My Demon Warlord

by Carolyn Jewel

  Her smile was genuine. “I did order you.”

  “And I had possession of you, Winters.” He lifted a hand, and more magic rolled between them. He reveled in the heat, let it fill him, juice him up. There was no way his eyes hadn’t changed. No way. Not with him feeling like he was a god. “I wasn’t kidding when I said you’d have been better off letting me die. But you didn’t. This is us the way we should be. The way we need to be.”

  He held her gaze. A thousand years ago, he would have pushed through with the access he could get just from them trading stares. “I know the way in now. I know the shape of you. I want us. You. Everything.”

  She flinched, but he kept going because sometimes humans needed to hear things they didn’t like.

  “I want us like we are when the sex is taking us both. Nothing held back. Not anything. Doing everything you like. More now, because it’s safer. If you were my sworn, we’d be safe. Both of us. I could take you past your limits.”

  She fanned her face, but he knew it for the pretense and mockery that it was. “You’re getting me all worked up.”

  “There’s a lot we can do.” He spoke evenly because he wanted to persuade her with his words, with no possibility of her thinking he was compelling her in any way. “In and out of bed. Kink. No kink. Doesn’t matter.” He looked her up and down. “We’re good that way. Now we can be better.”

  “I’m not ashamed of what I like.”

  “I like it, too.” He continued to hold her gaze. “I wish this was before the rules. I wish these were the days when I took what I wanted. I would fucking take you now. Right now.”

  “So sorry,” she said. Breathless. The hitch in her words was his, too.

  “Bullshit.” He crossed one ankle over his knee, and shut out the voices of his sworn. He and Winters were good together in just about every way, even in bed with everything messed-up between them. “I want to know what it would be like without the desperation. Without a call in the middle of the night. Don’t you?”

  She shook her head.

  “No one completes me the way you do. No one. Ever.” His voice softened when he hadn’t intended it to. “Who else matches you the way I do?”

  She used the tip of a nail to re-sort the gems, and he watched her expression settle. “It is possible to enjoy that sort of sex without giving up anything outside the fucking.”

  This wasn’t good, the way he wanted to push her. “Give me this link when we’re naked, and I’ll blow your mind.” Desire and need poured from him, infused everything he said. “You’ll blow mine. You always do.”

  She was rock steady. “Under the circumstances,” she said, cool as an Arctic wind, “I’m not sure that’s wise.”

  He realized he’d stood too fast only when his chair shot back several feet. “Don’t.” He rubbed his palm over his shorn head. “Don’t do this to me. To us. At least don’t deny what there is.”

  Her eyes landed on him, looked him up and down. “I hate you with that hair.”

  “Don’t.”

  “You don’t need to pass as my mageheld anymore. There’s no reason for that.” She looked at him, distant, assessing him as if he weren’t right here in front of her, ready to bleed for her if that’s what it took. She lifted her hands. “By now Nikodemus knows you’re not mageheld. There’s no need for you to keep up appearances.”

  He returned himself to his normal appearance, the longer, scruffier hair, nearly shoulder length. “Better?”

  She looked him up and down again. “Much.”

  “Is this another thing that you don’t want to like about me?” The way they were connected now, he was feeling the need not to be in human form. He watched her watch him.

  “Oh, I like that a lot. I always have.”

  Kynan gave her the kind of smile that made humans uneasy. She wasn’t a normal human, and their connection now meant she knew exactly what he wanted to do and how. He’d smiled at her like that in Berkeley, and she’d laughed at him, and not because she didn’t get it. He knew she was feeling the pull, too. The temptation of getting to that high.

  “When Nikodemus gets here,” she said, “I’m going to swear fealty to him again.”

  He steadied himself. “Don’t.”

  “I’m going to ask him to fix us.” She leaned forward. She was being completely honest about her intentions, so just fuck that. “We don’t work together, not the way you’re thinking. We—the two of us—we are too broken to be together. I wish it could work, but it can’t. It’s a fantasy. This”—she gestured between the two of them—“can’t last. You’re right, the highs with you are amazing. Always amazing.” She stood up and walked to him.

  He stayed just as he was but his mind was already halfway to the bedroom. She straddled his thighs and braced her palms on the back of his chair. He put a hand on her waist.

  “But, Kynan,” she whispered as she shook her head. He gathered a handful of her hair and held fast. “After the magnificent highs, the lows always come. Always. I can’t deal with what comes after.” She put a hand on his cheek. “I can’t.”

  “Try.” His hand slipped under her shirt, sliding over her smooth skin. She wasn’t fucked-up right now, and he was touching her, caressing the woman he’d sometimes hated nearly as much as he loved her. “Try. Try, so I can give you what you need. So we can have what we need.”

  “I don’t do relationships.” Her voice turned cool. “I don’t think you do, either. If you couldn’t make it work with Emily or Addison, believe me, there is no hope for us. There never was. We’ve had sex. Great sex. Fantastic sex. That’s all. I’m sorry if you think I have anything more to give.”

  He tightened his fingers around her hair. “You belong to me.”

  “How can that be when I have not said the words?” The air around them shimmered, and his sworn stirred, eager. Hungry. She felt the change and her breath caught. “You are astonishing. I don’t deny you that.” Her fingers danced over his cheek, his jaw. “I knew you got over Carson. Then Emily. Addison was different. You love her.” Like that, she was too calm. Too distant.

  “I’m not with Addison.” He unfastened the bottom button of her shirt. “This isn’t going away just because you want it to. You know what happened with Xia and Alexandrine. You and I are like them, except I didn’t make a mistake. I made those bonds on purpose, and they’ve been in place for years.”

  She blanched, and her hand stilled. “Nikodemus can fix this.”

  “Why, when he couldn’t fix what Xia did? What fantasy are you living?” He unfastened another button. She didn’t object, so he undid another one.

  “I’m going to ask him.”

  “Go ahead.” He made a sharp gesture and went back to unfastening her shirt. “I’m not asking. You can’t expect me to.”

  She gave him a hard look. “You don’t want this any more than I do.”

  “Wrong.”

  “Don’t take that tone with me.”

  “Fuck you.” He undid the fourth from the bottom. She wasn’t going to give in, that was obvious. Strong, passionate Maddy Winters didn’t give in to anything. Especially him.

  She spoke softly while he ran his fingers up the middle of her torso. “You have resented me since the beginning, so why am I wrong?”

  He held the next button between his thumb and forefinger. Time for some plain truths. When he spoke, it was low and hard. He lifted his face to hers, and what he wanted to do was get them both into a state where they didn’t have to think. “There’s no shared fealty between us, Winters. You’re not sworn to Nikodemus anymore. There’s only your bonds to me.” He unfastened one more button. “Nothing more. Nothing else in the way.”

  He had her attention now, and he waited out her silence. Her eyebrows drew together. “So?”

  “I will fight anyone who tries to break those bonds. Anyone. Including Nikodemus.” He stroked her stomach and ended with his fingers resting on the waistband of her jeans. “I didn’t make a mistake like Xia did. My intent liv
es in those bonds. Years of intent.”

  She curled in on herself. “Nikodemus has to be able to unravel this.”

  “At what cost?” he asked as gently as he could.

  “I don’t know.” She raised her head. “I do not know, Kynan.”

  “Three bonds between us, all this time evolving and gaining power.” He rose quickly enough to startle her, grabbing her by the waist and setting her on her feet. Her eyes flashed with annoyance and anger, but she didn’t do anything like refasten her shirt or walk away from him.

  He dropped to his knees, hands atop his head and opened himself to her. His sworn shouted and groaned, and she heard them shouting. Felt it. He knew she did because he wasn’t holding back anything. With her magic calling to him, he let her experience all of his desire.

  She swallowed hard. “Stop that.”

  “Let us happen, Maddy.” He held her eyes. “Let us be like this instead of fucked-up the way we have been. This isn’t the end. It’s a beginning. Let us begin.”

  “I can’t give myself up like that.”

  “You don’t have to give up anything.” He wanted to touch her. He ached to make contact with her, but he didn’t. She wasn’t kin and wouldn’t react as if she were, but more than the possibility of misinterpretation, there was the possibility that if he touched her, his desire for her would take fire the way it always did. She wanted that as much as he did. “The bonds have changed from what I made that day. They became. . .us. You live in me. I live in you.”

  “Talk about wishful thinking.”

  “Together—together we could touch paradise.”

  Her eyes turned to chips of ice as she buttoned her shirt. “What we need is to be cut off from each other. A clean break is best.”

  “Winters—” In her eyes he saw all he needed, even before her words left him with only ashes. Loss howled through him. His sworn raged, a deafening chorus.

  Carson would never have been his. Never. Even when he was insane and clinging to that fucked-up ache she caused in him, he’d known. Just like he’d known he and Emily weren’t going to be a permanent thing even while he was trying and failing to make a deeper connection with her. She’d been the one to walk away from him. Then he’d let Addison go because they both knew he wasn’t the one she wanted and part of him would always be wrapped up with Winters.

  “We’ll go on like before,” she said.

  “You’ll destroy us both.”

  “It’s what I want.”

  He cut her off.

  She gasped, and her eyes widened, but she settled back and got control of herself. Every atom of his being objected to shutting her down. He was used to it, burying his need like this.

  She rested a hand on the center of her chest, her breathing shallow. She grimaced, and he watched her as if she were a video of Maddy Winters instead of the real woman. Cool, and beautiful, and strong, and he had lost her.

  CHAPTER 20

  She was dead inside. Dead.

  Kynan had done what she’d asked and cut her off from his side of their bonds in what could only be called a highly targeted dead drop.

  Demonology 101. Binding magic was a defining characteristic of the demonkind. Such magic was the means by which demons defiled women and destroyed innocent human lives. The first lecture of her official training had been a dissection of how a human magic user could approximate the effects of such bonds and use them to enslave a demon and either kill it or prevent it from doing further harm.

  Demons were to be enslaved or killed. No other options existed. And it was all bullshit. Lies upon lies. No one was without blame in what had happened to set them at war.

  Maddy fought the emptiness threatening to take over her soul.

  Demon-sourced magic changed the human brain, as ibn Hazm had demonstrated in the second century. A bond between a demon and a human could be thought of as a single reservoir of magic that existed in two places at the same time. In the demon and in the human, with different presentations at either end. That was what Kynan’s bonds had done to her.

  Her lungs were jammed up against immovable pain, and she had to breathe slowly and deliberately and concentrate on the mechanics involved.

  With his thorough understanding of ibn Hazm, Álvaro Magellan had made the seminal breakthrough that married theory and observation and resulted in rituals the human-born could use against the demonkind.

  Modern researchers and methods had further refined both bodies of work. They now knew, for example, that in humans, and among other effects, such a bond rewired neural pathways and built new ones. Left in place long enough, the structural alterations became permanent. There was no true recovery from an indwell. Or a bond with a demon.

  Had she really thought this would be like her previous episodes of deprivation? Wrong. Horribly, gut-churningly wrong.

  This was why breaking an oath of fealty to a demon had deadly consequences for humans, too. The same was true of blood-bound promises. Once one understood both the physiological changes and the fact that the same magic existed in two places at once—yet looked different depending on the aspect one happened to be looking at—the use of ritual to enslave a demon was a trivial use of the knowledge. It was Magellan, again, who had realized that he could expand his life and maintain apparent youth through the ritual murder of a demon.

  Slowly, over the course of an eon, Maddy enlarged the corner of her mind that could think without agony. She clung to her chair and fought free of her paralysis. It couldn’t last, she told herself. The reaction—akin to withdrawal, she told herself—would settle down. She’d acclimate to being so utterly alone when, in truth, she would always be alone because every human was alone in his or her own mind.

  A much more difficult process than mere enslavement was binding a demon’s energy to a physical object. This could only be achieved, as proven so decisively by Álvaro Magellan, by killing a demon when its body was physically manifested.

  She was sitting—standing? Flat on her back? She had no idea—with panic tearing through her, a tornado of barbed-wire edges that did not let up, not for one second, no matter how hard she worked to control the reaction.

  The day her group of witches in training had been expected to kill their first demon—no one believed any of them would succeed—had been the day she’d walked out, never to return.

  Maddy understood very well that what Kynan had done all those years ago had permanently changed her. She understood the simultaneous existence of the bonds in Kynan and in her and that the magic, viewed through her as a lens, behaved differently than when viewed by or through Kynan.

  Fear slid down her spine like mist, twining through her, working its way along nerve endings while her soul screamed in horror at being abandoned. The conviction that she would die without him solidified. She breathed despite the constriction of her lungs and caught an edge of peace in the maelstrom. She reached for it, embraced it, and brought herself under control. Barely.

  She was sitting on a chair. Where? Not at home. She knew that much. Her hearing returned next, then touch, scent, and vision. Most of her recent memories returned. She was in Bodega, California, in the living room of a house owned by magekind. Kynan’s magic pulsed around her, but it was coming from the wards he’d set, not from him. She remained cut off from him.

  Durian was outside somewhere, watching. Waiting for her to require termination. Kynan was gone. Gone. He’d left her bereft, and she wanted the poison of him back.

  As if she weren’t still in pain and on the edge of panic, she let go of the chair and scooped up the rubies Kynan had brought her. She closed her fingers and drew power through them and shunted her panic and terror into a corner of her mind. What was left was scraped out—hollow and lined with ground glass.

  Bleakness cut like a cold knife dragged across her bones.

  “Winters?”

  She forced herself to focus on the man who’d spoken to her. He had one leg thrown over the arm of his chair, the other stretched out, the p
ersonification of I don’t give a shit. She didn’t know who he was, and that started up the panic again because she ought to.

  The rubies pulsed against her palm. Whoever he was, he twenty-three or four at the most. He had shaggy golden brown hair. Haircut, anyone? His clothes were at the grungier end of casual, but with a face like his, and those beautiful sunlit bronze eyes, he probably dressed up well. He was obviously very fit and absolutely gorgeous, but he was too young and not her type.

  Unfortunately, you couldn’t look at him with his glowing eyes and believe he was normal.

  The more powerful the demon, the more perfect the human manifestation.

  Kynan Aijan.

  Even as his name clicked into place in her head, she rejected the possibility that this was him. Kynan’s magic vibrated. This young man had no magic at all, despite his odd eyes, despite his surface similarity to a demon of that name.

  The rest came back. Everything.

  He’d cut her off, and that meant she no longer felt his magic.

  She might actually die from this.

  Her shuddering breath hurt, but she took another. Then another.

  Naturally she would have a hard time adjusting. But she would adjust. She had to. This was like a bad injury, intolerable at first, but, eventually, even the worst pain faded. She only had to last until her brain started healing or rerouting around the damage done by the bonds.

  “It has to be this way,” she said, still with a growing sense that she was not connected to the world.

  He shrugged because he really didn’t care.

  “So.” She crossed her legs. If he was okay with this, she could pretend she was, too. She concentrated on the part of her mind not howling with despair. Two mages had been here, and now they were dead. Their magehelds had been freed. She felt out of time and place, as if she might be the one who wasn’t real. She told herself she was seeing Kynan the way normal humans saw him. She hated it. Not knowing what he was. He didn’t care. Neither would she.

  She was hollow inside and shaky. Those bonds with Kynan had worked into every crevice of her existence. Three bonds. He’d made three bonds with her, and she still didn’t know what they’d been doing to her in all the years since he’d made them. Changing her, all this time. Making her into something else.