Black Widow Demon (19 page)

He was procrastinating because he had no idea what to say to Raven about what had just happened. She had been in danger and he had dealt with the threat, but there was more to it than that. He did not want her to learn to kill with the same ease he did, or develop a lack of regard for mortal life, which was what would happen if her friend Creed somehow did persuade the trainers to accept her. They would strip away her conscience and empathy and all that made her unique, for their own purposes.

But he did not really believe she would become like him if she received an assassin’s training. Without a conscience or empathy for others to temper the demon in her, it was entirely possible she could become something more terrible.

And if she could not relinquish her conscience, as she had been unable to do in the burned-out village when he had pushed the limits of her demon, an assassin’s training might very well destroy her. Either way, she could not win.

That, in turn, raised a disquieting question for him. If an assassin’s training destroyed her, what might being with him do to her?

Troubled, he returned to the shelter.

…

The shelter was quite roomy inside, with the small but adequate fire Raven had built giving off both heat and light. A crack in the rock ceiling above it created a natural chimney.

She sat by the fire and waited for Blade.

He pushed aside the flaps on the tarpaulin and entered the shelter on a flurry of wet snow. He tied the flaps behind him, shutting out the storm. There wasn’t enough clearance for him to stand upright, forcing him to stoop awkwardly as he removed his damp outer clothing, which he hung to dry. He was left wearing trousers of heavy denim tucked inside tall leather boots, and a high-collared shirt of tightly woven raw linen, now unbuttoned to mid-chest. The clothing would not be enough of a barrier against the numbing cold, and Raven scrabbled through one of their packs for a wool blanket.

As she looked back at him, she noticed the sleeve of his shirt was soaked in blood. The scent of it hit her nostrils, leaving her light-headed.

When he saw what she was staring at, he mistook her fascination for concern. “It’s nothing,” he said as he unbuttoned the shirt the rest of the way and slipped it off his shoulders. He wadded it into a ball and tossed it aside. After he cleaned and packed the wound with scraps of cotton lint, she helped him wrap it.

He hunched his large frame around to face her in the confined space. He took the fresh shirt and blanket she handed him.

“I hadn’t intended for you to be part of that,” he said.

She blamed the sudden chill pebbling her flesh on the rising wind that seeped beneath the tarpaulin’s skirts. He thought she found killing difficult, when the opposite was true.

She had no trouble with it when it was necessary. It was her demon’s reaction to it that she found so repugnant. It enjoyed blood. It craved it. But she couldn’t speak the words.

Kindling in the fire splintered to pieces, the glowing embers settling into the pit with a sigh. Blade took a seat with his back to the fire so that he faced her, both of them now cross-legged on the cold ground. He slid his arms into the sleeves of his shirt but did not fasten it, drawing the blanket over his shoulders instead.

“How long have you known you were half demon?” he asked.

Surprisingly, his quiet question held no judgment or recrimination. She’d been wrong. He was well aware she had no trouble with killing.

She considered her answer carefully. She could not remember a time when she had not known that a demon lived inside her, a part of her but also separate, possessing an existence and a will of its own. It waited for her weak moments and preyed on them. Outside, when she had hesitated, her demon had seen a threat to Blade and surged to the surface to protect him when she could not do so.

“I’ve always known,” she said.

“You must remember some specific moment, or event, when it manifested,” Blade persisted. “Otherwise, it would forever remain a suspicion to you, not a fact.”

“No. Nothing.”

He sat very still, his eyes locked on her face. She passed a hand over her forehead, sweeping away her sticky curls. He could easily outwait her. He had a great deal more patience, and there was nowhere for her to go. The storm could last for several days.

“All right,” she said. Her fingers had begun to tremble, and she linked them together in her lap. “I was maybe five years old. My mother was working on a particular piece of jewelry that required soldering enamel to silver, so she had a fire burning in her shop.” Raven remembered the sweltering heat of the day in vivid detail, but she’d always enjoyed watching her mother create beautiful things and would rather stay with her than join the other children outside. “I was playing on the floor in front of it. I stood up to grab my ball after it rolled away, and I caught my foot in the hem of my dress. I fell into the fire.” She could still remember her mother’s screams of terror and then the conflict of relief and dawning horror in her eyes when she discovered that Raven was unharmed, even though her clothing was ruined.

You’re a demon
, her mother had whispered.

For years, Raven had burned with the guilt and shame of that moment. It was not until Justice entered their lives that she understood that her mother must have known all along who had fathered her but was unwilling to acknowledge it.

“Ordinary fire doesn’t harm you,” Blade said thoughtfully, “but demon fire can.”

That was an understatement. She had almost consumed herself with it.

“The demon fire is new to me. It seems to be brought on by strong emotions, and that makes it hard to control.” And when her emotions ran high, her demon emerged, compounding the problem.

Reaching for her across the short distance between them, Blade took her hand and drew her against him, the top of her head settling beneath his chin, her cheek in the crook of his neck. He wrapped his arms around her so that the blanket at his shoulders covered them both, his heart rate strong and reassuring beneath one of her palms. He slid a hand under the thick, waxed-cotton jacket she wore over her lighter, feminine underclothing and stroked her spine with warm fingers.

“I didn’t want you to be a part of what happened outside because I didn’t want you to see how easy it is to be cold-blooded about killing,” he said. “It has nothing to do with whether or not you’re half demon. You control that part of your nature far better than you believe. It makes you stronger, not weaker.” He pressed a kiss to her temple, his breath ruffling the soft curls of her hair. “You aren’t a killer, Raven. I’d prefer you to stay this way. You aren’t a demon, either. You’re so much more than either of those things. So much better. Working with assassins isn’t the right future for you, and if I thought it a real possibility, I’d fight anyone, including your friend Creed, to keep it from happening.”

While his faith in her warmed her, the struggle to keep her demon under control would never end for her. She could not dismiss or deny it the way he thought she could. At any time, the balance could tip. Sooner or later he’d come to hate her. She already felt the distance he had placed between them since they left the village.

He caught her chin and forced her to look at him. His lean face, shadowed with a day’s growth of beard, was as unsmiling as ever, but its edges had softened.

“I’m going to find your friend Creed and reassure myself that you’ll be safe if I leave you with him. Then I’m walking away.” His low voice made her shiver. “It has nothing to do with demons and everything as to what I can and can’t offer you. If working with assassins isn’t the right future for you, being with me would be far worse. You deserve better.”

Need coiled through her. Her demon disagreed. This was the man it wanted. And this was one battle with her demon she saw no reason to fight.

She slipped one knee to the ground and swung the other to straddle his thighs, taking his roughened cheeks between her palms to kiss his mouth. He tasted of fresh air and smoke from the fire.

“You have no idea what I deserve,” Raven said. “You have even less of an idea about what your own value is. Walk away once we find Creed if you want—I won’t stop you. But until that time comes, don’t push me away.”

She shed her coat.

He did nothing at first, and then, slowly, his hands went to her hips. The scratch of his unshaven jaw scraped like sandpaper along the tender flesh of her throat as he trailed hot kisses to her ear.

Fumbling with the buttons of her blouse, Blade untucked it from the waist of her trousers. She drew a quivering breath as his rough fingertips grazed the smooth flesh of her abdomen. The demon inside her surged again, this time seeking pleasure, and she saw no reason to deny that, either.

She could not stop him from walking away from her, and in fact, agreed it was best. But for him, not her. They both had their demons to fight, and while she knew hers, she did not believe he knew his.

Justice and his companions rode through the open gates and into the courtyard of the Temple of Immortal Right ahead of the storm. Although they had not been challenged at the valley’s entrance, Justice knew their movements were being monitored.

The temple was not one single structure but a complex of rooms burrowed warren-like into the steep basin walls of one of the mountain’s many craggy valleys. Its courtyard ran the length of the valley floor, with a cordoned-off training yard occupying center stage. Inside it, assassin trainers, bared to the waist without regard for the bitter cold, bludgeoned the novices.

Justice slid from his hross, slapped dried, crusted mud from his chaps, and stretched the cramps from his injured leg. Having seen the training before, he had little interest in watching it now. They were rarely well matched. Cage and Might, however, nudged their hross closer to the sweating and bloodied fighters.

Justice passed his reins to one of the assassin attendants.

“Where’s Siege?” he asked.

The pimple-faced young man gestured over his shoulder toward the row of entrances leading to the temple’s inner maze of chambers, his attention occupied by the shying hross displaying its dislike of unfamiliar hands on its reins. “The library.”

Justice passed the lecture hall and refectory before reaching the entry to a long, low room. Shelves lined the stone walls, filled to capacity with well-worn books, and the room held the unmistakable smell of dry, ancient paper. A trim, elderly man sat, straight-backed and frowning in concentration, his white-haired head bent over a desk strewn with reams of bound volumes. A soft, eternal light radiated from the low ceiling, a gift to the temple’s servants from the goddesses.

Siege was a Godseeker as well as an assassin, but it was the name he had earned when still a young man that won him undying respect. He had once fended off three demons that had been hunting him in one of the retired mines, unworkable since before the time of the immortals. He had escaped through an old, caved-in shaft and made his way back from the desert to the protection of the goddesses’ mountains.

He had also been carrying his weight in pure gold.

Now that demons were gone, Justice intended to bring some of those lucrative old mining claims back into production.

The old man looked up when Justice’s shadow filled the doorway.

“Justice,” Siege said. His voice held no surprise, and no welcome either.

Justice bowed a greeting out of deference to the man’s age and status. While he might be old—and rumor had it his heart was no longer strong—his years had not softened him. Siege remained one of the best instructors and a passionate defender of the goddesses.

Justice hated him. He suspected the feeling was mutual.

“This is a poor time of year for travel in the mountains,” Siege added. “What brings you here?”

“Goddess business.”

Siege set down the pen he’d been holding. “Have a seat.”

Justice removed a stack of books from a spindle-back chair and nudged it closer to Siege’s desk with his knee before he sat down.

Siege began to spin the pen beneath his fingertips, around and around on the desk’s polished surface until Justice itched to take it from him.

“What might that business be?” Siege asked.

“Have you heard the reports of spawn in mortal form? Have you seen what’s been happening in the mountains?” Justice asked.

The old man’s expressionless face hid his thoughts. “I’ve heard. So far, I’ve seen no firsthand proof.”

“I have.” Justice told Siege of the destroyed village he and his companions had passed on the trail.

Siege’s creased face did not betray him. “How can you know spawn were responsible?”

The question was valid. The mountains had been under the protection of the goddesses since their first coming, longer than any living mortal could remember. To acknowledge that half demons could enter here meant the goddesses held no power over them anymore. To any Godseeker, it was an ugly possibility. Spawn, unlike their immortal fathers, were born to this world. What if that meant they had no restrictions within it?

If they did not, that made them more dangerous to mortals than full-blooded demons.

Female spawn would be an even greater problem. No one knew how the immortals came into being, and Siege might view them as half goddess, not half demon, based on their gender.

Justice himself believed there was no true difference between the immortals—he despised them all equally.

He answered Siege’s question with care. “I’ve witnessed house fires, barn fires, and fires in the mines where people and animals burned to death. A goddess temple was burned to the ground with everyone in it, leaving nothing but smoke and ash behind. It would take demon fire to cause that type of destruction.” He leaned back in his chair. “I’ve also seen the devastation a spawn can cause when it gets too close to mortal men. I’m afraid my stepdaughter may be one of them. She uses seduction to entice and enslave them, just as a demon would. She tried it on me, a Godseeker.” He tapped his amulet and looked at the one Siege wore. “This is all that saved me. If I were a weaker man, not even an amulet invoked by an immortal could have done so.”