My Demon Warlord
Carolyn Jewel
Copyright
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
Copyright © 2016 by Carolyn Jewel
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover Design by BookBeautiful.com
ISBN: 978-1-937823-46-7
All rights reserved. Where such permission is sufficient, the author grants the right to strip any DRM which may be applied to this work.
About My Demon Warlord
A Demon Warlord Bound by Dark Magic…
Kynan Aijan’s centuries-long enslavement to a mage left him borderline insane and bound to Maddy Winters, a witch he intended to kill in horrible ways. Though he’s sworn the bonds they share will never be completed, their very existence feeds his desire for her even as he accepts that Winters will never forgive him.
…to the Powerful Witch He’s Desired for Years.
For Maddy Winters, the fight against evil magic users always takes top priority. But her bonds to Kynan give her intimate access to his thoughts and experiences, and she can’t always ignore their chemistry. Her insistence that she has no feelings for him is a deception she can’t afford to give up.
As Kynan and Maddy join forces to stop a rebellious and murderous witch, the dark magic that binds them locks them into forbidden passions and magic that could destroy them both. Will their fight for what’s right lead to a fight for each other?
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
About My Demon Warlord
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
About Carolyn
Glossary
Books by Carolyn
Excerpts
Excerpt from Dead Drop
Excerpt from The King’s Dragon
Change Log
Acknowledgments
My thanks go out to my agent, Kristin Nelson, for her unwavering support of my career. Carolyn Crane, thank you so much for your early and emergency reading. As ever thanks to my son Nathaniel and my sister Marguerite and my nephew and nieces, Dylan, Lexie, and Hannah. Also, thanks, Bella, for not eating any of my shoes. Recently.
CHAPTER 1
Months of successfully avoiding Maddy Winters came to a swift end. She was hardly ever at the San Francisco house, but not only was she here, she was heading his way. His reaction to her was as predictable as it was unavoidable. His sworn set up a roar that shook him like some monstrous wave. All of them were dead. His last act as free kin had been to assimilate every one of the demons who had sworn to him. If he hadn’t, they would have spent eternity in torment.
Kynan Aijan abandoned lap number one thousand and hauled himself out of the pool. Water sluiced off him onto the concrete and the tile ledge. She walked out of the house and headed his direction. A beautiful woman who had every reason to hate him. He slammed down the reaction on his side of the bonds while she approached. Wouldn’t he know if she’d gotten caught up again?
When she was close enough, he said, “Do you need me?”
“I’m fine.”
He pushed wet hair off his face. Good. Good. She wasn’t suffering because of what he’d done while he was out of mind. “Out of your way in a sec.”
She didn’t deviate from her course. Fucking Maddy Winters. Hate her. Love her. There was never anything in between and sometimes there was both at once. He and Winters were too broken to fix. He wanted to hate her all the time, he really did.
“What are you doing here?” He’d done his part staying away from her; why wasn’t she doing the same? It was bad enough he kept sliding into her dreams. More than a dozen times in the past six months. Five of those times he’d been working for Nikodemus during the slip. He did not appreciate having his attention fractured like that. He doubted she liked it any more than he did.
Which was worse? Their bonds waking up and pulling them into unwanted connections when he was having sex or when he’d been sent to kill someone, and she ended up trapped in his violence? His greatest fear was that one day she’d be trapped in one of those wild, vicious links, and he wouldn’t be able to come to her in time. She’d be locked in with him, unable to escape her dreaming state while his thoughts destroyed her.
For him, the sex was worse. Winters might as well actually be in his arms when that happened—not whoever he’d picked up, not one of the women he’d tried to love instead. Her. His savage ferocity was for her; that low growl came from his mouth close enough for his breath to warm her ear. The build of his desire was from her hands stroking him. Her body was eager for his touch, she melted into his caresses and rose hard against a too-firm grip.
She stopped by the diving board, and he took in the package. She wore jeans, a white tank top, and sandals with rhinestone butterflies. Her hands were behind her back, and she stood in the awkward position of someone doing a crap job of hiding something. “You don’t take my calls anymore. I had to ask around to find out where you were.”
He slicked his hands over his hair one more time. Never mind a towel. He took care of that. “You sure you’re okay?”
“Yes.” She put a bottle of something on the diving board and smiled the way she almost never smiled at him. “Peace offering.”
He walked over to take a look. Twenty-five-year Macallan. “This’ll get you a damn fine peace.”
She put down two glasses and a box of shortbread. He lifted his eyebrows. She said, “Can we talk?”
Talk. Talk was never good, but he was fine with her bribe. “Why not?”
Winters looked back at the house. “Inside, if you don’t mind.”
Years ago now, but not long after he’d been freed from his centuries-long enslavement to the mage Magellan, Kynan had pulled memories of her from her best friend’s head—memories that had not been willingly given. At the time, he’d been more or less insane. The rules hadn’t been in place then, and he’d found her and fooled her long enough for them to end up naked and pretending, for a while, that they were both normal. That encounter had ended with him forging bonds between them that would enhance the sex, and her pain, and his ability to make both those things last.
Kynan had made his own mistakes that night. Every one of them began and ended with underestimating her. She hadn’t died, but the bonds he’d made, incomplete though they were, remained to this day. By
now those bonds, having never been intended to last beyond a day or two, had developed a reality of their own. Practically sentient. They resented their unfinished state.
He and Winters ended up in the first floor office kept open for anyone to use. He took the couch, expecting she’d want the desk or maybe the chair, but instead she sat beside him. Not close, but not far from him, either. “What do you want to talk about?” he asked.
She opened the Macallan, poured them both a drink, then handed out shortbread. “I’ll wait until you’re in a better mood if you don’t mind.”
“I’m never in a better mood.” He didn’t usually see her in a tank top like that. The cotton clung to her, and he struggled to keep his appreciation of her curves from getting in the way of a clear head. Maddy Winters was wicked smart, and she knew things about him no one else knew. She was also one of the most powerful witches he’d ever encountered. Maybe even the most powerful.
Winters lifted her glass. “To fighting the good fight.”
He laughed and tipped his whisky toward hers. “Sure. I’ll drink to that.” Considering how much time Nikodemus’s inner circle spent together, fought together, and partied together, and especially considering everything he and Winters had been through, he actually didn’t know her all that well. Most of the time when they were alone together, they were fucked-up. He sipped his drink. “That is damn fine.”
“It is.” She curled her legs on the couch and faced him, but he didn’t look at her. She wasn’t looking at him. She broke a piece of shortbread and ate one of the fragments.
He stayed on his side of the couch but gave her a sidelong look. “Is the whole bottle for me?”
“Yours to keep.”
“Generous.” He drained his entire glass and shook his head hard. “Damn.” He poured himself another. He shouldn’t have knocked back whisky that fine so fast. This one he would savor. Whatever she was after, it wasn’t chitchat. “Let’s get to it. What do you want, Winters?”
She scratched the back of her head. Stared at the couch. Stared at her glass. Played with one of the rhinestone butterflies on her sandals. Basically, she was looking anywhere but at him. She had a great deal of power on hand, and that made her dangerous to someone like him. And alluring. Because she was a witch, and he was a demon, and there had always been an affinity between their kind. Sex with her was mind-blowing when it happened. “I’ve been thinking.”
“About?” There wasn’t enough Macallan in the world to get him through this.
“Us.” She reached for his hand, and he allowed the contact. There wasn’t a way for them to be more screwed up. The day he found her, he’d been teetering on the edge of functional for weeks. Everyone, including him, knew it was possible Nikodemus might have no choice but to have him killed. He’d been unstable and no good at following the rules Nikodemus was putting in place.
“What about us?” He didn’t like the direction this conversation was going. There was no them. Not in any normal sense of the word.
“My point exactly.”
He had no idea what she was thinking. At no time during their initial, disastrous, encounter had he managed to take control of her will or get full access to her mind the way he had her friend’s. He didn’t know about her family or whether she had siblings or whether her parents were still alive. Nobody who knew her seemed to know those things. If they did, they weren’t talking. All he knew was that she was from a California Indian tribe, was a lawyer, and had been working with street witches and mages for a very long time. Long before she met Nikodemus. Or him.
She ate more shortbread. “Maybe there should be an us.”
He saw her fingers flex on the glass she held. She smelled good, she always looked good, and right now that white tank top with all her beautiful black hair? She was smoking hot. She had so much magic that there was always a buzz with her. Between them. There was no way this was going where he hoped. They had sex when things were going to hell between them. Just once, he’d like to bone her when at least one of them wasn’t in some level of crisis. “I have things to do, Winters. Can we hurry this up?”
She curled in on herself, like he’d hurt her feelings. That wasn’t possible. Maddy Winters didn’t have personal, private feelings, except when she hated him. “I just meant we should talk more. We work together a lot.” She shook her head, still without looking at him. “Don’t you think it’s strange how little we know each other?”
“What are we going to talk about? The weather?” That little flinch of hers kept him from standing up and walking out. He didn’t want her to be unhappy, but he didn’t see what he could do to prevent it. Especially since he didn’t want to talk.
“I don’t know. Anything. We can discuss what’s going on with the mages.” She was going to break that glass, she kept squeezing it so hard. “I agree with Harsh.” Her words sounded normal, but there was tension in her shoulders.
“If you want to talk, you could at least look at me.”
She did, but it didn’t help a thing. Not even when she smiled, because he knew it was fake. “The Polynesians are causing trouble again.”
“Aren’t they always?” Things went on like this for some time. An awkward stumbling conversation because they never talked unless they had to. For good reason. Maybe they were just hot in bed and that was all. Maybe everything that went on in a normal relationship would be like this. Fucking painful.
Her voice sounded forced to him, but he wasn’t all that good at reading Winters. He did okay with other magekind and humans, but not her. “We should have dinner,” she said.
The air was getting colder. Thicker.
He glanced at the wall clock. Humans were the only reason he ever looked at a clock. They cared about the time. He didn’t. “It’s almost two in the morning.”
“I didn’t mean now.” She ran her hands through her hair, and he tried not to stare. She looked at him. One glance and, okay. There was something going on here that he didn’t get. “I meant generally. You know. The way normal people do when they know each other.”
“Right.”
She met his gaze. Her cheeks flushed.
“Come on, Winters. Just say what you came here to say.”
“I think we should have sex.”
He kept his cool. Barely.
“Sex that doesn’t happen because we’re messed-up. Normal sex.”
“Normal sex.”
“Yes.”
He took another long drink of whisky. “Don’t you have girlfriends to talk you out of bad ideas?”
She heaved a sigh as she dropped her head on the arm she’d stretched out along the top of the couch, and he suppressed the urge to touch her and tell her everything was going to be all right. If he did, it would be a lie. They would never be all right. “This was their idea. I told them it wouldn’t work.”
He considered letting this play out in whatever way she had stuck in her head, but that idea only lasted a few seconds. He put down his glass. He and Winters did not have the kind of relationship where talking would do anything but make things worse. He should’ve left the minute he saw her flinch. Then she’d have kept hating him in general instead of hating him specifically for this train wreck. “We have had sex. More than once. So what the do you mean, we should have sex?”
She looked at him through the veil of her eyelashes. “Not sex sex.”
Times like this, he wished Nikodemus wasn’t so big on integration with humans. “I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
She squared her shoulders, and he braced himself for something monumentally stupid. Which he got. She was so exactly what he liked. Strong and beautiful, immensely powerful. “I think we should make love.”
He didn’t even have to think about this one. This was just too fucking absurd. She would rip him to pieces and not even know what she’d done, but he wasn’t about to tell her that. “Honey, I don’t make love. Did you forget that?”
Her mouth twitched, but he wasn’t sure whether she
thought that was funny or something a lot worse. “Maybe you should.” She lifted her hand, and he thought about human hands on him when he wasn’t passing like a good boy. “I’m tired of not talking about what’s wrong with us. I’m tired of waking up and realizing I’ve been in your head when, seriously, when you’re doing. . .any of that. . . I don’t want to be along for that ride.”
The problem was she understood the demonkind too well for him to bullshit her much. He said the one thing guaranteed to bring this conversation to a quick end. “I’ll do you however you want, but you have to give me what I want.”
Her suspicious look said it all. But she was trying, he had to give her that. “Which is?”
He leaned toward her. “Our bonds closed. Give me that, and I’ll take my chances. Nikodemus can go fuck himself.” The temperature in the room went up at least a hundred degrees, figuratively speaking.
She sat there, blinking at him, and during the silence all he could think about was, what if she said yes? “No.”
He stared at his glass, pissed off at himself. “How drunk were you and your girlfriends when you came up with this?”
She shrugged one shoulder. “I think it would be good, don’t you?”
“Maybe I don’t feel like it.”
She lifted a hand again. Lawyer Winters. He fucking hated lawyer Winters. “I’d never deny you your right to choose.”
“Sex. No sex.” He looked her up and down and took the opportunity to appreciate what he saw. He wanted her so badly it hurt. “It’s all the same to you, isn’t it?”
“No.” She let out a breath and shook her head, which pissed him off more. She would never agree. Never.
“That’s the only thing I’m interested in.” The voices of his dead sworn whirled through his head, and he relaxed into the buzz of the additional power. If he were alone, he’d give himself up to that state of bliss. But he wasn’t alone. He grabbed his whisky and held it close. Like that would shield him from the conversational truck about to run him over. Thinking about Winters giving herself to him wasn’t safe. He added a slow grin that felt a little too real to him. He allowed more of his magic to surface. Her glance at him confirmed his eyes had changed. A little risky, letting that happen, but there was good reason for them both to be feeling the bite of him not passing. “If you agree, I’m all over that. Right now.”
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