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Chapter Twenty-Seven
Ryder
“They should have been back by now,” says a voice.
It comes through a deep haze. My head is fuzzy, like my brain has been put through a coffee grinder. The room spins slightly, and I can taste a very strange magic on the air. Like a wintry night mixed with dirt and bone dust.
“How many men does it take to find one little witch?” The second voice is the tall woman. Goddess. Demon. Whatever she is.
“She’s not little,” someone says, and I realize that someone is me.
“Indeed.” The voice is amused now, and the shadows seem to snicker. “Tell me, since when do demons fall in love?”
My consciousness struggles up through the deep fog I’ve been lost in. “I’m not in love,” I mumble. Partly because it seems a foreign concept, and partly because I don’t want them to think that I am. Dante had gotten the better of me earlier. I should have played it cool.
“Tell me, then, lust demon—what is your greatest fear?”
It’s a command phrased as a question, but she doesn’t wait for my answer before she invades my mind. Just like she invaded it and saw that Ven was down in the cavern hospital. This creature is the most powerful and horrifying thing I’ve ever met.
Images begin to play in front of my eyes. Ven, tied to a stake, burning. I watch it unfold, helpless to stop it. The smoke, the screams. They surround me, penetrate me, punish me. I pull Ven down from the stake, but she’s already gone. Her body falls limp in my arms. It’s too late to save her. Too late to tell her that demons can change… that I want to change. That I want her and only her until the end of my existence.
“Ryder.”
It’s her voice, but I know it can’t be her, because her body lies before me. She’s gone where I can’t follow.
“Ryder!”
I feel hands on my shoulders, shaking me.
“He is mine, now, witch,” says the voice in the shadows. The voice that is the shadows.
“Not if he returns to me,” says the other voice, a voice of strength and power and sunlight.
A shock, like electricity, touches my heart. I open my eyes, and I’m surrounded by a familiar shimmer of lavender. A magic I have merged with in more ways than one.
“Ven?” My voice shakes. This is more of the evil hag’s trickery, surely.
“Yes. I’m here.”
The vision fades abruptly, and the dead Ven is replaced by a very real, very alive Ven. I grab her and crush her against me, pulling her down into my lap. Run my fingers through her hair, feel the warmth of her breath in my face. “I thought you were gone.”
She smiles. “No. I’m right here.”
The tall woman steps into view, and the shadows in the room creep closer. It feels as if the very air around us is being consumed by them, made scarce. “You shouldn’t have come back, witch. You might have enjoyed your life a bit longer before I found you again.”
Ven stands to face the creature, and I rise with her, our hands interwoven. “I know who you are,” she says softly. But in the softness, there is steel.
“Do you?” the woman asks with a smile that is blades of glass.
“You’ve visited me before. At the lowest points in my life, you crept in, with your shadows and your whispers.” Ven waves a hand around her, and the shadows undulate. “You are Darkness itself.”
The woman’s smile falls.
“But that’s just the thing, Darkness,” Ven says, and her voice resonates with power on the name of the woman, the thing, before us. “I know you, and I’ve defeated you before. I will defeat you again. And we—” she squeezes my hand as she emphasizes the word— “we will defeat you today.”
Darkness stretches, rising taller and thinner, and the shadows rush in toward us. Dante and his men flee like the cowards they are. Blackness descends like a curtain of velvet, and a wind rushes in, howling like a thousand banshees. I can’t see a thing. All I can feel is Ven’s hand on mine.
“Tell me,” booms the voice of Darkness, coming from everywhere at once, “What do you think you possess that can defeat me? I. Am. Infinite.”
