Page 79 of The Devil Knows Her Name

He sucked in a breath, as if I’d hurt him. Beneath my fingers, his pulse beat like a butterfly’s wings. How human he seemed like this.

“I would’ve taken care of it,” he whispered. “I wouldn’t have hurt it. I would’ve kept it, just like you did.”

“Don’t.” My voice cracked over the word, my fingers tightening convulsively. “Don’t lie to me.”

His eyes searched my face for a long moment, and for the first time, I realized it was sticky with blood—blood drying in the creases of my forehead, blood clotted in my eyelashes, blood crusted in rivulets down my neck. He raised his hand, and I thought he would wrest my grip from his throat, but instead he cupped my cheek softly, his thumb stroking my ruined lower lip.

“I knew I would see you like this someday,” he said. “From the moment I laid eyes on you, the moment I learned your name, I knew you were an animal. You just had to shed your skin, didn’t you?”

I released him at last, my fingers instead finding the buttons on my shirt, then my jeans. I threw them off piece by piece until I was as naked as him, revealing the knife-sharpness of my body, the long weals left by the buck’s antlers. My left hand was stiff and swollen, puncture wounds dotted across the tendons.

“Down,” I said, “on your back.”

He obeyed, lowering himself onto the bloody earth, white as a statue fallen in the garden. I sank to my knees beside him, hearing the scream inside my head that had not stopped since the moment I picked up the knife, but he was right; all I needed was to shed my skin. All I needed was to take what was in front of me.

In the moonlight, the shadows of his hips and ribs and collarbone were crater black. I went to each place, dipping my mouth into the hollows as if to drink the darkness, and I tasted the dirt of my orchard, the blood of my sacrifice, the salt of his skin in one. When I came to his neck, I felt the throb of his pulse and, resisting no urge now, bit down.

He moaned, his entire body surging like a wave, muscles flexing and shuddering with sensation. I hummed, satisfied, and swung astride him, pinning his hips with my own; dirt turned to bloody mud swelled on either side of my knees, the iron scent all around us. He reacted again when I took him inside, his head rolling back, the tendons in his neck as taut as harp strings. When he moved to grab me, I seized his hands, slamming them to the ground above his head. He went still, freezing like prey.

“You told me there was power to save my sanctuary.”

“Yes.”

“I bind you to that.”

Magic thrummed beneath us, through the blood and the sigil. A ghost of pain flitted across his face. He arched beneath me, but he couldn’t escape the binding.

“Yes,” he grunted again.

“But more than that, you said there was power to let it grow. Power for it to flourish, not just survive.”

“Yes.”

“I bind you to that.”

Another tremble through the earth. He gasped out a laugh, his six fingers flexing spasmodically. “Yes.”

“This is my power. It belongs to me, to replace what I lost, to make me new.”

“Yes.”

“I bind you to that.”

The ground shook. His eyelids, which had been half-closed in agony or ecstasy, snapped open.

“I would’ve given it to you,” he snarled, blood slicking the cracks between his teeth. “You didn’t have to kill her. I would’ve just given it to you.”

I leaned down, releasing his hands to gently trace the plane of his cheek. I kissed him, mingling the taste of my blood with his.

“Power can only be taken,” I said. “You, of all people, should know that.”

There was neither breath nor energy to talk after that. We were driven by need, all of existence winnowed down to sex. I did not feel the moment when his power became mine; it was suddenly there, simmering beneath my skin as I came, and I lost myself in the roar.

Chapter

25

I told the devil my plan, and he was silent for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Come on,” he said, offering me his hand. “We have a lot to do, and not much time to do it.”