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“So…” He drew closer, his lips mere inches from my skin. “Are you ready to bleed for me?”
Anticipation gnawed at my stomach, and my hands would have shook if I hadn’t clenched them into fists. My emotions were a tangled knot, tightening uncontrollably. I’d fought with everything I had to keep my soul, and now…now I was giving it away, like mere currency to be exchanged.
I’d faced worse. I couldn’t back down now. “How do we do this?”
“Demonic bargains are sealed with blood,” he said, and his hand eased away from my throat. I breathed out deeply, slowly. “Such a brave little wolf you are. I wonder if you’ll cry when you bleed.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” I scoffed. I reached down to where I kept my knife tucked into a sheath strapped to my thigh, and tugged it out. “Fine. Where do I —”
“Put your little toy away,” he said, his voice deepening as it had when I first arrived, to reverberate around me, seemingly directionless. He stepped back, held up a clawed hand, and the air morphed between his fingers, like heat over the road in summer. From within the vague shimmer, the shape of a blade appeared, slim and iridescent, smooth as glass. I blinked rapidly, certain my eyes were tricking me.
He grinned at the shock on my face. “What? Never seen a blade formed of aether before?”
“I don’t even know what the hell that is.”
“It’s the same matter I influence when I do this…” A sensation pressed against my back, like fingers playing over my skin despite no one touching me. The phantom fingers trailed up my neck and tangled in my hair, the sensation so real that I twitched away and reached for the back of my head.
“Some call it the fifth element,” he said. “It takes practice to form anything solid with it. Practice, several centuries, and a few dozen souls claimed for Hell. It’s a talent, really.”
God, he had an ego too. Considering the knife in his hand, I tried not to roll my eyes. “What now? You cut me and we’re done?”
He took a step forward — and I took one back, automatically, instinctually. He stopped, eyes narrowed, and extended the blade toward me. He tapped the sharp tip beneath my chin, the surface as cold as ice, tingling lightly on my skin. It shone with pale, innate light, even in the darkness beneath the trees.
“I’m going to take my time with you, Juniper.”
That simple sentence sent a shudder over my entire body.
“You’ve had your soul offered before, to another,” he said, staring at my chest as if he could see the scars there through my shirt. “It was an unwilling offering, but the method is not very different, whether one is offered to a God or a demon. You were marked with Its name, your blood was spilled for It. But since you weren’t willing, God would have had to have you in Its clutches to claim you. Here, tonight, you’re willing.” His eyes met mine, and that vicious hunger in them seared into me. “You will spill your blood for me. You’ll markmyname in your flesh. And it will be done.”
“I have to do it myself?” I tried not to keep looking at the blade, shining at my throat. I hated the way my stomach twisted at the sight of it, I hated the panic creeping up in my gut. My mind screamed with the memories of another knife, in another time.
“Are you scared?” His voice softened, almost tenderly. What the hell did he care if I was afraid?
“I’m not scared.” I swallowed hard. “It’s not fear.”
Itwasn’tfear, no. It was my clenching gut, my cold lungs, my trembling hands and light head. It was a battle I fought in silence, a war against my own mind. I couldn’t back down now, I had to face this.
“Don’t you want control?” Zane stepped back and flipped the blade so that the handle faced me. He watched me curiously, as if I’d presented a puzzle he couldn’t figure out. “It’s not required to be done by your own hand.”
“Then you do it,” I said quickly. “I can’t. My mind won’t let me, it…” I had to pause. My voice couldn’t shake. Not now. Get it together. “Bad memories.”
“Mm, I see.” He began to pace slowly, flipping the knife. He’d catch it by the blade, then by the handle, over and over. “I can do it for you, if you wish. But can you bear to let me?”
My eyes fixated on the blade, but I wasn’t truly seeing it. Instead, I saw my own blood. I heard my own screams of pain. I saw the old beams of the church around me. I could smell the fire and the dust. I could still feel the cold disregard of all those who had watched in silence as I suffered.
My head was spinning. I dug my nails into my palm in an effort not to pass out. Suddenly his heat drew closer to my back, his breath on my neck.
“You came here willingly, Juniper,” he said. “But unwilling memories are all you can think of.”
He was right. I was spiraling, and I couldn’t pull myself out. I squeezed my eyes shut, but it didn’t help. I clenched everything as tightly as I could, focusing on every muscle, reminding myself of where I was. Clench tight, hold. Relax one muscle at a time.
But I couldn’t run from memories. I couldn’t hide. I couldn’t erase the sight of that knife slicing open my skin, my blood running down —
A claw traced along the nape of my neck, caressing my spine. It jolted me back to reality so hard that I gasped, my eyes flying open. I could hear the wind in the trees again, and the sound of the rain falling around me. The drops were blessedly cold on my flushed skin.
“Allow me to help you defeat your first enemy, little wolf.”
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