Page 104 of Bent Out of Shade
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The demon tossedLaurent down like a piece of trash.
My—the wolf faced away from me. I curled my toes under in my shoes like I was taking root in the floor, so I didn’t give in to my screaming need to help him, because I refused to hand Kian any weakness.
Emmett scuttled over to the shifter.
The estrie swiveled her head one hundred and eighty degrees to face him. “Stay,” she said in a bored voice.
Emmett froze and I swallowed down a whimper.
We had to get past Kian and through that open door. The odds of besting her physically, even with my magic, weren’t great, but I had a better tool at my disposal.
“You fucked up, demon.” I stood up, pleased to note that at least I was taller than her.
Kian narrowed her eyes. She wore the same dress she had in the cell, and while still pale, there was a palpable strength that flowed off her now that she was free from all that iron. Or maybe she’d had her recommended serving of bodybuilder. “The human who wrenched me from Gehenna.” She stalked toward me, like bad too-fast stop-motion animation. From one blink to the next she’d narrowed the gap between us, her head askew and her shoulders crooked, and then suddenly she was in front of me, her eyes glinting with vicious glee. “Do you regret your actions? You should.”
I willed my breathing to remain even. “No, but you will.”
She blinked at me with an amused expression. “Why, pray tell?”
“Didn’t you hear? I gave Dumah the Ascendant.”
Kian tossed her fall of black hair off one shoulder. “A nothing trinket from a nothing human.”
Laurent’s left leg was stuck in a loop shifting from foreleg to forearm, fingers to claws, pallid skin to matted fur, while Emmett remained rooted in place, his face slack from the estrie’s magic command.
I mentally gathered up every shard of my heart, imagining them pounding into my body like spikes and embracing the pain. “I gave Dumah the keys to his jail cell. Given the messages he’s passed along, he’s very anxious to make my acquaintance. As powerful as you are,” I continued, “do you want to risk angering an angel with eons of torture expertise? I have no clue why you got tangled up in Vincenzo’s business, but I suggest you walk away and let us do the same.”
The demon furrowed her brow like she was doing complex math equations in her head.
Come on. Put two and two together and let us out.
There was a series of sharp snaps, and I slid my eyes sideways to catch the wolf’s head morphing into a lumpy man’s skull. The animal’s howl died as a human whimper, and Laurent scratched a matted furry foreleg over his lank, dark curls.
I gnawed on the inside of my cheek hard enough to draw blood. Why couldn’t he shift out of this hybrid form?
“You’re lying about the angel,” Kian said. She now hung upside down from ceiling in front of me, her hair brushing the floor. I yelped, because she had not been that way a second ago.
“Dumah has no interest in you.” She swayed like a giant spider about to pounce, her knobby fingers twitching.
My terror was knocked aside by the memory of Mom’s huge eyes, brimming with tears, and how she’d positioned herself so I couldn’t see my dead father before imploring me to hide on the night she died.
“Trust me,” I said icily, backing up, “his interest goes back years.”
The estrie landed on her toes, nose to nose with me. “This is so much better than I expected.” Huh? “I merely wanted he who is no longer of my line to suffer an unexpected change in plans.”
No longer because she’d stripped Zev of his name? Or of his life? I shoved the question away.
She wagged a finger. “But you believe you fly with the angels.”
I shivered, as frozen to the spot by those words as if Kian had glued me there. “I never claimed that.”
Delilah snuck up behind the demon with the scythe.
Kian did her creepy head swivel and blew on Delilah. Both my shadow and the scythe dissolved into waves, which rippled away. “You’ve done nothing for Dumah.”
My throat was dry and icy sweat crawled down the back of my neck, but I dared not show fear. “You’re wrong. Dumah is imprisoned in Gehenna, is he not? And the Ascendant brings the monsters out of the dark via my Banim Shovavim magic.” I cocked an eyebrow. “You’d know.”
