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Soon. Let her get close.
“No,” she crooned, “I much prefer being the one doing the rutting, especially when they’re my animals.”
“Eat shit and die,” Brass barked.
“I’d rather eat you. Oh, your rage will be delicious on my tongue, especially after you’ve destroyed that cooking wench. As a matter of practice, the mad do always tend to go after what they love the most when they first turn, rather like a rabid wolf that wants to play with its pack, only to discover that its manner of sport has turned from belly rubs to bloodshed.”
At the mention of Molly, Brass finally let the tether free. He grabbed Ragana’s throat and, with a roar that shook the ground beneath them, engulfed them both in his full celestial angel fire. Once the dam had been opened, there was no stopping the power that poured forth. Rage and fire drowned them both in a monsoon of destruction.
Ragana screamed and flailed in his arms. The pale skin that she’d exposed so much of crackled and puckered beneath his fingers, causing corrugated deltas of fire to snake up her body. Mahogany hair caught in the flames and incinerated into the night.
It was working! Brass propelled his fire higher, hotter. He threw all of himself into it, even as it meant sacrificing his defenses against the rage within that had finally been unleashed.
Balance will be restored once she’s dead. Just keep going . . .
Yes. More. One more push . . .
A blinding flare of power slammed into his chest and catapulted him across the field. His back smashed into the frozen earth with such force, the compacted soil split beneath him. His body sliced a trench several dozen yards long. Once his momentum had finally ceased, he hurried to his feet again, called upon his power, and . . .
Found nothing.
Through stilted mental movements, he frantically tried again to reach within himself for the power only he could command, that he needed to end this nightmare.
What reached him, instead, was a familiar feminine cackling that had haunted every single sunrise for two thousand years.
Ragana stood before him as healthy and hale as she’d been when she’d first arrived. Skin an unblemished porcelain. Hair a mass of silken waves.
Coal-black eyes promising that his death and the deaths of those he loved would not be swift.
“How?” he forced out through strained lungs and a body that wouldn’t listen.
Ragana stood over him and flicked a speck of dirt off her bodice and onto his cheek. Then she leveled him with a tempestuous sneer. “I am the goddess of death, sentinel! I am fire and pain and fury and birth. Your power was mine the moment I cursed you. Again, you question my benevolence? Allow me to demonstrate it one final time, so there is no mistaking what your new existence holds for you.”
With a swipe of her hand, the rage that had filled every muscle in his body so quickly it had begun to blind him receded to that familiar cage within his core. Brass cried out on a shuddering exhale of relief and flopped onto his back. Chest heaving, mind whirling, and limbs frozen to the ground, he had no choice but to lie there and listen.
“I’ll never understand why you threw your lot in with mortals. They are ungrateful, worthless swine who are as fickle as the wind.” She stormed over to him, knelt by his face, and, with a single claw depressed under his chin, turned his head from side to side. “Always looking to what new thing can serve their purpose, what they can exploit and corrupt for their own gain.” She took her hand away and stood but not before she drew her heel back and kicked him in the ribs. He grunted behind the gag of her magic. “They never appreciate what had sustained them from the beginning, what had allowed them to thrive into the beings they are.”
Ragana drew away from him. “Two thousand years ago, I was one of the most revered goddesses. Every new spring, mortals would leave me abundant sacrifices and carve my name into the stones of their people. Men would sing of me, while women would weave tapestries of my glory. Every fatted lamb, bowl of new milk, and rag of virgin blood smeared on my altars was such exquisite praise that I delighted in the mortals’ prosperity. I ensured their herds remained healthy, their crops free of winter’s frost and pestilence, and gifted fat, crying babies to their women. I gave them everything, and then one day, all the sacrifices stopped.”
The whisper her words had fallen into was as short-lived as the sun as it finally fell below the horizon.
“I had been too generous for too long, it seemed. They’d gotten so used to the abundance that they’d forgotten the goddess who granted it all in the first place. With one blink, I could rob the milk from their cows and infest their fields with any number of vermin.” Her upper lip curled while her eyes danced with freakish delight. “With a snap of my fingers, every single woman in that tribe would have wombs bleeding in rivers down the great mountains. They would feel my rage and remember exactly whom they had forsaken.” Then her eyes refocused with solemn clarity. “But the cycle would have all started over again eventually. A new tribe, new sacrifices, effusive gratitude, and then . . . nothing. Until Cyro came along with a most intriguing proposal.”
Brass’s heated blood boiled in his veins as she spoke the demon ruler’s name with such syrupy seduction.
“He found me and made me a quite delicious offer. Why rule among ungrateful mortals when I can rule among doting demons?” She smiled as the pieces clicked into place in Brass’s mind and his eyes widened in horror. “Yes, sentinel, you have guessed correctly. In exchange for me providing his charmers with mortal souls to extinguish, he would provide me with a place of power at his side, an opportunity to rule the unruly.” Then her features twisted into the fury he was expecting. “His apex—my apex—Sorig, had been the key to everything. He was Cyro’s harbinger of death, his second and equal to no other charmer, as he was the first demon his master had ever created. The original apex. And he was brutally exquisite. He was to be my assurance, my guarantee that Cyro would not turn his back on me the way so many mortals had done.” Claws lengthened at the tips of her fingers. “And I loved Sorig! Loved him enough to fuck him in any flesh form he took, male or female. Enough to scorch a thousand fields fallow for the promises of power he assured me he’d help me rise to at Cyro’s side. And you took him from me!”
Her voice dropped lower, taking on the vibrating growl of a beast. “So now, as promised, I will take from you. Most completely.” Her taloned fingertips stretched toward a spot on the field he’d not noticed before, but once the solar-powered lights kicked on around them, Brass saw the vision of his nightmares.
There, frozen by magic, was Molly.
The toes of Molly’s boots bent back the blades of grass as she was dragged through the air by some unseen force. The constriction around her middle took hold of her breath, allowing it to release or catch at the whims of another. Never, in her thirty-one years of life, had she felt so utterly helpless and terrified . . .
Until she saw Brass, filthy and feral, writhing against the same hidden bonds that held her. His wild eyes met hers as she was pulled closer, near enough to see the tendons threatening to leap from his neck and his shoulders nearly popping with strain against what confined him.
“Do you know what my favorite pastime is?” Ragana trilled, breaking Molly’s focus from the wrath etched on Brass’s face. “I believe the term you mortals use nowadays is people watching. It’s truly amazing what you learn when they think no one is looking.” Her onyx eyes slid toward Brass. “How the most heroic among us often behave no better than the vilest scavengers, always slithering over those beneath them to rise to the top and protect themselves. So, imagine what shifting into the simple form of a hound afforded me. Oh, I did, indeed, learn so much about our fearless sentinel, as well as his human lady love.”
Molly blanched at the use of the term but did her best to conceal it. Her neck vibrated with the need to turn and watch Brass’s reaction. She couldn’t. She wouldn’t. He’d confided in her how he despised the looks of pity on his brothers’ faces when he mentioned his curse, and she’d be damned if she had to experience the same expression painted on his face but aimed at her.
