How Not to Tame Your Human Tease (Falling for Demons #4)

Prologue

Ragnar

The forests were filled with all sorts of creatures—ferocious and timid, massive and minuscule, finned, clawed, winged.

But the forests were also filled with danger and death.

As is life’s way, creatures often befell perils amongst the trees and beneath the thickets, but on rare occasion, those creatures would also have the luck of being found by Ragnar.

And Ragnar always intended to set things right.

Only this time, there was no right to be set.

He had tried, searching for the rightness that was supposed to exist in all things, but the magic didn’t make itself known as it had so many times before.

The bird took heaving breaths for such a small thing.

Dwarfed by Ragnar’s palms, its size was especially woeful, barely a cluster of brown and gray feathers, chest a splash of orangey-red, tiny beak held open for air it just couldn’t seem to get.

Even with only eleven years behind him, Ragnar knew every species in the Veilwood and most of what could be found in the Dreadmoor too, if not by firsthand experience then by long hours poring over every bestiary he could get his hands on.

This creature, though, was one he had never come across.

Sometimes an animal from the outside world would mistakenly enter the Dreadmoor, and if it survived, might make it to the relative safety of the Veilwood.

That must have been this bird’s fate, but it had not been lucky enough to escape the Dreadmoor unscathed.

Was that why its magic didn’t speak to Ragnar? He’d helped other creatures from beyond the world he knew. Not all could be saved, but most…

Ragnar prodded gently at the bird’s bent wing, lifting it to see the wound beneath. Something with claws had done this, hungry or mean but not starving enough to finish the job. He cocked his horned head, surprised the wound wasn’t as bad as he expected.

Why then…why was it still dying?

It lay on its side, little talons curled.

Birds didn’t do that. They gripped with those talons and they flapped their wings and they chirped incessantly about the wonder of the world—they didn’t just…

lie there. Ragnar tried one last time, pushing magic into the tiny creature’s body and willing along life. And then? Nothing.

The bird’s next breath was much slower. Ragnar stroked a finger over its crown, pad so big he could have covered it completely. Its eyes shut, and it fell still.

The demon stared into his cupped hand for a long time because that was often all one could do when stunned. He knelt on the Veilwood’s floor of fallen leaves, the smell of damp decay filling his lungs with a shuddering breath.

“Why?” he whispered, confused first, angry second, and finally panicked because that was also often the way of things, especially when one was young and easily frightened.

It was only that he had always been so good, the best in all his classes, a wonder some even said.

But now, when it mattered, he had failed.

As he moved to wipe at a tear before it could fall, the answer made itself known like an arrow to the gut. There on the back of his hand, a blotch of skin had appeared so unlike the rest. The mark held no brightness, no magic, no life, and Ragnar’s world careened to a halt.

Gray.