Page 3 of The Demon’s Collar (The Bard’s Demon #1)

Ero: Stubborn and Reckless

T he rest of the party emerged as the clasp slid into place.

The pitch of the complaints morphed into ribbing when they saw me.

My crossbow quickly became the commodity of debate, and the man who won it in the mess of banter slung it over his shoulder as if he very much knew what to do with it. He did not even look at me.

I feared my lute would meet the same fate, but my captor casually picked it up and slid it into his cloak. If anyone noticed, no one bothered to challenge him about taking more than his share of the spoils.

A man with strawberry blond hair and an impish smile dropped to the ground before me, eyeing the bloody corpse that had served as a table for my lute a moment ago.

“Ho, good sir!” He prodded the dead man’s crushed skull with the tip of his dagger. “You look like you’ve got a splitting headache.”

Disgust bloomed in my throat. I looked away.

I hadn’t known the dead man for long. He sold spirits in town and had an endless well of tales about the travelers who visited his pub.

He said he’d joined the Huntress faction for adventure, though he was clearly past his adventuring prime.

On the walk to the caverns, he’d confided that his greatest desire for the day was to find a few interesting bottles to spruce up the decor for his patrons.

He didn’t deserve to die.

When I failed to react to the grotesque show, the man gave up his game and cast an appraising look at me. Fresh alarm prickled my spine.

“Mammoth in the room, Book,” he said. “You going to share?”

Book, it seemed, referred to my captor—who was busy speaking with another man. I spotted the sewn patch on his faction-issued cloak. B?k , not Book. Still, the irony was acidic. It seemed I’d gotten just what I’d come for. Wasn’t that so often how life worked? Perhaps only for me.

The entertainer— Fl?r , according to his patch—stood when B?k failed to respond, adjusting himself suggestively as he padded closer to where I still knelt. I tried not to flinch away.

Fl?r lifted my chin and brushed his bloody, grit-smeared thumb across my bottom lip. “I’d settle for the mouth,” he added, louder now. “Promise to give it back in top condition.”

I fought for calm, but my unsteady breathing made it obvious I was anything but. Hot tears welled in my eyes—and despite furious blinking, one slipped out. I’d put on the collar, and it hadn’t even saved me. What garbage.

Abruptly, the hand disappeared from my face, and a grunt of pain hissed from my assailant’s lips. We were eye to eye in a flash, he on his knees across from me, before I even registered that B?k had moved.

“Do you see that collar?” B?k asked Fl?r, his tone cold but so explicitly disinterested that he managed to sound bored. “Touch what’s mine again and you’ll lose a hand.”

Fl?r glowered at me. Basic survival instinct told me to drop my gaze and wait for the situation to resolve.

But give me even one single ounce of advantage, and I will abuse it.

It’s what I do best. Especially if you’ve recently made me cry.

And yes—even if I, too, am still on my knees at someone else’s mercy.

So rather than look away, I stared directly at Fl?r and smirked.

Fury twisted his face. He looked like he wanted to spit at me—but he got to his feet and returned his attention to B?k with a forced laugh instead.

“Hadn’t noticed the collar,” he said, chuckling louder for good measure. “All yours, B?k. Wouldn’t dream of touching your pet.”

He sashayed away, casually sliding right back into conversation with the others as though he hadn’t just been threatened with dismemberment.

I could feel B?k’s eyes on me. Pretending them away didn’t work. Finally, I slid my gaze up to meet his.

He brought his knife to my cheek and scraped it gently against my skin. His focus narrowed on the glistening tear now at the tip of his blade. His tongue flicked out to lick it off. My stomach hollowed.

“Careful with those claws, kitten,” he said in a low tone just for me. “Might come a day you’ll wish you’d made a friend here.”

Horses awaited us just outside the cavern. But before we could mount up, a massive, orcish-looking man begged for a short rest. Squabbling broke out. Some of the party were eager to get back to camp. Others agreed with the brute they called Hammond that food was in order.

B?k’s side lost.

He waved off his portion of the food and stalked into the woods alone without a backward glance.

I kept a wary eye on Fl?r, but he pretended I didn’t exist. Most of the others followed suit.

Brü—the apparent leader—handed me a hard bread roll.

I spent the next fifteen minutes nibbling it and thinking about how nonsensical it was to put someone named Brü in a party with someone named B?k.

From a lyrical standpoint, I mean. What a mess.

Faction leadership clearly didn’t take input from bards.

When I finished eating, I got tentatively to my feet—waiting for someone to tell me to stay put.

No one did, so I stretched my legs and took stock of my situation.

The little town I’d inhabited for the last month or so would not miss me.

They probably wouldn’t even notice I’d gone.

That was the unfortunate part about being a roaming bard.

It was so common for my kind to come and go, people didn’t notice or care much when we left.

I chanced a glance over my shoulder and wandered farther from the chattering men.

I’d always been good at adapting—finding the boundaries of a situation, settling into them, pushing where I found give.

It took a specific combination of observational skills and existential uncertainty.

If you never defined yourself, it was much easier to become something new over and over.

Here, I thought, I would need to be clever.

Outfoxing a demon would be no small task.

Speaking of the demon.

B?k didn’t make a sound. He simply appeared. His knife flashed out, cutting the ropes binding my wrists. He towered over me with his dark, glittering eyes and their all-seeing glare.

“We’ll share a horse,” he said, jerking his chin toward the beasts. Although the words were neutral, pain pulsed through each one. B?k avoided wincing outright, but he couldn’t conceal how badly his injury was affecting him.

Right. Sharing a horse with a grumpy, wounded demon was not on my list of hopes and dreams.

“I could still heal you,” I said.

“You can’t,” he bit out, again seemingly irritated at me for forcing him to speak.

“How do you know?” I challenged.

The air grew several degrees cooler. I don’t mean that figuratively. I wasn’t imagining it. His mood changed the air. The wound must have been worse even than he let on, because when I sucked in that first frigid breath, it blistered my lungs like poison.

B?k wiped a drop of blood off my arm, which I’d nicked on the wardrobe.

He held it up, examining its bright red color pointedly, and I knew exactly what he was thinking.

A healer like me, with human and fae blood, ought only to be capable of making his wound worse. Our kind weren’t meant to heal demons.

“If you’re wasting my time,” he warned, “I’ll compel you to serve the jester after all. ”

“Don’t. Compel. Me.”

B?k used his blade to tip my chin until he had firmly ensnared me with his gaze. “Then I’ll tell you to serve him. Is that better?”

The answer was obviously yes, in the sense that my greatest concern was the mind-eating spellwork and how it would unravel my sanity if he used it.

But I couldn’t say yes, because it also clearly wasn’t better regarding the outcome of the situation.

My silent swallow seemed to please him well enough.

“May I have my lute?” I asked.

“Can you heal without it?” he taunted.

I clenched my teeth. He was setting me up to fail.

The truth was, I didn’t know if I really could heal him, even with the instrument.

It was foolish to have offered, and more foolish still to have pressed.

But a wounded man is prone to bad temper—and a healed man ought to, at least on some level, be grateful.

Right? It stood to reason that demons were similar.

So, I’d let my mouth choose my path. Per usual.

Regarding the heal, I had a theory. I knew how to dispel holy water.

I also knew how to close a wound by drawing on the elements rather than the heavens—a necessity if one hoped to help an unholy being.

But I hadn’t exactly practiced . And I wasn’t sure dispelling the holy water would work inside a wound.

And on top of all of that, I’d grown quite used to channeling through music rather than trying to force my magic to obey without it.

“I don’t know,” I confessed.

His lips set in a cruel smile. “Try.”

I swallowed hard. Would he really give me to Fl?r if I failed? What even constituted failure? Certainly if he wanted to, he might call a scar some measure of failure.

The air chilled several degrees more. He didn’t have to say a word. I knew I was out of time. I blinked away my doubt and raised my hands.

Rather than diving in with no melody at all, I hummed.

It was nearly impossible to do even the first task with his dark glare trained on me.

But the hum drew out the wriggling tendrils of power that lived deep in my chest. They were always temperamental about answering my calls.

Perhaps my fear helped, though, because this time they came to life.

The holy water slowly fizzled and burned away. With my focus on the wound, I prodded at the tender parted flesh and sensed my way through the cleanup, methodically eradicating every drop of foreign moisture.

That turned out to be the simple part—relatively speaking.

The flesh was still burnt, and that reaction could not simply be undone. Worse, the exhaustion of the morning and the magic use so far was unraveling me from the inside. But I had no choice now. Not really.

And, fine. Maybe the challenge thrilled me a bit .

I closed my eyes and pushed. The dancing tendrils in my chest flowed through my fingertips into B?k’s gnarled skin.

That part felt right. But inside, my body was aflame.

I redoubled my efforts to focus. My attention narrowed to the sole task of cinching his flesh together, stanching the blood that got in the way.

I think I was making some progress. Some . But then I coughed. My tendrils scattered in a flash, and all that carefully held power fizzled far from my reach.

I gasped for air, mercifully free of B?k’s poison this time, and panted in a panic. He’d not given me a deadline. If I could catch a breath, I could try again—harder.

I looked up at him as my vision blurred in and out. The wound was still there. There was still blood. Did it look better? I couldn’t even tell.

I tried to speak, to explain that I only needed a moment, and that I hadn’t given up.

Colors pulsed in my vision. That was new. Then they exploded, white-hot, through my body.

Everything went black.