“Do I want to fuck her? Yes. She is hot and feisty. Am I about to lose my mind over it? No. Is that what you’re getting at?”
“Precisely,” I murmur, turning away from his cavalier attitude to stare at the woman who has effectively unravelled us in less than twenty-four hours. “If she is a vessel for something else, every monster in this realm is going to want a piece of her.”
Voren grunts. “They already do.”
I lock gazes with him. “This is only the beginning.”
Chapter 20
Nyssa
The first thing I notice is the taste of chalk. The second is that my body feels like it’s been put through a blender, reconstituted, and then dropped from a great height. Which, judging by the jagged hole in the bed canopy and the ceiling directly above me, is exactly what happened.
I groan, rolling onto my side. “One of you knocked me out, and I’m going to stab you.”
I push myself up on my elbows, expecting that weird, buzzing energy to send me pinging off the walls again, but I feel hollow. Scraped out. The manic hum Voren infected me with is gone, replaced by a dull, throbbing ache that feels different, not real, almost.
“She speaks,” Dastian says. “And she’s violent. Good sign.”
I glare at him through the curtain of dusty hair falling over my face, then shift my gaze to Dreven, who looks like he’s waiting for me to spontaneously combust. “You,” I hiss.
“It was necessary,” the Shadow God says, his faceimpassive, though his silver eyes are tracking my every movement. “You were not yourself.”
“Then who was I?”
He moves in closer and crouches down, so he is at eye level with me. “Good fucking question, slayer.”
The way he says it makes my blood chill. “Mind your tone, or you won’t get your dick wet again,” I murmur.
He smirks. It’s lazy, casual, but it belies the heat in his gaze. “I can live without getting my dick wet. Can you live if we don’t figure out what is driving you?”
“I’m a slayer,” I snap, swinging my legs off the ruined mattress. A cloud of plaster dust puffs up, making me cough, but I refuse to let it ruin my exit. “I kill demons. I drink tea. Occasionally, I make bad decisions regarding ancient deities. That is the extent of my complexity.”
Dreven stands to his full height, the shadows retreating slightly but still clinging to him like a second skin. “Your blood reacted to Voren’s power like gasoline to a naked flame. That is not standard slayer physiology, Nyssa. You know it.”
“Maybe I’m just allergic to bullshit,” I mutter, forcing myself to stand. My knees wobble, threatening to buckle, but I lock them straight. I am not falling down in front of them again. “Look, I appreciate the… whatever that was. Exorcism? Reboot? But I’m done being a science experiment for the night.”
“You can’t go back to that cottage,” Voren says. “Not until we know you won’t level the village next time you sneeze.”
“I don’t sneeze explosives,” I argue and try to take a step forward, but butt up against something solid, yet invisible. “Oh, you had better not!”
I slam my open palm against the invisible surface. Itfeels like pressing against a wall of solidified gloom—cold, unyielding, and distinctly Dreven.
“Let me out,” I demand, my voice low and dangerous.
Dreven doesn’t even blink. He stands there, looking like a disappointed headmaster who also happens to be a devastatingly handsome god of darkness. “Not until we are certain you won’t detonate again.”
Hitting the barrier again, it ripples, absorbing the force of my blow without a tremor. “I am not a bomb. I’m a person who would very much like to go home, put on pyjamas, and forget I ever met any of you.”
“Dreven is right. You’re unstable. If you walk out that door and explode in the middle of the village, the Order will hunt you down, and they won’t be as polite as we are,” Voren pipes up.
“Polite?” I laugh, a harsh, incredulous sound. “You call trapping me in a shadow box polite?”
“Compared to a cage made of cold iron? Yes.” Dreven steps closer, the barrier humming as he nears it. “Sit down, slayer. You aren’t going anywhere.”
“Want to hit the bookies with that assumption?” I ask and close my eyes. Drawing on the power that makes me less human than I’d like to be, I clench my hand into a fist and drive it through the shadows with a crack that makes more ceiling fall down around us.
I open my eyes and smile, taking a step forward. “You think it’s that easy to cage a being created to kill your kind?” I ask.
