Page 68 of Cold Sacrifice

“Kait?” Rick asked, reaching for me. “Can you hear me?”

“What happened in there?” Sam asked.

I opened my eyes and hissed. I fucking hissed.

Because for a second, I wasn’t me.

Remy and Sam practically leapt to their feet and took a couple of steps back. “What the hell?” Remy said. “What’s wrong with your eyes?”

Rick never said a word. He just wrapped his hand around my arm and waited, and he didn’t look away from me.

Zach was himself almost immediately. He sat up, shook his head as though loosening the confusion that gripped him, and then held out a hand so Remy could pull him to his feet.

After a slight hesitation, Remy did.

I closed my eyes and focused on my breathing, on Rick’s fingers around my arm, on the hard ground beneath me. I was okay. They’d felt me, I believed. The demons. And they’d tried powerfully hard to suck me into their world. And the scary thing was, they’d almost succeeded.

Something else lingered in my mind. A scent, a feeling, a voice. As the minutes ticked by, I remembered whose power I’d felt pulling me in. Not just random demons.

Kronor.

One of the times when he’d either touched me or held my blade, he’d done something to us. He’d planted something inside me. I was sure of it. When the vampire elder had asked him to show me magic, he’d left something in there. A tracking magic? An influencing magic? I didn’t know.

But I knew without a single doubt that he was the reason I’d nearly lost myself in his world. And he was the reason I’d actually thought about killing Zach and offering him up like a sacrifice, like a gift I’d need to hand over when I fell into the demon realm.

I’d very nearly given us both to the demons.

Rick sat on the ground and pulled me into his arms, and I was too upset to even cry. But as he held me, I began to see things in a different way.

I might be part demon. But I was also part Kait, and I was the boss of everything I was. I didn’t have to be their kind of demon. I could have a demon’s power and a demon’s blade, and a wolf’s heart. A woman’s heart.

And I would make Kronor regret fucking with me.

I sat up, at last, and I knew when I looked at the men again, I had no demon’s eyes. “The council,” I told them, “more particularly the demon elder, put something inside me when they pulled out a part of me they believe is demon.”

I stood, somewhat shakily, with Rick’s help. “When I was in the ground, I wasn’t following the necromancer. I was following a path cut by my blade, and it was leading me into the demons’ world.”

No one spoke. They didn’t know what to say. But finally, Zach took a breath, then released it, and the tension in his shoulders eased. “You resisted, Kait. You’ll never let them take you.”

If anyone knew the irresistible pull of dark, delicious magic, it was Zach. It had been pumped into him by the master vampire. He’d become addicted.

And still, he’d broken free of it. He’d broken his addiction.

I wasn’t addicted. I’d simply been force-fed a taste. And I would not be so weak that I couldn’t fight that shit.

I smiled, finally. “No,” I agreed. “I never will.”

“You didn’t get the necromancer,” Remy pointed out. “Are you going back in to see if you can find her?”

I shook my head. “That path won’t open for me.”

“Then we’re back to waiting,” he said.

“She’ll show herself again,” Sam said. “She can’t help it. After she sleeps, she’ll slither out of her bed and find someone to eat before she starts fucking up the vampires.”

I doubted he was wrong.

And I believed that even as her body was getting stronger, her brain was getting more damaged. Soon, she might even forget the reason she’d escaped her grave.