Page 99 of Want Me, Take Me, Haunt Me, Make Me

“You don’tknow?” The demon’s voice rose, and behind it the mass of maggot soldiers cringed. Perthrux lunged forward toward Maxwell. While the barrier still held it back, keeping it outside the physical world, no such obstacle kept Maxwell on the other side. As its arms shot forward, its power yanked Maxwell toward it. Talons sank into his shoulders. “You don’tKNOW?”

After his brief freedom, compulsion was agony. “I don’t know,” Maxwell repeated. It was all he could do just then.

Perthrux dragged him close to it, close enough for Maxwell to begin going numb from the chill it exuded. “Did you give her the potion?” it demanded.

“Yes.”

The flesh around its face rippled, wrinkled, as it thought. It was not a stupid creature when it didn’t want to be. “Allthe potion?”

Maxwell bit down on his tongue, but Perthrux’s magic pried hisjaws apart and forced the answer from his bleeding mouth. “No.”

Its claws tightened, piercing Maxwell’s flesh. “Traitor,” it snarled. “Why?”

“I love her,” he said, unwillingly but all the more sincere for it. “I hate you. I want you gone.”

“Then how—” Perthrux stopped. Both of its mouths gaped open while Maxwell’s heart stopped, and the revelation that crossed its misplaced face confirmed his worst fear. “Ah.Clever. Not clever enough.”

“My lord—”

“You’ve forgotten that,” said the demon, over his feeble protest. “I’ll remind you. Come.”

Before he could cry out, before he could even mouth some protest, useless as he knew it would be, the ethereal had become a blur around them. Maxwell couldn’t tell if the maggots were following, but he knew where they were going.

Chapter 52

Hazel kicked open the small door, stepped into Perthrux’s second room, and found her throat too tight to swear. She knew her time was short, but for a second all she could do was shiver in the arctic chill and gape at her surroundings.

The walls were bone. Age had yellowed it and smoothed out the different shapes, many but not all close to human, but nobody could have mistaken the material for anything else. An immense fanged mouth had been carved into each of the four walls, and a figure stood in each of those. Two were bipedal—one looked human from a distance, while the other had wings—the third was a horned creature with six legs, and the final one resembled a tree with glistening scales. Bone spikes stuck into each of their sides from the walls around them.

A low drone came from each throat, rising and falling with painful regularity. The gray, hairless head in the center of the room, floating above an obsidian dais, blinked its eyes slowly in the same rhythm.

Casper cringed back behind Hazel in the doorway. He snarled, ears back and tail low. Hazel could relate. Nothing in the room was particularly gory—the head simply stopped, with no sign of decapitation, and Hazel couldn’t see any blood around the spikes in the creatures’ sides—but just standing there made her want to go scrub herself until she bled.

“Hello?” She forced the word out and was glad to get no response. None of the room’s occupants even appeared to notice her.

Her guiding line didn’t fail, though, and it ran straight to the head. Hazel eyed it without surprise as she stepped into the room. The pulse of Perthrux’s name in her mind became one with the humming rhythm of the creatures around her and the pattern of the head’s blinking eyes. Even in its absence, the demon’s signature roared like the tide against rocks, and thinking above it took effort.

Here was the anchor. She knew that without question, though she had no idea what Perthrux had done to make it, and as she advanced on the head, she knew her next steps without having to think about them. Hours of fretting served a purpose after all: The mission had burned itself into her, and what came next was almost muscle memory.

She opened her backpack and took out the necessary supplies. Then she drew her knife, and the room exploded with blinding force.

* * *

Maxwell would have begged, but it wouldn’t have done any good. He tried to fight, but Perthrux’s grasp was iron and its magic held his mind pinioned. All he could do as they burst into the demon’s hideous inner chambers together was scream his denial to a universe that cared nothing for it or him.

No, not this, not her.

“Almost,almost,” Perthrux shrieked. It was laughing, but Maxwell knew the fury behind the sound. “Youarrogantcreatures. Mud and mind, and not much of the latter, and you think you have asay?”

The words came from far away, just as the chamber itself was a blur. Another time, the bone walls and their prisoners would have horrified even Maxwell, used as he was to the worst of the ethereal. The half-sentient construct feeding on those prisoners as it floated in the middle of the room would have twisted his stomach and hurt his brain.

He barely noticed. All he really saw was Hazel.

Their arrival had thrown her against the wall, across the room from Maxwell and Perthrux. She lay crumpled there with her knife in one outflung hand. For one endless moment, she lay still with blood running from her head, and Maxwell’s heart didn’t beat at all.

Then she was moving, shoving herself up with her free hand, not even looking toward him or the demon. Instead, she focused on a small, gray, oblong object on the floor by the dais. Maxwell couldn’t tell what it was, though he could probably have read the runes glowing on its surface if he’d been closer, but it was important enough for Hazel to sprint toward it, ignoring both Perthrux and the blood trickling down the side of her face.

“KILL HER,” Perthrux snarled.