Still, he would shift and adjust. Take what was needed, leave what wasn’t. Do what was necessary for himself and for the tenants of his land.
For Weavingshaw.
I will have to spend my days trying to release you.
He had stepped closer to her in the cave, his entire focus narrowed to the blush of her lips and how he wanted to submerge himself within her—to taste her in decadence, in starvation. The silhouette of her soft curves even now played across his vision. If what he could see was enticing, what heimaginedwas devastating. He had wanted to shred to pieces the overcoat that she was wearing, or kiss it in gratitude for covering her. Had it not been there, there would have been no secret, no request she could have made of him, that he would have denied.
He cursed under his breath, low and harsh.How,he thought,had she attained such previously unattainable power over him?He was not at all comforted by the fact that she did not know it yet. He was sure, sooner or later, he would reveal himself.
With effort, St. Silas restrained his thoughts.
He would be damned if he were to go further with Leena while the contract still stood. The power shift between them was too great, and he did not want her to feel the weight of it forcing herchoices. If she chose him, she needed to do it of her own volition, within her own freedom. He would not touch her until then.
He, himself, lived under the cruel hand of a contract, and he knew what it meant to be choiceless.
St. Silas glanced behind him. The candle’s light was now a mere speck. If that guttered out, then he would lose his direction. He’d never known this sort of blindness—the kind that had depth, that swallowed, that smothered. It was a trick designed to tug at the bleakness that rested in the consciousness of every human. To tempt them into the water.
Everyone except an Avon.
The crypt-demon needed the Avons.
St. Silas had heard stories of what Weavingshaw’s demon had done to his grandfather—slowly feasting on his soul day by day, until three decades later his grandfather had lost all semblance of himself, locked in his own head, wandering the grounds in madness and despair.
His father had told St. Silas once, when he was a child, that the Avons’ sacrifice was worth it, for the endurance of Weavingshaw.
The demon living in the crypts was a rare breed, unlike the ones St. Silas had dealt with in the underworld. Most demons fed on emotions, ultimately leaving the bodies of their victims hollow husks, or killing them outright if fed on too much and too quickly.
Weavingshaw’s demon fed on the mind, implanting obsessions and delusions instead, plunging the Avons into eventual madness. In exchange, the Avons prolonged the demon’s life by allowing it unrestrained access to feast on them.
The 1st Marquess of Avon had been an intelligent man and he had known how to guard himself, eventually succumbing to death before he succumbed to madness.
St. Silas’s grandfather had not been so strong—although he had managed to avoid complete insanity until streaks of gray threaded his fair hair. In contrast, Percival had been weak, and, even as a boyof twelve, St. Silas had seen the first fledglings of paranoia beginning to unsettle his father.
St. Silas knew that Weavingshaw’s demon could never easily plunge him into submission, into madness, unlike the majority of his bloodline.
If St. Silas had been a weaker man—if he didn’t strive endlessly—the underworld demons would have fed on him until depletion years ago. He would’ve been long dead. Buried in that cursed ocean that surrounded the Duke of Fray’s estate with the other boys dressed in white.
He saw them now.
It was the demon magic warping his mind; this he knew. He stared hollow-eyed as the young boys now marched across the water.
There was Joseph, the eldest of the group, still smooth-faced.
Hector, who cried into his fist at night while everyone else slept.
Theodore Daye, who had had the misfortune of being St. Silas’s servant, indentured to the demon alongside him as a parting gift from Lord Avon.
He’d forgotten the names of the rest. They had blurred over the years, becoming echoes of themselves, haunting no one, not even St. Silas—the only one of them to have lived.
But he saw them now.
They were all just children. He hadn’t realized it at the time. Not given the way they’d clawed at each other for survival.
In the beginning, St. Silas had been a lordling among street urchins and pickpockets. The Duke of Fray had paid him special attention at first—perhaps to reward him, perhaps to punish him—but it had stoked the hatred of the other boys.ExceptTheo Daye, who was now dead because of him.
It had disturbed him that Leena saw Theo’s ghost, forcing St. Silas to reckon with a past that he thought he’d already sealed over long ago.
He’d been twelve when Joseph had forced his head into the underworld canal and held him down until his limbs weakened, until black dots clouded his vision. Until the water’s rot had baptized him anew. Baptized himworse.It was Joseph whom St. Silas had killed with a rock to the brow in that final fight for survival.
