The Demon's Revenge (The Fay Morgan Chronicles Book 4) Read Free Page A

of the vial to her lips. She drank it down in one long sip.
    I watched her as the veil parted and knowing fell across her person. Her shoulders tensed. Her mouth became a flat line cutting across her face.
    “No one and nothing will be able to hear whatever it is you have to tell me,” I said.
    She nodded and spoke quickly. “I have thirty minutes to tell you everything you need to know. The spell on me, it keeps me from thinking, from even knowing, what my Lila is. From thinking about it….” She shook her head. “Where should I start?”
    I waited.
    “The beginning. I was a young and foolish girl. No one could tell me what to do or dissuade me from following my own passions. I was drawn to a man I met at a discotheque in Tehran. He was older and full of swagger and power. So much power. Being near him was like being near the sun. Warm yet blinding. Once I said yes to him, just one time. He would not ever allow me to say no. I was his, to do with as he pleased, and soon I was isolated and removed from my family or friends. From anyone I could confide in or get help from. He liked it like that. He had centuries of knowing how to break a girl like me down. How to own me. By the time he showed me the truth of his inner nature, I was dependent upon him in all ways and I could hardly think inside the palace of my own mind. I could hardly imagine a life or a day without him. He was cruel and kind, randomly via his own whims and moods and I was not his only girl, but I was his newest and so I was the one given lavish gifts for a time. Or beatings.” She paused and stared at me, searching for whether I was judging her.
    I stared back at her. I was no stranger to men with power who used it poorly. I had once been caught beneath a cruel thumb. My own father had been a monster. Not literally, but true enough in its own right.
    She nodded at me and continued. “The other girls — he always called us girls, even though some of us were in our sixties — we all avoided each other. He didn’t like us talking. Of having friends or communications with anyone but him. And so, three years into my life of living with him, when I found out I was pregnant, I had no one to speak to except him, and my belly clenched with the thought of him knowing. He was not anyone who should ever be around a baby. My instinct to protect the growing child was greater than my own self-preservation, and so, while he was gone, I went to the quarters of the oldest of my master’s girls and whispered to her what had happened. She did not believe me, and interrogated me heavily, sure that I had had dalliances with the help.”
    “You hadn’t,” I said.
    She nodded. “Yes. The fetus was his, even though no pregnancy between him and a woman had ever been known to occur. His kind are extremely rare and ancient. None of the women had ever heard of another of his kind being born.” She shook her head. “I wonder at that, at my ill fortune, or perhaps my luck, because my daughter, she is a wonder.” The woman’s face lit up for a moment, but then the clouds gathered back around her. “It was a lucky choice to go to the elder girl, for she had secret and clever ways of communicating with all the other girls and the outside world. They quickly came up with a plan for how I should flee. They knew, as well as I, that he should never be allowed to rear another creature such as he was, and if my child had any chance of not becoming a monster — ” The woman’s voice cracked and she took in a deep breath. “Then I must flee.”
    “And so you left,” I said, glancing at the clock. This was my one chance to get any information out of the woman. I was not at all committed to helping her child, but at the very least I wanted to hear the whole story.
    “Yes, with the great sacrifices of those women, for I am sure none of them escaped his wrath, I was smuggled away and taken out of Iran. I traveled with a magician for a time, and he placed a binding spell upon