Everything in McCrum’s had disappeared, and in its place stood this stranger who’d appeared from the topaz.
My precious antique shop, my only home, had turned into a giant monstrousman.
Chapter Five
Balor
After eight miserable centuries, I was free. Free of this curse that had forced me into that wretched building.
I was finally. Fecking.Free.
The McCrums had used my eye and the magic within as a battery. Me. The king of giants, milked for every drop of magic I was worth. Then they had the audacity to call my eye lucky.
For the first time in centuries, I finally felt like luck was on my side.
The cultist's bullet had narrowly missed Maeve, and instead shot through the painting concealing my eye, burrowing straight into the stone.
Freeing me from my prison.
“Fire and fury, does that feel good,” I groaned as I stretched my arms and flexed my fingers for the first time in an age.
I had a body again. Muscles to flex. A cock to stroke.
Fire filled my lungs, my veins. The cool night air licked at my flames, and I turned my head up and laughed at the sky.
Movement dragged my attention back to the Earth, cutting my celebration short.
The pathetic male who Maeve had brought home from the pub scrambled into the dark like a cockroach rid of its rock.
A slow, manic smile stretched my mouth. That old urge to crush and kill burned under my skin, and as luck would have it, I’d already found a victim.
There were a million ways I could do it. I could shift, and crush him beneath my feet. Unoriginal, but it was a classic for a reason. I could shoot fire from my eye. I could stay in my smaller form—a mere eight feet tall—and gut him with my bare hands.
A feminine voice cut through my dark thoughts. “Put it back.”
I turned. There, with a gun clutched in her small hands, was Maeve McCrum. She’dsummoned the nerve to pick up one of the cultist’s abandoned guns and had the barrel pointed right at my gemstone eye.
The confusion and anger on her face had my cock thickening. “Yer a bold thing fer bein’ so wee, I’ll give ya that.” My voice was raspier than I remembered it, like it had gotten thick from centuries of dust.
“I said, put it back!” the small human demanded, louder this time.
I grinned, feeling the flames of my beard licking my cheeks with the motion. “Put what back, wee one?”
There was a ferocity in the way she looked at me. By her racing heart, she was terrified. But Mave McCrum met me glare for glare. “The store. The building. My fucking apartment.”
She held that weapon like she was a natural killer. Maybe there was more of that natural monster hunter left in her blood than I’d expected.
“Look at ya. Threatening a god without so much as a twitch. Ya truly are all grown up.”
“You’re no god.” She swallowed. “You’re a monster.”
I plucked the bullet still lodged in my evil eye and it dropped to the ground with aclink.“Most godsaremonsters, girl.”
I didn’t bother telling her that the bullet would do nothing to me, not unless she was a good enough shot to hit my eye where the first bullet had, and shatter the entire thing.
She knew she was powerless against me.
Every cell in my body was vibrating with freshly unleashed magic. I flexed my fingers, laughing at the sensation, power rolling off each digit in potent waves. After hundreds of years trapped as an antique shop, returning to my old form was the most pleasurable high I’d experienced. It was feckingexhilarating.
