Demon's Daughter (Demon Outlaws) (10 page)

“Break’s over,” he snarled. “Get back in the saddle.”

Chapter Six

The Godseeker had refused to spend the night under Mamna’s roof, and she had not encouraged him. He had told her, however, that more Godseekers were coming.

Some, she suspected, might already be here.

She had gotten what little information she could from him and he was of no further use to her. She had dropped a few casual remarks about the amulet the old man wore and its abilities, knowing full well that her words would spread. The value of the stone would ensure that the old man’s days in Freetown were numbered. The amulet might alert him to the approach of demons, but offered little protection from mortal thieves.

She had not resolved a problem, merely delayed it, and her broken sleep that night reflected it.

She often dreamed of her time in the goddesses’ temple—a collage of memories of thousands of thoughtless little kindnesses and cruelties—but there was always one particular dream that stood out above all the rest.

The goddesses, unlike their demon counterparts, were few in number, no more than a dozen, and they had grown tired of being relentlessly pursued by them. They had found peace and happiness in the mortal world, and possessed no desire to abandon it or its pleasures.

A question was raised. If mortal women touched by the goddesses became their servants, and mortal men became their slaves, what would happen if a goddess touched a demon?

A goddess might well find a demon as irresistible as he found her. Therefore, Mamna was tasked with watching over the goddess chosen to tempt the Demon Lord. It never occurred to any of them that poor, deformed, homely Mamna might not be able to resist a demon any easier than other, more beautiful mortal women.

It certainly had not occurred to Mamna. But she had fallen in love with the Demon Lord on sight, and his blindness to anyone but the chosen goddess had cut her far worse than any other slight experienced in a lifetime of humiliations. She had wanted to be treated with some of the same gentle kindness he had shown to one of her mistresses. She wanted her own chance to serve him.

Telling him of the goddess’s deception had seemed the perfect opportunity.

He had been waiting for his lover in their usual place on the night Mamna finally gathered her courage to approach him. She kept her head down, her eyes on the cool, dew-dampened grass beneath her bare, misshapen feet.

“You have been betrayed,”
she had said.

At first, the Demon Lord had not believed her.

“Watch and see,”
Mamna declared.
“She will offer you a pendant, a small mountain stone of no obvious beauty or value, with all of the colors of the rainbow. She’ll tell you it’s a symbol of her love for you. She’ll tell you it offers immunity against the goddesses, just as the amulet you gave her protects her from demons. But it is the same stone the goddesses give to their favored mortal men. It is meant to enslave you. It will bind you to her as surely as it binds them.”
Mamna held out her hand, raising her eyes to his. She had a handful of the same colored stones, some set in pendants, others as yet unpolished.
“Have you seen these before?”

She could tell by the look on his face that he had.

Mamna withdrew to a nearby hiding place to watch what happened next. When the goddess had shown up with her offering, the Demon Lord rejected it with such violence that the protection of the amulet he had already given her was all that saved her.

The depth of his anger, however, had set the mountain on fire. Mamna had carried that demon fire onto the sacred ground for him, and the goddesses had fled before it.

All but one.

Any kindness he had shown his lover had not extended beyond that. What he had allowed his army to do to mortal men in the days that followed the departure of the goddesses still made Mamna shudder, even in her dreams.

Betraying immortals, she had discovered, was not for the timid.

Mamna never slept well after the fragments of those memories woke her in sweat-soaked terror, and tonight, when the shaking of the earth began, she was already wide awake.

The protective amulet she wore tucked beneath her nightdress remained silent, but she withdrew it for added reassurance that she was not under demon attack.

She rubbed it between her fingers. Its smoothness was gone. The fine cracks that shattered the desert varnish after she had summoned the demon that afternoon had deepened considerably. Had it lost the last of its power?

Was that what this trembling of the earth signified?

She crawled from the soft, warm depths of her canopied bed and padded across the swaying floor. Thin shafts of moonlight beckoned to her through the slit where the two heavy brocade curtains did not quite meet. She inched the crack wider and peered outside with one eye.

Her bedroom window, crafted from cut glass and exorbitantly expensive, overlooked the manicured garden of one of the many fortified inner compounds designed to keep Freetown’s wealthier inhabitants safe from thieves and murderers.

She pulled back one curtain and tried to see beyond the city’s main walls to the east, where the mountain dominated the horizon, but the night was too dark.

The raised voices of people swarming in the street outside the compound reached her ears. They, too, wondered what the quaking earth signified. The last time, it meant the mountain burned and the goddesses had abandoned them.

The tremors slowly died away. Mamna watched for a long time as the crowds thinned, and eventually, the street emptied.

The earthquake might have something to do with the spawn on the mountain. It might have much to do with her damaged amulet as well. The timing was too much of a coincidence, and Mamna did not believe in coincidences.

She remained at the window for several more hours. When night shifted to morning in an explosion of sunshine, Mamna crawled into her bed to rest and think.

If the Slayer succeeded in bringing the spawn back with him, she now had a problem. She could no longer rely upon her amulet. Therefore, she had no method to control the spawn if he did succeed.

She smoothed the silk pillows. The Slayer quite possibly possessed the only remaining amulet that could be used against demons. He would not give it up willingly. That meant she either had to convince him to control the spawn for her, or she would have to take his amulet from him by force.

…

Hunter and Airie reached the trading post by midmorning. They rode into the main yard of a long, low, weathered building constructed of shaved logs. A creaky, sagging verandah lined with barrels ran its full length.

It was what Hunter would expect to find in a remote location once devastated by fire. The logs for its construction would have been hauled from the far side of the mountain where the fire had not been as rampant.

Here, though, on the westward face of the lower mountain region, signs of the fire remained. Fast-growing thickets of conifers had squeezed out much of the struggling hardwood in the forests, although a few saplings of the hardier varieties had persevered and thrived.

Homesteads were scattered throughout the mountains, so he had not expected to find the trading post completely abandoned. It sat well out of range of any possible landslides from the implosion and would have made a good gathering place. That it was empty indicated that people remembered those terror-filled days of the demon fires and preferred to take their chances in the desert.

A part of him was disappointed to find the trading post empty because he had expected Airie’s appearance to trigger some sort of riot, and at the moment a good fight might be just the thing he needed to burn off some of the frustration he felt.

He entered the low-ceilinged building with caution, Airie behind him, making certain that it was, indeed, abandoned. Only the groan of the floorboards welcomed them.

“Take anything you think we might need,” Hunter said, tossing her a sack from a pile he found beside the counter. He began to fill one of his own.

Airie caught the sack but did not move. “I have no money to pay for what I take. I left everything behind.”

Hunter swept some dried meat from a hook on a rafter and dropped it into his sack. “You’re a thief. This isn’t a good time to develop morals.”

“I am not a thief.”

He stopped with his hand on a jar of preserves. “You tried to rob me.”

“I asked only for what the goddesses demand from anyone who enters the mountain. You aren’t exempt from that law.”

He struggled to be reasonable. “Since the goddesses are gone and you aren’t a priestess, I’d say that does make you a thief.”

Her expression grew cold and remote. “My mother is—was—a priestess and therefore entitled to receive alms. She could no longer collect them herself. I did what had to be done.”

The reference to her mother, reminding him of her loss and her reaction to it, did not improve his mood. She was a thief and a spawn. Those were the two most important things about her he needed to remember, and what silenced his conscience when he thought about her future.

“I’m not getting into a theological argument with you right now,” Hunter said. “Fill that sack, and I’ll leave money on the counter—although chances are good that some person other than the owner will come along and help himself to it first.”

They filled both sacks and Hunter, true to his word, tossed a few coins on the counter. Airie looked at him. Hunter sighed, then placed a few more beside them.

“There. I’ve paid for both of us. To repay me for your share, you can tell me why you didn’t want to be seen here.” He wondered if she would tell him the truth.

Her cheeks turned red, and she avoided meeting his eyes. “There might have been a slight altercation with a few traders. And they might have decided to talk about it.”

Hunter turned that information over carefully in his head. Wild stories of her had already reached Mamna. The fact that Airie reddened as she spoke of this particular incident suggested it had been worse than others.

But it bothered him that she could blush over it, and insist on paying for the goods they were taking, as if she really did know right from wrong. “Do I dare ask about the reason for this altercation?”

“Does a demon need one?” she threw back at him.

He grabbed one bulging sack, slung it over his shoulder, and turned away without another word.

They rode back the way they came, although as soon as they could Hunter intended to leave the common trail and find a place for them to rest. He was beyond tired. His muscles ached and his eyes scratched when he blinked. But he had no intention of being caught asleep by anyone returning to the small mountain outpost once the initial panic wore off.

They left the scarred mountain behind and entered the foothills, where the trail tended to curl around some of the more jagged hills. The forest remained thick, tapering off in the distance where the silver snake of the river and its delta divided the end of the mountain’s foothills from the beginnings of the desert flatlands. The river eventually entered one of the many canyons, where it disappeared into an underground waterway.

Hunter scanned the immediate landscape closely for any signs of those who had fled before them. The indications were there, but they told him that very few of the refugees were traveling together.

“Here,” he said, pulling Sally to a halt and pointing into the forest. “See that little patch of light, way back in there? It’s a clearing. We can make a shelter, and maybe get some sleep before nightfall.” He preferred traveling at night when few others would dare because of the threat of demons.

They dismounted, and as he led Sally through the undergrowth, he took care to erase any traces of their passing.

Airie proved to be an able woodswoman, requiring very little direction, and building a shelter out of spruce boughs and saplings went quickly.

For Hunter, the difficulties arose once the shelter was complete. He had made it big enough for them both because he wasn’t about to let her out of his sight, but how was he supposed to sleep and keep an eye on her as well?

He was not comfortable sleeping with a demon’s spawn at his side, although even he had to admit that a spawn who healed animals was unlikely to pose a threat to a sleeping man. But he also knew the only reason she was with him now was because of the cracking of the mountain and their forced flight.

How, then, did he make certain she was with him when he awoke?

She did not know she was his prisoner, and he had no desire for her to find out just yet. Even though she was spawn, he could not bring himself to tie her up, or to him, which was what he would have done if she had been a man.

Airie tossed down the last armload of sharp-scented spruce boughs and made two separate beds on the floor of the shelter. Hunter unfurled the blankets.

“You aren’t to leave this shelter without me,” he said to her. “It’s too dangerous for a woman alone. We don’t know who else might be around.”

She met his eyes, her response sharp and direct as if she’d read his thoughts. “It’s fortunate, then, that I’m not a real woman.”

“You give enough of the appearance of one for it to be a problem for you.” A sense of wrongdoing on his part, which he did not like, intensified. “But by all means, do as you wish.”