Page 107 of Bedeviled

The demon doesn’t so much as stir, and I’m unsure whether my spell worked. I’m about to try again when there’s a blur of movement, then a grunt as the demon rams into the invisible wall of the active spell circle.

My heart leaps, and I stagger back into Kane.

Fuck, that is terrifying.

Kane must think so too because the lycan makes the loudest, most unnerving growl from deep in his chest.

The demon gnashes his teeth, his nostrils flared. “You mean to trap me, witch?”

If you feed us, the Hungering Ones whisper, we shall strengthen your spell and keep the demon here …

“I have already fed you,” I say in Sarmatian to the voices. The foreign language earns me a look from Kane.

The demon’s eyebrows lift. “The Old Ones bargain with you?” he says incredulously, his gaze appraising me again.

I can feel Kane’s attention volleying back and forth between me and the creature, and I sense that he cannot hear the Hungering Ones the way the demon and I seem to.

“I haven’t heard that language in an eon,” the demon says conversationally, its cold eyes fixed to my mouth. “Whatever my bondmaster was told of your existence, it was clearly not enough.”

“What were they told?” I ask.

The demon gives me a sly smile. “What good would telling you do me? I am trapped, my doom certain. Entice me with a bargain, and maybe I’ll confide in you.”

I step close to the salt circle, careful not to cross it. It’s my turn to smile. “A bargain?” I say derisively. “You think that is how I’ll get information out of you?” I shake my head. “The last demon who crossed me was slowly dismembered then buried alive.” I don’t add that I didn’t do the dismembering. “He might be there still, in unending agony, forced to feel it all.” A lie, but the demon doesn’t know this.

Kane, meanwhile, is eyeing me like he’s never seen me before.

My focus remains on the demon. “I don’t need to make a bargain with you to get what I want.”

The nifty thing about spell circles is that while things cannot escape them when activated, things can enter them. Including spells.

I lift a hand, magic thickening at my palm. “Only the truth shall pass your lips,” I say in Sarmatian.

I release my power, my orange magic twisting in the air as it slithers toward the demon. I don’t know how potent my truth spell will be without touching the creature or having him drink it down in a tonic. I guess we’re about to find out.

When it gets close to his face, he intentionally breathes in, his eyes still fixed on mine. Clearly this demon does not give a shit about my spells or my intentions.

“What is your name?” I ask.

It arches a brow. “You think I will willingly give it to you?”

He doesn’t even seem remotely uncomfortable talking around the truth. Shit.

“Hungering Ones,” I say, keeping eye contact with the demon, “you wanted to be fed?”

I sense them stirring in the ground beneath me.

“Wanap.” Slice.

Spells like this one, which invoke dark magic, don’t have a lasting effect on demons. But right now, I don’t need it to have lasting effect; I just need it to have an effect.

And it does. Cloth and flesh part along the demon’s upper chest, and a curtain of black blood spills from the wound.

The creature hisses, but even as he does so, his blood drips, then sinks into the earth.

He peers down at his chest, then touches the wound. “You crazy bitch,” he murmurs, almost fondly.

Beneath him, the ground shivers and roils as the Hungering Ones draw in the demon’s blood.