Chapter 9

CHAPTER 9

"A kiss?" Malissa gasped.

"A kiss," said the demon, "and nothing more."

Malissa shivered, though the night was not cold. Neither was her body. On the contrary, her skin was feverishly hot, and it seemed to be growing hotter with every moment she spent in Beliath's presence. With every syllable he uttered in that smooth, deep voice. With every touch of his unseen eyes. Behind the cover of her arm, her bare nipples were as hard as a pair of pearls, and down between her legs, hidden by her hand, her naked sex was weeping with arousal.

Was the demon equally aroused? Malissa wondered.

She could not see him. Between the stone pillars and glowing candles of the darkstone ring, her eyes found only empty air. Perhaps the demon didn't even have a body at all, but Malissa thought he did. If she looked directly at him, she saw nothing, but when she looked away, she sensed a shadowy figure moving in the corner of her eye—a tall, winged form with long horns and gleaming orange eyes.

"This is a trick," she said, her voice trembling. "You're trying to trick me."

The demon purred in amusement.

"Trick you how?"

"As soon as I step into the circle with you… you'll kill me."

"Now that would be foolish. If I kill you, how would you ever free me from my imprisonment?"

"You'll rape me, then. You'll hold me down and have your way with me."

"Why would I rape you when I can have you willingly tomorrow night?"

"Maybe you think I won't come back tomorrow night. Maybe you think I'll change my mind."

When the demon spoke again, his voice was closer. Just on the other side of the invisible barrier. The sound of it sent goosepimples racing over Malissa's skin.

"My little queen," Beliath whispered. "After you taste my kiss, I am certain you will return for more."

The demon's cocksure tone made Malissa surge with a combination of anger and arousal. Her body throbbed in all the right and wrong places.

"You really think you're that good?" she said.

It was only after the words had left her tongue that she realized what she was doing. She was taunting the demon, provoking him.

Heavenly Creator, what was the matter with her?

"Tell me something, Malissa," the demon said. "How many men have you kissed?"

"More than I can remember," she lied.

In truth, the number was easy to remember. It was two. The first had been when she was fifteen, during the Feast of the Winter Solstice. The son of a visiting lord had stolen a kiss from her while the grownups were all too drunk on mulled wine to notice or to care.

The second had been her husband, the king.

Wulfgang had kissed her once at their wedding, and never again. Their nocturnal couplings had always been straightforward, workmanlike affairs—cold, kissless, and mercifully brief.

Beliath laughed softly.

"I promise you, woman: my kiss will make you forget all the rest. You will beg me for more."

Malissa's heart fired with anger, but she did her best not to let her feelings show. She could see what the demon was trying to do. He was tempting her and provoking her all at the same time. He was trying to make her step into the circle to prove him wrong—and to prove him right. Either way, it was a trick, and Malissa knew it.

And yet…

She wanted to step inside the circle with him.

She wasn't sure exactly why. She knew it was a terrible risk and foolish beyond belief, but she couldn't deny the little voice inside her, urging her to step over the line and enter the demon's domain. She knew she would be surrendering her power as soon as she did so, but that only excited her more.

She'd always been that way.

Once, when she was just a little girl, her father had hosted a band of traveling entertainers at his castle. There had been bards and dancers, clowns and conjurers—and most interesting of all, an animal tamer with a trained bear. The creature was smaller than Malissa had expected a bear to be, and it hadn't seemed very savage. Mostly it had just seemed sad. Still, it had worn a leather muzzle over its snout, so Malissa had guessed it still had some wildness in it which the animal tamer had not been able to train out.

When no one was looking, she had tried to unfasten the bear's muzzle.

The tamer had stopped her at the last moment, and her father had scolded her fiercely in front of everybody. Why would you do such a thing , he'd asked her. Why?

Little Malissa hadn't really had a good answer for that. Maybe she'd felt sorry for the bear, who looked so sad and scruffy. Maybe she'd thought he was just a silly, lumbering pet who wouldn't do anybody any harm.

Or maybe, just maybe, she'd wanted to see what would happen when the muzzle came off.

It wasn't the only time her curiosity had gotten her in trouble, but it was the one that jumped into her mind now as she stood trembling at the edge of the darkstone ring.

"If I step inside with you," she said, "and you hurt me—even a little—I will never set you free."

"I won't hurt you," Beliath said. "I promise ."

A demon's promise. How much was that worth?

At least as much as the promise of a man.

Malissa took a breath to try and steady her nerves, but it didn't help. Her heart was knocking inside her like a fist beating frantically against a wooden door. Her legs felt weak and weightless under her. She was starting to sweat.

She took a step forward. Then another. Her foot was on the soft grass between two of the standing stones, neither within the ring nor without.

She took a final step.

She was inside.

The air around her was deathly quiet. Nothing stirred. Even Malissa's own breathing sounded distant and dull, as if she had entered a dead space cut off from the rest of the physical world. The five candles flickered around her. Shadows danced.

"Beliath?" she whispered.

For a long moment, nothing happened, and Malissa wondered again if she had gone mad. Had it been nothing more than a waking dream? The voice speaking to her out of thin air. The malefic presence. The great, horned shape she had glimpsed moving in the corner of her vision. Had it all been a figment of her overactive imagination?

Then the demon's hands were on her. She couldn't see them, but she could feel them clamped around her upper arms, as solid as the hands of any man, but twice as large, and twice as warm. The tips of the fingers were adorned with claws.

Those unseen hands dragged her forward roughly, and her naked breasts flattened as they met an unyielding wall of invisible muscle. A male member, huge and upright with arousal, pressed against her abdomen. If she had looked down, she would have seen its hard imprint in her soft flesh.

But she didn't look down.

She looked up.

Up at the pair of orange eyes hovering in the air above her. Gleaming eyes with slitted pupils, like the eyes of a cat or a serpent, or some other creature that ambushes its prey.

This was no dream, she realized. This was real. This was happening.

The demon had her.