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T he demon sniffed a path down my temple, across the shell of my ear, and dipped to the column of my neck, leaving a trail of hot damp skin in his wake. Was he following the scent of my blood? He paused above my collarbone, over my jugular.

And licked.

I shuddered, a panicked whine rolling past my lips.

That the demon didn’t stab my unprotected stomach with slashing claws or rip out my throat was not great news. Well, okay, sure. Death would’ve sucked. Violent, excruciating murder by demon wasn’t the way anybody wanted to leave the earth. This demon wasn’t killing me, though. Despite the severity of his wounds and the desperation to survive whatever had happened to him, he still only snuffled my neck, his rough snort breaking the quiet as he sucked my scent deep into his lungs, sly tongue sneaking to lap at my throat.

He was learning my aroma, my flavor. With his sharper senses, he’d be able to follow those identifying markers to find me anywhere, if he chose.

If.

I flinched when he jerked my polo up, baring my vulnerable stomach. By then, I’d figured out he would not disembowel me, but I still startled when he tucked his chin over my shoulder to stare at my abs as one clawed finger, dripping with his blood, traced over my skin. I wasn’t so lost to the fear screaming through me that my wide eyes didn’t follow the pattern he drew on me—a sigil. My racing heartbeat and careening thoughts couldn’t make sense of what I witnessed, but the circle containing the symbols he etched on my skin was no less a sigil. Crude. Messy.

But effective.

No warning preceded the jolt of magic he fed into the bloody sigil and his power burned from my stomach to my limbs, scorching to my toes and to the tips of the hair on my head. My muscles tensed under the onslaught, but the pain was fleeting.

Caring not at all about my discomfort, the demon lifted his blood-soaked finger to my chin and nudged my gaze toward his. “Fire,” he said on a shallow pant, his voice a hot, shaky rumble. The feeble spark of red in his pupils winked out, his eyes once again fading to inky black.

Stomach threatening to vomit up today’s late lunch at Coney Island Famous Weiners, I gawped at the demon.

“I need fire.” He huffed out a breath, the words slurring. “To heal.” Lines of pain bracketed his mouth. “Here is not safe.” He gestured at the seeping wounds cross-hatching his torso. “They could follow.”

My teeth clacked when I snapped my gaping mouth shut. The sigil he’d drawn had been a translation spell. His eyes had emptied of power again, but we could communicate. More importantly, I now understood that if he healed, he’d get the fuck away from here. From me.

Demons lied. If manipulation and deception secured a demon’s survival, hells yes, that demon would lie. I wanted to believe him, though. Giddy hope zapped through me, as much a painful shock as the demon’s magic punching through my aching body only moments ago, but mixed with that foolish thread of optimism? Fear.

They could follow , he’d said. Whatever had damn near killed him—may yet snuff his life out—could portal here too. I cringed to the depths of my soul at the idea of meeting whatever had gotten the best of this demon. “Megan laid a bonfire in the amphitheater at the Visitors Center for a scout event tonight. I saw it from the garage when I left.” I swallowed thickly. “I parked my golf cart past those trees. If I brace you, can you walk?”

“ Issa .” The demon jerked his head in a clumsy nod. “We go to the bone fire.”

Bonfire, bone fire, close enough. I shifted off his chest to stand, but lightning fast, he manacled my wrist, squeezing. Hurt mushroomed up my forearm and to my fingertips. “Do not run,” the demon growled, voice tight with warning. “You run. I chase.” He thumped his bloody chest. “Heart to hunt. I cannot stop this.” He pointed at me with the hand not crushing my wrist. “So, you die.” He shook his head. “Is not good.”

Pulse skittering, I nodded my understanding. “No running. You bet.” I gulped. “C’mon, let’s get you up.”

He’d loosened his grip, but unimpressed with my promise not to flee at the first opportunity, he kept physical control of me despite my difficulty pulling his leaden weight off the forest floor. I wasn’t a small guy. At a couple inches over six feet, few men stood taller, and I was no skinny twig of a dude, either. My job in the botanical garden demanded strength and stamina. Transplanting a tree with a root ball of a square foot meant lifting a hundred pounds, minimum, and the world would stop turning if I ever had a day free of hauling supplies to repair, maintain, or upgrade the garden’s architectural features and infrastructure. Add in the endless fifty-pound sacks of compost and topsoil I worked into the grounds to boost nutrients and keep our plants thriving…No need for a botany student to pay for a gym membership. The work alone built muscle. I was fit.

But that demon weighed a ton and between the grave injuries he’d suffered as well as the impediment of hanging onto me instead of helping me yank him onto his feet, I grunted and sweat. I cursed raggedly. My stumbling and unsteady lurch as I pulled him jarred his wounds, which spilled a fresh font of slick, hot blood over his torso. It pasted me to him like glue. “Listen,” I said, catching my breath when I’d only dragged the demon to his knees. “I don’t want to die, all right? I won’t take off, but if you don’t worry more about standing up than making sure I don’t get away, we’re both falling to the dirt in about two seconds.”

“You will run.” Panting as well, the demon glowered at me. “ Hoo-mins always–” He waved, fingers wagging to represent legs scrambling away. Seething foul temper, the demon jutted his chin. “ Hoo-mins stupid.”

I glared in return. “Almost as stupid as injured demons too stubborn to help me get him upright instead of crashing us in a heap on the ground.”

The demon’s mouth compressed into a cruel line. “And weak.” He nodded, grasp on me tightening. “ Hoo-mins weak.”

Bracing my stance, I heaved him up another couple inches which, twined together, wrecked our balance, and nearly toppled us to the forest floor. As predicted. “Well, if you want to bleed out and poison more of my dirt, keep doing what you’re doing,” I said with a grunt once I’d adjusted my grip enough to steady us both. “Christ on a pogo stick. Do you want to die? I thought you were worried more demons were coming to finish you off.”

Scowling, the demon huffed out thorough if exhausted contempt and finally released my aching wrist. “ Gibbon-diza .” His hand shifted to my hip, the demon unrepentant as I flinched at several claws sinking into the meat of my flesh to steady himself.

“Fuck,” I said through clenched teeth, my cargo shorts wetting at fresh blood seeping from the puncture wounds. I didn’t drop him, though. With his claws anchored in me, I didn’t dare. Moving away from the pain would just tear the punctures into gashes.

My compliance—at getting stabbed—kindled an ounce of respect in the demon’s stare. “You stay,” he commanded.

“Just do whatever you’re going to do.” Throat tight at the hurt throbbing in my thigh, I grimaced. “Hurry.”

“Weak.” But thank sweet baby Jesus, the demon pushed off the claws in my hip, pulling with his other hand on my shoulder. He groaned and the coppery scent of his spilling blood intensified. I couldn’t tell which gave my head a dizzy spin, the intensifying metallic smell of his blood wetting my front or the escalating misery of his claws piercing me. He shifted, though, the hard edge of greaves protecting his legs opening a cut on my shin. I yelped, equal parts surprise and hurt, but miracle of miracles, he rose from the foot he’d planted on the forest floor.

He stood.

Holy shit. I gaped at him anew because this lethal, badass demon barely reached my eye level. Once I steadied him to ensure he wouldn’t topple over and he’d slid his claws free of my wrecked thigh? When I straightened to my full height?

The crown of his head brushed my chin.

I’d been masquerading as a mundane my whole life. What I knew about demons was probably almost as wrong as mundane beliefs. Before his murder, Dad hadn’t spoken of demons often. The mountain highlands of western Maryland weren’t an active nexus of demon portaling. Why would he have tutored me about a being I’d likely never face when so many other dangers surrounded us?

That said, I was super confident demons weren’t supposed to be this short.

I knew the physical features of demons differed drastically, according to whichever tribe the demon originated from. Some had wings for flight. Others didn’t. One tribe’s demons sported a sharp ridge of scales down their spines, while a thick mat of hair covering their bodies identified still another tribe. Demons from the most common tribe stood as tall as two-story homes. Most towered several feet above humans.

I’d believe maybe this demon wasn’t fully grown, if not for the prevailing theory the species lacked the power to portal until they reached adulthood. A lot of what we knew about demons was conjecture. Demons who selected a magical partner to remain here on Earth didn’t explain much, at least nothing their human was willing to share. Simple logic indicated that the absence of demon young in our realm suggested their children couldn’t jump dimensions, though.

My demon wasn’t a kid.

He was just…runty.

As the demon arced a quizzical brow at me, I gave myself a few more seconds. Ignoring the disturbing tackiness of my blood-soaked polo and outright refusing to assess the damage the demon had done under my sodden cargo shorts, I squared my shoulders. “Okay. A little farther,” I said, not mentioning one fricking word about how short the demon was. Because I wanted to live. “Can you loop your arm over my shoulder? On my uninjured side.”

The demon complied, threading his beefy arm around me. The heat pouring off the brace armoring his forearm made the day’s atypical scorching heat that much more of a misery.

“The cart is about twenty yards through those oaks.” I jerked my chin behind me. “Try to stay on your feet. It’ll go faster if I don’t have to drag you.”

“I can walk.” The demon sneered his disdain. “Go.”

After a few lurched paces, my back protested and my muscles burned with the effort of supporting his astounding weight and I knew with zero doubt that as strong as I was, I wouldn’t be capable of aiding any demon my height or taller. Maybe the armor. The pieces I’d been close enough to win more than a cursory glance at had seemed thin enough, remarkably thin, but the telltale tingle where the demon’s brace protecting his forearm touched my skin signaled magical enhancement. The pieces could be a great deal heavier, sturdier, than they looked. Still, that wasn’t enough to explain how arduous keeping one short demon on his feet taxed me. I slung around fifty-pound sacks daily, for fuck’s sake. Without breaking a sweat.

Meanwhile, perspiration poured off me in rivers and my overburdened muscle quivered by the time we reached the tree line bordering the trail path. My heart sunk as I wiped my eyes to clear the sting of sweat dripping from my crown to my chin. I remembered pulling the cart to a halt when I’d first spied the dryads flitting around oaks. I’d been reluctant to disturb the already distressed creatures with the machinery they despised, so I’d parked a disheartening distance away.

I wouldn’t make it.

Judging by how heavily the demon leaned on me, neither would he.

Executive decision.

“It’s too far.” I gasped for air, halting us in our wobbling tracks. I stared across the impossible gulf separating us from the golf cart. “I’ll have to get the cart and drive it to you.”

“ Ne. ” The demon shook his head, his claws digging more securely into my biceps, though the tips did not puncture me. “You will leave.”

Hot, exhausted, and hurting everywhere, I was in no state to smother my flaring temper, though mouthing off a demon— short and injured or not—wasn’t smart. “My friends are here. Visitors aren’t supposed to be in this area of the park, but since when has a couple sawhorses ever stopped them? Do you think I want you anywhere near mundanes while you’re wounded? And don’t get me started about the magicals on staff. I’m not letting you within a hundred yards of them.” I shook my head. “So yeah, I’ll get the cart. But no, I won’t leave.”

He stared at me, unblinking. Intent. Pressed so close together, practically sharing each other’s breaths, I sensed his voracious hunger. That I was still standing next to him instead of filling the demon’s cavernous stomach astonished me. I felt, too, his desperation and fury at his physical incapacity and the dearth of strength that forced him to rely on a fragile hoo-min. More than anything else, however, I shared his fear.

Whatever the demon was scared of, whatever monster he feared might follow him to this realm, I wanted no part of it. The faster we put distance between us and these oaks, the better. “I won’t ditch you. I promise.” If I sensed what the demon felt, surely he had some glimmer of what was in my heart, too?

“This is your oath, Dah-veed?” he asked, mouth slack, words slurring again. As arduous as our slog to the trail had been for me, I wasn’t mortally wounded. The demon suffered worse. That he wasn’t dead yet was both mystery and miracle.

If I wanted to abandon him to his fate, I could. He wouldn’t be able to stop me, but I didn’t rip myself away from him. Instead, I nodded. “I’ll be right back with the cart.”

He blew out a shaky breath. “I cannot stand.”

I maneuvered us to an oak bordering the path, one sturdy enough to bear his enormous weight, and once I’d propped him against the trunk, I turned down the path. Amazed at the unsteadiness of my gait and how greatly my strength had flagged, I lurched to the cart. I hopped in. Pressing the pedal down, I turned the key in the ignition and the engine purred to life. When I glanced through the windshield, the demon watched from the edge of the oaks, his stare unconcerned that I might go back on my word.

I didn’t.

Weirdly, running did not tempt me.

Promises were funny things for magicals. With enough power feeding into them—and mine was leaking from me like a sieve—they could be broken only with extreme difficulty and a lot of pain. I hadn’t intentionally boosted my promise to not leave the demon behind, but my heretofore pristine control at containing my magic had collapsed under the throbbing agony of my hip. Entirely possible some of my power had spilled into the words I’d spoken.

Or I could be as stupid as the demon insisted humans were.

Either way, I drove the cart forward, and going against every dictate from management against damaging the garden, I steered off the path as close to the demon as I could get. Shoving the gearshift into park, I hauled my weary butt from the cab and crossed to him. “You don’t have to take a single step. Just lean forward.” I guided the exhausted demon into the cart’s passenger seat. The cart’s tires settled lower in the dirt at his extra weight, but I manhandled him inside with quick efficiency, then returned to the driver’s side.

I whipped the wheel to point the cart back to the Visitors Center. “A couple more minutes. Then fire.” When he didn’t make a sound, only fell into my lap, my arm anchored him so he didn’t roll out of the cart. I struggled to drive and manage his dead weight both.

The roar of gunning ATV engines reached me first. Moments later, the cart zipped past a couple of uniformed cops who reached for their holstered weapons as I passed with the demon draped over my lap. Fortunately, shock slowed them and we were gone, headed through a loose cluster of WMBG staff and to the right, where we’d carved an outdoor amphitheater out of an obliging hillside. Megan gaped as I steered down the stairs. I winced at the bucking of the cart as the stair risers ripped out the cart’s transmission.

Screw it. I’d dip into my trust fund to replace the cart and apologize to my boss later. The alarmingly quiet demon rolling with each jerk and bump was priority number one.

The cart made awful grinding noises, but I reached the center of the amphitheater, where Megan had indeed laid the start of a bonfire. The stacked wood wasn’t tall. We hauled an iron platform from storage for these events for safety, to better contain the fire, but also to make the flames appear bigger than they were. Wriggling from under the unconscious demon, I dashed from the cart and bent to jam my arm under the platform and I grinned when my grasping fingers found the long barrel of our rechargeable electric lighter. As I scrambled to the waiting stack of wood, the others I’d passed in the cart appeared at the top of the steps I belatedly realized I’d destroyed on our way down.

“David,” my boss shouted. “Get away from it.”

I would be more than happy to haul ass…as soon as I got this fire lit. I lifted an arm to wave and flicked the switch of the lighter with my other hand. “Just a sec.” I jammed the tip through the logs and into the center, where the kindling would’ve been laid.

Whoosh!

Yelping my surprise at the instant inferno, I jumped and then fell as a solid hand on my shoulder jerked me away. I landed on my ass again, so hard this time I bit my tongue and hot copper filled my mouth.

“ Hoo-mins burn,” the demon said on a low mumble and flashed a wan smile. “I do not.”

Blood and spit trickling from my hurting mouth, I watched him sinuously crawl onto the iron platform and into the licking yellow and orange flames. My stomach flipped. I instinctively shifted to grab—but whereas before the demon had struggled to crawl into the fire, he kicked to his feet, as steady as the Rock of Gibraltar. His color improved in the span of a heartbeat, too.

Western Maryland was a metropolitan area. Business and industry concentrated in a dense cluster with Cumberland at the center, but small towns circled it so closely only locals recognized the lines demarcating the city from its suburbs and satellite towns. Untamed woodlands surrounded that crush of people for miles and miles, the mountains thick with old-growth forests threaded with rivers and streams ripe for fishing. The topography isolated us from the rest of the world. We liked it that way.

That isolation also meant the only people who came here were tourists hiking the Great Allegheny Passage or the C&O Canal Towpath. Those who preferred to take in nature’s unspoiled beauty in comfort purchased a ticket on one of the excursion trains. This place was not what anyone would ever consider a demon hotspot.

Demons were rare. Few were desperate enough to portal to the human realm, and that number lowered still more to represent the demons who survived and stayed. I’d never seen one before, not up close.

This demon’s skin was still dark, but the licking flames brought out the inky red undertone that I was positive wasn’t burns we humans would’ve suffered. Not when I watched deep gashes that he’d arrived in our world with knitting together. He stiffened his spine. His shoulders squared. The barbed tail that had drooped lax and still in the dryad’s circle rose from the platform and whipped around him as the demon moved inside the fire. Fully involved and laid atop the platform, the flames would’ve barely reached my waist if I’d stood—WMBG bonfires were for effect. For show. The demon wasn’t engulfed in the snapping reds and oranges that poured out heat. Short as he was, the flames only reached his kneecaps. He kicked the logs with his bare feet to make the bonfire leap higher.

“David, run!” Megan shrieked somewhere behind me, but transfixed, I couldn’t tear my attention from the regenerating demon. Megan wasn’t the only staffer to build bonfires for events. I had too. This one should’ve burned for a couple of hours, but already, the logs selected to determine and limit the blaze’s longevity crumbled to ash under the demon’s stamping feet. Sparks shot up, like incendiary glitter dotting his healing chest and shoulders. His wounds had stopped bleeding, the thick red of his blood crackling in the heat on his dark skin, but a stomach-churning mass of cuts still mapped the muscles of his abdomen. Even his breastplate and the crude tunic he wore underneath seemed to absorb the flames rather than be consumed, glimmering with a hint of magic. Dread certainty filled me that, given a more intense and prolonged fire, the dents in his armor and ragged rends in the fabric would mend too.

The fire banked before his wounds completely healed, but he was no less magnificent. Every part of him not shielded by his armor bulged with thick muscle. Black wings unfurled from his back, tattered and shredded on the left side, but the hollow bones supporting the span of thin membrane were more or less intact. Inky hair fell in a riot of curls to his shoulders. His proud head lifted as his nostrils flared, scenting his surroundings. When he pivoted to face me, his barbed tail rose into the air, as high as the tip of his wings.

No. He didn’t face me. His attention focused over my head, past me.

On the police.

“Step clear of the human.” The command rang out from the crowd gathering behind me, the order cool and concise, brooking no argument.

The demon wouldn’t argue, though. I felt that certainty to the marrow of my bones.

He would fight.

I didn’t know the demon. I didn’t like him and wanted him as gone from my territory as gone could be, but I didn’t want him dead, either. Demons were as much a part of the natural order as we humans were. Maybe not in our natural order. He’d portaled to our realm, after all, but in the dimension from which he originated, no doubts clouded my mind that demons were an integral facet of that ecosystem. The power secreted away inside me screamed that certainty like a clarion alarm. After the suffering and teeth-gritting work we’d endured to drag his mortally wounded body to healing fire, I couldn’t watch him die.

“They’ll have battle mages,” I told him around the knot lodged in my throat. “If they haven’t arrived yet, they will soon. Mundane cops also have an emergency supply of spelled ammunition for their guns.” My mind swamped with images of those bullets slamming into him, undoing the rejuvenation we’d struggled to reach, to say nothing of the magical attacks the police department mages would bring to bear. At full strength, with his power lighting his eyes crimson, the demon might stand a chance, but weakened? With his magic bled so dry no stingy spark of red glimmered in his dark eyes?

They will end you, I didn’t say.

Then froze, my heart stopping when the demon answered, They can try.

“Final warning. Step away from the human,” a cop shouted.

Terror spiking my pulse, I scrambled backward, if only to give the cops less reason to kill the demon—too late. As soon as I’d managed a few precious feet from my demon, the deafening crack of gunfire thundered around me, drowning out my frantic scream, “No! Don’t hurt him.”

Most of the shots went wide. A neat bullet hole blossomed on an unprotected stretch of his biceps, however, an unhealthy blue cast spreading outward. Blood also gushed from the mass of curls at his right ear, slicking his sternum in a torrent. He didn’t so much as stumble, though, the glare he focused over my head ripe with malevolence and evil intent.

Fortunately—for the cops—a sonorous clang joined the cacophony of gunfire, the sound of a bullet ricocheting off his armor. I spun backward with a pained grunt as numbing cold exploded from my right shoulder.

Shrieks erupted around us to vie with the deafening gunshots. My demon’s attention shifted from the launched attack to narrow his black eyes on me, sprawled in the dirt, my shoulder a frigid agony to me. “You need to run,” I said, struggling against fainting from the pain.

He must have agreed because, spelled bullets zipping through the air, he stepped from the dying bonfire. Instead of heading east, away from this godawful mess, he strode forward. To me. “Think,” he told me as he crouched over my prone body, shielding me from more of the not-so-friendly fire. “A safe place.” He scooped me up with one arm. He tapped his temple. “Where no harm would ever come.”

“What?” I blinked at him, stunned lethargy seeping through me. Part of me wanted to fear the cold wet spreading from my injured shoulder. I should be petrified, but I was tired. So tired.

“Picture this.” The demon shook me, dragging my bleary stare back to his cruel face. “Safety.”

“Need to sleep,” I tried to say, but oomphed instead when he lifted me off the ground and slung me over his shoulder and under his damaged wing. God, he was hot. Scorching, but the warmth felt amazing against the arctic tundra that was my wounded shoulder. Black dots swam across my vision, but I heaved a sigh of relief. “That’s nice.”

He crouched low, muscles bunched, and then shot up, leaving the cops—and my stomach—behind. The weakness and lethargy polluting my body made regret at vomiting a trail of partially digested chilidogs down his spine impossible. Awkward, our ascent choppy with his yet damaged wings and the imbalance of my weight, we no less ascended. Gun shots followed. I groaned when the icy sting hit my calf and, my thinking muddied, I sensed a less intense ache puncturing the demon’s abdomen on the same side.

Safety , his voice inside my head demanded as we whirled and wrestled the air currents to stay in flight, to gain precious distance. Where will you be safe?

“Shot me,” I mumbled.

Where?

No more gunfire. He must have made his shredded wings carry us out of range, but those wings would take us no farther. We plummeted in a chaotic spiral, the ground with its lush landscape of fall leaves just beginning to seep color spinning ever closer.

I was going to die. When we hit, I’d die and this terribleness would be over.

The demon’s claws sinking into my flanks didn’t even faze me.

Think!

I fainted. I had taken two bullets, and he’d stabbed me with his claws. Of course, I passed out, but before the darkness claimed me, as the hard impact with the ground spun closer, an image formed in my head. The one spot on this whole goddess-forsaken planet I knew, to my core, that no harm could come to me. The only place I was protected, my life secure. No bullet could reach me, no magic infect my mind or body.

The power my dead father had fed into his wards would keep me alive.

Hoo-mins are stupid.

Yeah. Pretty much.

I blacked out.