Chapter 4
The circle was tight, hands clasped around the board.
As soon as Síofra sat down, Morgan scrambled to take the last remaining space facing her.
His eyes never left Síofra, though she tried to look anywhere else-at the carved symbols etched into the wood, the guttering fire, even the restless twitching elf boy.
Anywhere but him while everything inside him said-LOOK AT ME.
The chanting built in layers, low at first, then pulsing like a heartbeat. It had an odd hypnotic quality to it.
A sting ripped across her finger. Síofra flinched and pulled away, blood rising, splashing dark across the board.
“Oops,” murmured the raven-haired girl beside her. Her pale eyes glinted, her smile did not have an apology behind it. She looked down to see the girl turn her ring.
Síofra wanted to raise her injured thumb to her mouth but the girl wouldn't let go. Morgan pushed up, but the shriek of many voices stopped him.
“Don’t break the circle!”
Reluctantly, he sat again, though it was taking everything in him not to rush to her side.
Witch magic made him nervous, elf magic made his hair stand up.
His eyes clung to her as she pulled her hand along with the girls to suck her wound, her plump lower lip streaked scarlet.
A groan escaped him before he could swallow it, and the pale-eyed girl’s knowing glance slid over him.
Then there was a sudden cold gust of air in the closed room. It swept through the fireplace and the fire immediately died. The candles snuffed and an eerie darkness pressed in.
There was a heavy presence hovering just above them.
Síofra’s skin prickled, the hair along her arms stood on end. Something vast bent low, its gaze heavy and cold on her . For a heartbeat, it lingered next to her ear. A voice slid through her skull, raw and jagged, not in any tongue she knew-yet she understood it as if it were her own.
“My… queen,” it hissed, a cold breath tickling the shell of her ear before moving on.
The flames roared back to life, before subsiding into embers.
In that heartbeat of darkness, something touched her.
Hands that weren’t hands skimming over her breasts, a phantom caress that teased her nipples into hard peaks.
A slick sensation, like a tongue dragging along the sensitive hollow where her neck met her shoulder, leaving a path of ice-fire gooseflesh in its wake.
Her spine arched as another touch followed-a cold, clawed finger gliding down the soft plane of her stomach to slowly dip lower.
Her thighs snapped shut instinctively, but the ghostly intrusion pressed further, parting her resistance as if her body were only air.
The cold slid beneath the thin barrier of her thong, gently tracing her clit in circles so unbearably light she nearly cried out and pressed forward for more pressure.
Then it dipped lower- probing, seeking.
A soft, choked moan broke between her clenched teeth.
And then, just like it appeared out of nowhere, the sensation vanished. As though it had never been.
Síofra trembled, her chest heaving, her blood thrumming with a heat that didn’t belong to her.
And in the silence, the whisper in a strange tongue again.
“Mine.”
There was the loud thud of a body hitting the floor and Morgan was convulsing on the floor.
His body thrashed, shaking the ancient boards. Síofra instinctively reached him and dropped beside him, dragging him onto his side. He seized until suddenly he went still. His chest heaved, and then his eyes snapped open.
“Mate?” he rasped, his eyes shining gold in the low light like a predator in the wild.
In the prison between realms, the demon stirred.
The taste of blood, warm and sweet coated his tongue. The essence was familiar. The coppery scent was like an aphrodisiac teasing his senses, deadened by centuries of ennui.
He knew his moment had arrived. This time he put all his strength into it.
Even weak, the membrane began to part, the thin texture of it separating into fibres.
Hope sparked in his chest as he pushed through the gap, clawing at the loose earth leading to the tunnel to his kingdom, to the abyss where his throne waited - but the pull dragged him elsewhere. To the hated human realm.
He burst through the veil like a shadow, incorporeal and ravenous with seething hunger. Heat bled from the fire, the candles, the inhabitants' own shadows, feeding him. He hovered like an immense spectre in the cavernous room where the mortals gathered in a circle around the portal.
And then he sensed her.
The taste of her warmth, the brush of her pulsing life, hit him like a lightning bolt.
Mine.
His voice broken, jagged and halting-
“Warm… alive… pretty little thing-mine.”
Unwittingly, she reeled him closer, moth to the flame. The centuries of silence crackled into a growl, a whisper, a laugh.
“Blood on lips…. I see. I see you. Feel you. Ahh-hungry-hungry for you.”
He had to have a taste.
The portal around him trembled as he savored the echo of her moan, the phantom-pleasure he had woven through her flesh.
Demons tested compatibility through coupling-crude, violent and unrelenting.
Some castes kept harems to grind away their hunger and their need until they found their one and only-their prime. But for him,the wait was over.
He would have only this one. The mortal with hair like fire and blood that tasted achingly familiar, like an echo of something he had once known and lost. Her blood beckoned him like a siren’s song.
Her heat still lingered on his tongue, her softness imprinted on his claws. Mine, the word reverberated through the black between realms, the vow of a mad king long denied.
The craving folded into an unending obsession. He imagined her body arching beneath him for real, not just under his spectral touch. He would test her, break her open, claim her utterly. He would lock her up-the only one in his harem. Just her.
The portal sealed behind him, the threads of his bondage snapping one by one. His hunger drove him forward, seeking a vessel, a tether to hold him in this cursed world before he was forced back.
Never!
He would rather cease to exist than face that limbo again.
And then-there he was.
The wolf-blooded mortal eying the one who was his.
He plunged into him, sliding deep into marrow and sinew. The runes etched into the boy’s blood flared, walls long locked crumbling under his power. Something long imprisoned stirred within, roaring free.
The demon laughed, jagged and low.
Ahh. The wolf.
A mighty sable beast tore loose, no longer shackled. Power surged as the beast’s howl rattled through bone and soul. An endless well of nourishment, a source to gorge upon. The perfect cage to house him, to fuel him, to hunt for her until he could shed this shell and take his throne back.
He curled inside the wolf-blood’s chest, his talons sunk deep into both spirit and beast.
“Mine,” he whispered in his host’s mind, tasting the word, savoring the promise as emerald-green eyes looked down at his host with worry.
And within the husk, the demon’s words rattled-content, for now.
“Yes. Yes. Until I am ready.”
The demon slid inside, deep into the mortal shell.
And slept.
And like a whisper, he sensed the wolfborn say,”Mate”