It’s a sudden burst of light as all the air rushes back into my lungs and power … sweet, heady power surges through my limbs. It’s electricity and heat, and a pure surge of adrenaline that startles Rase when I shove him hard enough to create a dent in the stone wall. His bulk slumps to the ground in an avalanche of crushed bricks.
I leap off the dais, veins pulsing with the most delicious wave of life.
“What…?”
Dain tries to scramble back, but my tendrils lash out and I seize him around the throat. Barbs cut into veins, saw through muscles as I lift him.
“You should have gone back in the box,” I tell them.
I nearly consider the joy of torturing them. Of locking them in the box forever, but I need to find Lenora. I need to see our baby and I’ve already been gone too long.
Determined to end this, I dig Rase from the debris and pull the two together. I squeeze and bind the way I had the Duval brothers. But I snap the arms, bend the legs. I ignore their screams as I wad them up, crushing them. The gush and splatter of blood rains across the stone. Bones crunch and flesh squelches until I have compressed them to nothing more than a bundle of oozing flesh that I drop into their box.
They’re not dead.
It will take more than this to kill a demon, but they are confined as I take a deep breath and absorb them.
I melt them back into my body. Soak them through my skin and lock them where they will never see the light of day again. And as the wound closes on the only family I’ve ever had, I can’t help the pang of loss. A subtle kind of grief that I have to swallow down and forget.
Brothers gone for good, I face the bodies. The twisted bundle of limbs and torsos. Augustus and Bernard Duval are mere husks that will not die. Their purgatory suspends them in a perpetual state of living-dead. I could end their suffering, but why? They had been cruel and merciless to their victims. The guilty and the innocent. There is no place of redemption for their kind.
I place them in a hole.
A dark, cavernous hole with no hopes of escape. They will resume their existence in their current state. Feeling every pain while wandering an endless void.
Them dealt with, I turn to the flayed remains of Julen Duval. Like his sons, he isn’t dead. He lies curled up in the filth, skinless, shivering and wheezing as his nerves burn with exposure.
“What to do with you?” I murmur, starting towards him.
I like having his sons alone in their pit, but the idea of having him always mere feet from them, hearing them cry for him and never reaching them pleases me.
So, I put him in the hole with them, but separated by a thin film of time and space like a veil keeping them apart. That should be enough punishment for the trio.
I’m feeling pretty pleased with myself and still pulsing with that boost of power. The surge of strength is unlike anything I’ve tasted in … centuries. I glance down at my hands and I flex my fingers. There had never been anything wrong with them in the past, but it feels different. The motions. I still don’t understand, nor do I have time to figure it out as I hurry up the platform in the direction of my mirror.
I need to find Lenora.
But I barely pass the dais when I’m stopped by the movement. The faint rustle that has me spinning to face the figure slumped against the altar.
Chapter Forty-Four
Marcus
DyingforLenoraandour baby is a gift I would offer up every time.
Dying for a demon I can barely stand is an injustice I can’t help feeling a bit miffed about, but how was I supposed to let him die when I know it would destroy her? How was I supposed to ignore her tangled screams of agony and grief as she begged me not to leave him?
And, damn it, maybe a part of me doesn’t want him to die, either. It’s a small part. Barely a pinprick, but annoying enough to have me abandon Lenora mid labor, sneak back through the mirror and save a demon I can’t stand.
Now, the asshole is looming over me looking dumbfounded.
“What are you doing here?”
Struggling to breathe without agitating the jagged wound gouged deep across my side, I glower up at him.
“What the hell does it look like?”
As if English isn’t registering in his thick skull, he turns his head from me to search the room.
