Page 5 of The Demon’s Due (Bedeviled #5)

That would have been an awesome place for the final credits to roll on this adventure, but alas, I still had the worst task ahead. I had to help Alastair perform the ritual—then kill the son of a bitch at the right moment.

A woman’s work…

The lights flicked back on, revealing I was in the fortress basement hallway again. There was no sign of Daphne or Alastair, who had probably blown a gasket waiting all this time.

Heh.

For magic lodged at the back of my throat, it was surprisingly noninvasive. I mean, it pulsed through every inch of me, but it didn’t make me gag like Daniel Suarez’s dick during my ill-fated first blow job.

“Sorry about the teeth, Dan!” Okay, I could speak normally without the power word being uttered. Good to know.

Back in human form, I was poking my head into rooms on the main floor to find Daphne, when a door blew off its hinges, whistling past me to smash against the wall.

I jumped backward, arms up, protecting my face from splintered wood.

My skull bounced off a tapestry that did little to soften the impact.

“Did you get it?” Alastair’s feverishly intense eyes peered into mine.

“Yes.”

His fingers dug into my shoulders. “We’re doing the ritual.”

“Obvious—”

He grabbed my arm and hauled me into the room he’d just exited.

Oh, you meant this second .

The spartan space contained a perfect circle scratched into the floor. Next to it was a small round table with a half-melted candle, a cheap lighter, and a switchblade.

I sighed. I’d been kidnapped and traumatized, did we really need to throw stabbing into the mix?

Daphne sat in a threadbare brocade chair, the only other piece of furniture. “I’m looking forward to that Merlot,” she said, looking up from a tattered Salman Rushdie novel.

“You and me both,” I said, allowing myself a moment to imagine life beyond an endless string of dangers. “First round’s on me.”

Alastair lit the candle. “I called off my people before, now make her swear not to attack me while I’m vulnerable. Neither of us gets an advantage.”

I curled my fingers into fists. That was exactly when I had to attack him. He had to die before his vampness got cranked to eleven. While he wouldn’t be as strong as a Prime, I couldn’t say how powerful he’d end up once the Luce settled.

Daphne nodded. “That’s fair.”

“Well?” Alastair flicked the blade open and sterilized it in the flame.

We can still take him , Cherry insisted. Trust me .

“Fine,” I said.

Alastair gave a mean little smile like he was looking forward to kicking my ass. Knife in hand, he stepped into the circle and pushed up his sleeve. The blade moved with inhuman precision as he carved, his jaw clenched against pain that he couldn’t ignore, yet he didn’t bleed.

That wasn’t even the strangest part.

His design defied geometry, the rune’s angles bending in ways that made my vision blur when I tried to follow them.

It wasn’t so much carved into his skin as carved through it, as if it continued somewhere beneath reality.

It looked less like a symbol and more like a wound in the shape of the world.

Alastair studied the rune with glassy eyes, sweat beading on his forehead. He carved one more flourish, then dropped the blade in favor of drinking from the canteen.

Every drop that slid down his chin made me itch to wrap my hands around his throat. Six lives. Six futures destroyed, and he gulped their blood like a frat boy crushing beer cans for Instagram likes.

I, however, saw the faces of the dead in every splash that hit the ground. My jaw clenched, but I forced myself to bear witness. Someone had to remember the cost.

He closed his eyes.

Guess that was my cue.

I didn’t so much speak the power word as envision it freed like a bird from a cage. The noise I made didn’t correspond to any language I’d ever heard. It was a combination of thunder trapped underwater and whale song.

All memory of its shape and sound vanished, but its release shattered something inside me. My Eishei Kodesh magic erupted, splitting my skin with cracks of blue light. The world contracted to a pinhole, sound fading to distant snaps like someone trying to wake me from a dream.

A wash of dazzling blue light stormed my vision, obscuring everything else. I felt disconnected to my body, suddenly unable to tell where my arms and legs were. No sight, no proprioception; my heartbeat spiked.

Cherry’s voice in my head was white noise, but she was helping to keep me on my feet. I had to remain upright and not show weakness. I’d sworn not to attack Alastair when he was vulnerable; he’d done no such thing in return.

Was he even still in the grips of the healing ritual? Would his fangs tear through my throat or his hands rip out my heart any moment now?

A light touch penetrated my haze and I jumped.

“My bad.” Daphne spoke calmly, but she sounded like she was speaking to me down a staticky phone line. “No need for claws. I’ve got you.”

I calmed somewhat at the feel of a chair under my butt.

Synesthete overload—my vision had exploded with so many layers of blue auras that I couldn’t distinguish one object from another.

The world had become a kaleidoscope of azure, cerulean, and cobalt, all of them crashing together in a blinding tidal wave of information that my brain couldn’t process.

Every Eishei Kodesh was susceptible to overload, and it manifested differently for every type of flame, but I’d never experienced it before.

Slowly, my vision cleared, sound resumed normally, and my sense of self centered in my body once more. I sucked in a shaky breath and pried my fingers off the armrest.

The air crackled with an electric bite, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I could feel Alastair’s molecules rearranging, his athletic build swelling into something that would make peak Arnold Schwarzenegger look wimpy.

His shirt shredded as muscles surged beneath skin mapped with dark veins, his flesh taking on an unnatural luminescence. He laughed with pure joy, fangs flashing, and his head thrown back in triumph like a god accepting worship.

I wasn’t about to check out his junk with my magic sight to see if he could procreate, but it was pretty fucking safe to say that the ritual worked. Looking at the raw power radiating from him, I felt dread pool in my stomach. How could I possibly defeat that?

What had I done? I could almost hear a doomsday clock ticking down, the faces of everyone who’d suffer flashing before my eyes as nausea rose in my throat. I’d given a monster exactly what he wanted and now everyone would pay the price.

Daphne watched him with the impassiveness of one who’d seen it all.

The room stilled into the unnatural silence of the eye of a hurricane. A single perfect moment of calm, marred only by the disquieting certainty that even if I survived, I had to ride out the other side of the storm.

Alastair cracked his neck, rolled his shoulders, and shot me an ugly leer.

I dropped into a fighter stance.

He stepped forward, then stumbled, his foot suddenly grotesquely distorted.

It was like the first domino falling in a chain that would bring down an empire.

The ground bucked, and a roar built like a thousand angry hornets trapped in steel drums.

Run , Cherry said.

Alastair slapped at a pulpy lump swimming through his veins, his muscles growing bigger and ropier and bulging out as if trying to escape his body. “Stop this!”

I grabbed for the table as the overhead light exploded, raining glass and plaster. The fortress walls shuddered with the sound of ancient stone giving up its fight against time, tremors rolling underfoot.

Alastair pleaded with whatever god or devil would listen. The thing in his veins puffed up, tearing his skin with wet, meaty pops.

We both screamed.

All his teeth elongated into fangs too large for his mouth, his face distorting and stretching until he began to vibrate, his form becoming the blur of a bad video effect.

“Help!” he begged.

Massive chunks of the ceiling crashed around me, my heart trying to punch through my ribs.

Get out! The Baroness clawed at the inside of my skull to get me to move.

“Daphne!” I spun around, and the sound that left me was pure animal fear.

She was collapsing in on herself, withering like time-lapse footage of decay. The runes etched in her flesh dimmed and faded.

I scrambled across the broken stones to reach her. “Stop this! Help yourself!”

“I can’t.” Her expression held the peace of the already dead, but her voice was the rasp of sandpaper on bone.

The power word was supposed to heal Alastair. How had things gone so wrong? Was it because the ritual was performed here in the fortress? Had Alastair lost control of whatever magic was in his rune?

I shook Daphne, as if I could shake sense into this nightmare. “Why didn’t you stop us from doing the ritual here?”

“Not my place.” She patted my arm with a hand missing most of its fingers, her reassuring smile revealing a mouth full of dust. “He actually set me free.” Her voice quivered with wonder.

The rapturous light in her eyes turned blank, and her skin crumbled away. Suddenly she collapsed, her yellowed bones clattering to the ground.

Daphne—the seemingly immortal gatekeeper—was gone in seconds.

Yet somehow, impossibly, I was still standing.

The unfairness of her end struck me with unexpected force, a hollowness opening in my chest for someone I barely knew but had grown to respect, perhaps even admire, in our brief, fraught encounters.

A violent rumble beneath my feet pulled me back to my immediate predicament. The fortress was tearing itself apart and Alastair…

I caught one last glimpse of terror in his eyes before his bodyshattered into a storm of ash.

Aviva! Cherry’s scream jolted me into motion. I was the only one left alive, and I intended to stay that way. I ran for the door, dodging falling stones, choking on centuries of disturbed dust, my ears ringing from the fortress’s death rattle.

I made it as far as the courtyard before the world turned white. The light engulfed me, and I was blasted backward. Then there was nothing but the sensation of falling, tumbling through empty space.

The Brink, that impossible realm of chaos magic, was collapsing like a house of cards—and I was caught in its freefall.