“I don’t know!”
The harpy scowled. “Fine. I can see you are useless.” She back-winged out of the way.
“No!” Piper screamed. “Don’t drop me! Please don’t!”
“We will,” the harpy said, “unless you offer some real answers. No?” She gestured sharply to another hovering daemon. “Check her over. Tear off all her clothes if you have to, but make sure beyond a doubt she isn’t hiding the Stone on her.” She smiled maliciously at Piper. “And if you are, my dear, we won’t drop you. That would be painless compared to the death we’ll give you if you’ve been lying.”
The second harpy swooped in. She grabbed Piper’s shirt, tearing open the front.
“Stop it!” she cried pointlessly. The Sahar in her pocket felt as cold and heavy as the touch of death itself. It would be moments, seconds, before they found it. She couldn’t hide it, couldn’t run away, couldn’t even struggle without getting dropped. Terrified tears coursed down her cheeks as the harpy raked her claws over Piper’s chest, checking for anything hidden. Micah, the mercenary bastard, had obviously revealed where he’d found the fake Stone.
“Hurry up,” the harpy leader barked.
The other one growled. She grabbed at Piper’s hip, tearing open the empty pocket on the right. She ripped the back pocket, tearing the side seam wide open. As she turned to the pockets on the left, Piper made a split second decision born purely out of spite.
If she was going to die, then she damn well wouldn’t make it easy for them.
As the harpy’s claws hooked her left pocket, Piper wrenched her left arm, tearing it out of the harpy’s claws. She swung down, her doubled weight jerking the other harpy off balance. As they dropped, Piper jammed her hand into her pocket and closed her fist tightly around the Sahar.
The harpy leader screamed in triumph, diving at Piper. Knowing what was coming, knowing she would die, Piper pulled her arm out and cocked it back. She locked stares with the harpy leader in the instant before they collided. Time slowed as the final moment of her life stretched out, denying its imminent end.
Fist clenched around the Sahar, glare locked on her enemy’s face, Piper summoned every last bit of strength she had, every searing flame of fury, every desperate, choking dredge of panic, and channeled it all into her fist as she let it fly right into the harpy bitch’s face.
Her knuckles never touched the harpy.
Piper’s thoughts splintered, doubled, twisted with alien power. The Sahar burned white-hot against her palm. White light burst from between her clenched fingers. Thunder split the air. The world rent all around her.
The harpy’s skull burst apart like a shattered melon, spraying gore in every direction. The concussion blasted outward from Piper, a perfect half circle that expanded faster than sound. Harpy bodies exploded. Bloody feathers flew in every direction. Torn limbs and broken bodies arched through the air with eerie grace, caught on the pressure wave before they tumbled toward the distant, night-cloaked forest below.
The hand gripping Piper’s other arm was torn away.
She plummeted. Something slammed into her. Claws sank into her arm. Suddenly she was dangling by the hand that still clutched the Sahar as one last harpy tore frantically at her fist. A cry of agony burst from her as talons ripped through her flesh. She clenched her fist as hard as she could, unable to reach the harpy holding her, unable to fight back. The air crackled as the harpy summoned magic.
Power tore into Piper’s arm as the harpy’s spell hit her. Excruciating, consuming agony slammed through her. Blackness swept over her vision. Her sight popped in on another wave of torture. She didn’t realize she was falling until the dark silhouette of the harpy swooped away above her, clutching the Stone she’d blasted out of Piper’s hand.
She dropped through black, empty space. The wind tore at her, howling in her ears. Her arm had gone numb. Her mind was numb. She was dead and her brain hadn’t caught up with the fact. It would be over in a second or two.
Black oblivion sucked at her. She gave in to it, embracing the darkness as the invisible ground rushed up to claim her.
. . .
Consciousness returned sluggishly. Pain came more swiftly. She groaned, then choked on a sob. God, her arm was a blazing inferno of agony. She could never have imagined so much pain. It was so terrible she didn’t immediately realize she was being dragged.
Something above her grunted. She was gently set down. Whatever had a grip on the back of her shirt let go. She slumped in the mud, unable to find the strength to move. Whoever or whatever had been dragging her could do as they pleased. She didn’t care.
She wondered briefly why she wasn’t dead.
It wasn’t right. If Ash and Lyre had died, she should die too. It was only fair. They were in this together. She felt a foggy, disjointed flash of regret that she’d never get to ask Ash all the questions burning in the back of her head. She wished she’d given him the Sahar. Then maybe he could have survived the choronzon. Or at the least, the harpy wouldn’t have gotten it. Samael wouldn’t have won.
Something snuffled her back. A strange low-pitched sound like a stuttering truck engine. Something warm nudged the side of her face. An animal whined.
Piper couldn’t stand not knowing what was standing over her. Clenching her teeth, she rolled onto her back. Pain rocketed down her arm. Her vision went white with the intensity, blinding her. Then she realized it wasn’t her vision. She was staring at a wall of white.
No . . . not a wall. Wings. White wings. Two gold spots appeared in front of her face—golden eyes with a stripe of black mane between them. The thing made another stuttering, chattering sound.
Piper blinked repeatedly. Licked her lips and exhaled. “Zwi?” she whispered.
The horse-sized dragon made a bass-deep trill that sounded disturbingly wrong. Zwi spread her enormous wings and flapped them once, then poked her muzzle gently into Piper’s belly.
“You caught me?” she asked hoarsely.
Zwi bobbed her head. She trilled again and nudged at Piper. The message was clear: get up.
Piper shuddered. She couldn’t. She had to. She had to know for sure. If Zwi was off rescuing Piper, chances were the dragonet no longer had a master to protect. She had to know for sure. With a deep breath, she carefully sat up. A cry escaped her as she pulled her wounded arm to her chest. She pointedly did not look at the damage. Holding it tightly in place, she awkwardly pushed to her feet with a few helpful nudges from Zwi. Her whole body hurt but mostly her arm. She couldn’t feel her hand at all.
Zwi gave her a light push in the right direction, then turned all her scales to black, practically disappearing. A hint of predawn glow had lightened the pitch-black night enough for Piper to make out the trail. She stumbled forward, numb inside. Dread slowly kindled in her gut. Tears trickled sporadically down her face.
She smelled the choronzon before she saw it. The trees began to thin. Zwi stuttered her strange, deep chittering before whining piteously. Piper swallowed a sob. She didn’t want to see. She had to.
She shouldered a tree branch aside and stepped into the clearing.
The choronzon was sprawled in a mass of twisted tentacles. Yellow blood and foul gore splashed the grass and nearby trees like macabre graffiti. Its head was split open like a bomb had gone off in its skull. Massive wounds scored its body. It had fought hard before it died.
Nothing moved in the clearing. Nothing stirred.
She stared at the dead beast, trying to imagine what could have killed it. What even greater monster could have inflicted those terrible wounds on a creature known to be nearly invincible with its magic-resistant scales and impossible, crushing strength?
In the shadow of the dead beast, something moved.
A dark figure rose, a black wraith in the night. Wings as dark as midnight spread wide as he turned toward her. They slowly drew in again. He stepped forward.
Piper didn’t move. She didn’t even breathe as Ash came toward her.
 
; For the first time, she looked on his true form.
Walk was too harmless a word for the way he moved. He drifted like a slinking shadow, each movement melting seamlessly into the next. It was so graceful, so sinister, that he had closed half the distance before she recognized the heavy limp with each step.
He stopped with ten long steps still between them. Silent, he waited—waited for her to pass judgment on him.
Her gaze raked over him, desperately searching for something familiar. Something human. Black, plate-like scales ran down his arms and covered the back of his hands, leathery in texture, faintly glossy. They plated his fingers, each one ending in a deadly, curved claw. The scales were like living artwork, beautifully interlocking, mimicking the lines of his body, almost identical to a dragon hide. The dark armor spread over his shoulders, dipped down along his collarbones, and faded into dark lines that coiled over the upper half of his bare torso. She’d seen the same pattern drawn in shimmering red across his skin when she’d faced him in the Styx’s fighting ring.
Scales edged his sides while leaving the muscled planes of his stomach and most of his chest bare. A handful of leather straps interrupted the expanse of his torso, baldrics for unseen weapon sheaths on his back. Behind him, a powerful, whip-like tail snaked in the grass, almost invisible in the darkness. His lower half was clad in dark pants of a heavy material. Straps crisscrossed his thighs, holding two empty sword sheaths in place. Below the calf, his legs lost their human-like composition. His black-scaled feet ended in three talons similar to Zwi’s. He balanced on the balls of his feet with strong, steady readiness.
In his hand, he held a long, curved sword. Yellow gore smeared the double-edged blade.
Finally, she dared lift her gaze to his face.
Black scales edged his jaw and ran across the tops of his cheekbones. Dark, menacing designs dipped down his temples and coiled in the hollows of his cheeks. His hair, black in the darkness, was the only thing she recognized. Curved horns, sets of three on each side of his head, swept backward. She remembered tracing them in the darkness of the caved-in cellar.
The eyes that watched her were black as pitch, cold and unforgiving. There was no mercy in them.
The few similarities between this creature and the daemon she knew were meaningless. The being beneath the skin was as wholly different as his glamour. There was nothing of Ash in those icy midnight eyes. There was no familiar soul behind them, no heart, nothing.
She trembled, fought to breathe. For the first time, she truly understood what it meant when a daemon shaded. Shading was the mental release of glamour in the same way she now looked at the physical shedding of glamour. When daemons donned their physical glamour to look human, they bound themselves mentally to act human. Shading wasn’t a shift from their normal behavior; it was a shift back to their true nature. As she stared at Ash’s true form, she thought of all those times before when she’d seen his eyes go dark . . . this is what had been looking out at her.
He remained motionless, watching her with a cold expectancy. Believing she had died once already only made it harder to face death a second time—but delay was pointless.
“The Sahar is gone,” she whispered into the choking silence. She pressed her injured arm tighter to her chest. “I—I tried. They—one of them . . . flew away with it.”
He didn’t react. Stared at her, silent, waiting.
“I’m sorry.” She tried to take a deep breath, couldn’t manage it. She wished he’d just kill her. The weight of his attention crushed her. She wanted to fall to her knees and beg for mercy. Knew it would be pointless. The aura of power around Ash was palpable. She could taste it in the air, the harsh tang of blood yearning to be spilled. The atmosphere was charged, electric with power waiting to be unleashed—enough power to tear gaping holes in one of the most feared monsters in the Underworld.
Behind her, Zwi shook her head and loosed a deep, somehow admonishing growl. Ash’s gaze shifted toward the dragon. Released from his stare, Piper shook violently. She swallowed back a whimper. Desperately, she reminded herself that she’d faced his true self once before, even if she hadn’t been able to see him. She remembered that he’d hugged her with that lethal strength, wrapped those black wings gently around her. He was the same as then. This was no different. It was—
His gaze slid back to her. Her heart jumped into her throat and her knees went weak. No, it was completely different.
Zwi slunk out of from behind her. In a swirl of black magic, the dragon shrank back to her smaller form. With a shake of her head, she spread her wings and sprang into the air, gliding across the clearing to vanish into the trees. Piper wanted to scream at the dragonet to come back, not to leave her. Swallowing, she reluctantly brought her attention back to the dark creature before her.
Finally, he moved. He slid forward, closing the gap between them. When he was a step away, she squeezed her eyes shut, bracing for the killing blow.
A moment passed.
Careful, gentle fingers touched her chin. Tilted her face up. She squeezed her eyes tighter.
“Piper.” He exhaled slowly. “Piper, you need to try not to be afraid. I need your help.” His touch fell from her cheek, then wrapped gently around her uninjured wrist. He pulled her arm up and pressed her hand to the horns on the side of his head. “You know me, Piper. Remember? You weren’t this scared before. I need you to be strong this time too.”
She shivered at his alien voice. Her shaking fingers touched the smooth, cool horns.
“Please, Piper,” he whispered. “I can’t use glamour because my wing is dislocated. I need your help to fix it.” A silent pause. “I won’t hurt you. I promise.”
Breathing fast, she wrapped her hand around the top horn, squeezing until her fingers hurt. Fear bubbled in her, deep, visceral, and uncontrollable. Fear of the ultimate predator, of a powerful, alien creature far beyond her understanding.
From amidst the pieces of coherent thought and emotion left to her, a memory rose. Lyre’s voice echoed in her head, hot with passion and frustration. Some daemons you can’t help but fear. You will always be afraid. It’s human nature.
She sucked in air, fighting for control. Lots of things were scary. Suck it up and deal with it. So what if Ash’s true self was the most terrifying sight she’d ever seen, the most petrifying monster she’d ever faced? She could cope.
One last deep breath and she opened her eyes.
Black irises met hers. Terror sucked out the breath she’d just taken. She clenched her teeth and fought to remember his careful touch on her cheek. He wouldn’t hurt her. He wouldn’t. He’d promised.
“What do you need me to do?” she asked, her voice almost soundless.
His gaze searched hers for a second, then he stepped back, pulling her hand away from his head. He turned sideways and carefully unfurled one wing. The elbow joint wasn’t right. Angling the wing toward her, he took her hand and placed it below the joint. She wrapped her fingers around hard muscle, surprised by the supple texture, like sun-warmed leather.
“Hold on as tight as you can,” he told her. “Brace yourself.”
With her injured arm tucked to her chest, she bent her knees, leaned back, and squeezed his wing as hard as she could.
He checked her stance, nodded, then braced himself. Inhaled. Held it. Then he jerked hard away from her, snapping the joint straight. The sickening pop of the bone slipping back into its socket was loud in the silence. He staggered, breathing hard. She let go and watched mutely as he gingerly folded both wings against his back. His tail lashed from one side to the other as he recovered from the pain.
Her own pain was starting to overwhelm her. She pressed one shaking hand over her face. She felt sick with it all—the agony in her arm and the soul-deep terror of the daemon before her. She’d never known. She’d never realized what they truly were.
“Piper.”
Her breath caught. Warily, she lowered her hand.
Ash stood in front of her. His ey
es had lightened to a dull gray, his skin unmarked by pattern or scale—full glamour flawlessly hiding the monster underneath. His sword was gone as were his wings and tail. Glamour was much more than illusion; it was a shifting of reality.
His shirt was torn and dirty from the cellar cave-in but without a single speck of choronzon blood. This clothing had been in a different plane of reality while he’d fought the choronzon, just as his strange black pants and weapons were no longer in this dimension. She could only imagine how daemons could bend physics to accommodate their whims.
“Ash.” She exhaled sharply, then swallowed hard. She understood now what Lyre had meant when he said she’d never look at a daemon the same again after seeing his true face. Her gut now knew what he was. At least she wasn’t overwhelmed by fear anymore. As it faded, clearing her head, shame pricked at her. She’d been convinced he was going to kill her. How could she have lost faith in him so easily?
The memory of those merciless eyes, black with the night, flashed through her head. Yes, she knew how.
“Come on,” he said tonelessly. “Lyre is back in the trees. His shoulder is broken but he should be fine. I’ll wrap your arm.”
Relief touched her. At least Lyre wasn’t too badly hurt, though a broken shoulder was no small injury. Glancing at the choronzon, she wondered if it had been Lyre’s cry of pain she’d heard as the harpies carried her away.
She tried to take a deep breath. “Okay,” she agreed. Her voice came out hoarse and shaky.
Ash stepped away, putting a couple paces between them. “It won’t be as bad in a few hours.”
“What won’t?” she asked with a frown.
He stared across the clearing. “The fear. It will fade . . . to a point. In a few hours.”
Her feeling of shame grew. “I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” She forced a smile. “Just don’t ever show me that again, and we’ll be good.”
He was already turning toward the other side of the clearing when she spoke. He paused. Slowly he looked over his shoulder. His face was a cool, distant mask as he appraised her. The weight of his judgment settled on her, almost palpable.