.
Airie released her grip on the demon’s windpipe and it staggered backward, scratching at its throat and gasping for breath.
Cunning returned to its blood-red, glowing eyes. It looked to where a familiar presence watched from the black shadows, and for the first time since the demon approached her, Airie experienced real fear.
Hunter stood close by.
The demon sensed him, too.
…
Not one hundred feet from Hunter, Airie stood in the arms of a half-naked man, who had one hand on her breast and his mouth on her cheek, near her ear.
Stunned surprise, followed by a sharp stab of male jealousy, secured Hunter to the spot at the sight of a demon touching Airie so intimately. A desire to kill came over him, and blood pounded behind his eyes, but as he started forward, a small hand slid into his to hold him back.
Hunter’s vision cleared. Scratch, his little face solemn, looked up at him, his tiny fingers wrapped tight around one of Hunter’s.
Hunter’s thoughts settled, became less chaotic, and he tore his gaze back to Airie. As difficult as it was for him to stand by while she fought a battle of wills with a demon, he needed to know if she could stand strong against temptation when his sister had not.
Could she deny one of her own kind?
He tensed when the demon backed away from Airie to assume demon form, and he pushed Scratch behind him, out of the way of danger.
Hunter started toward Airie, then froze when she dashed sand in the demon’s eyes and grabbed it by the throat. He watched her fingers tighten, sending fire into its flesh, and saw the demon’s eyes cloud over. He recognized the telltale bluish-green haze that accompanied the death of a demon.
And then, she released it.
Hunter’s heart skipped several beats. What was she doing? Why had she stopped?
The demon lifted its head and looked in Hunter’s direction.
“Hunter!” Airie cried. “Look out!”
Instead he looked at her, afraid she’d somehow been harmed, a distraction that cost him.
The demon drove itself at him on widespread, leathery wings, striking him in the chest with splayed feet, knocking him thirty feet backward into the canyon wall to send the sword spinning from his hand. Air exploded from his lungs on a painful and protracted exhale. Hunter slumped to the ground, stunned by the impact, only alive thanks to the amulet.
The demon landed and paced toward him, an ominous shadow in the dim light, growing steadily larger as it approached.
Hunter wheezed into the dirt as he tried to reach his sword, feigning more serious injury to lull the demon into false confidence even as the amulet siphoned strength from it to him.
He caught a flurry of movement from the corner of one eye. Airie had grabbed a shovel standing against the side of the cabin and now brandished it like a cudgel, the rough wood rolling easily between her palms.
She had diverted the demon’s attention from him. Hunter, abandoning his search for the sword, brought his elbow up to ram into its groin. The demon backhanded him across the face in rebuttal, and Hunter’s head snapped back.
Airie delivered a sharp crack to the back of the demon’s head with the flat of the shovel.
It turned on her.
“Get back!” Hunter shouted at her. She had not been able to kill it before, and he did not want her to have to do it now. Not on his behalf. He hauled himself to his sword and grabbed its hilt.
Airie, however, like a golden, glowing, avenging goddess, rammed the handle of the shovel into the demon’s stomach. When it doubled over, she swung the flat end up and under its chin with enough strength to bring it to its knees. The metal blade of the shovel was bent.
Scrabbling in the loose dirt, it got its clawed feet beneath it and launched itself into the sky. Its dark shadow blocked out the splinter of moon before it disappeared from sight.
Hunter’s gaze never left Airie. She could not know how impossibly beautiful she appeared in this moment, with her golden skin on fire and yellow flames, not red, now dancing in her dark eyes. He wondered at the significance, if any.
The flames died. She dropped the shovel and hurried to Hunter’s side.
“Are you hurt?” she asked.
He had not protected her, and that left him furious, but he was not certain with whom. He spit a mouthful of coppery blood onto the sand. The demon had drawn blood, yet it had run away. It knew what Airie was, as well.
Nothing good would come of this night.
Frustration and worry fed into his anger, and that was the emotion more easily expressed. He directed it at Airie. “The next time I give you an order, you do as you’re told.”
She drew back the hand she had been about to place on his arm. It took her a moment to find her voice, and when she did, it was soft and full of hurt. “I was afraid for you.”
Hunter could have handled the demon on his own, but it did not change the fact that she had come to his rescue with no regard for her own safety. He should be grateful, not angry with her.
And yet it was his anger he continued to lash her with, flaying tiny pieces off her with well-honed words. “The demon escaped. Now it will bring others. I would have killed it if you hadn’t interfered. You should have killed it when you had the chance.”
She twisted the front pockets of the old pair of trousers she wore with her fingers. “I don’t kill.”
He could not stop now. He plowed forward, digging in deeper. “Not for any reason?” he demanded. “Not even if to kill is the only way to rid the world of something that doesn’t belong here?”
“As you would have killed me if my mother had not interfered?”
The quiet observation, filled with scorn, cut him down. He could think of nothing to say, no way to refute it, because he did not know if it was true or false.
Turning on her heel, she marched with stiff dignity back to the cabin. The door closed behind her, and he heard the wooden lock bar snick into place.
He kicked the shovel she’d left on the ground as hard as he could. Then he gathered up his bedding and moved it to the front of the cabin so he could guard the door in case the demon should decide to return.
He remembered Scratch. At some point in all the confusion, the child had vanished.
That was another problem Hunter needed to consider in more depth. The boy seemed to have an uncanny ability to disappear when he chose. How else had he managed to get out of the cabin without being seen? Hunter started to search the yard for him but soon gave up when common sense told him Airie would have come running by now if he wasn’t already safe inside the cabin with her.
Instead, as Hunter tossed and turned on the hard ground well into the early hours of the morning, he wondered about something else.
What had brought a demon this close to Freetown on a night the west winds did not blow?
…
“A demon was not a part of our deal.”
Mamna, seated in the lush garden beneath her living quarters, sheltered from the morning sun by heavy arbors of palm and thick drapes of multicolored, sweet-smelling desert blossoms, regarded the angry assassin with cool eyes.
Calling this man before her an assassin gave him far more credit than he deserved. He was a hired thug. True assassins were harder to come by, and not as easily intimidated into service.
“I don’t control what demons do beyond these city gates,” she replied without inflection.
Runner slouched in his chair across the delicate, round glass table from her, his dark expression brooding. An artesian well fed a fountain nearby,
spilling water from a pitcher cradled in the arms of a winged cherub. The soft noise of the water effectively distorted any conversation that might otherwise be overheard.
As a rule, Mamna conducted most of her private business from within her compound because she was too easily recognizable to most of Freetown’s population. Being born with her physical disadvantages made it difficult to find that delicate balance between being seen and unseen. Even if people had never met her, they had heard her described. The irony was not lost on her. When she had served the goddesses, she had gone unnoticed for decades. Now, people could not help but stare. Mamna could never decide which she hated more.
The only exception she made regarding the location when conducting personal business was for the Slayer, who refused to do anything by anyone’s rules but his own.
In truth, she was more than a little disappointed in the Slayer. She’d thought he hated demons and their spawn beyond anything. She had assumed he’d be immune to a beautiful face, if that face belonged to one of them. She had also expected the amulet he wore to offer some protection against the irresistible appeal of an immortal.
But the Slayer, it seemed, was as susceptible as the next man to a pretty face, proving to her that physical beauty remained the most powerful asset a woman could possess. It made her hate this spawn even more.
This so-called assassin before her was also proving to be a disappointment. She had sent Runner to see if the Slayer had brought a woman off the mountain with him. She wanted to know if he’d captured the spawn, or if he had killed her outright. She had told Runner to approach him, to repeat the tale the Godseeker had given her, and to relieve the Slayer of his amulet if at all possible.
She wanted to be certain, however, that she would not be implicated in any attack on the Slayer. Shifting suspicion onto the Godseekers worked well for her.
“The woman was unafraid of the demon,” Runner said with undisguised admiration.
This was the part of the tale Mamna found most difficult to understand. Why would a spawn have come to the Demon Slayer’s defense?
How had he persuaded her to travel with him willingly?
“Tell me again,” she demanded, trying to make sense of his words. Perhaps the spawn had plans of her own. If so, Mamna would take care of those.
Runner tipped his wide-brimmed hat back with the blunt of his thumb. “She spent the day playing with a small boy in the yard. The Slayer called them inside to eat. She stayed in the cabin. He moved to the yard for the night. They did not seem all that friendly toward each other. Which surprised me, at least on his part,” Runner’s boot tapped the clay tiling, “because that is one gorgeous woman. The Slayer doesn’t seem to appreciate his good fortune.”
Mamna ignored that last comment, and the trace of envy that accompanied it. She had lived with the goddesses. She had a history with the Demon Lord. She knew all about mortal infatuation for the immortals. Given the spawn’s parentage, it stood to reason that she would have been born with at least some of their allure.
But that the Slayer did not seem to be interested in her as a woman was what puzzled Mamna. If not for that purpose, then why else would he keep her with him instead of turning her over immediately?
“Where did the child come from?” she wondered out loud. Could it possibly belong to the spawn? If so, who, or what, was its father?
Runner had no interest in the child and dismissed him. “The Slayer doesn’t believe she’s a goddess,” he was saying. “He was clear on that. Maybe your Godseeker gave you false information.”
Mamna ran her finger around the lip of her dainty porcelain teacup. “The Godseeker told me what he believed to be true. That doesn’t make it the truth. She is no goddess. The woman is the daughter of an old priestess, and nothing more than a thief who needs to be brought to justice.”
While she had no patience for the ramblings of aging men who’d once been favored by the goddesses and who wished to recapture a place in time that could no longer be revisited, she could not deny that both the story and the spawn had become serious problems for her.
Part of Mamna’s bargain with the Demon Lord was that she would watch for, and tell him, of any goddess activity on the mountain. She did not want him to discover that the thief on the mountain was indeed his, for while he had once loved the goddess as much as he was capable of loving anyone, he believed she had willingly abandoned him. If he discovered she had refused to leave him, and instead had died in childbirth, what would he do to the one who had fed him those lies to the contrary?
Mamna had no way of knowing what the old priestess had told the spawn of her actual parentage. She did not know what the spawn, in turn, might have told the Slayer. That the spawn appeared to possess a predominantly mortal form was yet another complication, because it would make it easier for the Slayer to overlook or disregard what she really was.
Runner continued reciting his story. “I approached the Slayer and gave him your story. The demon arrived. I pretended to run away, then went back to watch. She helped the Slayer drive off the demon.”
The sun had shifted, and Mamna’s legs were no longer in the shade. She straightened the folds of her light linen trousers, unable to adjust the position of her chair without help and refusing to ask for it.
If the demon had not been hunting for pleasure, what purpose did it have for being so close to Freetown?
Because that had been another part of her bargain with the Demon Lord—the demons could hunt on the west winds, but other than that, they were to leave Freetown and its surrounding areas alone.
Her amulet was weakening, and the Demon Lord no longer respected their bargain. She had to regain control over the Demon Lord. To do that, she had to get the spawn away from the Slayer.
The sun burned too hot for her. She would get a message to the Slayer asking for a meeting. If he brought her the spawn, she would forgive him. If he came alone, she would have him killed, and deservedly so for taking payment and not delivering the promised results. Once he was dead, she would concentrate on recapturing the spawn.
She picked up the teapot and filled both cups, preoccupied with another, more pleasant, thought. If he came alone and she had him killed, she would have his amulet. It did not offer the same type of protection as the one she owned, but hers was damaged and his was better than nothing.
And she worried that soon, nothing was all she would have.
Chapter Nine
Something was wrong.
Hunter jerked on the sand swift’s harness, pulling it to a halt a short distance from a bend in the arroyo he’d been following.
The overhanging rock and occasional scrub offered only slight protection from the desert heat, and Sally was out of sorts. To make matters worse, the animal had developed an attachment to Airie that made it reluctant to travel too far from her side.
Hunter, on the other hand, wanted to get as far away from Airie as possible and for as long as he dared. He had not expected or planned to find the demon that had attacked him.
That had been his excuse to escape the accusations in her eyes.
But now he had found something out here in the desert, and the circling of vultures in the barren sky overhead and the sand swift’s sudden increase of surliness did not bode well. Neither did the smell.
He tugged his neckerchief over his nose and mouth and slid to the ground, wrapping the reins around the saddle horn and holding Sally by the bridle to leave his hands unencumbered. He could hear nothing, which was another bad sign.
The amulet around his neck flickered dully, then darkened again, confirming what he’d already suspected. Demons, one or more, had been at work here but were now gone, and the arrival of vultures meant other natural scavengers would soon follow.
The weight of his sword against his leg offered a measure of comfort. So did the repeating rifle he carried in his saddle scabbard. The amulet gave him no protection from any coyotes and wolven emboldened by the safety of numbers and the prospect of an easy meal.
He should turn around and walk away while he could. Whatever was ahead was beyond saving.
Sally didn’t protest as they neared the bend in the arroyo, however, so Hunter felt confident he faced no immediate danger. Morbid curiosity won out over common sense, along with an urge to reinforce his hatred of anything demon. Including their spawn.
He rounded the bend.
Although he had been prepared for it, still, what he found was no easier to accept. He inhaled sharply.
A small wagon train, no more than five units all told, had made an attempt to cross the desert through demon territory. They had chosen the flat-bottomed arroyo as an easier path to travel than the drifting desert sands, as well as for the moderate protection it offered from anything flying the skies above.
Hunter wrapped the sand swift’s reins around a thorny bush and approached the wagon train cautiously, even though he knew there would be no survivors. Pity and anger filled him at the sight of the blackened remains of a campfire that would have acted as a beacon to anything hunting at night. Its scattered ashes indicated that, when the attack began, they had tried to circle their wagons, an action which would have been of little help against an enemy that struck from the air.
He had seen similar scenes before. These had been small-time, inexperienced traders trying to make fast money. He’d occasionally hired out his services to escort such wagoners through demon territory in the past. Their wagons would have been filled with whiskey, worth its weight in gold in a place like Freetown, isolated as it was from the rest of the world. The wagons would be empty now. Demons, pleasure-seeking bastards that they were, liked alcohol almost as much as they liked women.
The hross that had hauled the wagons, long-legged, sturdy draft animals with enormous, thick-hoofed feet suited for the hot sands of the desert, had been cut loose. Their tracks showed where they’d scrambled in panic up the embankments of the arroyo.
The dismembered and partially eaten remains of the wagoners, however, littered the campsite. Hunter’s stomach lurched. He knew from Blade’s experience that demons cared little if the men were alive when they started to feed. It was not about hunger. They hated men, believing them to be poor copies of the immortals, and held them in little regard. This was their way of showing contempt.
Demon's Daughter (Demon Outlaws) Page 13
