Only for every single cell in my body to freeze when the front door of the tavern swings open.
A demon stands in the doorway.
Unmistakable, with his curling horns and leathery black wings, his long whip of a tail and the crimson gleam of his eyes in the candlelight as he surveys the gathered crowd.
I avert my gaze as he enters the tavern, pull my cloak’s hood higher around my face, but he pays me no mind. In fact, he doesn’t seem to spare any of the patrons more than a cursory glance as he finds an open seat in the opposite corner of the room.
Unable to help myself, I sneak another glance at him.
Demons aren’t a new sight for me. A human witch reigns as queen of the demon realm, and the new bargain she struck has caused an influx of other witches through the Veil to meet their own demon mates. Not to mention, Joan—one of my best friends—has recently shacked up with her own demon partner back in the human realm.
But unlike Allie’s husband, King Eren, or Joan’s mate, Rhett, or any of the other demons I’ve crossed paths with,thisdemon looks like some kind of Viking warrior. Broad through the shoulders and tall, with long, dark brown hair pulled back from his face and adorned with braids and metal beads. He’s white, with a deep tan like he spends a lot of time outdoors, and more than a few visible scars—one through his eyebrow, another adorning the line of his jaw.
He’s wearing some kind of leather armor, scuffed and worn, with a sigil stamped into the shoulder that looks like a dragon or wyvern from the brief glimpse I get of it. Strapped to his back is a sword—an honest-to-Goddesssword—like he just stepped off a battlefield.
Conversations die in his wake as he makes his way across the tavern and sinks onto one of the long benches at the opposite side of the room. Though the din kicks back up once he’s seated, there’s an edge to it, a tightness, like everyone’s just waiting for chaos to erupt.
It makes a strange, shaky energy coil in the bottom of my belly, something not entirely unlike the energy I feel when I’m seeking.
The seeking instinct feels like a magnet, a deep and intrinsic force that’s always been a part of me. From the time I was little and would slip out the back door and into the woods behind my parents’ house to find a pretty feather or a particularly shiny rock, I’ve always been able to reach for it and listen for its call. Over time, I’ve even been able to hone and focus it, sharpening it until it’s not just about finding things that are lost, but seeing things as they really are.
Glamours, enchantments, concealment charms, wards, none of them stand a chance against my magick.
Esme Hawthorn—the Crescent Coven’s High Priestess and Allie’s mother—was always fascinated by my gift.
She’d never seen anything quite like it, and my novelty made me a pet of hers. She worked with me personally to develop it, to challenge it with tasks that usually benefited the coven in one way or another, to put me on the exalted little pedestal where she kept all her gifted students, the bright and shiny future of the coven.
At least until the day I turned eighteen and decided I’d had enough.
So now it’s just mine, this Goddess-given gift. It’s mine to own and mine to wield, no more covens or priestesses to do that for me.
But unlike my seeking magick, this new energy is ever so slightly… off.
Sideways, upside down, just out of reach. Like I can’t control it completely. Or, maybe more accurately, likeit’scontrollingme.
Two ends of taut, invisible twine stretch between me and this demon, insisting I do something. Stand, go to him, discover what it means.
Part of me wants to do just that. I could sidle over and sit down next to him, bat my eyes a little and see what a demon like him is doing so far away from his own realm.
I should get out of here.
Nothing good ever comes from temptation like him.
As alarming as the demon’s appearance is, and as much as he radiates an aura ofstay the fuck away from me, I’d be a damn dirty liar if I tried to deny how handsome he is. I'd be lying to deny how much that energy’s pulling me toward him, whispering what a good idea it would be to see if he wants some company for the evening.
Before I can decide whether I’m going to listen to that stupid, reckless thread of magick, movement from the front of the tavern catches my attention again.
An ogre, tall and corpulent with deep green skin and two sharp tusks jutting up from his bottom lip, swings the door wide and throws off his cloak with a swagger and a grin. He gets the attention of everyone in the room, and I’m almost certain I know who he is.
A smuggler, and a famous one to boot.
I’ve never met him myself, but Pytri’s reputation precedes him. The ogre is infamous in some of the less reputable circles of folks who regularly cross realms.
All sorts of goods make their way from one realm to another, along with the traders and smugglers who peddle them.
And Pytri smuggles more dangerous goods than most.
Last I heard, he’d just escaped a hangman’s noose in the frost realm for the illegal transport of the highly prized minerals mined from beneath its mile-thick fields of ice.
