Destiny's Child (Kitsune series Book 3) Read Free Page B

fast, but this…
    I took a breath and wished I hadn’t.  My Gawd, take a bath.  I’ll spring for a bar of soap.
    He set me down and lifted my face toward his.  The edge of a long claw scraped tears off my cheek.  He licked them off his claw tip. 
    What the hell…
    He saw me staring.  “Human tears are demon wine,” he explained.  “I’m a connoisseur.” He sighed, backed away, and settled in the grass.  His wings snapped out, fluttering a moment before growing still.  “Your vulnerable naïveté forms a delightful bouquet,” he murmured. 
    I ignored his comment on my fragrance, pointing back at the house.  “How long has that been going on?”
    He turned his head to follow my gesture, and shrugged, looking back at me.  “A few years, I suppose.  I don’t really…”  He tensed, gathering himself up into a crouch.  His gaze swept the yard.  “Don’t move,” he warned.
    “Why not?”  I turned to scan the area.  The rain had slacked and the clouds were parting toward the horizon where the morning sun shed a gray haze of light, but it still took me a moment to see what had put him on edge—pools of black sludge, hiding in the weeds.  There were four stretched out sections, forming a curved, creeping, imaginary line of sorts. 
    Shadow men?  Is Onyx back from his father’s court?
    Each blob cast gloppy ribbons of shadow up into the air.  Each fountain thickened, forming columns.  Demons solidified, breathing laboriously as if they’d battled from across some vast space.  Not shadow men after all.  They carefully fanned misshapen wings, as if in pain.  Scars furrowed their skin where ugly wounds had healed, old and new. 
    I tried crossing over, pulling on the veil between the human world and the ghost realm.  The usual electric tingle danced over me, but the veil didn’t shift.  I was trapped by the supernatural interference of the demons’ proximity and could only shiver in fear as the creatures took note of me, dissecting my body with hungry stares.
    Damn it, Tukka, where are you?
    Taliesina, my inner fox, was a tight ball of terror.  Her emotions were a thick, black fog that ate at my nerves, but we were both smart enough to know that running now would be instantly fatal.  Predators chase what they see running.  
    Pleased grins appeared.  One of the demons reached out languidly, claws splayed in casual threat.  “Shall we see how well this one screams?”
    I shrank in on myself, knees buckling sinking in the weeds as though they could hide me.
    “No,” Wocky’s voice lashed out.  “Mine.”
    The claws hovered near me as the demon looked back at Wocky.  “We have fought for you.  We have bled for you, and drank our own pain.  You owe us.”
    “ No, she is destined to be the sword that rips away the veil of our prison, and my dark queen.  I will not let you spoil my plans.”
    While grateful for his protection, his words worried me as much as the other demon’s.
    “You owe us,” the demon repeated.
    His friends took up the chant.  “You owe us … you owe us…”
    “You’re challenging me?”  Wocky’s voice was soft, sweet butter, milder than I’d ever heard it.  “You’re forgetting your place, so I’ll remind you where it is—in the dust beneath my feet.”
    Teeth bared, claws raised, three of the demons ignored me, facing Wocky.  Hard growls rumbled in the cold, dawn air. 
    The fourth demon hung back.  He watched his friends, but flicked a glance my way at irregular intervals.
    I kept very still, waiting for a moment when I could get clear, and remembered one of the lessons from my martial arts class: Don’t focus on any one thing; be moonlight falling evenly on the world. I needed to internally distance myself from the threat, what Shaun called being “centered.”  I went to slow, deep breaths from the diaphragm, and used peripheral vision to see everything at once. 
    Incredibly fast, someone made a move and they were all in a common