The Demigod (Seven Sins MC #6)

Chapter Five

CHAPTER FIVE

Daemon

What can I say? I had nothing else to do with my immortal life. Might as well help the pretty girl find her sister.

And, hell, in the process, I might just gain the favor of the rest of the demons who expected very little of me.

Though I had to admit that the biggest motivation was to get to spend a little more time with my shadow girl.

If you were going to subject yourself to endless torture, there better as fuck be a pretty girl involved.

By the time we got the half-dead human back to civilization and made our way back to the estate, though, the sun was starting to cast little golden threads across the sky.

“I have to put you back,” Nox said, regret clear in her voice.

I couldn’t claim to fully understand her empathy. I’d have to have a soul for that. But, given my nature, I believed that only those who deserved punishment should be on the receiving end of torture.

And, sure, one could argue that all you had to do was look at humankind and their deplorable treatment of those who looked, lived, loved, or prayed differently than them to believe they were all pretty wicked in their own way.

But if a human was going to be damn near eviscerated, they better have done something equally as brutal in their lives to warrant it.

I didn’t want to tell shadow girl that the man had a pretty low chance of survival. And, hell, who knew? Humans could be pretty tough at times. Better not to fuck with her spirit when she was clearly just trying to do good.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her, shrugging. I would be. It was going to suck. But I wasn’t going to die. “You should go get some rest,” I added as we moved through the woods.

The shadows under her eyes looked purple against her pale skin. The whites of her eyes were red, and her lids were heavy.

“I will,” she said, but there was a false note in her voice.

We fell into a companionable silence as we walked back toward the estate, listening to the cooing of the morning birds waking up to greet the day.

“Can I ask you something?” I asked.

“Sure.”

“Why are you doing this?”

“What?”

“This. Risking yourself to save the humans, to find your sister. Why are you doing it? You could just go into hiding somewhere.”

“Could I?” she asked. “I mean, this is just the beginning. Once all of the gods are up and trying to take back the sky, land, and sea, there will be nowhere to hide. Certainly not if you live much longer than a mortal.”

“Besides,” she said after a moment, “each time in history when there was something big and bad going on, there were always the good guys doing their best to fix things, to save people. I want to be on the right side of history. What’s the point in being partially immortal if all I do is serve myself?”

“That is noble,” I decided, admiring that even if I couldn’t necessarily relate. I liked humans. Especially human women. Their mortality made them—as a whole—kinder, braver, and more empathetic.

“You think it’s silly,” she said.

“I think it’s—” I started.

It happened so quickly.

One second, we were walking side by side.

The next, she was in front of me, and her arms wrapped around me tight.

The warmth hit me first. The literal warmth of her body, the way it chased the chill that had been needling at my skin for the walk back from the car.

It wasn’t long, though, before I was noticing other things. The swells of her breasts against my chest. Her heart beating wildly against me. The sweet orange and cream scent of her skin. The brush of her silky hair on my arm. The way she seemed to fit against me so perfectly.

Mine.

What?

Where the fuck had that thought come from?

I mean, sure, all that pretty would be nice for a night or two. I would love to get lost between her thighs for an hour or two.

But she wasn’t mine.

Mineminemine.

“W—“ I started, only to feel Nox’s hand slap over my mouth, pressing down hard, desperate to get something across to me. Namely, yeah, to shut the fuck up. But also…

The crunch had my head whipping over just in time to see someone walking right alongside us. His head turned, brows pinched, as he started right toward us.

But didn’t see.

It was right then that I understood what she was doing. She wasn’t throwing herself at me like she just couldn’t fight her desire— damnit . She was wrapping her darkness around us both, hiding us.

The man shook his head and lumbered off. Not, I have to admit, before I noticed the power emanating off of him.

I hadn’t really ever noticed that before. The closest I’d ever come was when I’d first met Arick. An extremely powerful warlock. Power seemed to actually flicker in the air around him.

It was a different sort of power, though. Arick seemed to specialize in things like seduction and, for his clients, pointing them in the most profitable directions.

The power that was emanating from the man who’d just passed us was something different entirely. Something… elemental.

He meandered off, disappearing from view, but Nox held onto me, her face buried in my neck, her breath warm on my skin.

So what if my arms went around her too? Maybe they even slid up and down her back, pressed into the hard knots in her muscles, and worked them free as she melted against me.

It was the way that she swayed against me, maybe actually falling asleep on her feet, that had her jerking back, stepping away.

“We have to move,” she said, avoiding my eyes. “Silently,” she added. “But stay close.”

As we made our way back to the estate, the natural shadows of night were drawing away. And, I noted, Nox’s cloak of darkness was flickering, just barely holding.

One look at her strained, pale, exhausted face said it was taking everything she had to keep it going even as we finally moved behind the door to make our way downstairs.

“I would stay,” she said, her voice as small as her heavy-lidded eyes. “But there’s nowhere to hide. Not when I’m fading.”

“Don’t worry about me, sweetness. I’ll be just fine.”

Was it mostly false bravado? Yep. I wasn’t looking forward to the emotional or physical torture that was surely coming my way in a matter of hours. But it was also true. It would hurt. Then I would heal. That was how shit worked with us.

“I really wish there felt like there was another way,” she said, finishing chaining me back up, her gaze finally cutting to mine.

The grief in her eyes—for a complete stranger, and an evil one at that—had that little voice whispering at the back of my mind again.

Mine.

“Just do me a favor,” I said.

“Anything.”

“Once you hear the screaming stop, give me an hour or two before you come down.”

“Why?”

“Give a demon a chance to heal up a bit, will ya? Gotta keep up appearances. Can’t be denying you this gorgeous face, now, can I?”

That got a small laugh out of her.

“Okay. I can do that. What about, uh, food? Sustenance?”

“I don’t need to eat,” I told her. Sure, I liked it a fuckuva lot more than my demon friends did. I mean, if you couldn’t appreciate a deep-fried onion blossom, something was wrong with you. “But I wouldn’t mind a warmer shirt,” I said, thinking of a long night trekking through the grounds with her.

“Done,” she said with a firm nod.

“Where do you go?” I asked, not quite ready for her to leave yet. Even if I knew she was risking herself with each moment she stayed here during the daylight hours.

“What do you mean?”

“When you’re not here, where do you go?”

“I’m always here,” she said. “I have a room rented in town. They gave it to me on a song since no one wants to visit the ‘suicide town’ anymore. “It’s the other way down the road we took. Sits all by itself in the middle of nowhere. Honestly, it’s creepy. But it’s cheap. There’s hot water. I can’t complain. It’s better than being chained to a wall in a freezing basement.”

“Oh, shadow girl, don’t go worrying about me. Get some rest. I’ll see you in a few hours.”

She hesitated again, not wanting to leave me, even if this was her very idea. Good to her core, this one.

Eventually, though, she did turn, making her way toward the steps. Watching her, I swore she struggled to keep putting one foot in front of another.

My stomach twisted, worrying that she might not be able to make it all the way back to safety without being discovered.

But she was the pro at this, I had to remind myself. She’d been taking care of herself without me for a long time.

She didn’t need me.

Mineminemine , the strange voice croaked at the back of my mind even as I started to drift back off to sleep.

Only to be woken up by pain.