Page 2 of Bound By Love
He never would.
Centuries ago, he stopped being capable of love. Caro had already burrowed deeper under his skin than he would have believed possible for anyone. He’d make sure she didn’t get any further. While she’d made him fail in his vow to never care for another again, he couldn’t love her.
Saber turned his attention back to the night. The image of the fire blazed back across his mind, but though he could hear its crackle, it didn’t materialize. But in his mind’s eye, he saw it once again moving across the earth, destroying everything in its path… much like the demons and Savages.
The demons! Or justonedemon. One demon in a storm drain.
“What time did this happen?” Saber asked.
“Around ten o’clock,” Ronan replied.
Saber closed his eyes as he tried to recall all the details of what happened earlier. What time was it when they got back in the car?
And then he saw the numbers on the vehicle’s display once more. It was seven minutes after ten when Caro started the car. Elena came back around the same time the demon died.
“Holy shit,” he muttered.
The stones stopped crunching as Ronan ceased walking. “What is it?”
CHAPTERTWO
Saber tooka minute to compose his thoughts as he tried to hammer out all the details before replying. “My sword is finished. I took it out last night to test it on the Savages. Things went wrong, and Caro was grabbed by some of them and taken into a storm drain.”
“Who’s Caro?” Ronan inquired.
Saber hadn’t realized how much he’d kept from them as he waited for Caro to forge his sword and while he tried to understand the strange effect she had on him. He understood it now; she was his mate, and the demon part of him had recognized it and sought to claim her.
“Caro is the woman who created my sword,” Saber said.
“Is she okay?”
“I got her away from them, but not before we also encountered a demon in the tunnels. I killed it… right around ten o’clock. Right around the time Elena came back.”
The wind whistled across the other end as Ronan didn’t respond for a few seconds. “Why would a demon’s death have any effect on Elena?”
Saber pondered this as he stared at the night; he waited for the flames to reappear, but everything remained blessedly normal. An idea was forming in his head, but he’d never heard of anything like it before and wasn’t sure how it could be possible.
But, until recently, he’d also never heard of demons injecting hunters and vampires with their blood and turning them into wild-eyed, crazed monsters either. His idea might not be crazy.
“The demon blood,” Saber said.
“Yes,” Ronan said.
Saber suspected Ronan was already coming to the same crazy conclusion as him.
“The demon I killed must have been the same demon whose blood they used to inject Elena,” Saber said.
“When it died, its blood died with it, and that blood also died inside Elena. Have youeverheard of, or seen, anything like this before?”
“No. This is all new territory for me. The demons never did or talked about anything like this while I was with them. I didn’t know many of their secrets, butthiswouldn’t have stayed hidden. If they’d thought of it while I was still with them, they would have started doing it centuries ago. This is a new development, as is the fact they don’t seem to care about the havoc they’re wreaking.”
He recalled the burning Earth outside the door and realizedthat’swhat the demons would unleash on them, whether they meant to or not. He didn’t think they sought to destroy the whole world; it would be much less fun for them if there was no one to torture and kill.
They probably had no idea they were close to unleashing complete devastation on the planet. However, they were screwing with so many things, it would be easy for them to lose control of it all. They were also far too arrogant to ever think such a thing could happen to them.
“If we don’t stop them, it’s going to get a lot worse,” he said.
“If we kill the demons, we can set the injected, and the rest of the world, free from their insanity,” Ronan said.
