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His knife sliced through the demon’s skin and muscles as if they were made of paper, the blade forged by a metal fae and reinforced with elemental magic. While the guy tried to hold his spilling guts inside his body, Tallak whirled around and slashed at the throat of the demon to his right, and the dude’s scream of terror ended in a wet gurgle. Tallak opened him up like a package with one more well-aimed cut, and the intestines of the dude tumbled out.
Pivoting to the third demon, the one who’d opened his pants, Tallak wiped the blood off the knife and pocketed it again. Eyes on the bastard, he took a step closer with a growl in his throat.
“You,” Tallak said, and the demon flinched back, hunkering in the corner. “You don’t get a quick death.”
The next second, he launched himself at the motherfucker, rammed his arm against his throat, and followed with a punch that knocked the wind out of the demon. The guy gasped and struggled, flailed and tried to fight back, but he was either too drunk or still half-paralyzed by Tallak’s nightmare attack to successfully defend himself.
Tallak hurled him away from the wall with his hand around his throat and slammed him down on the floor. The blood pooling on the tiles splashed as the demon’s back hit the ground. Flanked by his dying buddies gurgling their last breaths, the demon’s eyes widened in abject fear as Tallak’s fist drove straight for his face.
Over and over again, he punched the shithead, pummeled him with the force of the rage boiling inside him, and his demon nature sang in delight at bathing once again in the blood of his enemies. When the bastard’s face was but a mess of broken bones and swollen skin, Tallak sat up, took a breath, and calmly pulled out his knife again.
Yanking the guy’s pants open, he grabbed the bastard’s junk and cut it straight off.
The demon howled in pain and horror, twitching wildly.
Tallak threw the severed appendage at the dude’s face, effectively bitch-slapping him with his own dick, and got to his feet.
Rose stirred on the countertop, slid down, and almost slipped in the blood on the floor. Holding on to the counter, she blinked at the abattoir all around her, two dead demons and the third currently weeping in a fetal position, blood painting the room in a crimson Jackson Pollock knock-off, and then her eyes tracked to Tallak.
Having seen himself in the mirror, he knew he looked like a blood-spattered specter of furious vengeance, eyes glowing with his demon power.
But Rose didn’t shrink away, didn’t cower. Neither did she thank him for butchering the demon assholes, no.
What she did was snarl at him, her face hard and her witch power charging the air, making the lights flicker.
“What the fuck did you do?” she yelled at him in Fae.
Without waiting for an answer, she gathered her magic, about to lash out at him. Drunk as she was, he saw it coming from a mile away, and easily evaded her strike. The raw force of her power crashed into the stalls behind him, shattering the wood. He had her pressed against the wall with her hands bound in his grip before she could even blink.
Using his powers to tamp down her sluggish magic, he shot back in Fae, “Snap the fuck out of it!”
Rose writhed in his grasp, but he held her firm. “Leave me alone. I’m fine.”
“Like hell you are. You’re out of control, kid, and I’m not watching this shit.”
Rose lifted her chin. “Then don’t look.”
Tallak bared his teeth. “Kinda hard to do when you choose my bar to circle the drain. You need to get a fucking grip.”
“Don’t tell me what to do,” Rose snarled. “I’ve had enough of that all my life.”
Tallak scoffed. “You won’t get any pity points from me for what you’ve been through—you’re not the only one who’s come out of decades of captivity and torture. Rhun spent twenty years being flayed alive in the Shadows, and I rotted in the fae’s dungeon for twenty-six fucking years, but you don’t see either of us trying to kill ourselves one bottle at a time.”
“I’m not trying to kill myself,” Rose said through gritted teeth.
“Then what the fuck else is this? Huh?” He shook her a little. “You’re the textbook case for self-destructive behavior.”
“You don’t know shit.”
“Right.” He huffed a humorless laugh. “I wouldn’t know what it feels like to drift without hope because you think there’s nothing to live for, would I? Not like I fought my way out of the bloody fae dungeon to slaughter them all, with the dim understanding that once I’ve had my revenge, nothing else mattered and I’d have no reason to go on because both my lover and my child were dead and I had no one else left.”
Rose glared at him, her indigo eyes surprisingly lucid. “But you found a reason.”
“And you didn’t?” He pressed his lips together. “I found a son to live for. You found a whole fucking family! How’s that not a reason to get your shit together? Why are you out here drowning yourself when you’ve got them?”
Rose made a noncommittal sound, and he shook her again.
“You’ve got a mother who would die for you,” he snapped, “who is dying to get to know you and have a relationship with you, for fuck’s sake. And yet you can’t even manage to try to be her daughter.”
