The Demon Creed (A Demon Outlaws Novel) (Entangled Edge) (5 page)

Flames licked at her heels as Willow climbed from the burning jail to freedom. She followed Stone’s trail through the pines.

He could shift individual body parts. That could prove a useful talent to her, after all.

Chapter Three

The stable smelled of warm hross, and grain mixed with molasses.

It was not long past the end of winter and the few bales of dusty hay that remained in the loft were no longer fit for consumption, so Creed cut the twine on one bale and threw it down for bedding. He then fed his hross a liberal amount of feed from the well-stocked bin. Bear might not offer much by way of hospitality to people, but signs indicated he was good to his animals. The other hross in the stable appeared well tended.

Bear’s sand swift, thankfully, did not share a roof with the other animals, but had been turned loose to fend for itself. Creed assumed the creature did not wander far from the ranch, and suspected the reason Bear released it was because it served as an excellent watchdog. That made Creed doubly glad he had gotten an invitation to stay. The thought of a hungry sand swift following his scent in the night held little appeal.

It also meant he was effectively trapped inside the stable until daylight. He hoped to have better luck using compulsion on Bear in the morning. Without the sand swift around, he would not hesitate to use his talents to get the information he required so he could then be on his way. This place disturbed him, leaving him restless.

He was not used to the sensation.

He spread his blankets in an empty stall and dug out some hardtack from one of his packs. It was fully dark outside now. The moon had not yet risen, and the faint light from the tiny windows beneath the rafters of one long wall was inadequate. Even so, he chose not to employ his kerosene lantern. Stable fires were too common. He planned to spend his time sleeping.

His thoughts returned to the pretty, timid young woman and the possible reasons why she had been eavesdropping on his conversation with Bear, and could only reach one conclusion. The child had to be hers. That was all he could think of that would make her so bold, because in every other respect, she gave off an air of the utterly defeated.

Raven would despise a woman like that.

Creed did not often think of his sister these days. Leaving her had been the hardest thing he’d ever done, but the moment he’d met Blade, he had known that disengaging himself from her life was the right thing to do. The former assassin might have his hands full with her, but he would protect her in a way Creed could no longer do. She’d needed more. And Raven, for her part, would tear the soul from anyone who tried to harm Blade.

The two women could not be more unlike, and yet in their own way, each was equally vulnerable.

He wondered why Bear would sell off his son when it was obvious not only could he afford to keep him, but someday soon would have need of the cheap labor he would have provided.

A faint scraping noise at the front of the stable had Creed sitting upright, instantly alert. The door inched slowly back, and a thin stream of pale yellow light crept inside.

When he saw who it was, Creed could not have been more surprised. She had made it clear he frightened her to the point of incapacity.

She juggled a lantern and a large basket as she wrestled with the door. Creed took swift advantage of her distraction, and was out of the stall and across the stable in an instant to help her. He took the basket from her hand and manipulated the door, pushing it wider on its runners to let her inside before drawing it shut again behind her.

She turned her face toward the closed-off escape route, and Creed saw that he frightened her still. He put as much reassurance as he could into his manner.

“There’s a sand swift roaming free,” he said. “I’d prefer it to stay out there.”

She made an excellent attempt to return his smile. “It’s been trained to leave me alone, but I still run when I see it coming if Bear’s not around.”

Creed doubted if running would save her. Sand swifts were faster than they looked, especially when hunting, but at least she did not simply stand and do nothing to try and save herself.

“Grab a rock or whatever is handy and hit it on the snout,” he advised her. “But avoid its tongue if you can.” A sand swift’s tongue, meant to capture prey, was covered in coarse buds that could tear a woman’s delicate flesh to shreds with one flick. He looked at the basket. An enticing aroma of cooked kyson meat and vegetables wafted from it, and the hardtack he’d been planning to eat no longer held much appeal. He hefted the basket. “Is this for me?”

“Bear told me to bring you some dinner. It’s stew,” she added.

She exuded waves of discomfort at being alone with him. She shifted her eyes to the closed door, and Creed wondered why she did not leave now that the meal had been delivered.

He wondered, too, why Bear had really sent her. He was not the type of man to be concerned over the welfare of an unwelcome guest. The odds were good that she had been sent to question Creed, and there could be only one way he thought she could get information from him. Although whoring women to guests was a common enough practice, Creed’s distaste for Bear increased. A man should protect a woman under his roof, not place her in a position such as this.

Since she seemed in no hurry to leave, and he thought it likely she might have answers to some of his own questions, he tried to make himself appear as non-threatening to her as possible.

Normally that was not difficult for him to do. This wo-man, however, seemed immune to him. He found that both intriguing and a challenge. If most women loved him, and his intentions toward this one were harmless, why did she continue to shy away from him?

This one’s life was difficult enough without him adding to that. While he would like to question her about her son, he wanted to win her confidence more.

“Thank you,” he said. “Since you know my name, do you mind if I ask for yours?” He sent out a tiny bit of compulsion with the question, although not enough to do more than give her a choice as to her response. She could answer him or not, whichever she preferred.

She bit her lip. “Nieve.”

The name meant
innocent
. He could not imagine a more appropriate one. Except, perhaps, for
Mouse
.

“Well, Nieve. Would you like to sit with me while I eat, so you can take the basket back to the kitchen with you?”

She nodded, her relief at being handed a reasonable excuse to stay palpable, but she had so many other emotions swirling in her that he found them difficult to sift through. Fear was most prevalent. Almost equal was determination.

He dragged two new bales of hay from the loft above for them to sit on, and positioned them so that he faced her. Nieve said nothing as he proceeded to eat the contents of the basket.

He chewed slowly, watching her without appearing to do so. In the light from her lamp, which he’d hung from a hook on a gray-cobwebbed, dusty beam, he saw a darkening bruise spreading, finger-like, across her face. The bruise had not been there earlier.

His grip on the fork he held tightened, and he forced himself to remember that she belonged to another man. He had a duty to uphold the laws of the land, and right now, like it or not, the laws did not favor her. It was incomprehensible to him, though, how Bear could treat a sand swift with more patience and kindness than a fragile, beautiful woman such as this.

“Is it true that the Godseekers are hunting down spawn and putting them to death?” she blurted out, breaking the silence.

Creed, his mouth full of food, took his time to think about that before answering. “Yes and no. It has to be proven they’re half demon, and dangerous,” he replied. “All I’m tasked with is bringing them to justice.”

Nieve looked at her fingers, which she had twisted together in her lap, as she asked her next question. “If you’re seeking spawn, then why are a few missing children of such interest to the Godseekers?”

“It’s a matter of who they belong to that makes them of interest.” And they were not of interest to the Godseekers. Only to Creed.

“Do you believe there’s a connection between spawn and these missing children?”

The deeper Creed investigated the matter, the more certain of that he became, and while he suspected the an-swer, he could not yet say for sure. What he did know was that the questions Nieve asked were of far more importance to her than to Bear. He might have wondered if she had demon in her own background if she were not so meek. He wiped his mouth with a cloth napkin she had provided him, then packed his empty plate and his fork into the basket and closed it.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly, “but I know nothing of your son or what might have happened to him. Bear readily admits to selling him, so he doesn’t fit the same pattern as the others who’ve disappeared. Tell me what Bear sent you to find out from me so I can help you provide him with satisfactory answers.”

Her face crumpled. Enormous tears, captured by the lamplight, tracked like melting diamonds down both of her cheeks.

Creed rubbed the back of his neck, torn between an instinct to offer comfort and use of common sense. With a faint, muttered oath, he crossed the short distance between them to sit at her side. She did not stiffen or pull away, as he’d half-expected and hoped, but lost in some private world of her own, seemed not to notice his presence at all.

She doubled over with her arms clutched tight around her waist and sucked in loud, agonized breaths that shook her slight shoulders. Hair the color of cream spilled from her bent head and over her arm to hide her face from him. Her grief, so enormous and fresh that it hurt him to be this close to her, swept over and around him.

He was at a loss for an explanation for her behavior. Something was not right. Her son had been taken from her a year ago, yet she reacted as if it had happened much more recently than that.

Again, he ran his hand along the back of his neck, and up the smooth lines of the tattoo winding from the nape of his neck to his crown. He was reacting to her as if he had never been this close to a woman before. He tried to imagine her as his sister, and how he would deal with her in this situation, but could not. Raven was fire and passion. She would be plotting a murder, not sobbing as if she had lost all reason to live.

Nieve seemed a broken woman.

Another man’s property or not, Creed could not walk away from this and ignore it. He draped an arm around her and drew her to him so that her cheek rested against his thigh. His other hand stroked the top of her head, his fingers tangling through her soft hair. He was large in comparison to her, and he did not wish for her to be frightened by him again, so he sent a faint tendril of compulsion to belay her fear while he whispered a few nonsensical words of comfort.

It was a long time before her shaking stopped and the sobs died away to become muffled sniffles and sighs. He reached for the basket, on the floor not far from their feet, and pulled it closer. From inside, he retrieved the cloth napkin and used the clean side of it to wipe her face as if she were a child.

Up close in the pale lantern light, even with her bruised face splotched from crying and her eyes red, it was plain she was even lovelier than his first impression of her had intimated. What was equally obvious was that she had no wish to bring any attention to it.

She did not object to him holding her, however, so he did not release her. She shifted her head so her cheek pressed against the front of his shirt. He rested his chin on her crown but otherwise allowed her the freedom to withdraw from his touch whenever she chose. There was very little he could do for her except treat her with kindness, something he was certain she rarely received.

“You have yet to ask me Bear’s questions,” he said to her.

When she answered, she sounded tired. Defeated. “I have nothing more to ask, other than that we sit here like this for a few minutes. That’s all.”

The raw emotions that had bombarded him dissipated, as if she had drawn them back into herself and somehow buried them. In their place ran a thin thread of psychological steel, bent but not yet broken. Perhaps she was not as defeated as he’d thought.

He eased them apart, worried that she would soon grow aware of the awkwardness of their too-familiar position, but she slid her arms around his waist. Instantly, desire for her shot from his groin to his chest. Her action, and his response to it, startled him in equal measure. He blamed it on the compulsion he had extended to her, and worried that this might not be the best time for him to withdraw it. But she could not continue to fear him while he held her, at her own request, when so far he had posed no threat.

She rolled deeper into his arms before lifting her face. Their eyes connected. It seemed he was not the only one equipped with emitting compulsion. He dipped his mouth to hers. She tasted sweet and warm, and made him forget his resolve not to frighten her further. It was as if a switch had gone off in his brain, telling him that she was his and he had to have her.

His mouth moved from hers to the soft curve of her neck. He slid his fingers into the collar of her dress, plucking at the buttons, easing them undone until her breast filled one palm. She let out soft cries of pleasure, her fingers clutching at his arms, her green eyes closed and her head thrown back. Creed carried her from the bale of hay to the stall where he’d spread his blankets. She shivered in his arms, as if suddenly uncertain, and he again sent out a waft of compulsion—not enough to sway her against her wishes, but enough to overcome any fears she might yet entertain. He wanted her, but of her own will, not his.

Certainly not Bear’s.

The thought of the other man made Creed too reckless. The compulsion he discharged became more intense than he’d planned. Nieve’s eyes widened, her small hands tightening on his biceps as he settled her on the blankets beneath him.

It was darker here, and he could not read her expression, but the sudden stiffening in her body, and the heightened caution in her mood, were unmistakable.

She pushed against his chest with both tiny hands, surprisingly strong for such a small woman, and he rolled away, not resisting.

She sat up, drawing the front of her dress together as she scrambled to her feet, then stumbling as the blankets tangled around her. He reached out to steady her, fingers brushing the length of her skirt, but she swept it out of his reach.