Free Demon's Kiss by Eve Silver

wet, fluid building in his lungs as his heart slowly gave way, its pumping action growing ever weaker. He coughed again, and his body convulsed as though he was in great pain.
    “Water.” Clea leaped from the chair, took a step forward, her face a mask of concern. “Would you like some water?”
    Compassion flowed from her, and Ciarran wondered at her willingness to be kind to a man who had brought her destruction to her. Matthew was the one who had obeyed the demon, who had brought it into Clea’s life. And Ciarran had no doubt that she knew it. Yet she was not immune to the man’s suffering, willing to ease it despite what he had done.
    He was not certain how he felt about that. Perhaps a little awed.
    “No. No water.” Matthew raised one hand weakly, then let it fall back against the coverlet. “I’m fine. Fine.”
    After a moment, he slowly raised his head and stared at himself in the mirror that hung across from the bed, above the cheap pasteboard dresser. “Not three hours ago, I looked as young as you, sorcerer.” With a wheezing sigh, he fell back against the mattress, his reserves depleted.
    “Appearances can be deceiving.” Ciarran smiled grimly in acknowledgment of the dark, bitter venom, the putrid rot that ate away at him from the inside out. Only he knew the strength of the darkness that was his daily battle. Not even his comrades, the Compact of Sorcerers, knew the worst of it.
    “Hnn.” Matthew nodded. “So it is gone? Killed?”
    “Your demon is terminated, bound to you no longer.”
    “And so I am free. I knew it. Sensed the very instant it was gone.” Matthew looked at Clea, pausing to take a rasping breath. His words were punctuated by shallow gasps for air. “You are the woman from the motel. I wanted a room. And the demon wanted you.”
    “I know,” she whispered. “I found that out pretty quickly.”
    “I tried to lock it in until I could get to the city, to an alley. Let it feed on a pimp or a murderer.” He paused, sucked in a rattling gasp of air, and when he spoke, his voice was faint and labored. “I couldn’t stop it, not completely, but over the years I gained some knowledge, learned how to cast wards. In a room with a lock.”
    As though reminding her that she had turned him away, he nodded at Clea. “I had some say in its prey, and I tried to make it choose where I willed it.”
    The man’s voice was so faint as to be almost inaudible. Ciarran leaned closer. “The demon broke from me tonight, proving that I had deceived myself. So long as I was close enough to maintain the link, it could move from my side. I had no power over it, no true influence.” Labored breath, a rattling whisper. “It only chose to let me believe I did. Until tonight. Tonight its lust for her was stronger than its desire to trick me.” He paused, made an obvious effort to rally his strength. “I am glad she is unharmed.”
    “As am I.” Ciarran’s gaze strayed to Clea, his gut wrenching at the thought of what might have been had the demon succeeded in capturing her. He slapped back the unfamiliar intensity of the emotion. He should have long ago stopped feeling anything. A soldier. A killer. He was an instrument in a battle between dimensions. Nothing more. And if he told himself that often enough, maybe someday it would be true.
    He had never learned to stop caring altogether. Every death, every moment of grief that he sensed in the humans he protected, rubbed his senses like pumice rock. But this, this inexplicable anger, this feeling of utter rage at the thought of the slightest harm befalling Clea Masters, this was outside his experience.
    My Clea, he thought. And the darkness inside him shifted restlessly, as though it, too, laid claim to her. An unsettling thought.
    “I wanted to die the day after I summoned it,” Matthew said, his voice thin and reedy. “You know, it was true to its word. It promised to take away the diphtheria, to save my wife. And it did. She got up from