“What happened to your accent?” I stepped sideways so I could get a better look at her face.
Her whole body gave a shiver and Liam dropped a few inches. My heart lurched upward. “Daniels, I’ll give you what you want, just don’t drop him.”
She turned to face me and when she did, she seemed to inadvertently bring Liam with her. While he wasn’t out of danger, he was closer to the edge of the pit then he had been.
“I want your head on a pike on London bridge, I want you to suffer as I have suffered, to see your innards twisted around a stick and removed from your body inch by inch while you scream for mercy that will never come,” she whispered, her lips not moving in tandem with her words. Like a poorly dubbed old school Kung Fu movie. Freaky-ass demon possession.
And then she wasn’t really Daniels anymore, or at least her voice wasn’t.
“Tracker.” Male, and a lower octave that she should have been able to hit, the voice rumbled out of her mouth. “Do you remember me?”
I blinked at her, and a cold sweat popped out all over my body. A memory buried deep flickered to life.
The barest whisper of a snake, Milly, and my first understanding of what I was. And then it was gone as if it had never been. I shook my head. “No. But I know who you are you nasty motherfucking piece of shit. You’re the demon I’m going to wipe off the face of the world.”
“Ah, I see your foul, unimaginative mouth hasn’t improved since last we spoke,” the voice said, and Daniels stepped toward me, and then snapped her fingers without turning around. Liam dropped like a stone, down below the lip of the pit.
“NO!” I launched myself at Daniels, and when she flicked a hand at me, her magic slid off. Only it wasn’t magic the way Daniels had. It was a heavy thump of power that grasped me, and the snowflake on my chest burned, pushing the power aside.
A snarl twisted her features as the demon’s taint slid away from me. What the hell had just happened? Didn’t matter, I would figure it out later.
He roared a wordless bellow as I body slammed Daniels to the ground for a second time. The back of her head connected with the hard rock and I thought she would be out cold.
No such luck.
She rolled and pinned me below her with a strength that was far beyond her own. And it wasn’t Daniels’ eyes that stared down at me. No, these eyes were not the muddy brown I recalled. A swirling dark red fog covered the brown irises up, swallowed what was left of Daniels. I’d never seen it, but I knew it from Giselle’s teachings what I was looking at. Daniels had been well and truly possessed. There was no coming back from it, no magical ceremony that would save her from Orion. He had taken her in one fell swoop. Which, considering she had been the one tangling with him, she deserved, in my eyes.
Once a demon had you, that was it. Say good night to everything you ever knew and loved.
“You, I let you live once. Because I didn’t think you could be the one to stand between me and this world. There were others and I wiped them out one by one. Yet here you are; though I must say, your attempt is, at best, pitiful.” His strength was beyond anything I could fight against, and he held me easily. He leaned in closer, eyes wide. “You don’t even know what you truly are, do you? Even I know where I come from, you don’t even have that.”
“Go fuck a troll, you ass hat. You aren’t going to win.”
I tried to flip him off me, bucking my hips, straining against his hands with everything I had. It wasn’t enough. He was too strong. I couldn’t reach my weapons, and Liam … gods, let him have been able to reach the edge of the pit.
Orion lowered his face to mine, his voice frosting over me, stilling my efforts. “You will belong to me; I will have to thank Milly. She tried to do me a disservice, sending the Hoarfrost demon to build your immunity to a demon’s taint, but then she so kindly sends you here to me. Truly, she is a sly one.”
His words hit me and the past seemed to swallow me up. The black coven of witches and the Hoarfrost demon. Milly had engineered it all? So that I would be immune to a demon that I would one day have to kill … .
“Now you will witness firsthand my rebirth into this world. And then I will eat your soul.”
Okay, panic wasn’t even close to what spun up through me. Blind with the fear that he could actually do what he said he could, I flailed, all my training going out the window. Demons were bad enough, but a soul-eater … motherfucking pus buckets. I’d read about them, in the black-skinned book. They were at the top of the demon food chain, for good reason.
This was who Milly was bound to.