7. Leah #2
The arrogance of his manner punctures my fear.
He’s so nonchalant, as if he’s an acquaintance I ran into on the street.
As if I’m not still coated in the sticky, half-dried remnants of the blood he forced me to spill.
Just thinking about it has me mentally replaying the screams, the smell—an iron tang fresh in my nostrils because the blood hasn’t gone anywhere.
It all makes my hands shake. I clench them into fists.
“I’m not doing anything for you,” I bite out. It’s the horror speaking, the disgust at what I’ve done. What he made me do.
The demon’s face drops abruptly, the slight smile he was wearing replaced by a serious, straight line. Not bothering with subtlety, I scramble backward up the slope, gut twisting in warning.
“I was afraid you’d say that.” His voice scrapes lightly across my mind like talons preparing to clamp down. I don’t have a plan, there’s no logic to the way I break into a run, yet I sprint away from him as fast as I can—which is pretty quick by human standards.
But of course there’s no outrunning him.
His presence unfolds from that spot inside my head, licking its way down my neck and curling across my shoulders. It slips through my body like a specter, making my nerve endings quiver as it wraps around my legs.
By the time I reach the top of the plateau, the demon has seized my muscles, forcing me to a complete standstill.
I try to fight him, try to claw my way out of his grip, but it’s like I’m trapped in my own body.
No matter how much I push back, my own limbs won’t answer my commands.
I might as well be shouting into a void.
I hear his footsteps behind me, almost as close as the brush of his presence against my mind.
“I’d hoped we could do this without a demonstration. But since you want to do this the hard way…”
My feet shift, turning me toward the opposite edge of the plateau. I can’t move my neck, but I can slide my eyes over enough to see his face. His expression is placid but for the faint lines where his brow furrows in concentration.
My right foot lifts, taking me a step forward, then my left. Straight toward the edge of the cliff.
No. There’s a split second, just a moment, when my survival instinct rears and my feet stumble, as if they’d almost decided to resist. The lines in the demon’s brow deepen, and the moment’s gone.
My legs carry me traitorously fast to the edge, stopping just as my toes send a few chunks of earth tumbling downward.
I don’t hear or see them hit the ground, but I do note that the drop on this side of the ridge is much more dramatic, stretching perhaps five hundred feet. A stiff breeze whips up toward my face as I stand inches from the precipice, snatching at my hair so it dances around my face.
“Do you understand now, Rose Radley? I could make you step off this cliff at any moment. I could hand you another knife and have you stab yourself with it.” His presence strokes its way across my throat, making me gasp.
“I could simply command you to stop breathing if I wished, and your body would obey.”
I can’t move an inch without his say so. I have no control, no power. Nothing. My eyes fill with tears as the magnitude of what’s been taken from me hits home, but I blink, refusing to let those tears fall. It’s the only shred of choice I have left in this nightmare.
“All right!” I shout into my mind, because my mouth is too busy taking in deep, shaky breaths. “I understand. I’ll cooperate.”
“Good. If you help me get what I want, I’ll return you to Strata.”
He draws near to the edge of the cliff so I can see him out the corner of my eye.
“The choice is simple, isn’t it?” he asks, crossing his arms and looking utterly unfazed by the fatal fall awaiting him just inches away.
I stare at him. He looks almost…bored. That’s definitely the word.
It’s the expression of a man who has much better things to do.
Which just makes me wonder how sadistic this demon must be if dangling women over steep drops is so banal to him—if stripping me of every ounce of control is all in a day’s work.
The thought stokes the flames of hate in my heart, burning hot enough to start consuming my fear.
“You’ll really let me go?” I ask, pleased my mental voice isn’t shaking like my real one would if I tried to speak right now. “How can I know you’re telling the truth?”
The demon’s eyes brighten, then narrow, the scarlet rings around his irises gleaming. “I could just force you to do what I need. You’ve seen it’s possible. The fact I don’t is your proof that I’m a reasonable man.”
I doubt he’s keeping my leash loose out of the goodness of his black, infernal heart, but I decide to test out exactly how reasonable he can be.
“It would be much easier to have this conversation a bit further away from certain death,” I say.
He gives a curt nod. “Fair enough.”
My feet take three steps back from the edge. The iron grip on my muscles eases a fraction, and I can finally fully inhale.
“So what is it you want my help with?” I ask, as if we’re two people discussing a business transaction. One side of his mouth twitches up so briefly I almost miss it, but I think I’ve amused him. I’m not sure if that’s better than him being bored.
“I want you to visit Strata. There’s something I need there. I’ll come with you in your mind, using that helpful binding spell your robed friends put in place.”
Normally, demons need some kind of permission to possess a human.
I suppose the sorcerers’ magic leap-frogged right over that little hurdle.
He’d already taken my body over before he spoke a word to me.
But what would he want from the human realm that requires a human delivery girl?
Why not go himself, or send another demon?
Alarm bells start ringing. Whatever he wants me to do in Strata, it must be criminal for a supernatural. Something that risks breaking the Concords. Why else would he need a human?
Does he want me to kill again? To keep his hands clean while mine are stained an even darker shade of red?
Does it even matter? I have about as much choice as a rat in a trap, and it’s obvious I can only have one answer for him. It’s possible that some point down the road I can wriggle free…but if this really is just business to him, maybe he can be talked into sweetening the deal too.
Hodges always said I scavenged like a woman with nothing to lose. The secret was I always had so much to lose that even the highest stakes started to feel normal after a while. That can make you fearless in weird ways.
I glance at the edge of the cliff, then back to the demon’s crimson-ringed eyes. The stakes are certainly high right now.
“Make it worth my while.” I hold my breath as soon as I say it, wondering if he’ll hurl me over the cliff for my insolence.
Perhaps the thought occurs to him too, because I feel the brush of his presence across my legs before it slides into my mind. “You mean aside from granting you your freedom?”
Since that’s something he’s already promised, I try to look like it’s not the only thing I’ve ever wanted and focus on other things I need.
“I want gold,” I say. “I know you demons have a lot of it. If you’re a man of your word, then it’s only fair you pay me for access to my b—” I wince as he raises an eyebrow. Maybe I should try making myself sound less like a prostitute. “For my services,” I go for instead, which isn’t much better.
“Very well,” he says dismissively, clearly not in the mood to barter with someone so completely at his mercy. “We can come to some arrangement on that score—after you’ve gotten me what I need.”
I’ve bartered enough at the Three Bridges that it should be second nature to me, but this negotiation is happening so fast—and with such stakes—that only now a dreadful thought occurs to me.
Whether I willingly let this demon use me for his mysterious mission or not, it could kill me.