Page 118 of Bedeviled

Memnon bends down and scoops me up, distracting me from my thoughts.

“I can walk,” I insist. But even to my own ears my voice sounds unsure.

“I don’t care,” he says.

“Can I at least have a piggyback ride so I don’t feel so helpless?” I mean, I did just help imprison a field of demons.

Memnon pauses, those illuminated eyes of his enigmatic. I’m not entirely sure the man even knows what a piggyback ride is. He does, however, set me down.

I circle to the back of him as Nero moves in close to us, and I give a sad, halfhearted leap onto his broad back. Memnon manages to catch me, hoisting me up and locking his arms under my legs.

I wrap my own arms around his neck and hold on to him while he strides across the field, my familiar at his side. I try to ignore the way the sorcerer’s boots squelch as he steps in puddles of blood and mud.

As we cut through Slain Maiden’s Meadow, I notice an upended cauldron and discarded cups. There was revelry here before it was cut violently short. Revelry I might’ve joined in on had Sybil not called me earlier.

My gaze darts away from the cauldron, but I make the horrible mistake of meeting the empty eyes of a blond witch by the name of Savannah who I’ve seen around the house. Then she’d seemed so expressive and vivacious, but now, her jaw is slack, and her graying skin is speckled with blood. Her throat and stomach have been ripped open, and entrails coated in dark magic spill from her.

I press my mouth against my arm to stop myself from retching again, but the fetid smell of meat and fresh death seem to have seeped into my very pores.

Memnon tightens his hold on me.

Drawing a deep breath through my nose, I say, “I knew them.”

It’s worse than that though. Some of these witches had likely been bonded against their will just a short while ago. They had what? Two weeks of freedom from those dissolved bonds? They didn’t deserve this.

A tear drips down my cheek. Then another.

“We will avenge them,” Memnon says with great malice.

Malice I can get behind.

I tighten my hold.

Avenging them means finding Eislyn. Finding her and destroying her for good.

For a second time this week, I find myself in the shower with Memnon while his power rides him. This time, however, my husband doesn’t seem nearly as interested in screwing me into oblivion.

No, at the moment, he’s carefully washing me down, despite my many protests.

“I really can do this myself, Memnon,” I say when he kneels at my feet and carefully lifts each one to wash them, forcing me to grip his shoulders to keep my balance.

He doesn’t respond, but when he sets my foot down, his sudsy hands run up my leg, grazing the juncture between them for only the barest instant before continuing up the sides of my torso. His hands then brush the outsides of my breasts as he rises from the floor. And his palms only stop when they get to my neck.

Memnon tilts my head, his glowing eyes peering at the juncture between my shoulder and throat.

I swallow, feeling the phantom heat of the demon bite there.

“I haven’t grown fangs, have I?” I joke weakly.

His glowing eyes snap to my lips, and Goddess, but I don’t understand how power can make his eyes look so unnerving, or how, even half dead with fatigue, I can still find them as alluring as I do.

“No fangs,” he murmurs.

I lean forward and bite his shoulder anyway, enjoying how gooseflesh shivers across his skin. His hand comes up and he holds me there, like he enjoys it.

“I do enjoy it,” he says in that unnaturally deep voice.

I smile briefly, but just as quickly it falls away, the horrors of the evening rising up once more. And then I’m tightening my hold on him.