Page 29 of The Demon’s Collar (The Bard’s Demon #1)

B?k: Not Dead

I woke up cold, naked, and furious.

Again.

I should have seen the celestial spear coming. In fact, I had . It’d been one of the many visions nagging at the periphery of my mind as I’d toyed with my kitten.

Which raised the question, what else had I missed?

I rose, absently gathering moss and leaves and weaving them with shadow to cover myself. I didn’t need my cock out while I sorted the Huntress’s vermin.

I wasted no time after that finding the bard’s trail. It wasn’t easy despite our proximity. The dampeners essentially hid her magic signature. But I caught the trail—and shortly after dawn, I came upon a scene that made my blood boil.

A siphon stood over her, hook raised. Blood and bruises painted her pale skin. Agony twisted her desires toward survival.

My instinct told me to cook the creature. One quick flame to the back, and all that power would leech back into the earth. But as I lifted my hand, she sensed me. I tasted her relief and then…her frustration .

I smiled despite the situation. She wanted her own shot at this man who’d tormented her, the same way she had with Wendlin. Fine. There were more than enough bodies to go around.

I cloaked the key to the manacles in shadow. It crawled unseen across the forest floor while the siphon leaned down and gripped Ero’s hair, wrenching her head up.

He didn’t notice the temperature rise. I almost abandoned my plan and killed him outright.

“I said , what is the weapon?” he hissed.

I paused. I’d been so attuned to Ero’s desires, I’d not paid attention to his. After all—he was powerful, but insignificant. He was about to die. Now that he’d piqued my interest, though, I breathed him in.

He wanted a weapon— my weapon—whatever that was supposed to be. He wanted power. No surprise there. He wanted to wed the Huntress—wanted to be worthy of wedding her. Tiny bubbles of mirth rose up my throat. Good luck with that. The man was delusional, but determined.

I returned my attention to the shadows— quite finished watching another creature lay his hands on what was mine.

I turned the key in one manacle. Ero didn’t miss a beat, catching it before it could fall and alert the siphon.

When the key turned in the other, though, she crashed face-first to the ground.

I winced. Her magic probably would have caught her had it not been strained and weak from its time in the chains.

It wasn’t so weak that it didn’t lance immediately through the siphon, though.

His cry of pain echoed beautifully through the trees.

I would have stayed to watch her finish him.

I wanted to. Watching my kitten rip the man to shreds was second only on my list of desires to doing it myself.

But at the man’s cry, other factionites outed their locations with flares of panic.

And one of those flares had a celestial quality that I owed a very specific end.

I left Ero to her revenge—more than ready to take my own.

I found the earth elemental first. She crumbled at my touch.

She was so hollow, bones empty, organs diminished, that I knew the siphon was not a good sort.

You might think that came with the territory for a siphon—but not so much.

Like vampires and humans, there were plenty of energy siphons who rode a line and took only what they needed to survive.

This siphon took everything. Greedy little bastard.

Three more Huntress soldiers fell to my quick killing blows. I didn’t bother with flourish. I saved that for my assassin, assuming it would be a simple but entertaining battle.

And then I found her.

A fucking child.

She stood in a warded cave, aching with the desire to catch sight of a companion whose name she breathed over and over like a personal mantra.

When she saw me, she fell silent. Her desire to be brave painted the air.

She wanted so badly to face me without trembling.

She didn’t manage it. She stumbled back, ready to flee to the deepest part of the shallow cave—but I didn’t allow it.

I poured flame into the darkness behind her—a fire so intense she had no choice but to dive past the protection of the wards and fall at my feet .

“No!” she cried. “MIRI!”

To my surprise, her anger was still greater than her fear. The depth of her wants echoed inside me. Kill Van. Kill Van. Kill Van. In her mind’s eye, his face was so pummeled and swollen that I almost didn’t recognize him as the siphon.

Appalling.

Terrifying creature of darkness that I was, hovering over this insignificant child—and that child had the audacity to focus on someone else? I already wouldn’t get a fight out of this. The least she could have done was be terrified of me.

“You’ll see them both in Hell,” I promised impatiently.

“No,” she spat. And then she pointed at me, jabbing her finger to punctuate her words. “Don’t kill her. Don’t. Fucking. Kill. Her.”

Again, the strength of her desire overwhelmed me.

I couldn’t tell if she was pushing it on purpose—an almost absurd thought, because how could she even know that I could taste it?

Perhaps young humans simply felt things more strongly by default?

One thing was for sure, though. She wanted me to see her mind.

And unfortunately, I did.

I was a fourteen-year-old girl. (Haz’s tits.

I tried to clear the vision, but it had an iron grip.) My sister—more of a mother to me than my own mother had ever been, and by far the most badass woman in town—sauntered in, freshly back from deployment.

She was Faction. They gave her free ale at the tavern, called her in to set scoundrels right and clear any beasties—even the big ones—that harassed the area.

I couldn’t wait to join the faction. I bounced up to her, hugged her, whispered, “Pleeeease tell them I’m sixteen so I can join.

I have tits now! They might believe you. ”

She’d always laughed when I asked before.

This time, she didn’t. Her smile fell away like autumn leaves (Really?

I was even narrating in her infantile metaphors?), and it almost looked like she would cry.

I’d never seen Miri cry. Not when our parents died.

Not when she’d shattered her shoulder. Not even when the boy she’d been with for two years up and left with some floozy from the next town.

And then she crushed me. “You can’t join, Sadie. Ever.”

My heart fell through the floor. She had to be kidding. What changed? She refused to explain. She just kept telling me to dream other dreams.

A flash, and it was my sixteenth birthday. I wasn’t supposed to enter the barracks, but Miri never showed up for breakfast—and it was practically deserted, anyway. I heard Miri’s voice.

“Fuck off, Van. Find someone else.”

At the sound of a hard slap and Miri’s gasp, I ran into the room with a throwing knife already in hand. I’d practiced for two years. I was sure I could hit true. But he moved so fast. Spotting me, pinning me to the wall, squeezing my wrist until it popped, and the knife fell to the floor.

“Oh look, someone else,” he said.

A series of horrible flashes. The holy symbol burned into my flesh as he held the searing metal to my back. The temple’s holy water poured into my lungs as he shoved my head into the fountain, and Miri—spelled to immobility—watched helplessly.

I could have died, but the goddess accepted me. Gave me the power Miri had refused to harbor. Made me his weapon. And I had to be his weapon, or he would have hurt her. He’d been hurting her all along. I was stupid to seal the promise to him with an oath. I didn’t see any other way.

I finally shook the girl’s vision from my head. The sunlight needled my eyes, the forest especially heady and present after the prolonged hallucination. My body felt huge and strange.

Right. Good.

Time to kill the kid .

I reached for her. Her hands covered her face.

Tears leaked through her fingers. Because nothing could ever work the way it should, those tears buzzed like bees in my throat.

Why did this feel wrong when it was objectively justified?

She made choices. She accepted the holy symbol to save her sister.

She joined the wrong faction. She fucking killed me.

And even if none of that had been true, my entire department was torment. This should feel fine.

Her companions skidded into the clearing then. An irritating interruption, even though tracking them down was solidly on my list of things to do. And now here they were, saving me the effort. Four women, united in their desire to destroy me.

Well, too bad.

I turned on them, raising shadow and flame resplendent with the power of every drop of irritation I’d felt since regenerating an hour before. The air sizzled with my fury. Three of them reeled back. The only one who didn’t was Miri. I recognized her from my brief time as a teenage girl.

No matter. She was about to be a burnt husk formerly known as Miri.

“B?k, no!”

My attention snapped to the treeline. There stood my kitten with a fresh, nasty cut across her cheek.

She swayed, physically incapable of standing upright without help from her flickering magic.

Despite her state, she lurched forward, pushing her energy into the fray—forming a pathetic wall between my flame and the women.

Miri lunged at me. I could have flame-broiled her, but Ero’s desire was so strong and clear that I hesitated. Did Miri know something? Did we need her? I couldn’t unkill her once the thing was done—so instead, I pivoted .

In a flash, the five Huntress soldiers were bound and gagged with shadow. They fought—some harder than others—but it barely took a shred of concentration to hold them.

Ero was at my side in an instant, gripping my arm.

“He’s gone,” she said urgently. “He knows where they are.”

I tilted my head. Did she mean the siphon? I’d watched her skewer him. Surely he hadn’t skipped away from that.

“He wants Aelith,” she rushed on, holding up her torn elven undershirt, as if that would tell me something. “He can track. He—I don’t know—but he’s going to find her.”

I considered this only briefly. The siphon was going to find Aelith?

“I don’t see the problem.”

“B?k,” she hissed. “He has a fire elemental. He’s headed for the camp. Aelith, Brü—all of them—are in danger.”

I sighed. That still didn’t explain why she’d interrupted my cleanup job. If we needed to rush off to play save-the-party, we really ought to wrap this up first. And there was only one reasonable way to do so, even if my sniveling little assassin had temporarily given me pause.

“Then let’s go,” I said, lifting one hand to raise a fresh column of flame.

Which Ero promptly doused with a flurry of rainbow tendrils.

I glowered. “What are you doing?”

“You aren’t going to kill them.”

My jaw worked overtime to prevent a more biting response. I landed on, “Why not?”

When that simple question brought her up short, I blinked, appalled. Did they not have something we needed after all? Was my bard just having feelings? Too bad. We weren’t leaving loose ends. That wasn’t how war worked .

“Because I— Because they—” she started, but struggled to complete the statement.

I quirked a brow. Her desires were a tangled mess. In them, I tasted the usual syrupy longing for human connection. But that didn’t seem relevant here. They were a clear and distinct enemy—not even remotely interested in making a new friend. Wrong strays to adopt, and all that. Feral. Messy. Mean.

“Because you’re not,” she finished with remarkable confidence for someone I’d spent the previous day chasing and fucking into oblivion.

She looked around us and zeroed in on a fallen tree. She pointed. “Put their arms there, faction tattoos up.”

Color me intrigued. Sure, some part of me wanted to put her there instead and let them watch as I reminded her who she was talking to.

But those bees buzzed in my chest again.

I was the reason the siphon had tortured her.

I’d dampened her magic so I could play with her without winding up dead again.

Instead, he’d gotten his hands on her. I’m not saying I owed her—but perhaps I had the smallest urge to go easy for a moment.

My shadows dragged the women to the log and displayed their tattooed forearms in a neat line, per request. Ero stood over them.

I saw the slight tremble, the hesitation.

But she set her jaw and concentrated until five tendrils peeled away from the rest and shot out, wrapping around each captive’s arm like colorful snakes.

When the tendrils receded, the tattoos were ruined. Angry burns in swirling patterns remained on the skin. All five women screamed their pain into the gags, the sound swallowed by my shadows.

Interesting. Someone had read the faction handbook. Had one of our enemies defaced our soldiers this way rather than opting to kill them, Colonel Astrada would be forced to consider them compromised. A life spared was a life owed. It didn’t mean the Huntress would disown them—but she might.

I still didn’t understand Ero’s logic. Dead enemies were far less complicated than live ones.

“Let them go,” she said. “We need to hurry. Their horses are close.”

Again, I bristled at receiving orders . But once more, urgent visions danced just outside of my reach—a flurry of them, changing faster than I could latch on.

The Fates were up in the air right now. I didn’t know what was coming, but I knew Ero was right.

Something hung in the balance. What we did now mattered.

“Then go,” I said.

I released my shadows. Screams immediately polluted the air. The women fell against one another, holding their burned arms, holding each other. Ero’s gaze lingered for a beat longer before she turned and fled.

I cast one last look at the child who’d slain me and found her staring right back—the only one among them who seemed to have attention to spare for us through their pain. She didn’t look angry anymore. Just curious.

“B?k.” In Ero’s exhausted tone, my name was a plea. And once again, some distant relative of guilt bid me to answer her call.

Anyhow, although my reaction to hearing that the siphon might finally free me of Aelith was truly indifference bordering on relief—the same couldn’t be said for the rest of our party. So, I followed Ero to the horses, and we rode toward yet another fight.