Chapter 1
“This is zh’ūltis.”
I glared at Zylas. “Just be patient. All you have to do is stand still.”
Positioned in front of him, I held a piece of black fabric to his shoulders, the seams glinting with pins. Behind the demon, Amalia muttered under her breath as she pinned what would become the hood of the garment to the back collar.
“Zylas!” she exclaimed. “Stop hitting me with your tail. I can’t put pins in while you’re whacking me.”
His scowl deepened and his tail thudded to the floor, the barbed end twitching like an angry cat. Amalia rose on her tiptoes, checking the alignment of the hood piece, then nudged my fingers aside to add a few more pins.
“Okay. Gonna test it.” She carefully lifted the hood and settled it on top of Zylas’s head. “How’s it look? Right size?”
I took a few steps back to give the demon a proper assessment. His crimson eyes glowed from beneath the hood, sharp with impatience. The garment looked like a hooded vest, but once finished, it would be a jacket—or so Amalia claimed. I was having trouble picturing it.
“Looks good to me,” I said uncertainly.
She pulled the hood down to rest against his back. “I don’t like how the side seam is sitting. Lift up the bottom so I can take measurements.”
Zylas rumbled in the back of his throat, an exasperated half-growl that was more intimidating than it should’ve been.
Obediently, I slid the shirt’s hem up—and my knuckles brushed against his sides, teasing across smooth, warm skin. My cheeks heated as I held the fabric halfway up his torso. Amalia looped her measuring tape around his waist, checked the number, then lowered it to his hips and pulled it tight.
“You’re skinnier than I thought,” she muttered. “You look so beefy and muscular, but you’re a lightweight.”
“Ch,” was his unimpressed response.
I watched her adjust the measuring tape, ensuring it sat in the right spot just below the waistline of his dark, demonically fashionable shorts. My gaze drifted across his smooth, reddish-brown skin to his defined V line that disappeared beneath the fabric. I tried to jerk my eyes off him, but they snagged on his unfairly perfect abs.
“Move the fabric up more,” Amalia instructed. “I need to measure his chest again.”
“Wouldn’t it be easier to take his measurements after you take this off him?” I asked, aiming to sound casual.
“Just do it.”
Puffing out a breath, I slid the fabric up until it bunched under his arms. Amalia cinched the tape measure around his pectorals.
“Hmm. Zylas, take a deep breath and flex your muscles.”
He grumbled—I picked up “mailēshta”—then inhaled, his chest expanding and muscles tightening. My blush intensified as Amalia calmly measured again. Did she even notice his physique? Were his flexing muscles and warm skin no different from a plastic mannequin to her?
“All right.” She tossed the measuring tape into her sewing bag. “I just need to take in the side seams.”
I lowered the fabric to its original position. “So the lining will be embroidered?”
“Yeah, it’ll look like a normal jacket from the outside.” She prodded Zylas’s arm until he lifted it out of the way, then crouched beside him. “This one will be more durable than the last set I made him, and since it doesn’t need to fit over his armor, I can make it look more normal.”
The armor issue had originated with his shoulder plates, but they were no longer a problem. The īnkav had shattered them, and even if Zylas could’ve repaired them, we’d had neither time nor opportunity to collect the broken pieces.
“Done,” Amalia declared, startling me out of my thoughts. “Help me slide this off him. Zylas, put your arms up.”
He lifted his arms, and Amalia and I tugged the pin-lined garment over his head. She held the incomplete jacket up, squinting critically, then grabbed her sewing bag and headed for her bedroom.
“He’s all yours, Robin,” she called distractedly.
She disappeared through the door, missing the way my face had blanched at her words. I gulped, telling myself to get a grip.
“Vayanin.”
I turned toward Zylas, now shirtless with soft light washing over his bare skin and impossibly perfect musculature.
He peered at me, his face unreadable, and I tensed in anxious anticipation, waiting for the gavel to fall. How much of my inner dialogue had he picked up on? Had he noticed me ogling him? Was he about to—
“Where are my cookies?”
His—oh. Amalia and I had bribed him into participating in the garment fitting by promising a new type of cookie. I was supposed to feed him now.
That’s what Amalia meant when she’d said he was all mine.
“Right,” I squeaked, spinning on my heel. I zoomed into the kitchen where a bag of chocolate chips waited. I measured out a cup and stuck them in the microwave, then faced the counter where a dozen cookies cooled on a rack, their golden-brown tops capped with white blobs of marshmallow.
I alternated between melting the chocolate chips, which needed stirring every thirty seconds, and arranging the cookies on a piece of parchment paper. The familiar, mundane movements calmed my jitters, and I hummed as I mixed a tablespoon of shortening into the melted chocolate to smooth it out.
The aroma made my mouth water as I drizzled chocolate in zigzags across the cookie tops, then sprinkled them with crumbled walnuts. Smiling at the cute, delicious desserts, I washed out the measuring cup and tidied the counters.
When the chocolate had cooled, I stacked the cookies on a plate and ventured out of the safe kitchen.
Zylas had retreated to the far end of the sofa, his elbow propped on his knee and chin on his palm. Watching me.
All my anxiety came flooding right back.
I set the plate on the end table beside him. “These are called rocky road cookies.”
“Rocky road? Why?” He picked up a cookie and squinted at the chocolate-drizzled marshmallow on top. “How is this a road?”
“I … I’m not sure, actually. That’s just what it’s called.” Now that he mentioned it, the name was kind of odd. I made a mental note to look it up later.
He gave the cookie a quick examination, then bit it in half. The sight of his white canines made my stomach drop strangely.
After a few cursory chews, he swallowed. “Part of it … it is soft.”
“That’s the marshmallow.” I tugged self-consciously on the sleeve of my sweater. “Do you like it?”
In answer, he tossed the rest of the cookie in his mouth. I relaxed. Why did I always worry about him liking my baking even though he’d devoured every single thing I’d ever made him?
He picked up a second cookie. His tail twitched as he studied it, then his gaze flicked to my face—or was he looking at my mouth?
Panic shot through me and I reeled backward. “I’m going to work on the grimoire!”
My feet scooted swiftly across the carpet, then I was safely in my bedroom.
Sprawled across my pillow, Socks lifted her head, her ears perked toward me. She blinked her huge green eyes as I stopped beside the bed, my heart racing uncomfortably.
Memories flitted through me. Of placing a bite of strawberry against Zylas’s lips. Of his lips on my skin. Of his mouth brushing across mine. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. The mere sight of his predatory canines had triggered a visceral recollection of what they’d felt like against my skin.
I pressed both hands to my face, breathing deep, then crouched and slid a flat metal case from beneath my bed. I whispered the incantation and flipped the lid open. The Athanas grimoire waited in its nest of brown paper with my notebook.
I lifted the latter out and flipped it to a completed translation.
I have stood before a demon of another world and wondered that which no woman should ever wonder. I have yearned for that which no woman should ever claim. I have laid my hands upon that which no woman should ever touch.
My throat bobbed as I swallowed. Like Myrrine, my ancestor who’d added her story to the grimoire thousands of years ago, I too had stood before a demon and wondered things a woman shouldn’t wonder. I’d longed for a demon. I’d touched a demon. I’d kissed a demon.
I could forgive myself for getting caught up in the moment. Zylas had just revealed he’d been protecting me all this time simply because he’d promised, not because our contract forced him to. I’d been emotional and overwhelmed. I hadn’t been thinking straight.
That excuse no longer applied.
Myrrine had accepted her feelings for her demon, but she’d lived in a different time. I lived in a world where demons were considered brutal killers too violent for anything but enslavement as a contractor’s tool. Zylas was neither a slave nor a tool nor a heartless monster—but he was a brutal killer.
I bit the inside of my cheek. Not only was I in a complete tailspin over our kiss, but I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. Sharing my confusion with Zylas wouldn’t help either of us, and confiding in Amalia was out of the question.
That had left me in the same spot for the past four days: caught in an unending spiral of doubt. Every time I convinced myself this attraction between me and Zylas was worth exploring, panic would set in that I was making a terrible mistake. But when I tried to convince myself it could never happen again, my reasons seemed so flimsy.
Exhaling, I stacked the grimoire on my pile of reference texts and headed back to the living room.
Zylas was sprawled across the sofa, eyes closed. Three of the dozen cookies remained on the plate, but he’d eaten his fill.
He opened one eye as I sank down to sit on the floor between the sofa and coffee table, my back against the cushions. His tail was draped off the seat beside me, the barbs on the end gleaming faintly. I arranged my books and pen, then opened the grimoire to the page where Anthea had begun her first experiments in Arcana Fenestram—portal magic.
Though I could feel his gaze on me, Zylas said nothing.
I squinted at the complex notation spread across the grimoire page, then flipped the aging paper until I found one of Myrrine’s journal entries. Why hadn’t she written more about her relationship with her demon?
The ancient sorceress lingered stubbornly in my thoughts as I mindlessly turned pages. What I wouldn’t give to be able to jump back in time and speak with her. What answers could she offer about the mysterious workings of the demonic mind?
I stole a glance over my shoulder. Zylas’s eyes were closed again, his breathing slow. Black hair tangled across his forehead, the small horns that marked him as a young adult in demon years poking through the messy locks.
My gaze traveled along his jawline, then down the column of his throat to the shadows of tendons that ran to the inner dip of his collarbones. His hard pectorals met those defined abdominals that I could never ignore … and that enticing V shape.
I’d touched every inch of his back while massaging his tight muscles after an intensive healing, but his front … somehow that was more intimate. More suggestive. More forbidden.
My hand crept upward. How deeply asleep was he? Large doses of sugar made him drowsy but he was never completely comatose.
I touched his inner forearm. The muscles beneath my fingertips tensed as he inhaled, his eyelids fluttering—and a swirl of emotion danced through my head, thoughts and feelings that weren’t mine.
A vision of burnt-red sand, dotted with jagged rocks, surrounding a hidden valley among the dunes. Dwellings of chiseled stone at the valley’s base. The sun’s rays flaring on the horizon. A cold, teasing wind that carried a gritty scent tinged with an iron tang.
Pashir. Ahlēavah. Home.
Flickering. A twist of longing. Swirling memory, then a nightscape of dark buildings and brightly lit streets. A glowing window, beckoning. Slipping through long drapes, soft carpet underfoot. A quiet bed, covers pulled up over a sleeping body, dark hair spilling across a white pillow.
Foreign. Strange. Hh’ainun.
A slash of denial. Icy trepidation. The dark room deepened into black night. A concrete platform, glowing with lines and runes and surrounded by salty water. A ring in the center, the night sky of another world calling.
Go!
What are you waiting for?
Isn’t this what you want?
The sound of my own raised voice hit me like a slap to the face and I recoiled, my fingers digging into his arm.
His eyes opened all the way, dim with drowsiness. “Vayanin?”
I stared at him, my lungs frozen as the fragments of his thoughts and memories slipped away—but I couldn’t unhear my voice as he’d heard it. Those harsh, angry, desperate shouts … was that what I’d sounded like when I’d told him to go through the portal?
When I merely stared at him, saying nothing, he squinted briefly, then closed his eyes again, too sleepy for the mysteries of a hh’ainun female.
Disquiet simmered in my chest as I robotically faced the grimoire and gazed sightlessly at the open book. I’d felt his longing and denial, but which of those memories did he long for and what was he denying?
As the question churned in my mind, the pages in front of me came into focus, the complex notation in cluttered Ancient Greek letters sinking into my distracted brain.
I leaned closer to the page. “Zylas?”
“Var?” he muttered unenthusiastically.
“Look at this.”
He sat up and leaned forward, his face appearing beside mine, chin brushing my shoulder. He gazed down at the grimoire.
“Hashē,” he breathed, his irritation forgotten. “You found it.”
If I hadn’t just revisited the array through his eidetic memory, I might not have recognized it. But the spell laid out across the ancient paper matched his recollection almost perfectly.
My hands curled into fists. “The portal spell.”
--
Delivering Evil for Experts
The Guild Codex: Demonized / Book Four
Copyright © 2020 by Annette Marie
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