I reached for the door handle only to have him squeeze my thigh and hit the accelerator through the rest of the red light. “Struggle and you could die, they have y
our scent, they want you because you feel warm to them, alive, and if there were that many, it means you’ve been watched, marked for dead. You stay or you die.”
“You, your eyes match theirs.” I couldn’t take the trembling from my voice or the way my body kept shivering. “They called you ‘master.’”
He bit out a curse and turned down a dirt road where I would most likely be killed. Right?
His body convulsed a bit and then he said in a booming voice that caused the car to shake. “I am the last of the first!”
And everything faded to black.
TIMBER
I paced in front of the couch while Tarek and Mason ate me out of house and home and Cassius stood by the fire deep in thoughts that he refused to share. All I knew? They were bad because his ice kept dousing the fire regardless of what Stephanie did to calm him down.
Genesis and Ethan had been on a rare date night, which I’d interrupted and now I was the focus of both of their glares.
Hope and Alex were seated on the other couch watching Netflix while Serenity stood guard by the door just in case.
It was a complete shit show.
Demons never attacked without my command.
And yet there they’d been, in her apartment, actually hunting a human outside of the clubs.
I wondered if they felt what I did when they touched her. Did they taste colors? Did things finally feel at peace? Or was she just so good they wanted her soul regardless of the laws that were intact—if you wanted yours restored, you could have it, but demons were a selfish race, they wanted what they wanted and they wanted more than one.
We were split down the middle.
I’d like to think I was keeping the peace, and now I was questioning everything.
“Sooooo…” Mason chomped on a piece of raw celery and made a face, “Are we gonna talk about the elephant in the room.”
“He means Kyra,” Tarek explained, always the helpful one.
“I just want to know what the hell you said to her that made a star actually fall from the sky.” Alex grinned at the TV without looking at me.
“Stop exaggerating.” I rolled my eyes. “A shooting star bigger than anything in history flew across the skyline toward Egypt, shit happens.”
“I love it when the refined sounding ones cuss.” This from Mason, which earned a laugh from Ethan.
I groaned into my hands. “Is she at least okay?”
Cassius’s eyes flashed white. “She’s fine, she’s just stunned.”
“I mean let’s be honest.” Alex snorted. “You went full Demon King on her, ohhh, I’m the worst of them all, growl, bite, flash my red eyes, look I have claws. For the love of God tell me you didn’t flash a bit of horn, you dirty bastard.”
I prayed for patience. “Can someone muzzle him? Huh? Ice him? Cassius, we know you can…”
Ethan chuckled while Alex flipped us all off from his spot on the couch.
“And no.” I kept pacing a hole in my carpet. “I didn’t go full demon and show her horns,” I conveniently left out the part where I hadn’t shifted ever since the tattoo started growing, yes my eyes flashed red but I never went into full demon mode at least not anymore and it had been rare once I received my restored soul.
I frowned.
If Hope restored my soul—quite literally my old soul, the one that had been taken from me somehow eons ago—then what sort of used soul had been given to me?
I remembered nothing.