Page 25 of The Demon Kept Me

"More," she begs, her voice breaking. "Malvek, give me all of it."

So I bring my secondary weapons to bear. My tail lashes up between her legs from behind, coiling tight, the blunt tip grinding against her clit in a brutal counter-rhythm to my thrusts, and her eyes go wide as the dual pressure traps her between the two, her hips bucking up helplessly to meet it.

I lean down and close my lips around one swollen nipple, sucking hard, my fangs grazing just enough to make her writhe, while I slide one hand between our bodies to work her throbbing clit directly with two thick, slicked fingers. I have her utterly trapped — stretched from the inside, pinned from behind, driven half out of her mind from the front, and the wet heat of my mouth besides. She is a soaking, desperate mess beneath me, and I want her exactly that ruined.

"I'm coming — Malvek, please —"

"Take it," I roar against her skin, my pace turning furious, hammering into her with everything I have left, my own control fraying to nothing under the sound of her.

The tension snaps. She breaks apart with my name torn from her throat, every muscle in her locking tight around me in one long, rippling wave that wrings me mercilessly, her nails raking hard down the glowing lines on my back, her cries breaking apart into something wordless against my throat as the aftershocks keep rolling through her.

She grips me so perfectly, so completely, that whatever control I had left doesn't survive it. With a roar that shakes the rafters, I drive one last time to the hilt, pinning her hips flat against the mattress, and unleash a relentless, scalding torrent deep inside her, my whole massive body shaking with the force of it until there is nothing left in me to give.

Afterward we lie tangled in the blankets with the coals ticking low, her head over my heart, my hand tracing slow along the curve of her spine, and neither one speaks for a long while because nothing needs it.

"Whatever tomorrow brings," she says finally, into the dark, "I don't regret a moment of this. Not one. Not the mill, not the danger, not any of it. I'd choose it all again. I'd choose you again."

"And I you," I say. "If I fall tomorrow, I fall a fortunate creature. I had more life in these few months with you than in a long age of years before you came. Remember that, if it comes to it. Whatever they say of the demon of Ashbrook after — remember that he died the happiest he had ever been, because he did not die alone."

"You're not going to die," she says fiercely, tightening her arms around me. "I won't allow it. We've a garden to plant."

"We've a garden to plant," I agree, and I hold her against the coming storm, and for this one night the storm can wait.

22

WREN

The scouts come in at first light with mud to their knees and the truth in their faces before they say a word.

"Men in the trees," Bren pants, first up the mill lane as always, freckled face grey with cold and fear both. "Armed ones. Garrik counted near twenty. They're keeping off the roads, coming down through the deep timber where nobody farms. They don't want to be seen coming, Wren."

"Then they've made their choice," I say, and I'm surprised how steady my voice comes out. "Go tell Malvek exactly what you told me, word for word. Then get warm and get food in you. I need you sharp today, not brave."

He goes. And Ashbrook, which spent a great while as a scattering of frightened farms that couldn't agree on a fence line, becomes something else in front of my eyes.

Garrik moves through the village like the elder he never called himself, thick gray beard frosted, his farmer's limp forgotten, gathering every hand that can hold a tool. Not soldiers — we've no soldiers. Farmers with axes and hunting bows, the blacksmith with a hammer, boys with pitchforks and more nerve than sense. He sorts them the way he'd sort a harvest crew, by what they're good for, and nobody argues with him because everybody's known him their whole lives.

Father Aldren takes the other half of it — the half that breaks my heart a little to watch. The children. The old ones. The mothers with babes too small to leave. He gathers them into the chapel, the sturdiest stone building in the valley, kind blue eyes calm as still water, and he does the thing only a priest can do: he makes frightened people believe, just by the steadiness of his voice, that they might see morning. I hear him leading the little ones in a counting song to keep them from the fear, and I have to turn away and press my sleeve to my eyes and get back to my work.

My work is the grain, and the plan, and the thousand small pieces that turn a mob into a defense.

"You," I tell the miller's-lane families, "move every sack from the low store to the chapel undercroft. Not one grain stays below the flood line." To the ridge cottages: "Take in the Harrow family and old Tomas — your homes sit highest, they'll shelter with you if the horn sounds." To the strong-armed among the women: "Water barrels. Every door of the mill, every corner of the grain barns. If they bring fire, we drown it before it catches." I move through them handing out tasks like bread, and I watch the fear settle into purpose behind their eyes, one villager at a time, because a person with a job to do has no room left to panic.

And the thing that undoes me, the thing I'll carry the rest of my life: they come to Malvek now.

I watch it happen a dozen times through the long grey morning. A farmer who once stepped wide around him a season ago now jogs up to ask where he wants the barricade set. A woman who called him cursed at the well asks him, plain and unafraid, whether the barn door will hold. They bring their questions to the demon and they wait on his answers, and Malvek — my enormous, gruff, walled-off Malvek — gives them, patient and clear, those slitted red eyes moving over the ground like he's reading a contract only he can see. He's done this before. In another life, in a floating city, he marshaled defenses and men looked to him. His hands remember it. And Ashbrook, which feared him a great while, has decided in the space of two days that the most frightening thing in the valley is exactly the thing they want standing between them and the water.

He finds me at midday, in the lee of the grain barn where we've a moment out of the wind, and for a breath he looks at me.

"They're listening to me," he says, low, like he can't quite credit it. "All those years, and now they hand me their children's lives and wait to hear what I'll do with them."

"They should. You've kept them fed since before some were born. They're only now catching up to what you are."

"What I am." His jaw works. He reaches out and tucks a loose curl behind my ear with a claw that could open a door off its hinges, gentle as anything. "Do you know why I trust them enough to lead them, Wren?” He doesn't wait for my answer. "Because you believed in me first. Before Garrik. Before the boy. Before any of them. When every household still whispered curse, you stood at the well and told them they were wrong. I learned to trust this village by watching you trust it. Whatever courage I've got today, you gave it to me."

My throat's too tight to answer that properly, so I do what I can — I take his great hand in both of mine and press my mouth to his knuckles, careful of the fangs, the way he does to me, and I let that be my answer.

"Come on," I manage. "Walk the ground with me. I want to see it through your eyes before dark."