Page 102 of Demon Touched

I groan around my fist, trying to picture anything that might distract me from this torture. The sun, shining over a city in Strata. Leah’s bright, green eyes, sparking with joy. The cool, endless blackness of the eternal dark, where there’ll be no pain or sadness or suffering⁠—

Something inside me unlatches, and a jolt of power runs through my body, rushing out of me like the air being punched out of my lungs.

The lightning fizzles out, and the pain slides back beneath the surface, morphing into an intense, throbbing hurt rather than the needle-piercing sharpness of before.

My chest is heaving, my sides running with sweat, but still I manage to gasp out a single word.

“Well?”

“It’s gone,” she says, dazed.

“It’s gone?” I repeat, not quite daring to believe it. “It’s not healing back over with the runes still on there?”

“No, it’s—I mean, goddess, your neck’s a fucking mess, but…” Her voice is trembling a little, but I twist around, grabbing her hand. It’s still warm from the lightning. She looks back at me, expression strained but with a small smile on her lips.

“Leah, that’s incredible. I…” I find I don’t have the words to express the hope now flourishing, wild and unchecked, in my chest. “Keep going,” I say. “It’ll be over soon.”

“I think I should be telling you that,” she huffs out. “But good, because I hated it.”

She comes to kneel in front of me, turning my hands so the insides of my wrists face upward, pausing only briefly when she sees the cuts my teeth made on my knuckles. They’re already healing, fading to light, greenish marks, but unhappiness still flashes across her face.

“Should I do one at a time?” she asks, looking at the rune on each wrist. “Or⁠—”

“Both,” I say. “Let’s get it over with.”

She nods weakly and then, on impulse, she lifts one of my wrists and gives it a quick, soft kiss.

“I’m sorry,” she murmurs against my skin, and for just a second, the pain in my neck doesn’t register anymore. A silly joke comes to mind, something about how if I’d known that I just needed to ask her to burn me alive to get her to touch me like this again, I would’ve done it a long time ago, but I hold it back.

“Don’t be,” I say instead. Simple. True.

She drops her gaze to my wrists, placing her hands over each one, and calls on her magic.

This time it’s easier because I know it’s going to work—that this will set me free at last. Something I haven’t dared dream about for three centuries. And, perhaps even more importantly, from this angle I can see Leah. As the lightning snakes down, lashing across the runes on my wrists and leaving bands of charred flesh behind, I lock my eyes on her face, tracing the determined set of her mouth and pin-point focus of her green eyes. I think about what it’s like to watch them scrunch up with laughter, how it feels to kiss that face, brushing my lips against her freckled cheeks.

I think of that and endure the bite of incinerating heat through gritted teeth, the muscles in my forearms cording with pain. I’m aware, distantly, of a sound rising from my throat—a deep, lowing noise that escapes even as I swallow down a much louder scream. I’m concentrating so hard on Leah that I almost miss that same feeling of release as the runes’ magic leaves, catching only the tail end of it as it rushes from me.

She drops her hands and the lightning retreats, leaving only the acrid scent of burning flesh. I relish it, staring at the raw, seared patches of skin where the runes used to be. I hear a sniff, and when I look up, I see Leah kneeling there with a few quiet tears dripping down her face.

The tips of my fingers are on her cheek in an instant, wiping them away. “Oh, my darling,” I say, the words coming before I can think about them.

“I’m fine,” she says, furiously wiping her face with the heel of her hand. “I just hated that…putting you through so much pain. Not fun. Felt almost like I was hurting myself.”

She admits the last part sheepishly, not meeting my gaze. It doesn’t escape me that hours ago we separated from each other, breaking a connection that had tied us together in the most intimate ways. That was meant to be the end. If all had gone according to plan, we’d have parted after that for good. And yet—I understand what she means. The thought of causing Leah pain feels like taking a blade to myself.

Which is why her upset now must be banished.

“Leah, you’ve given me the greatest gift,” I say. “What’s a few burns next to that?”

I can’t keep the awe out of my voice, and I don’t want to. All this time, I thought I would be Leah’s savior, shielding her from the violence of Aradis, or Infernum, or even on the plains of Strata. But in fact, she was always coming to save me.

An ephilium with a demon heart—a unique, impossible set of circumstances that make her precisely equipped to break the spell that’s haunted me for three centuries.

“Look,” I say, my smile so wide it feels like it’ll swallow up everything else, as I show her my wrists. The burns are already starting to fade, raw flesh being replaced with fresh skin, unmarked and runeless.

She stares at them, surprised, which makes me want to laugh, given how confident she was before she started barbequing me.

Is fate really setting me up to fail, or has it maybe perfectly aligned things to deliver this woman into my arms? And if the prophecy is not all one terrible trap, then could I possibly have the thing I’d convinced myself I had to give up?