Chapter 40
I don’t get anywhere near my target. My face explodes with pain and I fly backward into the couch.
My entire eye socket pulses and my vision goes warped and spotty.
I’m going to have one hell of a black eye if I make it out of here alive.
When I scramble up, I realize he’s laughing, still holding his drink, unspilled.
Shame and fury roil in my bloodstream. “You knew.”
“You think I can’t scent a hunter? With how many I’ve had?”
Had. Like hunter souls are notches on his bedpost. I know taking the soul of a hunter gives demons more strength, more power, but to be able to scent one…
I knew a demon once who could, Reid told us that first week. He’d taken so many hunter souls, he said he could feel them coming a mile away.
This guy must have killed hundreds of hunters.
Only then does it dawn on me. Secret criminal kingpin, operates under a false name, ferociously powerful, can discern hunters just by their scent. Maybe that’s why he has no mark of the Brood. Because he owns them. I might be facing the fucking High Thane.
I take a centering, bracing breath. I’m probably going to die tonight. But my father didn’t raise me to give up. Not ever. “Too bad you’ve had your last.”
The demon rolls his eyes as if my taunt is boring and sets his drink down on the desk. “Save your cute little one-liners for sometime I can jerk off, will you?”
My grimace makes my already-swelling eye hurt. “You’re depraved.”
“So they tell me.” He curls his fingers lightly in a let’s have it gesture.
I leap from the couch and catch him around the middle, sending us both back over the desk.
His drink shatters on the cold stone floor, and the scent of bitter liquor stings my nose.
I drive my blades toward his back, but he rolls faster than I’ve seen anything move, tossing me clean off him.
I land hard on my side and dodge before his fist can connect again.
His knuckles slam into the stone, and tiny cracks fissure out like lightning.
When I snap my head up, he yanks me back by the shirt and gets ahold of my chin, brushing the curtain of black hair from my face as I pant. He studies me with lethal intensity. “My, my.”
“Don’t touch me,” I spit, driving my fist into his rib cage.
He doubles over with a groan, allowing me to scramble back until I’m on the other side of the leather couch.
He flexes his bloodied knuckles across from me, catching his breath, and I clock how close I am to the only door.
I could probably clear it in one leap and make it out, but my body is vibrating for the kill.
I wipe the blood that’s dripping down my cheek from my busted eye and release a growl as I charge him again.
I swear I hear a low chuckle as he allows me to take him down to the ground and drive one silver dagger into his thigh. He groans in pain. My blood roars to end him.
“You’re like a little hellcat.” The words are bitten out through clenched teeth.
“I’m going”—I heave—“to kill you.”
“Yeah,” he says, shoving me off him in one push and yanking my dagger free from his thigh with a wince. “I got that.”
The silver hisses in his palm, and he allows my blade to clatter to the ground.
Slowly, his veined forearms ripple down to the fingertips with pale, moon-white scales.
His nails grow into long night-black claws.
He must see the horror in my eyes as I dodge his next swing and scuttle around the desk, desperate to put space between us.
“How can you be the High Thane,” I manage as I pant, “with no Brood on hand to fight for you?”
“High Thane?” The demon recoils as if I’ve insulted him. The first moment of real anger. It chills me to the bone. “I’d rather drown in my own blood then be dragged onto the Throne of Bael as some bullshit decorative joke of a king.”
But everything the dean said…The power over the Elders…And Kitty and Lyra—“The missing students…They wore your stamp.”
He’s not even out of breath. “Harker huntresses partying when they should be studying? A crying shame.”
This time he doesn’t wait for me to regroup.
He leaps over the desk in one smooth, powerful motion and catches me around the throat in a vise grip.
The hand around my neck is shimmering with that corpse-pale scaling, his claws digging into the back of my neck to draw blood.
I land a solid punch to his granite jaw and feel his bones crack. It’s like poppy in my veins.
With a lethal snarl, he drags me across the room, knocking over modern art and glossy vases. He slams me down onto the stone coffee table until I lose my grip on my remaining blade. My spine sings with pain, my head throbs, every inch of me breaking—
His lips hover over mine, scenting the soul he’s about to drink, filling my vision with his depthless eyes, and I’m running out of air, and none of my kicks are connecting, and even as my vision blacks out into merciful oblivion and I can’t get one breath in, I can hear his sinister laugh in the shell of my ear.
“Deacon! Get your fucking hands off her.”
That voice. The one that yanks me back from the darkness. Reid.
For reasons I wouldn’t be able to fathom under normal circumstances, much less in my half-conscious state, the demon—Deacon, it seems—who’s hovering over me releases my neck and lets me fall back onto the table in a heap.
Blessed air courses into my lungs, and I’m engulfed by lemongrass and the soft wool of Reid’s sweater. He lifts me onto my feet and then tips my chin up to examine the pulpy mess I’m sure is my face. He curses, low and deadly. My fingers grasp his arms to keep myself upright.
“I’m fine.” I sound half-dead.
“I’ll kill him,” he husks. “For touching you.”
“Remind me,” Deacon says, bored. “How did that go for you the last time?”
Reid snarls. A sound of white-hot rage. “You might not have died, but you suffered quite a bit, didn’t you?”
When I peer past Reid, all the taunting amusement has drained from Deacon’s cruel, carved face. He yanks open a desk drawer and then another. “Either of you have a light?”
Reid brushes his lips across my temple, and I nearly sway into him. I know I have a concussion. I’m usually the last one to say it, but I should get to the infirmary. Pixie magic is needed stat. Reid keeps me behind him in a painfully protective gesture as he says, low and steady, “We’re leaving.”
Deacon shuts the drawer below him with a real laugh. The sound is wicked. Wicked and shiver-inducing. When he looks up, his sky-blue eyes are on fire. “Never knew you to have a sense of humor before, but man, that is top-notch.”
Reid stiffens. His fear fuels my own. I’m trembling and dizzy. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I wonder if I’m going to be sick.
“If you wanted to kill me, you could have. All these years…” Reid shakes his head, then repeats, “We’re leaving.”
“Just because I didn’t care enough to hunt you down doesn’t mean I won’t rip your limbs off now that you’re standing here in front of me, asking for it.”
Reid doesn’t even flinch. It’s as if Deacon’s brutality is nothing new to him. “Do what you have to. But leave her out of it.”
“Reid,” I breathe, grasping him tighter. “No.”
His face shutters. “Viv—”
“Oh god, spare me,” Deacon drawls, fishing a fresh cigarette from his pack. “Melodrama gives me the shits.”
I sneer at him, and he glares right back at me, nostrils flaring. He cuts his ruthless gaze to Reid. “I’m almost proud. You finally decided to stop hiding from me.” I wonder if I spy an ounce of pain in those astoundingly blue eyes. But it’s gone as soon as I blink.
Reid bristles. “I didn’t come here for you.”
“Just for your huntress, then.”
His voice is barely audible. “You were going to kill her.”
Deacon’s gaze shifts from Reid to me behind him. His eyes travel with lethal leisure from my split lip to Sophia’s ripped top and my breasts underneath. He sucks his lip between his teeth. “I’m glad my reputation still precedes me.”
“It isn’t happening,” Reid growls.
Deacon pops the cigarette behind his ear. “My guy. You know I can’t allow hunters to come for me and live to tell the tale.”
“It was a mistake,” Reid says evenly. “She won’t be back.”
This concussion must be one of my worst, because I have the stupid instinct to say, “I’m not leaving without proof he took Kitty and Lyra.”
Reid groans in frustration. “Viv—”
Deacon opens another drawer and finally finds his lighter. “I have no idea who those people are.”
“Lying sack of shit,” I snarl at him.
“Often, yes.” His playful aggression has slipped into boredom. I can’t tell if that’s a good thing. “But I have no interest in Harker or your precious dean or philandering Citadel—”
It doesn’t make sense. My stomach seizes and churns. “But the stamps—”
“Viv,” Reid snaps, furious. “Enough.”
Deacon stalks toward us, and I watch as dark red scales feather up the back of Reid’s neck. I’ve only ever seen them on his arms. “Stay away from her,” he growls.
Deacon ignores Reid completely, leaning around him to ask me, “What would I want with Harker students?”
It’s not the question that stumps me. It’s the honest curiosity in Deacon’s eyes. He has no clue what I’m talking about. He wants to know more.
“Doesn’t matter,” Reid says. “You do what you want with who you want, hunter or otherwise. We’re leaving.”
I shoot my gaze up to Reid. That is not my stance on the matter.
“I can find your huntress, you know,” Deacon purrs. “Anytime.”
“But you won’t,” Reid says, backing us both toward the doorway. “I kept your secret for years. Until the day he died.”
I open my mouth to ask who when I notice a twisted twinkle gleaming in Deacon’s eye. “You owe me a lot more than that, brother.”
Brother?
It’s not the head injury that sends my vision tunneling, nor the shiver down my spine. It’s shock—utter shock. I swallow it quickly, though. I refuse to give Deacon any satisfaction, and I can see the way he examines us. Looking for cracks—surveying to see if Reid’s been honest with me.
Which he hasn’t.
Reid doesn’t allow the reveal to shake his conviction. “Way I see it, we’re even now.”
“Hardly,” Deacon purrs. “If I ever see your girlfriend again, just know I’ll be picking fragments of her spine from my teeth by the time you show up to save the day.” Deacon runs his eyes over me one last time, and I desperately wish for more clothing. “Night-night, Vivienne.”
“It’s Viv,” I spit.
And then Reid’s hauling me out the door and into Fever Dream’s smoking garden. Techno from inside pounds through my aching head. A fog of tobacco funnels from the open door into Deacon’s office and paints his unreadable expression in a haze of swirling gray.