Page 5

Chapter Five

Balor

A fter 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 a clink. “Most gods are monsters, 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 fecking exhilarating.

I wanted to eat and drink and shag myself silly. Just standing on my own two legs was damn near a religious experience. And the scents… Hers was the first to hit me.

Maeve smelled of sugar and lavender soap and fresh air. I couldn’t gulp down enough of her aroma. It filled my lungs and, suddenly, I burned with the need to touch her.

My hunger for her was an ache in my brain, my bones, my balls—an itch in my blood, instant and ferocious.

It was an urge I couldn’t act on. Not yet.

As soon as I touched her, she’d die.

Ignoring the pit in my gut, I took a step toward her, then another. She flinched when I kicked one of the bodies of the cultist’s from my path, but she didn’t run. Too bad, I was hoping for a chase.

“Do you know who I am, wee one?”

I had a feeling she knew exactly what I was. She knew the legend. She’d even jokingly called me by name.

Now I loomed over her, proof that the story she’d grown up hearing was more than a fairytale. Balor of the Evil Eye wasn’t some fairytale villain. I was violence and vengeance in corporeal form.

With every step I took toward her she scooted back, until we were in the alley and out of sight from the road. Good. This was a quiet neighborhood this time of night. No one had seen what happened.

No one was coming to help her.

When her back hit the trash can of the next shop over, she stared up at me, the blue pools of her eyes swimming with loathing. “I know what you are.”

“Say it girl. Say my name.”

“B–Balor. You’re Balor of the Evil Eye. Now tell me where my fucking store is.”

That look on her face. It did twisted things to me.

It was agony not touching her. She was so damn beautiful. With one brush of my bare flesh against her, she’d be set ablaze.

I wasn’t ready for her to die yet. Not when tormenting her was the most fun I’d had in eight centuries.

“Your store?” My grin stretched wide, and I could make out the glowing embers of my beard in the reflection of her eyes. “Oh, sweet little misfortune. You’re looking right at it.”

I tugged the lapel of my jacket, made from the mismatched furniture patterns that had collected dust in the store for years, and waved my fingers, flashing the gems and gold that had been on display on the shop’s register counter.

“McCrum’s was only an illusion, created with the magic your family stole from me. ”

“My family didn’t steal shite from you!”

I opened my mouth to unleash the truth, when the cowardly male darted from his hiding place beside the trash bins at the end of the alley.

“Where do ya think yer going, ya wee gobshite?” A blast of fire shot from my eye, igniting at the mouth of the alley, cutting off his exit. It spread, forcing him back toward where I stood. A sobbing pathetic mess.

I stooped down, grabbing him by the front of his jacket and hoisting him in the air above my head. “What kind of milk dribblin’ feck-smear uses a woman as a shield?”

He choked and wept, and by the dark spot in his trousers, wet himself.

Fire licked up my arm, consuming the boy in moments.

I breathed in the fumes and released a satisfied sigh. I discarded the boy’s corpse to the floor, crouched to pry the skull loose from the charred heap, and turned to face a horrified Maeve.

“Whether you like it or not, I am McCrum’s, girl.” I stretched my arm out to her, offering her the skull with a dark smile bending my lips. “Welcome home.”