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Gods help me, clearly something terrible had happened. The demon was upset in a way I hadn’t felt from it in well over a decade, since the last time everything went so horribly wrong.
And given the way Gwyneira was glaring at me…
“What is it?” I whispered, my voice tight with dread for what I knew was coming.
Confusion flickered through her angry expression.
“What did the demon do?”
The anger returned. “It took me from the others.”
Agonized certainty shivered through my veins. That was it, then. The demon had killed them after it finished with the dragon. I wouldn’t have wanted that, but the gods knew what I wanted had never changed a damned thing. But based on how upset the demon was now, we must have killed them and then?—
Images suddenly pelted me hard and fast as if the demon was hurling them at me. The others standing in the garden commons, staring up as we flew away with our mate. Their rage and horror. The way Gwyneira struggled and then stilled when I—no, the demon—promised not to hurt them, and her regal expression when she told us she wasn’t ours.
I staggered backward as the images faded, barely stopping myself from going over the edge of the tower. We hadn’t killed them? Oh gods, we actually hadn’t? Gwyneira’s reactions hurt like hell, yes, but that thing also hadn’t touched her.
This was better news than I could’ve dreamed.
Unless the demon was deceiving me. Telling me some story to hide the horrific reality of what we’d done to my friends and the princess, all because it didn’t want to feel my pain over it.
Cold dread returned. Fuck me, it would do that.
“Did it touch you?” I asked her. “Hurt you?”
Gwyneira’s eyes narrowed warily.
Shit, I’d overstepped. Asked too much, too soon. If the demon hurt her, then I definitely shouldn’t push her to talk about it until she was ready.
I squeezed my eyes shut, regrouping. “I’m sorry. For whatever it did to you and—” Gods, I wanted to throw up and howl and hurl myself from this tower all at once. “For the others. For what the demon did to them. I’m so sorry.”
Her silence was horrible.
“Okay,” she said carefully.
My eyes opened. Okay? Just okay? “What?”
Her confused look came back, and I couldn’t breathe. That expression could mean anything. Bafflement that I couldn’t remember killing them, for instance. Alarm that I would ever forget such a thing. “What do you think happened, Roan?”
Why would she ask that?
At my silence, she continued carefully, “The demon saved us. It threw Ozias into a house, and it hurt Casimir, but that’s all.”
No, that couldn’t be true.
Nothing on her face said she was lying.
“It… it didn’t kill them?” I could barely get the words out. “It…”
Her head shook. “No.”
A choked noise left me. My body was ice, my blood tingling in every limb. But not like I was about to shift or because I was still buck-naked in this gods-damned winter cold. No, I was torn between extremes, unable to breathe and wanting to scream, because the hope and the relief and the sheer question of how the hell the demon could have managed that were all too overwhelming.
But… it hadn’t killed them. It hadn’t burned them. Okay, so the demon might’ve injured Ozias and I hated that. Definitely injured the vampire too, for which I supposed some part of me was sorry, even if I couldn’t stand that bastard.
But no one was dead.
No one… was dead.
