Page 30 of The Demon’s Collar (The Bard’s Demon #1)

Ero: Asking the Impossible

Bardic Advice from Eroithiel von Dua to future generations: Don’t try to kill a siphon with your own magic. Siphoning magic is literally what they do.

E verything was slow. So slow. Like moving within the confines of a massive gelatinous cube.

I watched myself order B?k away from my band of captors. I don’t know why I did it. I can’t explain what compelled me to mark them instead of letting them die. I understood how things like this were supposed to work. I didn’t even like them. I just couldn’t watch him end their little family.

I don’t remember selecting or mounting a horse, but soon we raced through the forest, wet leaves slapping my cheeks, silence echoing with the siphon’s laughter.

My body was at its absolute limit. I couldn’t convince the tendrils that were already working overtime to keep me in my saddle to so much as clot the blood dripping down my face.

I closed my eyes for just a moment .

My tendrils pierced the siphon. They should have cooked him like they had Wendlin, but his expression flickered from surprise to fury to dark delight in the space of a few seconds.

I couldn’t pull back. He drank, freezing my magic in place and drawing it in deeper, slurping it like his stew. His eyes flickered, losing their forest green in favor of an iridescent swirl.

I don’t know how I knew it, but I did. I’d just told him everything. He grabbed me, tearing my elven mail shirt like worn fabric. His teeth gleamed when he grinned. “Her mate gave this to you.”

It wasn’t a question, so I didn’t bother to answer. He released my tendrils, and I reeled inside, off balance in too many ways. He was going to kill them all. And more immediately, he was going to kill me.

Only he didn’t.

A figure stood behind him, bouncing a ball of fire like a fidgety child.

They exchanged words, but I was too busy trying to shake the pins and needles from my drained tendrils to pay attention.

I caught only snippets. Locations I forgot as soon as I heard them.

Names he shouldn’t know rolling off his tongue.

His knife shot out, slicing my cheek. I tried to swipe at him, but I fell over my own feet. He let the blood from his blade drip into a tiny glass vial.

What did he want with my blood? I opened my mouth to ask ? —

I didn’t see the branch coming. B?k must have ducked it. It swept me off my mount and out of the memory with a bone-rattling blow. I landed hard—my tendrils making a clumsy attempt at catching me, but the numbed ones were still disoriented, so I careened straight into a bush.

When I peeled the leaves from my face, B?k stood over me.

I tried to tell him we had to go—that there was no time to slow down. No words came out.

“You need to heal,” he said evenly .

After a heroic effort to generate the words to explain that my tendrils were half drunk and my energy was depleted and we just needed to get on with it, I managed to gasp a single word. “Can’t.”

He frowned, kneeling to inspect me closer.

“Go,” I said, reasoning that if he went alone, he would be faster. He might even overtake Van on the trail—and if not, he could at least get there in time to stop whatever attack the energy-sucker had planned.

B?k’s onyx eyes danced briefly skyward. He didn’t bother to argue.

He simply scooped me up and remounted his horse, carrying me along for the ride like a broken doll.

We sat chest to chest. My horse was long gone, probably quite relieved to be down one wet noodle of a rider.

By the time I rallied enough to protest the situation, we were already at full canter.

I sighed. At least we were moving.

I drifted in and out of sleep as we rode.

Van’s gleaming teeth haunted the brief wisps of unconsciousness I managed.

B?k’s arm held me in place, but his shadows were more attentive.

I wondered if they were like my magic—operating with little input from their host. They must have been, because the gentle circles they traced on my aching back and shoulders were very un-B?k-like.

I’d just descended into a deeper sleep—or maybe I’d been there for hours—when the acrid smell of burning woke me.

A blast of heat spiked my adrenaline. I reached automatically for my lute, stunned to realize that not only had I never collected it from the enemy camp—I hadn’t even noticed its absence until right then.

B?k slid it into my hands.

I blinked up at him.

And then I looked around. The woods were on fire, but not in the wild, chaotic way a natural fire would burn.

A rigid line of flames tinged green with magical influence cut the forest in two.

I didn’t have time to worry about that, though.

All around us were the remains of the Fated’s carts—ransacked, broken, and abandoned.

No bodies. That was a good sign, right?

“We’ll have to go around,” B?k said.

The tension in his tone worried me. I followed his gaze and saw what he’d already registered. The prints in the mud did not go around the flaming section of woods. They went straight into it.

I hugged the lute to my chest. B?k urged the horse—who clearly disliked us now—forward.

What would I do if we found them dead?

I pressed my face into B?k’s chest, breathing through his cloak of shadow and moss to keep the smoke at bay. My eyes burned anyway. The horse rocked beneath us.

My thumb drifted to the tattoo on my forearm. Not the Fated’s eye, but the gloved fist. Yes. I was desperate enough to pray. Temple, save me.

“Haz, for the love of war and peace…” I thought in the general upward direction.

What? For the love of war and peace… what?

Let them be alive? And why would the God of War and Peace care?

Wasn’t he also the Huntress’s god? Wouldn’t her devout factionites pray too?

Did he keep a ?tally? Would one prayer weigh the vote in our favor?

Or were we just so many baby chicks, pecking at a mother hen who barely knew we existed?

And why did one god cover war and peace, anyway?

They were two distinctly different things.

When has this land ever even known peace? Clearly, Haz had a favorite child .

We cut a hard turn at what I assumed was the end of the flames.

“They’re alive,” B?k said for my benefit, because we were still too enveloped in smoke for me to see anything.

Great , I thought sardonically. Praying works.

It took another ten minutes to reach them. At which point I discovered that B?k had left out a few details. Like the fact that there were only a few dozen of “them” left.

I scrambled down from the saddle despite B?k’s attempt to hold me in place. My lute was already raised. The need to help—to focus on the one thing that I was good at and provide some measure of relief in the face of the destruction I’d caused—overwhelmed me.

But there was no one to heal. Aside from a scant few who looked like they’d been at the back of the fleeing group and had their clothes singed, no one was harmed.

Even those few were sipping potions and looking better off than I was.

I suspected that meant anyone who wasn’t here had already turned to ash in the inferno that still raged mere paces away.

I swayed. It was Brü who caught my arm.

His concern was plain as we locked eyes—but mine was more important.

“Aelith?” I demanded.

“She’s been in and out searching for survivors,” he said.

Something in his tone flagged my alarm.

“The siphon?” B?k asked, edging in. Although I had more questions for Brü, I was grateful for B?k’s proximity—solely because his giant form shielded me from the waves of heat rolling off the trees.

Brü shook his head. “We haven’t seen him or any of the others since the initial attack. ”

B?k opened his mouth again, but I was faster. “How long has Aelith been in there?”

The flash of fear in Brü’s eyes was unmistakable. The answer was too long . Whether that meant Van had gotten to her or the flames had.

“I’m going after him,” B?k said, unlatching his satchel from his hip and letting it fall at Brü’s feet.

“I’m going too,” I said.

Both men leveled me with remarkably similar glares.

“If she’s hurt?—”

“Stay with Brü,” B?k growled.

The compulsion barely registered in my war-torn body—but I knew I wouldn’t be going anywhere. And if I were honest, I’d already known that. I couldn’t even heal myself. The idea that I would be of any use to Aelith after I marched into hellfire was absurd. But I couldn’t do nothing.

“B?k,” I said. “If you find her…help her. Please.”

He frowned. I didn’t know the extent of his and Aelith’s past, but I knew enough to know that this wasn’t a minor request. He looked from me to Brü and back again. The tables had turned. Now it was Brü and I who shared a single expression.

“I’ll do what I can,” B?k groused, turning from us without further ado.

And then he was gone—into the flames.

I sagged against Brü, the last of my energy spent. He helped me to a log. The gelatinous cube feeling returned, worse than ever. I answered his questions, drank his potions, and lay against his shoulder vaguely murmuring reassurances I couldn’t support about Aelith’s safety.

Then, I let the darkness claim me.