“It’s lost some of its power over the years, but it still gets the job done. Spector is working to mass produce it now. I particularly like the ones we’ve powdered down and installed into firearms.”
As he spoke, two guards flanked the necromancer and held her shoulders. I wanted her to fight back. To use her demon to get them away, but she was terrified. In the next breath, Lowell slammed the gold coin against her eye.
She screamed.
It was a blistering sort of sound, reverberating around the training room as the smell of burning flesh invaded my nose. She writhed and scrambled at his hand, trying to get him away, blood coating her face and Lowell’s fingers. But he continued to jam the small, seemingly harmless coin against her eye. It seared past her eyelid and burrowed into her socket, melting her gaze with just a simple touch and leaving nothing but an empty hole in its place.
She fought against them, shaking her body and kicking her legs, but the guards held her down. You could see the way their meaty fingers dug into her pale skin.
Nobody moved. The rest of the guards held their guns up in an obvious threat, successfully subduing the rest of the hybrids whose terrorized faces watched.
I cried for her, begging them to stop, but my words fell on deaf ears. Spector wanted to make an example of my insubordination, and they were doing it happily.
“Please stop!” I screamed.
It wasn’t until the girl fell to her knees and blacked out that Lowell stopped pressing. The entire room went deadly silent, and my eyes flickered to Tomb, who was rippling with change.
With a roll of his eyes, Lowell bent over and fished the coin out of her eye, then used the hem of her hospital gown to clean the blood off of it.
“As you can see, it’s quite effective. Just a graze of it against a demon’s skin causes intense burning and pain,” he said, making my horror stricken face turn toward him as he slipped the coin into his pocket. “So, as I was saying, you will follow instructions, or more of your peers will suffer for your insubordination. Understood?”
I saw black. Not red. But pure, endlessly wicked black. My fangs punched all the way out, and my nails elongated. My spider was there, sharing my consciousness as we stared back at him.
We were going to kill him. I couldn’t say for sure when or how, but that was a promise seared into my own being, just as much as that coin had been seared into the girl.
He smiled at me, like seeing the death threat flashing in my eyes got him off. He turned to the other scientists watching behind the glass. “Subject six-two-seven, the black widow hybrid, will now feed from subject six-one-eight,” he droned on in his analytical tone.
My blue eyes flicked over to Tomb and Crow. They stood next to each other, staring back at me with tense bodies and furious eyes. But I knew that fury wasn’t at me. It was for me.
I meant what I said. I wasn’t going to fuck Byron. I knew that my demon’s magic required my body to be penetrated in order for her to latch onto his essence, but I was going to control this, and I sure as shit wasn’t letting his dick anywhere near me.
I moved forward, and then I stood in front of Byron while the rest of the hybrids stayed on the other side of the room with the guards, watching warily.
Byron gave me a shit-eating smirk. “Remember when you turned me down that one time, when I wanted to fuck you in the hall? I guess we’re going to get an audience anyway,” he said, his tone full of amusement. “Get on your knees and suck my cock, and then if you do a good enough job, I’ll stick my dick in you.”
Faster than he could fathom, webs shot from my right hand and planted against his mouth, wrapping around his head until he was totally gagged.
“That’s better,” my husky voice said, my spider and I feeling utterly smug.
His hands came up, trying to rip the webs away from his mouth, but my smile widened when they were too strong for him. He let out a muffled string of curses at the guards, but everyone ignored him. Lowell sighed behind me. “What?” I asked innocently. “No one said I had to let him talk. Just that I had to feed.”
“Continue on, Miss Coven,” he said in a warning tone.
I turned back to Byron and shoved my fingers through his hair, wrenching his head back at an uncomfortable angle. “The only thing I’ll be sucking is your blood, and your dick stays in your pants, or my webs will wrap around it so tightly it’ll fall off from blood loss. Understand?”
His face went utterly pale, and he swallowed hard. He must’ve seen the truth in my eyes, because he nodded slowly.
“That’s a good little fly,” I said with a fanged grin, releasing him.
As soon as I let him go, Byron’s eyes fluttered, and then he started to shake.
But it wasn’t a normal shaking. It wasn’t trembling or the way your body shivers when you have a chill. It wasn’t even like he was shaking from anger. It was almost like he was...flashing, except he was staying in one place. His body thrummed in hyper speeds, making him appear blurred. In a creepy display, his head began jolting left and right, and then different faces started to flash across his own.
I gaped at him, caught between uneasiness and rising fear. “What’s wrong with him?”
“Seems you provoked his demon to come out,” Lowell answered, seemingly nonplussed.
Oh shit.
“What kind of demon is he?”
“Nothing for you to worry about. He’s a nightmare demon. He shows you your greatest fears
