Lunara spared a glance for the female who’d spoken directly beside her, a stunning Demon with red-rimmed eyes like moss. “I will do it, just tell me where to go.”
The Demon hesitated briefly before standing. “Follow me.”
Ignoring the twinge already starting in her hips, Lunara rose, her hands fused to his exposed muscle and bone. She bade the male’s body to follow and he left the ground, his particles obeying her commands. Lunara kept one eye on her charge and the other on the female’s back, the steady pitter patter of blood dropping to stone the only sound as she followed.
It wasn’t long before they came to a door and she was led inside. The bed had been prepared with gauzy, clean linens, blankets and pillows absent and the curtains removed.
Lunara placed the Demon on its soft surface as gently as she could manage. “What is his name?”
The female stood at the end of the bed, gaze distant. “Baldrir.”
“Hello, Baldrir,” Lunara crooned as she detached herself from him, leaving two small handprints of perfectly healed skin, her palms burning as if it had been her own flesh she’d left behind. “And yours?”
“Hedda.” Her voice was thick, trembling.
Lunara pushed a matted lock of black hair away from Baldrir’s beaten face. “I’m going to do everything I can to save him, Hedda,” she said quietly. “I swear it.”
“Thank you.” Hedda drew in a deep breath and made for the door. “Is there anything else you need?”
“My things, from Thaddeus. Otherwise, just time.”
Hedda bowed her head. “It shall be done, my lady.”
Lunara sat on the edge of the mattress as the door closed, lifting the Demon’s large hand in her own. “You are beloved by those around you, Baldrir, which says a great deal. I should think they’d be rather cross if you left them here without your company. Let’s not disappoint them, hmm?”
Light flared as Lunara’s power concentrated between their palms, and she began.
Time wasn’treal in that place, where flesh knit and bones mended. Where power was exchanged for pain over minutes and hours and days.
Where Lunara broke so others could heal.
Every reconnected vessel was a knife to her own. Rebuilding jointed places caused hers to splinter. Each bit of sinew restored and ligament repaired sent a fiery blaze of devastation through her.
She held Baldrir’s violent mutilation within her hands and then accepted it all into herself.
No, Lunara didn’t bleed. She didn’t bruise, or split, or shatter. Her skin didn’t rend in the same places. Her limbs didn’t crack in the same ways.
There was nothing to see, but shefelt it.Sisters save her, she felt every horrific second.
Lunara’s fangs cut into her more than once as she clenched her teeth against it, slicing her lips and tongue, shredding her gums. Sweat beaded on her scalp and soaked her dress, the film of hard labor clinging to her. Her throat ached and her head pounded from the screams withheld.
From bearing every raw ounce of Baldrir’s torture in silence.
Silent, but for the whispers she gave him between their shared torment. Soft words she uttered in earnest, their only purpose to uplift and bring him back gently.
“Who would dare?Who wouldfuckingdareinsult me and mine in such a manner!”
The Demon King was in a spitting temper, each stomping step shaking the windows of the great hall. His sunlight markings dimmed with every bellow he freed, until the obsidian flare of his membranous wings were like a void behind him. It was the footprints trailing him, though—the ones left behind in Baldrir’s drying blood—that had Brand seeing his own shade of red.
“You said he was well! You assured us you’d seen him! Now,this?!” Lyriat chucked a wooden bench across the great hall, the seat splintering into infinite pieces as it landed and he roared to the glass ceiling, “I want the fucking truth, Magnus, right fuckingnow!”
Brand choked back the rage trying to rise in answer to his friend’s fury. Hedda and Faldir didn’t possess anywhere nearhis level of control, having long-since succumbed and made the change to tower above him along with the seething king.
If not for Lyriat’s copper hair to the twins’ wine-red coloring, the three of them could have been triplets pacing there, growling and grunting with every pass.
“I swear to the Sisters and all I hold dear that I left him whole and hale last night,” Mag rasped, a haunted look in his golden eyes. “He was well. I don’t understand what happened.”
“Would you say the same while under the effects of a genuinely binding oath?” Lyriat spun on him, snatching Mag’s rumpled robe in a colossal fist as he crouched and brought their noses together. “Shall we call Caius and your precious Chieftains here to perform it? Maybe the lot of you can take turns sinking your dripping, poisonous teeth into one another for good measure so that I am reassured and no longer tempted to lay waste to every last, fucking inch of your traitorous realm!”
