Demon Bound
‘Thank you.’ ”
“Yeah? You’re welcome. Now be quiet.”
“Very well. We do seem to get along best when we don’t speak.” Her eyelids were slowly lowering, her voice was thick with exhaustion, and his heart was freezing in his chest.
Guardians could be knocked unconscious, they could drift—release all of the psychic buildup—by meditating, but they didn’t sleep and didn’t physically tire. And they could sweat, but not from exertion. Only severe emotional distress or sickness could have put that clammy perspiration on her upper lip, on the backs of her knees.
Alice tried to turn her head, and her horns bumped his neck. “Oh, dear,” she said on a sigh. Her eyes didn’t open. “I’m still a demon.”
He felt her crimson scales shift into dark golden skin. Her body and her features became her own again. When he realized he was staring at her bare throat, he faced forward.
There’d be no looking down. The demon armor didn’t hide as much as her dress—and he didn’t doubt that if she hadn’t been sick, she’d have already covered up. Taking a peek now seemed like a betrayal of her trust, an invasion of her privacy.
Maybe there was a chance that, one day, she’d invite him to look. For now, he kept his eyes up.
He began walking. The sand was soft beneath his boots. A tall pile of jagged stone loomed in the distance. He mentally marked it as north, set out in that direction. Unless something else inhabited the rocks, he and Alice could hide there, wait it out.
A small creature scurried ahead of him and disappeared beneath the sand. Scaly, with glowing crimson eyes and a long, skinny tail. A wyrmrat, he thought. Lilith had mentioned them before, had said they were mostly harmless. Once, when she’d been trying to frighten him into teleporting, she’d described a giant spider. He’d assumed she was lying.
Now he was trying to remember everything else he’d thought she’d lied about. There were hellhounds, wyrmrats, spiders—all hybrids that Lucifer had supposedly created from creatures in Chaos, because he couldn’t control the purebreds. She’d mentioned some kind of snake. A basilisk, maybe. Bats.
He turned in a circle, paused to study a dark cloud in the northeastern sky. Hell didn’t have weather any more than Caelum did. Something flying, then. No telling yet if it was demons.
Alice made a soft, agitated noise, and he slanted a glance at her face. Her eyes were still closed. Her heartbeat was quick, but regular. That mattered most. As long as her heart was beating, he wouldn’t panic.
She still hadn’t exchanged her armor for her dress by the time her psychic scent slid from wakefulness into sleep. She went limp against him. Her breath came in deep, ravaged shudders, like the aftermath of a crying jag.
His jaw clenched, and he trudged on.
Walking through hostile territory—always expecting an attack but never knowing when it would happen—had a way of making a man start listing the things he had. Jake didn’t know why that was, but he’d done the same before, when he’d been walking through jungles instead of over sand.
And after thirty-eight hours of walking, the list Jake compiled felt pretty damn comprehensive—if not all that impressive. It was one he liked better, though, than the list he’d made forty years ago.
Some things were the same. He had a packet of memories from his human years: Grandma and Granddad, cornfields and tractors, Billy Hopewell and Barbara. Those were mostly good. He’d added to them, almost four decades of doing nothing in Caelum except training, studying, and bullshitting with Pim and the others. Those were mostly good, too.
But it also meant he had four decades of basically doing nothing. Getting smarter, but staying in one place. The past two years, though, had been a boot in his ass. He still had a stinging footprint from his failure up in Seattle.
Yeah, he had a nice little collection of fuckups. But he was re-classifying one thing that he’d always thought belonged there.
He had a daughter. Once, he’d had intentions that surrounded her, like getting out of Vietnam alive and going back to marry Barbara, staying in Kansas, being a good dad and husband, and making sure that his little girl wouldn’t have to fight so hard to escape the same thing he had. Those intentions had become failures when he died, and later had become guilt when he avoided facing them. Now he had a different intention, one that didn’t weigh
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