Demon from the Dark

distracted that he didn't see them—

Until they'd surrounded him, at least twenty of them. The largest one wore a grand suit of armor and was nearly as large as Malkom. The others called that demon Ronath. From the look on his face, Malkom despised him.

They were here for Malkom, specifically for his capture. If Malkom was a fugitive, had this armored demon come to arrest him?

With hatred seething in his now dark eyes, Malkom said something in a low, brutal tone.

When Ronath responded, sneering some reply, Malkom launched himself at the demon, driving him into a tree.

But Ronath's armor took the brunt of the blow. And unlike Malkom, Ronath and some of his men could trace. Even with Malkom's speed, he couldn't defend against so many as they appeared and disappeared, stabbing him again and again.

Can't watch this ... can't watch...

After several tries, they cast a metal net over him, but they couldn't trace him away when he was resisting so violently.

How much longer could he keep up his struggles? He was weakening—he clearly knew it. Still he clashed with them, and he might have gotten free. But then Malkom froze. His senses were better than the others'. And he'd heard Carrow calling for him, approaching them.

His eyes were calculating, his mind working. Her lips parted as he stopped fighting them. He'd made the decision to be taken.

Just before they traced him away, he roared twice more to cover her drunken calls. And then they were gone.

Ah, gods, no.

If they'd seized Malkom for that murder, then they'd likely take him back to the nearest city. She hurriedly climbed to a vantage point to gaze out from the mountain.

In the distance, she could barely spy out a collection of buildings rising from the horizon. If the winds had been up much more, she'd never have spotted them.

Surely regicide was punishable by death. She had to go after him. Aside from the fact that she felt guilty as hell for injuring him and then distracting him, she needed Malkom for her and Ruby's freedom.

So she'd go and save him, just so she could betray him?

Are you so cold, Carrow? Not cold, she was committed to a little girl who needed her.

A part of her cried, Malkom needs me, too. At that moment, she made a promise to herself. If Chase kept his word, then she'd return to the facility for Malkom. 'I swear to Hekate that I won't stop until he's freed.' Carrow would make everything right. It just might take time....

With that vow made, she focused once more on the problem at hand—some asshole named Ronath.

The sobering spell she'd cast made one sober as though through the passing of time. Which meant Carrow was now hungover. Which meant...

Demons would die today!

How to get to them? Between her and the city was a beastie-filled desert. She'd have to expend beaucoup energy to make herself invincible. Oh, and to float across the sand.

Yes, she'd been using power to reinforce her body with Malkom—and she'd used still more to attack him today. So she wouldn't have enough juice left over from her trek to contend with a town full of demons.

She'd need an infusion. It all would depend on one thing.

Malkom Slaine had better be happy to see her.

Chapter 24

'You've come full circle now, Slaine,' Ronath said from outside Malkom's cell, the same one in which he'd been imprisoned with Kallen all those years ago. 'And still after all these centuries, you are nothing.'

Narrowing his bloodied and swollen eyes, Malkom gripped the cell bars, the wrath inside him burning for release. Earlier, the armorer had ordered his guards to beat him but refused to face Malkom alone—even though Ronath could now trace. 'And still you are a coward, one who has always feared me.'

When Ronath shrugged, his elaborate armor clanked with the movement. 'Your taunts mean nothing to me because we both know that I've won. And you, Scarba, will always lose. It might take hundreds of years, but you will always fail.'

Never had Malkom needed to kill as he did now. Because everything Ronath said was true.

I wanted to live with Carrow. That was all.

Though the idea of being kept from his female made him crazed—he'd sworn he would never be separated from her—he had one consolation. Ronath wouldn't find her. So I win. By the time the armorer and his men had finished torturing Malkom and returned to the mountain to begin mining, she would be long gone.

Malkom had made her so furious that there was no chance she'd try to follow him. As if there'd been a chance before the bite. She would make her own way to the portal and leave without him this night. With the power she'd demonstrated this morning, she should be safe.

I would have liked to see her world. To have her show it to me.

Would she wonder what had become of him?

It didn't matter. He would die here, and she would be safe from these demons.

Ronath ran the tip of his bone spear under a claw. 'Surely even you can recognize that you were born just to be punished. What I do not understand is why you haven't simply ended yourself. Seems you are more coward than I.'

Kallen had once asked him about his will to live, marveling at it, especially in light of Malkom's earlier hardships. This morning, when Malkom had been brought into the city, memories of his imprisonment and his childhood overwhelmed him, until even he had begun to marvel at what he'd survived.

The torture and pain, the unending loneliness.

In this very cell, he'd been trapped with the body of his best friend for days. The brother he'd murdered...

Never had he regretted anything so badly. Even before he'd been released, Malkom had realized that Kallen's actions hadn't been the betrayal he thought; the prince had merely decided on a rational course of action.

The better male lives, the lesser sacrifices.

In four hundred years, Malkom had accomplished nothing. Kallen could have achieved so much more.

Yet now Malkom realized that if he hadn't had the will to live that night, he never would have known his witch, wouldn't have been here to save her life.

He pictured Carrow smiling up at him from under a jet-black curl. Malkom had somehow endured long enough to protect the most exquisite woman born, to pleasure her. I savored her cries in my ear and safeguarded her to the end.

Gods, how much more easily he would have been able to withstand his past if he'd known she'd be in his future, for even this short a time.

On that night so long ago, Malkom hadn't been willing to die for Kallen, but for the witch...

I do it gladly.

Malkom shoved his shoulders back. 'You know nothing of my life, Ronath,' he said, his tone smug.

'I know it's about to end,' Ronath replied, turning to call for the guards. 'It's time.'

Time to begin the dwellers' grueling ritual. With me as the sacrifice. Yet even now, Malkom had only one regret.

He'd broken his vow to Carrow.

She'd been enraged with him. And he hadn't had the words to tell her that he'd bitten her because he was