Chapter 35 #2
“Joining the Brood was important to my dad. It’s the most exalted rank for a demon and all he ever wanted for us.
I was so young then…thought it would change how he felt about me.
” Reid shakes his head. Clearly, his joining didn’t have the desired effect.
“I knew immediately the Brood wasn’t what I wanted.
Did things I can never take back. I wish I could tell you I left immediately.
Or that I left even after I secretly stopped taking souls or when my father was killed and I had nobody left to live my life for.
But by then…” His inhale is as sharp as the needle piercing my arm.
“I’d been in for too long. It wasn’t until I met Edgar that I had any idea where else I could go.
What I could be useful for. I’d actually been sent by the Brood to kill him. ”
“Really? Why?”
“Warlock dean of Harker? The High Thane had a hundred reasons to take Driscoll out. Many of his men had tried and failed. But Edgar saw something in me. Maybe how miserable I was…He offered me an alternative. Convinced the Elders to hire me. Protected my cottage with a cloaking spell when the High Thane realized I wasn’t coming back. I owe the man my life.”
“That must have been…” I search for the words. Leaving everything you know behind—a brotherhood, even a cruel one—to be a pariah here at Harker. “Difficult.”
“It was. At first it was almost unbearable. I was a traitor to my own kind. But as soon as I started working with the students…seeing real growth in them, seeing them put a stop to my depraved kind…”
I don’t dare say the words aloud, but I wonder if working here at Harker gave Reid’s life purpose after his father’s death.
After he did all he was asked and still never made the man, nor his brother, proud.
The thought bites at me until I ask, “Whatever happened to your brother? Once your father died?”
“My father hurt a lot of people. My mother, his kids. And my brother learned from him. He killed”—the needle leaves my skin as Reid’s voice lowers—“the woman I loved…and died shortly after that.”
Reid releases me and wipes his brow with the back of his hand to keep my blood from his face. I am rendered still on the corner of his desk. It’s all I can do to watch him clean his fingers with a cloth and put away the first aid kit.
My heart aches for him. This man I’ve come to respect. Come to admire. Who’s been so wronged. Wants so badly to be good and has to fight his inherent genetic makeup every day to do so. I know that pain because I’ve been living with it for years.
When I still haven’t moved, he tells me, “It’s okay. It was a long time ago.”
“What was she like?”
Reid crosses his arms over his chest, and then, as if noticing his own defense mechanism, lets down his guard, hands falling to his sides. “She was good. Like you.”
I can’t make sense of what the words do to my heart. The way it sails and breaks at once. “How could he do that to you?”
Reid leans back against the edge of the sink. Whatever anger filled him earlier seems to have all washed out. “Jealousy, maybe. A show of power. Perhaps he just wanted to hurt me…I’m not sure. I try not to think about it.”
I come down off the desk. “Do you miss her?”
“Not all these years later.”
I peel a bandage and stick it on my arm. “Hundreds of years, right?”
Reid nods, pressing his lips together.
“Because you used to take souls.”
His chin dips again, slower this time.
I know I shouldn’t ask. Know there’s no right answer for him. But I can’t help myself. Not in the solitude of his moon-drenched cottage, just the two of us, finally talking. I need to know if we’re the same. “Did you like it?”
His chest has begun to rise and fall faster than when he was sewing me up. “You should leave.”
“Do you remember your first?”
“Viv.” His voice has grown dark and husky. “I’m your instructor. It isn’t right.”
I take a step closer. “Do you?”
“Why would you want to hear of it?” His ask is almost a plea. “We both already know I’m not good for you.”
And yet I only bring myself another step closer. The room is dense with quiet. Perhaps nobody else is on campus tonight. Reid’s lips part. I wonder if he can taste my closeness the way I can taste his. Lemongrass and traces of my own blood. The animal inside me likes that last bit far too much.
“Have you thought about it?”
He knows what I’m asking. It’s not about being his student. We’re both consenting adults. It’s about my soul.
“You know the answer.”
His eyes are on my mouth. I take a step closer until I’m nearly standing between his legs. He’s spread them for me a little. Wide and masculine and waiting. He’s sandwiched between me and his kitchen counter. The hunter in me thinks, You’ve trapped him well. But it also says Run.
“Tell me.”
His hands find my hips, and the heat there is like a furnace.
I wonder if he means to hold me at a distance but can’t bring himself to push me back.
“Whatever you’re imagining…” he says, so low it’s nearly just a rumble in his chest. “Worse.” His fingers curl around the thin cotton of my waistband.
“So much worse.” I wonder if we’re even talking about souls anymore. “Does that scare you?”
I shake my head slowly. It’s beginning to hurt, this wanting.
How much I’m craving his mouth over mine.
It feels like sacrilege—yearning for a demon’s tongue against my lips and on my skin.
Not taboo because I’m his student—though that gets me going too—but because of my shameful, sick desire for something born from hell.
I’ve been put on this earth to eradicate his kind.
Now I’m imagining his hands moving lower.
Bending me over his desk and forcing me to submit to whatever pain or pleasure he chooses to inflict. It’s wrong. I know it is.
“Do you want my soul?” I want him to feel as torn up and turned-on as I do.
His eyes have gone poison black. No more night-sky blue. His hands feel stronger on my body. He doesn’t look away and neither do I. “No, huntress.”
And I know it’s a lie. I can see the pulse in his throat.
Can imagine what years—hundreds of them, perhaps—without a drop of human sin has done to him.
The longing it’s left him with. A predator chained in a cage of his own creation.
And here I am—wounded, needy prey. The best kind too—a hunter, the veal of demon meat.
Offering myself up to him. All I can hope is that a different kind of hunger reigns in Reid.
I really don’t want to have to kill him.
After today, I know I’d be able to, but not whether I could bring myself to.
His fingers brush my cheek, and every hair on my body rises. I lean into his touch, but he makes no move to close the gap.
“Then kiss me,” I tell him, brushing my fingers down the cotton of his shirt. Feeling the muscle and bone and heat underneath. The way he shudders under my touch. “Please.”
And he does.