Page 5 of The Veil of Hollow Gods

When next time I wake, it’s not with the same confidence as the first time.

My arms hang over my head, dead and numb, like they’ve been swinging there for hours.

The back of my legs ache with cold and strain, being bent over a demon’s shoulder for miles through the land the sun forgot isn’t natural.

And my head pounds, both where the demon hit me but also at being upside down for so long.

A ragged groan shambles from my lips.

"Quiet!" the demon hisses.

I go limp at the metal in his voice, willing myself not to retch. If this is how I’m meant to get wherever it is we’re going, I doubt I’ll make it there without freezing to death first.

He must know that.

He must know that humans can’t be in the elements for so long. Blackness swims in my vision, and I don’t fight it. If I’m not conscious, then I’m also not cold.

Searing pain in my lip drags me from the void.

The flesh feels raw, torn apart by ice burn, the kind that doesn’t stop at pain but whispers of decay.

I try to move, to touch it, to assess the damage, but can’t feel my arms or hands except for the dead weight of them hanging over my head.

Can’t open my eyes through the thick crust of ice coating my lashes, the cold seeping inward, deeper and deeper, as if it wants to reach my brain.

Every breath is a knife, frozen air slicing through my throat, blazing through my lungs with fire that doesn’t warm but destroys.

I want to fall back into nothingness, bury myself in the merciful void once more, but my mind is cruel.

It forces me to connect the slow, even tread of this demon—each step promising more pain, more damage—to what lies ahead.

Because if I survive this trek, I doubt I’ll survive whatever horrors await me at the end of it.

And then, in its cruelest trick yet, my mind conjures an image of my fresh-faced sister, rosy cheeks and hair flowing loose.

She doesn’t deserve this. None of us do, but she’s the one among us least deserving.

Dama’s chains, I hope she made it. I hope she told Mother just enough of what happened without incriminating herself.

Tears drip onto my brows, freezing hard as soon as they touch the hair.

"C-cold." My voice is weak, shallow.

"Yes. You’re meant to be cold," the guard says.

"Dying." I hardly have the breath to get the word out of my throat.

"I doubt that. You humans are all the same, begging for more. More food, more clothes, more warmth. You have plenty."

Plenty? If this is his notion of plenty… "Idiot."

In a smooth motion, the demon slides me off his shoulder and for a moment, I’m sailing through the air. My head bounces on the hard-packed ice, and bright colors flash behind my lids.

"Say that again, you worthless whore." His raised voice sends a wave of nausea through me so violent, my stomach cramps, and I pitch to my side despite my throbbing head and dead arms.

Through gritted teeth, I pry open my frozen lids and stare at his covered face. "Does it make you feel good? Looking down at me, boot raised, and seeing nothing worth saving? Only something soft to ruin."

The demon guard’s weight shifts. He’s about to retort but pauses at a different voice in the forest.

"She has a point, guardsman. What is your goal in hurting my potential Maiden? "

Something in me uncoils at the sound of that voice.

The guard’s posture stiffens. "Lord?—"

The rest of the snowy-haired demon’s title is cut off, and those coal-black eyes find mine, searching my face, my body. But I’m more interested in the way the guard’s hands go to his throat.

"Is this how you treat all women, guard? Or just Maiden potentials?"

That voice. Unsettling, but in such a different way than the other demons I’ve heard. The king’s voice is intimate, sliding across my skin, under it, like a lover’s might.

He doesn’t give the guard the opportunity to answer. "I suppose handing the woman over to you and giving you explicit direction to get her to my vestige was unclear. I should have made sure to mention that I wanted her undamaged."

The guard falls to his knees, gloved hands now more like talons, continuing to claw at his throat. I shuffle back, trying to stay out of the way in case the guard keels over entirely.

"I’d expect this sort of barbarism from Lorien’s guards. But from my own?"

The guard rips his helmet off, lips parted and trying to suck in air that just won’t come. His reddening face slowly changes. Lashes bow under the weight of accumulating ice. His lower lip splits open, turning black with blood or death, I cannot tell which.

The demon king waves his hand, and several layers of the guard’s armor and clothing vanish. "Do you think being left to the elements will be a peaceful death?"

The guard’’s eyes bulge, bloodshot and wild, as he shakes his head.

The demon king finally releases whatever hold he has on the air, and after several groaning, gasping breaths, the guard finally answers. "No," he wheezes, pitching forward. "It would not be a peaceful way to die."

The king stares down at the guard, appraising his worth. "Do be sure to let me know for certain in the Veil."

The demon king saunters over to me, boots hardly making a sound. As he does, he unfastens the cape at his throat, and when he reaches me, spreads it over my frozen body. He bends and pulls me into his arms. No movement is wasted, no contact, unneeded.

His warmth seeps into me instantly, along with that scent—so sweet and rich with the ghost of something sharper underneath—a bloom I can’t name. The change is so sudden, I can’t imagine how I’d ever been so cold on the shoulder of the guard.

"Suffer the way you condemned her to, Guise, and I’ll be sure to tell your commander what a disappointment you turned out to be."

The demon king turns away from the pitiful thing dying on the ground and heads deeper into the forest.

Being away from that guard, with my limbs warming and the threat of death hopefully passed, at least for now, a strange giddiness bubbles in my chest, like over-fermented wine. "So, what does that pretty red blade really do, if not take life?" I ask, unable to resist.

Those coal eyes flick to mine, then back to the path ahead. "Sleep," the demon king says.

I want to object. I want to tell this demon, king or not, exactly what he can do with his audacious sleep command.

But the word and its magic slides under my skin, settling like it’s always belonged there, finding a home in the seam between the threads of me—between borrowed breath and bound blood .

"Sleep," he repeats, softly.

And I obey.

"Wake."

I burrow deeper into the sweet-smelling blanket and let out a long sigh. "Just a little longer, Mother."

"Amara."

That voice. Tidal, resonate, crashing into me. Pulling me toward the dark unknown that begs me to unravel it. Discover it. To experience, feel, have it.

The demon king.

Saying my name.

I bolt upright, dazed. "Where am I?" The words are thick and stick to my tongue, no doubt a side effect of the unnatural sleep the demon commanded of me. I run my hand over my face, strangely warm and…

There’s no dead spot or chunk of missing flesh on my lip. I thought for sure the ice would have marred it permanently. And my lashes, still soft and seemingly just as plentiful as before I’d ripped them out to stare down that idiot guard.

How is this possible?

Still blurry-eyed, I try to focus on the surroundings—truly, I do.

The glittering stone walls of what surely must be a cave, the fire’s soft flicker.

But my gaze drifts, settling on him instead.

There’s something about the set of his mouth, the way his lower lip just barely curves that anchors my stare.

Firelight sparks in his black eyes, turning them into dark mirrors before glinting off a thin silvery scar slashed over his left eyebrow—a mark of danger and survival that shouldn’t be so beautiful .

I mean to look away, to note the shape of the cave or the path outside.

Instead, my gaze falls lower to the easy strength suggested in the stubble along his jaw.

The column of his throat left bare, and a black bit of tattoo peeking over his silk collar, daring me to imagine the heat of his skin against my lips.

His lips twitch upward, drawing my gaze. My heart stutters as I realize too late that I’ve been staring.

"See something you like, Maiden?" The low current of dark amusement in his voice pulls me under as the question rattles through me, equal parts challenge and invitation.

I resist the urge to look away too quickly. Let him wonder what I’ve seen, since I’m not truly sure myself.

Slowly, my gaze falls from his smiling eyes to his lips. Then lower to that black silk collar and all that skin and strokes of ink…hinting at more below, before finally settling on the fire he must have built while I slept.

It’s small. Enough to take the chill from the air, but no more.

The sweet-scented blanket that’s not a blanket but the demon king’s warm wool cape falls to my lap as I sit straighter.

"Where am I, and why am I so warm? That fire is hardly enough…" A wild thought races through my mind, and just as quickly, it dances off my tongue. "Demons must not like their meals cold. Thawing me like a frozen duck, hmm?"

Several heartbeats pass before a sound, sharp and sudden, breaks the silence.

It takes me several more heartbeats to realize it’s laughter.

The demon king’s laughter. Low and rough, it thrums through me like the taut strings of a malevolent instrument.

The sound and the now unmistakably joyful upward curve to his mouth strike me as entirely out of place—like a smile on a storm.

My stomach clenches, mind skittering to make sense of this reaction—to fit it into everything I know about demons.

"Is that what they’re teaching you?" He locks his gaze on me, and I cannot move under it. Can’t look away. "That demons eat humans?"