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He was…something else.
“Those filthy pigs dared to touch you, didn’t they?” Ashtaroth snarled. “They put their hands on you and consigned you to death.You,who are infinitely superior to them in every way.”
“Y-yes. Help me…please,” I cried. The smoke strangled me with a merciless grip.
“How dare they!”the man-thing, Ashtaroth, cried, his face suddenly—impossibly— inches from mine with a stench so powerful that it infiltrated the smoke until I wanted to gag.
Death. He’s made of death.
“I’ve been watching you for a long time, Ambrosius Edward Meade-Finch.”
“Watching me…?”
“Your friends—criminals and swindlers, all. But it’s you we want.”
Despite the heat, those words sent a shiver down my spine. “We?”
“Your carnal appetites are delicious. You are powerful. Magnificent. We see it when others choose not to. Not your parents who sent you away instead of your villainous uncle. Not those vagabonds who dare to hurt you.” He smiled, showing rotted teeth. “Not that cruel Armand who broke your heart.”
My throat tightened, and the tears in my eyes came not from the smoke. “How could they do this to me?”
“Indeed,” Ashtaroth agreed. “Say the word, and I’ll take you away from it all. I can make all this disappear.”
“Then do it!” I cried, my heels scrabbling as the fire licked closer. “Help me!”
“I’ll give you a new existence,” Ashtaroth continued, unhurried. “An existence without regrets. Without abandon.Youwill be in command. Humans will dance on the ends ofyourstrings. You will be young and beautiful forever, and death will never touch you.”
I nodded, tears streaming down my cheeks. “No more…wanting.”
“No more wanting,” he agreed. “It istheywho will wantyou. You will feed on their desire for you. You will be impossible to deny, impossible to erase, as you were by those who were meant to love you.”
Anger raged in me at the unfairness of it all. Theinjustice. My parents banishing me from our home, pretending I no longer existed because that was easier than bearing the shame of my uncle’s actions. My official portrait absent from the family gallery. Never painted. As if I’d ceased to be.
I’d been consigned to a life of searching for belonging and love in the beds of a hundred strangers and never found it. How much easier would it be to hate them instead?
“Will you surrender, Ambri?” Eagerness dripped from Ashtaroth’s words. “Will you give yourself to me?”
I could barely see him in the smoke and flame. But his hand—bejeweled and beckoning—was a lifeline. I had only to say the word. A small voice told me not to surrender, that I was making an unholy bargain for my very soul with one of Hell’s own.
Because he’s a demon. And I…
I’d be like him. Powerful. Untouchable. Immortal.
“I surrender,” I whispered. “I’m yours.”
“Excellent.”
He smiled in triumph, then retreated into the smoke, leaving my hand grasping.
“Wait! Don’t go! You said you’d save me!”
“So I shall,” he intoned. “But first, my sweet boy…you must burn.”
I gasped and then writhed as the first real agony found me. My feet were burning inside my shoes. Then the blaze found my stockings, chewing through silk and skin with teeth of flame. The fire climbed higher and higher; the stench of my own scorched flesh filled my nose. I held my hands up and watched them blacken and curl. The agony grew so intense and total, it became separate from me. Somehow, I had voice to scream as the fire consumed me…
…and I scattered like ash on the wind. I flew in fragments, disoriented by the sensation of being broken into pieces and yet whole at the same time. Black beetles the size of a man’s hand—sleek and shiny—swarmed around me.
But that wasn’t right.
