Free Demon Possessed by Stacia Kane

of any other way to put it, and it didn’t matter anyway. He filled her with power, with light, with something that made her want to laugh and cry at the same time.
     
    He let go of her and clutched at his chest; she felt him trying to expel her energy weapon, her psychic blade that was still embedded in him. Felt him grow weak. Watched him fall to his knees as she spun away from him on nimble feet. The height of the roof seemed to be nothing at all. The stars above shone down just for her, blessing her, as she filled herself with him and he crumpled closer to the edge of the roof—
     
    He was going to fall. Because she was stealing his life.
     
    Horrified, she tried to pull away, but the weapon was too bloated, too pure and full and strong to collapse. Her hands scrabbled at his shoulders, trying to yank him back away from the edge, but he struggled against her as if her touch burned him.
     
    Which it might be doing; her skin glowed where it touched him, and energy pulsed up her arms from him. Feeding her. She was trapped in him, terrified but elated. Terrified because she was elated. It was beautiful and glorious and ecstatic and horrifying, and she gritted her teeth against it and threw everything she could into her shields, envisioning them snapping into place with a thick, heavy clang.
     
    They did. The weapon broke. The man—the witch, whatever he was—gasped and struggled to stand, pushing himself away from her.
     
    Wrong move. He stumbled, pitched forward. And fell over the ledge.
     
    He didn’t scream as he fell.
     

Chapter Eight
    “I have to call—Spud, cut it out, damn it!” She batted his eyeshadow-wielding hand away from her eye and glared at him. The glow from the lights behind him surrounded his cap like a bizarre halo. “It doesn’t matter how I look, because nobody is going to see me but Tera, and even if they do, I was just attacked and almost killed, and I think —maybe I’m crazy—but I think perhaps that gives me license to have smudged mascara!”
     
    “ Bryaela, we can’t—”
     
    “No. No, don’t you dare bryaela me. He almost threw me off the fucking roof, Greyson. And I—I—” Shit. She couldn’t finish the sentence, because it hit her again, the way she’d fed off him, sucked out his energy. The way she’d gloried in it.
     
    “You did what you had to do,” he finished for her. He stood a foot or so away, his arms folded and his brows drawn down, with his hair moving in the breeze. After his initial clutching and holding he’d stepped away, and she was glad. If he’d touched her just then she would have broken down, and she did not want to do that. Not yet. The inner workings of the Vergadering—the witches’ organization, a sort of magical law-enforcement agency, for which Tera worked—were pretty shadowy, but she was pretty sure that she’d need to hold on to as much of that grief and horror as she could for when they showed up.
     
    Just in case it made a difference. She had no idea if it would.
     
    When she didn’t reply, he said it again. “You did what you had to do, Meg. It was you or him. You did the right thing.”
     
    Shit. “I didn’t.”
     
    “You did. If you hadn’t done whatever you did, you’d be dead right now, and I can assure you that would most definitely not be right.”
     
    Without meaning to, she glanced to her left again, at the spot where he’d fallen. She couldn’t seem to stop looking at it; it pulsed in her vision, glowing. “I killed him.”
     
    “And that’s why you’re still here. Look, I don’t mean to be insensitive, but we need to get back down to dinner immediately.”
     
    “I can’t go back down to—Spud, if you come at me with that thing one more time I am going to stick it right up—”
     
    “Spud, why don’t you give us a minute?” Greyson cut in smoothly. “Go wait over there with Malleus.”
     
    Spud looked from him back to her, his heavy features sorrowful like a basset hound’s, before