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His fingers curled around my palm, his touch solid. “I can seeandfeel you.”
When I glanced over my shoulder at my real body, my phantom form jerked out of Fane’s grasp and stumbled back. I still straddled the decapitated demon with the sword pressing into the cement. Black blood speckled my skin and clothes, and my raspberry hair fell in disheveled waves.
And my face? The cold, calculating look of a predator hardened every feature, and brutality clung to the atmosphere around me.
But that wasn’t the worst part. The eyes were.
An eerie, luminescent glow brightened my irises, and the pupils had elongated into diamonds. Just like Fane’s.
Ice water rolled over my spine. What was I turning into?
Voices sounded through the night, and figures dressed in black darted into the alley. Gia and Axel led the group of ravens while Hawk brought up the rear.
Cold panic stole through my system as my old life was about to collide with my new one.
I slammed into my body so violently that my back arched, and I tumbled off the demon. My heart crashed against my rib cage as I scrambled up, my limbs shaking while the ravens approached.
They couldn’t see me like this. They couldn’t know, especially Hawk, that I’d become a monster.
I bolted the other way, blood thundering in my ears and drowning out Fane’s shouts.
Oh, shit. Fane.I couldn’t leave him behind.
My frantic steps slowed, and I turned back as three demons jumped from the roof and charged him. Fane didn’t hesitate to attack.
“Go!”he shouted through our mental link.“Get somewhere safe, and I’ll find you.”
I had no doubt that he could find me anywhere. That was what he did. And he could easily cut down three demons. The ravens would assess the situation and realize Fane wasn’t the aggressor. If they didn’t, the demon shifter could vanish into the shadows and lose them in a heartbeat.
So I ran like the fucking wind to escape not the demons but the people I’d once thought of as my allies—and the one person I thought I loved.
After sprinting through downtown Savannah, weaving a confusing path so the demons couldn’t easily follow me, I jumped the fence into Colonial Park Cemetery, keeping to the shadows. I wiped sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand and smeared it on my jeans.
The historic slabs of marble and granite headstones blurred in and out of focus as images of me with that cruel look and those glowing eyes kept crashing through my barriers. I ran my fingers over the tattoo on my neck and then the one on my stomach.
Which one of these had turned me into a sadistic, torturing beast?
A bitter laugh slipped out. I was fucked up way before Fane or the demon amulet ever came into my life. I’d just been hiding it for two years as a raven. Now, without the dutiful soldier mask for Coltrane, the killer inside had clawed back to the surface.
The wind carried a strange, salty scent, and I sniffed the air, a very shifter-like reflex. Other people were in the cemetery with me.
Not people. Not exactly. Nightworlders.
I whipped around and swung my sword, decapitating a dux demon. But as I spun back to take on the enemy approaching from the other side, something moved too fast, and a figure appeared in front of me.
The scarlet eyes of a vampire startled me, giving him enough time to use his supernatural speed—faster than any other nightworlder—to blow gold dust in my face.
I coughed and stumbled back, shaking the magic from my head.Shit. Malefic ash.
Someone cursed. “Hit her again!”
Before I could recover, a cyclone of dust slammed into me, and I gagged. Dizziness overwhelmed me, and I tumbled backward, the thick cemetery grass cushioning my fall.
As I stared up at the dark sky, a massive, familiar demon appeared, a smile pulling his lips apart.
“Karn will be most pleased.” Mykel, the guard who chased me through Karn’s mansion in Vlehull, bared his teeth. “Finally caught you.”
ChapterThirty-Four
