The evening light was dim beneath the trees, almost dusk. The scent of the pines, the rattle of the aspen leaves in the wind, and the smell of rich damp earth all took me straight back to my childhood. Running through these woods. Digging my hands into the dirt. Watching squirrels scamper up the trees.
“I’ve missed coming out at night,” I said softly. Leon was nearby, behind me, leaning against a trunk. He’d walked with me into the trees, arm around my shoulders, silent now that he’d gotten all of his anger out of his system. There was a spot on the property back behind the cabin, where a massive pine had fallen years before I was born, and the carcass still laid there, covered in moss and lichens. I was perched up on it, my booted feet knocking against the wood as I swung my legs. I heard the flick of a lighter, and sour scent of pot wafted through the air.
Were all demons such stoners? It wasn’t as if Leon acted high. If anything, his moods went from a dangerously quiet calm to raging impending-apocalypse.
“So you have been listening to me,” he said. “You’re safe to go out after dark, as long as I’m here. Unless the Eld beasts get particularly bold, they won’t come back around with me near you. They’ve learned I’m dangerous.”
I stared into the trees as my feet swung, as if my eyes could permeate the dark. How did humans ever survive before electricity, before fire? How did we ever make it out of the dark?
Probably by having far better survival instincts than me. I’d been running blindly into the dark for years, screaming into it, waiting for an answer.
“I used to go walking at night all the time in California,” I said. “We lived close enough to the beach that I could walk down a few blocks and listen to the waves. When the moon was full and the fog rolled in, I’d sit out at the pier for hours.”
I glanced back at him. The cherry-red tip of the joint in his mouth flared in the dark, casting an orange glow across his face. “Where is your family now?” he said. “You moved here alone.”
“Spain. My dad finally retired and my mom’s side of the family lives there. They have a house in some gorgeous coastal city now.” I laughed, a little bitterly. “I could have gone with them. They wanted me to. But I had to be independent.” I air-quoted around the last word. “What a different time that would have been.”
Something that could have been a frown flickered across his face, then disappeared just as quickly. “Then your father’s family is from here?”
“I was born here. Stayed here until I was seven, then we moved down to California. My grandparents moved around the same time we did. Now my Grams lives in Colville after Papa passed.”
“You should visit her. I’m sure she misses you.”
“You’re trying to get me to leave town.”
“Absolutely.”
My fingers plucked continually at a stubborn bit of moss on the trunk beneath me. The temperature had dropped rapidly as the sun set, and the chill made me shiver.
Leon motioned to me, curling his finger. “Come here.”
I hopped off the tree and went to his side, where he pulled me close against him and offered me the joint. His heat warmed me almost immediately, and he held the joint to my lips as I took a drag. “Did you like this place? As a child?”
“I thought Abelaum was magical as a kid,” I said. “I convinced myself that fairies lived in the forest. Right there.” I pointed at the fallen log, which was riddled with cracks and crevices, and little gaps beneath it where the moss made a curtain. “I used to come out here with cookie crumbs and little bottle caps full of honey, and I’d leave it for the fairies.”
“I’m sure they appreciated it.”
I looked up at him, eyes wide. “Fairies are real?”
“They are. But they’re not very nice. And you’re unlikely to ever see one unless you really piss them off.” He stiffened. “Don’t you fucking dare try to piss them off for a video.” I laughed, and his arm around my shoulders curled up, nudging up beneath my chin and tightening across my throat. He brought his mouth close to my ear, and said, “I mean it, Rae. Do not piss off the fae.”
“I won’t,” I choked out, still smiling because how the hell could I resist smiling with his muscles tightening around my throat? He relaxed his hold, leaning back a little more comfortably against the tree. A few minutes passed in silence as we smoked together, the high relaxing me against him.
After several minutes, I said, “So…how old are you?”
“I’m not sure,” he flicked down the stub of the joint, crushing it beneath his shoe. “I don’t have any memories beyond the 1700s. My kind don’t give much attention to age.”
“You’re immortal then?”
He shrugged. “Old age and disease won’t take me. I could grow bored and fade away as some of my kind do. Or I could be ripped apart — that would kill me. Crush my skull and I probably wouldn’t be able to heal. I’m immortal if I’m careful, and if I wish to be.” He smirked. “I’m not very careful. Living forever isn’t so terribly important.”
“What’s important then?”
“Freedom,” he said softly. Crickets had begun to chirp, and a few stray raindrops made their way through the trees to splatter against my face. The darkness had moved in close now, like a cold blanket wrapping around us. From inside the cabin, the darkness seemed sinister in the way it filled the windows and was barely beaten back by the porchlight. But standing in it, calm and quiet, wasn’t sinister at all.
The dark was peaceful.
“Leon,” I said, after several more minutes passed in silence. “You said the God demands a life in return for my ancestor’s. What…what does that…” I didn’t know how to finish the question. I knew what I needed to ask, but I didn’t want to ask it.
He understood. “Three survivors, three sacrifices. The Deep One promised power to those who fulfilled Its demands. It’s been asleep a long time, It’s weak. But with three souls, It will be free, and the human world will come under the rule of an ancient God once again.”
It sounded so fantastical, so impossible. But I’d heard that voice calling in my dreams. I’d seen things, felt things.
“The Hadleighs already sent me after you,” he said, and my stomach twisted into a knot. “That was Kent’s last command: bring you to him, alive. Make your disappearance look like an accident. Leave no evidence that you’d been taken to be murdered. Your family would have had a funeral without a body.”
He said it so calmly, but there was something like anger in his tone. It didn’t take much to imagine how truly horrifying it would be to be hunted by Leon, truly hunted.
I never would have escaped.
“Why didn’t you do it?”
“Kent had lost the grimoire. I didn’t have to do shit he said anymore.”
“But if he’d had it…would you have come after me?”
He stiffened a little, and was silent. Then, finally, he said roughly, “Kent tried and failed to sacrifice a girl before. Juniper Kynes. He got Jeremiah and Victoria to lure her into the woods. Drug her. When she ran, he sent me after her.” His teeth clipped together, again and again: a slow, irritated click. “I lost her in the woods. There were consequences for failing to fulfill Kent’s orders, so I did everything I could to hunt her down. But she escaped me.”
I couldn’t imagine being able to escape him. It seemed impossible. “She got away? Did she live?”
“That’s what I’ve heard,” he said. “I’m shocked she managed to fight off the Eld all these years. Kent considered her a loss, and they went after her brother instead. That one was successful. Marcus is sleeping with the God now.”
I shoved out from under his arm, staring at him in horror. “Marcus? The boy that got stabbed on campus?”
He nodded. “The first sacrifice. Two more to come.”
“Did you kill him?” I whispered, the knot in my stomach pulling tighter and tighter.
“No.” His voice was firm, his eyes bright in the dark as he shoved his hands in his pockets. “Kent would never allow a demon to perform a sacrifice. One of his own little cult, his Libiri, need to wield the knife. Prove themselves to their God. It would be a waste of the God’s favor if I did the killing.”
My breath came out shaky but relieved. He’d already admitted to killing people — numerous people, probably dozens — but somehow it still mattered whether or not he’d killed an innocent like Marcus.
He was staring at me. Watching me. Consuming me with the fire in his eyes. “Does that make me less monstrous?” he said, his voice quiet in the dark. “Does it somehow make me redeemable, that I didn’t wield the knife? That I only dug up his corpse? That I only did the grunt work?” He didn’t really expect me to answer; he just kept going. “Do the atrocities I’ve committed get a pass in your mind because I had to choose between obedience and torture? Would you have forgiven me for taking you, if you knew it was to avoid pain?”
I gulped. His voice was tight, as if he was still in pain, as if whatever tortures Kent had inflicted to force his obedience were still lingering. “You wouldn’t have taken me.”
He scoffed. “What the hell makes you so certain of that?”
“You wouldn’t have,” I whispered. I didn’t know why I was so certain. Perhaps it was just that flawed survival instinct again, imagining I was somehow too special to die.
Or perhaps it was because I could so vividly remember him picking me up in his truck as I was walking home in the dark. Perhaps it was because I could still hear the fury in his voice when he’d said, “I don’t know why the hell you think it’s a good idea to go walking around in the dark, but you need to cut that shit out.”
“Why did you protect me, Leon?”
He looked appalled at my question. He shook his head, but I insisted. “Why are you protecting me? Why? What makes me any different than the last girl?”
He was really scowling now; his hands were working inside his jacket, as if he was clenching and unclenching his fists. His jaw, too, was tensing. But I let the question hang. I wanted an answer. There was a hell of a lot going on that I didn’t understand, but him? Us? Whatever the hell that meant? I wanted to know.
“I decided I wanted you,” he said simply, but the words barely made their way out from between his teeth. “I saw you, and…and I felt…” He winced, as if the word stung. Felt. What did a demon feel? “Not anger. Not hatred or fury. You…” He turned his face away, staring back into the trees. “You’re a light in the dark, and I’ve been in the dark a very long time.”
His words were like fists beating against my heart. It hurt, somehow, to hear something so genuine from him. And it terrified me, to feel it tug at me, to feel those beating fists press into my heart and pull.
He looked at me again, and I forgot how to breathe. “I want you. Irrevocably. But I can’t settle for less than all of you. Body and soul, Raelynn. We demons, when we see something we like, we need to possess it. It’s in our nature.”
He took a step toward me, and I took a step back. He smirked at that, his sharp teeth so white in the dark. “Does it frighten you, to be so desired? To know I want you regardless of time or distance? To know I want you as mine, wholly possessed without question?”
How could I be frightened of the very thing I’d wanted? I couldn’t imagine being desired so determinedly that eternity wasn’t a question, but a demand. It was not only a promise of protection, of safety. It was a promise of ownership. Desire. Bondage. A reassurance of forever.
“I can’t settle for less.” He circled me, slowly, shoes crunching on the twigs and leaves, his voice deepening to a growl as he said, “It’s enough to drive me to madness, Rae, wanting you so fucking badly. But I’ve lingered on Earth for too long now.” He laughed humorlessly, and I felt the familiar caress of him getting inside my head, the subtle influence that made my spine tingle like fingers brushing over my skin. “I want to have you, but I can’t unless you agree. That’s the curse of it all. I can’t —” He cut himself off, wrestled with the words, then, “I can’t linger here and watch you die.”
I blinked rapidly, as if he’d slapped me. “I’m…I’m not going to die.”
“Oh, but you will. You will, as all humans do. That light will go out and death will take you from me.” It was so dark, I couldn’t see his face now. Only his eyes, preternaturally bright. “But with your soul, death can’t touch you. The God can’t touch you. Nothing, nothing will take you from me.”
My chest felt tight. The weight of his words was suffocating, and perhaps it was the lack of oxygen that made my face feel so hot.
“You used to come out here and feed your fairies,” he said. “You believed in something you couldn’t see, something you couldn’t grasp. I did too, once. Boulevard du Temple, Paris. 1755. There was a young man with a violin and fire in his heart. I believed, with such certainty, he would be mine. And I was young. So much imagination.” He shook his head. “Humans grow old so quickly. Your lives are the blink of an eye when you see all eternity stretched out before you. Yet I kept bringing honey to something I couldn’t hold, I couldn’t possess. He died.” He nodded, as if to remind himself that it was true. “His fire was gone. So easily. And then my name was called by strangers, to Cairo. By the time I’d freed myself, and went back to France…” He fluttered his hand. “I never found his grave. I searched. I haunted the cemeteries so long they began to tell stories of me. Zane found me there.” He shook his head. “He dragged me back to Hell. Told me I was mad. Mad for a human whose soul I could never possess.”
“Leon…” I didn’t know what to say. It had been centuries, but his voice was still rough with pain. So many years, and a single human death haunted him.
Ironic that a killer would be tortured by a death.
“I’ve spent enough time haunting graveyards,” he said. “If you gave me your soul, neither gods nor men could take you from me. And that frightens you.”
“Of course it does.” I was surprised to hear my voice break. It was frightening because it didn’t feel real. It felt impossible.
Breakups were easy, too easy. Because they needed space, because it just wasn’t working, because I was moving, because I was too much. But commitment? To belong? To be really and truly wanted? That was hard.
Humans weren’t good at forever. We weren’t built for forever.
“Raelynn. Come here.”
I went to him without hesitation, and I stood in front of him feeling so small, somewhere between frightened and hopeful, as if there was anything he could possibly say that would make all this make sense.
His fingers brushed over my face, and I leaned into his palm. For a moment, the whole world was the touch of his hand. The warmth in him. The citrus-smoke smell of him. For a moment, I thought of eternity.
“I’m leaving.”
I opened my eyes. “What?”
“I need to find the grimoire. Then my time on Earth is done. I’ve been here long enough.”
It felt like cold water dripping down my ribs. I didn’t want to hear him say that, but I couldn’t prevent it. I couldn’t say the words that would make him stay. I couldn’t say anything at all. I could only let the decisions I couldn’t bear to make form a stranglehold around my lungs and squeeze until it hurt.
Maybe he thought I would say something. The silence stretched out between us, and he pulled his hand away from my face. It was cold. So cold. He leaned his face down, the gap between our mouths so small, but somehow it was a chasm.
“Go inside,” he said softly. Such a simple dismissal. He’d taken all that passion, all that desperation, folded it up and tucked it away as neatly as if it was never there. My stomach twisted, tighter and tighter. My lungs squeezed, smaller and smaller.
“I don’t want you to go,” I said. He frowned.
“Then make me stay. Properly. Not with petty magic tricks.”
Give up your soul.
Terrifying, alluring. Everything I wanted and was terrified of having. A weight so heavy it crushed the words inside me.
Leon smirked.
“Go inside, doll. For tonight, I’ll watch. In the morning, I’ll go.”
“That’s not fair.” My voice sounded petulant. Desperate.
He shook his head. “No. It’s not. I’ve yet to find fairness anywhere on Earth.”
I had to walk away. Had to. So I turned and trudged back through the trees, refusing to look back. Why look to see if he was following or if he’d vanished already? Why pretend he was some mortal man whom I could convince to stay for just a little longer, until things got too serious and everything was too stifling and I wasn’t worth the effort?
Why pretend he hadn’t offered exactly what I wanted, and I’d refused it?
