My Darkest Passion
Addison O’Henry has no idea magic is real or that the fragile peace between the magekind—humans who can use magic—and demons is about to shatter. All that changes the day she’s abducted by one of the magekind. After a ritual murder goes horribly wrong, Addison ends up with demon-sourced magic that nearly kills her. But for the intervention of demon Harsh Marit, she might not have survived. Though Harsh does what he can to help her return to what used to be normal, they both know her life will never be the same.
With corrupt mages threatening them both, her honor requires her to help Harsh and the demon warlord he serves. If that means accepting her power and the high rank it confers on her, so be it. Now her once distant relationship with Harsh turns hot and immediate as the two of them explore the dark passion of a forbidden relationship.
My Darkest Passion
is Book 5 in the
My Immortals Series
, set in a world where demons are real and the people who have used magic to protect innocent humans aren’ always in the right. You can find a list of the books in the series
here (in this eBook)
.
A
ddison stood up when she heard a car stop on the gravel driveway. Sweat trickled down her spine. She breathed through her mouth because the air was so thick with heat and humidity she could taste the stink. Even so, the skin along her arms and the back of her neck rippled and goose-pimpled as if an arctic wind had penetrated the walls that confined her
Since the only movement of air in her ten-by-ten prison came from the heat radiating from the floor, she had to wonder if the reaction might be a symptom of heat stroke.
Her legs wobbled, and for a couple of seconds she expected to collapse again. She didn’t. She shuffled forward to sneak a look out the window. Lucky her, she had a prime view of the car and the two men who got out. By now she’d guessed enough about the people who’d locked her in here that she figured the two men weren’t any more human than the others. They didn’t mean her any good, either. Why would they?
The shed she was trapped in was fifteen or twenty feet from where they’d parked and in direct sun. For the next four hours it would only get hotter inside and out. She knew that because she’d been stuck in here for at least three days. Might be only two. Could be four. She was losing track. There was no water. No food. No furniture. No toilet.
Naturally, she’d tried to escape, but every time she touched the door the resulting shock sent her crashing against the opposite wall. No matter how hard she hit the ramshackle walls, they never broke. Same thing if she tried to open the window. Or break it. Or pry up a floorboard or punch through the ceiling.
She didn’t want to risk another of those full-body shocks, so she kept her distance from the window while she watched the two men. Both were tall and fit. One of them was dark-haired with brown skin that announced he wasn’t from Anglo-Saxon stock. The other one was at least mixed ethnicity. He had hair just short of blond.
The darker man had gotten out of the driver’s seat, and now he stood by the car, within spitting distance of her. He pressed his key fob. The cherry-red Mercedes chirped in response. In twenty minutes, the inside of that car was going to be an oven.
That invisible arctic wind danced along her skin even as she breathed in hot, suffocating air. The darker man wore shiny shoes and a suit and tie, and he held himself like someone who knew he could beat the crap out of anyone who looked at him crosswise. He dropped the fob into his pocket.
When his companion walked around the car to the driver’s side, she could see he was as casually dressed as the car’s driver was formal. His jeans were ragged at the knees, his tee-shirt was faded to a shadow of its original blue, and his tan shoes were battered. He looked as if he’d enjoy any and every opportunity to be mean. She didn’t like his looks. At all.
Another ripple of awareness shuddered through her. She no longer believed she was imagining it. Whoever those men were, they set off a physical reaction in her that threatened to shake her apart; a reaction that had begun before she heard the car.
Her body had become alien to her the minute she lost control over what happened to her. Not just her body. Forces she didn’t understand ruled her new reality. She’d been changed against her will and there was no one to tell her how to deal with what she was now.
She resisted the urge to step away from the window, but there was no holding off the apprehension that curled in her stomach. She knew, without understanding why, that the man in jeans was the source of that new and deeper dread. He looked young, her age. Early twenties for sure.
The dark-haired man might be late twenties, maybe early thirties. Mere surface, of course, because they were passing for human right now. If she was right about what she’d figured out on her own—from words overheard, actions observed, knowledge that seemed to have been injected into her with no context—they could be thousands of years old.
Every moment since she’d been abducted to right now had reduced her to a set of survival instincts that qualified as insane. She had no idea how to get back to normal when everything that happened here was so emphatically real.
The man responsible for all this controlled demons who did his bidding. Demons. Creatures who didn’t always look human and who could take over your will. She’d tried refusing to believe, and for that she’d damn near died. Not believing had ended up with her here. Trapped. A prisoner. Dying by the hour. Watching two strangers she knew were demons.
The two stood by the car, and she was convinced they were taking defensive stock of the surroundings. They did not look comfortable. Maybe they weren’t friends of her captors? She pushed away the surge of hope. No one was going to rescue her. Nobody but her captors knew she was here. Still, if the newcomers caused a commotion, maybe she could get away. Somehow.
The men scanned the outbuildings: stables, the falling-down chicken coops, kennels, the barn. The tumble-down 1850s-era house and what had been, back in the day, the bunkhouse for a working dairy. She didn’t know much about where she was except the obvious. She was in the middle of nowhere.
Her spine turned to ice as, very slowly, the younger-looking of the men faced the shed. No man as heartstoppingly gorgeous as he was should feel that evil. But he did. The danger rolled toward her in a stomach-turning wave. The other man turned, too, and his face was a whole other kind of gorgeous. Indian. Not Native American, but Indian from India. She felt that beauty in her bones, and it terrified her, as unwelcome as it was perverted to be attracted to creatures that weren’t even human. But that was the whole point, wasn’t it?
They saw her. Staring out the window at them. She stayed where she was, her skin practically leaping off her body. These…creatures didn’t like to be challenged. They took staring as a challenge. The sick thing was, part of her wanted to challenge them. Even the two newcomers. Especially them. She didn’t just want to win, she needed to win.
A whirlpool of energy formed in her chest and spread outward, roaring through her with hurricane force. The last time that happened, five of those things out there had ended up dead.
The temperature in the shed reached the point where the heat seared her nose and throat and burned in her lungs. They’d done something to the structure she was in, the mage and his demon slaves, that kept her inside these flimsy, rotting walls. The power coiled in her wanted out; it whispered to her like a lover. She could blast everything around her to atoms, except if she did, whatever they’d done to trap her here would either kill her or make her wish it had. A hard lesson painfully learned.
Now that the men were facing her head on, she could see the color of their eyes, too. Normal for now. Demons, she’d learned, when they weren’t pretending to be human, had eyes that changed colors, whirling specks of otherworldly colors. They were passing right now. The younger one had light brown eyes, golden, really. The older man’s ink-black eyes made him look like his thoughts weighed on him. That bit of anthropomorphism was likely to get her killed faster than the heat. His gorgeous physical appearance was nothing but an illusion. He wasn’t human.
Her biggest lesson, the one burned into her marrow, was that his kind didn’t give a shit whether she lived or died.
She didn’t doubt for a second that they’d been brought here to kill her.
H
arsh walked out of the main house and stood at the bottom of the steps, head tipped to the sky. Not a cloud in sight and not even a hint of fog yet. He was rarely comfortable when he visited what he considered unfriendly locations and this place was exceptionally unfriendly.
Another ripple of awareness slid down his spine, as malign as anything he’d felt in his life. The sense of something not right hadn’t let up once since he and Kynan got out of the car. Whatever that goddamned mage Infante had going here, it was wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. He was fast approaching the point where he was done asking questions and waiting for answers.
No, this encounter was not going well. At all. His dislike of what he’d seen so far pushed him in the direction of precipitous action. Decisions made in the heat of emotion were rarely wise, but Giuseppe Infante set his teeth on edge. Not just Infante, but Infante and this entire compound.
Kynan joined him. Unlike Harsh, he didn’t bother admiring the scenery. Kynan Aijan was all about violence as a way to remind others of their character flaws. He didn’t believe in half-measures or interim steps, so Harsh was prepared for attitude from him. He got it.
“There’s no point working with this asshole.”
“He’s a mage.” A human who could do magic. Most humans with magical ability didn’t understand what they were, but some, like Infante, did. They studied the art. Honed their skills. They believed they had a sacred calling to protect innocent humans from demons. Like him. Like Kynan Aijan.
“Fucking mages,” Kynan said.
The landscape was a deceptively bland palette of browns and greens because it was October and there hadn’t yet been enough rain to turn the hills green. In this part of California, October weather was often hot, as it was today. Most of the vegetation was the color of sand, or was faintly reddish, and set amid the dusty green of some hardscrabble plant that thrived in the salty air. To the east, the hills behind the compound were the gentle, rolling sort. There wasn’t a house in sight besides the one they’d just walked out of. “He has a legitimate complaint.”
“I have a complaint about him.” Kynan wasn’t shy with his opinions about anything. “He has a house full of magehelds.”
“That will be addressed in due course.” Times like this he hated politics. He truly did. He and Kynan were sworn to the demon warlord Nikodemus, and Nikodemus wanted peace, and if not peace, then a truce. Part of Harsh’s job was to broker a detente between the magekind and the demonkind—the kin, as they called themselves.
“We ought to call in a crew and fucking enforce the rules right now. Strip him of his magehelds, sic Paisley on his sorry ass, and send in Leonidas to do some reeducation.”
As usual, Kynan was morally right and politically wrong. Harsh’s own opinion was that the politics were bullshit. Utter bullshit. The longer he had to play this game, the more he wanted to institute the nuclear option. He sighed and glanced at Kynan. A year ago, the warlord couldn’t have been trusted on this excursion. A year ago Harsh would have refused to bring him. “Giuseppe Infante has friends in high places. Let’s not piss him off if it’s not necessary.”
“Fuck Infante, and fuck his friends.” Kynan looked in the direction of that shed.
There was a reason Kynan Aijan, for all that he had more power in his little finger than most of the kin had in their whole bodies, wasn’t leading the negotiations. The problem now was that Harsh didn’t disagree. They ought to level the place and be done with Infante and whatever the hell he had trapped in that shed.
Harsh walked away from the house, west, toward the ocean and the sun, but the slither of foreboding down his spine didn’t stop. That goddamned shed. Still baking in the sun. Recognition of the woman inside zinged through him. Always an unpleasant shock when it hit hard like this. More than human.
The inside of the structure was dark, but he saw enough to know she wasn’t in his line of sight. He moved to change his point of view into the shed. All he saw was more weathered redwood boards. She was in there and had been all day. In this fuck-awful last-gasp of summer heat that wasn’t yet relieved by even a hint of breeze from the ocean.
Kynan followed. “I say we talk to her now.”
He stared at the shed and thought about the woman he’d seen staring out the window at them. She hadn’t looked like a stone-cold killer. But then, neither did Kynan. He didn’t like this. At all. Everything about Infante stank. Everything about his compound felt off. Why would the only thing Infante wasn’t lying about be in that shed? “And ask her what?”