Lord of Embers(The Demon Queen Trials #2)(18)

My body buzzed with nerves as I slid my backpack on over my shoulders. “What’s the best way out?”

“How well can you fly?”

I could fly… sort of, but Shai couldn’t. I needed a path she could take, and I needed to make sure she could catch up to us. “Not really. Is there any other way?”

“I’ll fly with you in my arms.”

“You won’t touch me,” I said with venom.

A banging sounded at the door, and Orion went still.

I felt the air heating around me like a dry wind. Orion crossed to the window and slid it all the way open. He crawled onto the sill, his enormous body filling the frame—half out and half in. Outside, the rising sunlight gleamed on the swimming pool, so bright it was almost blinding.

I stared as he climbed through it, then perched on the sill. And then he seemed to fall.





C H A P T E R 1 0 — O R I O N

I touched down, then turned to look up at her, my beautiful nemesis.

Did she have any control over her wings whatsoever? She seemed to have forgotten everything about being a demon—how to shift, how to fight, how to instill fear into another person. In fact, she almost seemed afraid of herself.

Her red hair caught in the wind and the morning sunlight, like flames dancing around her. Was she going to jump, or was I going to have fly up there and get her?

Cypress trees surrounded the pool on three sides, giving us some privacy, but if anyone stopped to peer through the trunks and branches, they’d see us here. And the guards would break down that door at any moment.

At last, she leapt from the windowsill… and dropped like a rock, red hair streaming toward the heavens. She hadn’t unfolded her wings and dropped right into my arms.

Instinctively, I held her tight, her heartbeat thudding against me. For a moment, I stared at her perfect mouth, and my mind brought up the memory of her lips parting against mine. She smelled like ripe cherries and the rich earth after rain. Heat sparked in my chest, embers of smoldering red. She was sexy as hell, no matter what she did or how much I hated her. And for an incubus like me, a woman like her was our lifeblood.

She glowered at me. “You can put me down now, dickhead.”

Ah, good. She still hated me.

I let her down and started for the river. “Follow me.”

Other demons in the City of Thorns hadn’t spent over a century tunneling beneath the city. They had no idea what lay under our feet. It had taken me a long time to get from the dungeon to the old buried vaults, but once I had, I’d found a whole world underground—stone tunnels that had once been used for storing wine and food in the days before refrigerators.

I glanced back to see Rowan looking at her phone, seemingly unconcerned that the king might be handing her over to her executioners. She glared at me and shoved the phone into her pocket.

At the tree line, I looked in both directions, making sure no one was nearby. The sun slanted over the river, and the dark Acheron forest loomed on the opposite side. Cambriel’s army had already passed by here.

On the pavement beneath me, I could feel the vibrations of the king’s army marching in the other direction. But soon, the soldiers would fan out across the city, searching every alley and alcove.

I found the vault covering, a round carving in the pavement marked with serpents, and lifted it. I climbed down into the darkness—not much of a jump down to the stone floor beneath—then looked through the opening, waiting for Rowan. She lowered herself, and I reached up to grab her by her waist, letting her down next to me. Then I slid the cover over the vault once more.

“This will get us out,” I whispered. “Almost none of the other demons know the way around the vaults.”

She still wasn’t speaking to me. In the cold and wet down here, it smelled of the dungeons. In the dark, my mind slipped back again to the past.

King Nergal had capitulated to the mortals, and he’d learned his worst cruelties from them, the Puritans in particular. They taught him to terrify people. Break them, and they don’t fight back.

When they’d marched us to the dungeons—the women, the children, the injured—they’d taken us past the severed heads of those slain. I saw my brother’s head bleeding on top of a pike, and my father’s. The mortals had done that.

That was the first time I’d felt something crack. When I saw their heads, I no longer knew exactly who I was because nothing was real anymore. The world had become a nightmare.

The thing was, for most people—even demons—it wasn’t always easy to kill someone. If you recognized yourself in them, if you could see them as being like you, it was hard to end a person’s life. This spark of similarity was protection, and Nergal didn’t really to kill all the

w an t

women and children, the prisoners of war. That would be immoral.

That’s why the king’s soldiers had to change us first. Nergal had learned this from the mortals, too.

In Salem, they locked people in prisons. Most who went behind bars simply died there. Bodies full of lice, skin covered in lesions, gnawed on by rats. Those who survived were half-mad. And when it came time to kill them—I mean, they hardly seemed human anymore.

The Puritans, with their filthy prisons, had taught us how to control people.

taught us how to turn off empathy and get the results we T h ey