Very interesting.
Myanin had not taken Jewel’s place.She had altered the exchange itself.
Raja stared into the smoke, his dark eyes unfocused, seeing not the broken city before him but the gray, hungry prison that existed beyond sight and sound.“What did you do, little djinn?”
The vampire beside him did not move.No one answered.
Good.The question had not been for them.
Raja could feel the book reaching across the distance between them, searching, feeding, but carefully now, with a restraint it had never shown him during all the centuries it had held him.It was testing its new anchors, turning old oaths over in its grip like bones in a careful hand.
Myanin and Shade.A disgraced djinn female and a warrior who still believed wanting something badly enough could make it his.
Raja’s mouth curved again, slow and full of something darker than satisfaction.
There were stories there.Regrets.Promises.Blood-deep wounds that had never been allowed to scar over properly.
The Nushtonia would enjoy them.
And when it finished, when it had drained the last confession from their marrow and left them hollow enough to fill, Raja would take back what had once held him.Not because he needed a prison.He had outgrown the need for cages long ago.He wanted the book because anything powerful enough to bind a being like him was powerful enough to be made useful in the hands of one who no longer feared it.
A scream split the night nearby, high and sudden, and was swallowed almost at once by the roar of collapsing stone somewhere beyond the avenue.
Raja inhaled slowly, letting the sound roll through him, letting it settle in his chest the way another man might let warmth from a fire settle into his bones.
Then he turned to the creatures waiting in the street.
“Go,” he said.
The demons twitched with eagerness, their clawed hands flexing at their sides.The vampires watched him with the taut stillness of hounds waiting for a more specific command.
Raja’s eyes darkened, black bleeding outward until the whites of them were swallowed entirely.“Find the angry.The abandoned.The starving.Find every supernatural tired of being told to kneel.”His voice dropped lower, soft as silk drawn across a blade.“Give them my name.”
The black-eyed vampire bowed his head.“And if they refuse?”
Raja smiled, and for a moment even the smoke around him seemed to recoil.“Then show them what freedom looks like when it stops asking nicely.”
The creatures scattered into the broken city, vanishing between wrecked cars and down alleyways thick with smoke, their footsteps swallowed by the distant wail of sirens.Within seconds, Raja stood alone in the middle of the avenue, surrounded by the slow-rising panic of a realm that was only just beginning to understand something ancient had taken over it.
Above him, the red traffic light continued to blink on its bent pole, stubborn and pointless and small.
Stop.
Stop.
Stop.
Raja lifted one hand and closed it into a fist.
The light crushed inward with a sharp metallic crack, sparks bursting outward in a brief, bright rain before the darkness reclaimed the intersection entirely.
“No,” he said softly to the empty street.“Not anymore.”
CHAPTER10
“Idon’t know what our future holds.But I do know that I do not have one without her in it.”~ Shade
The Nushtonia didn’t turnthis time.It folded.One moment the gray nothing stretched endlessly in every direction, soft and shapeless and patient, and the next, the space compressed inward on itself, the air pulling tight against Shade’s skin, the scent of old ink sharpening at the back of his throat until he could taste it.Shade rolled his shoulders against the sensation and let his hand drift closer to the place at his hip where his hilt should be.Old habit.But it wasn’t there.When he’d jumped in after Myanin, whatever magic the book wielded, it had taken their weapons.Not that the book was something he could cut, but the body remembered what the mind hadn’t yet accepted.
