Page 11 of Hated By the Gargoyle

I shoved aside my disappointment.

“We must leave.” His voice held an urgency that hadn’t been there before. “We were lucky the wyrm’s body was deathly allergic to the spike you stole from the demon’s carcass or else we would both be dead at this time.”

That certainly explained a lot.

“Are there a lot of those monsters out here?” I gave a cautious glance around, almost expecting one to shoot out of the ground again. I wanted to jump in his arms, but refrained.

“Many more,” he affirmed.

My fingers dug into the hem of my tank top, twisting the material until my joints ached. “Can we find shelter? Somewhere they won’t find us?”

There was a heavy beat of silence and he appeared to be in deep contemplation. The longer the minutes stretched, the more irate he became until his nostrils were flaring and he was glaring at me, again, like everything was my fault.

“I know of a place,” he stated, straightening to his height. “But we will walk.”

“Yeah, okay. Perfect. Let’s go.”

He stared at me, and I ignored the way his anger made me feel so unsettled. I didn’t want to admit it, but even if I didn’t like him, he was the safest option in this unknown world.

I didn’t want to, but I was just going to have to trust in this gargoyle who so obviously hated me.

“Come,” he ordered, turning and stumbling away.

I followed quickly after, ducking under his shoulder. My touch made him flinch. He tried to shove me away, but I held tightly to his wrist.

“Let me help,” I said. “You’re in pain. Let me help you, okay?”

He gave me a look that was hard to decipher before it shuttered and became furious once again.

“So, where are we going anyway?” Not that I’d know how to get there.

The gargoyle’s gaze was on the horizon ahead. His jaw worked and I could hear his teeth grinding with impatience. Finally, he answered, “To my den.”

The curses I spewed internally at myself could not cease.

Fool.

Stupid, ridiculous, utter fool.

My rampage became a wildfire inside me without an outlet. I needed to release it. I needed to tear through the world, to roar, to rage, to destroy. To lose myself in the darkness that always consumed me.

Oftentimes, it was difficult to claw myself from the depths. Even more often, I could not even feel myself falling into that pit. One second, it rose and in the next, I blinked and I was whole again. Covered in blood and carnage, a feeling of despair festering inside my chest, and I never even knew why.

This time had been different.

I’d heard her voice, like a flame within the darkness, guiding me out with patience and care, the likes of which I had never received before in my life and could not begin to understand.

Not understanding made me angry enough to lash out, even as she only wanted to aid me. I could not allow myself to fall for her charms.

My shoulders bunched, every muscle tensing as the emotions closed tightly inside.

How could I be so careless so as to not pay attention to the things and creatures that surrounded me? I silently berated myself.

I was not in the human world. I was in the Underworld, and here lived an abundance of anomalies that would have loved nothing more than to rip apart the third general of the Underworld in retaliation for all I had done to their kind.

I was paying the price of my own stupidity, the pain tearing through my back with an ache that I wished to ignore but could not.

The demon had caught me completely by surprise, creating wounds that, once again, ruined my carefully curated plans.