Free Seduced by Shadows by Jessa Slade Page B

No, why would you? It was an ancient naval weapon, like a gangplank with a sharp tooth on the end. The Romans dropped the corvus on enemy ships, which allowed their soldiers to rush across the bridge.” At the dealer’s silent confusion, Corvus rubbed wearily at his eyes. “I am a bridge, my friend.”
    The dealer nodded. “You giving everybody a free taste, then they come to you.”
    “A taste of freedom, yes, then they will come to me.”
    The dealer looked crafty. “If you’re just the bridge for
sol, what’re your masters gonna want at the other end? I ain’t paying twice.”
    Corvus smiled thinly. “You are wiser than I thought. Let us just say, the masters have more pressing concerns. But you, my friend, needn’t pay them anything more. And I will take my reward in the hereafter.”
    “You sure sound like a priest.”
    Corvus inclined his head. “Perhaps in a manner of speaking.”
    He sent the dealer away on a drifting tide of weakness like a plague ship. Corvus patted the remaining satchels. Two more vessels yet to be launched into the night.
    In all his centuries, only recently had enough devotees of doom perceived the freedom he had sought for so long. The Worm thought his formula was the catalyst. But the hunger had come first. That emptiness had drawn the demon through the Veil, leaving the wound through which the rest would follow. And that craving would never be assuaged until the world’s isolation was ended, until heaven and hell collided.
    At the mouth of an alley, a few misshapen hulks, lured by their smaller brethren’s littered feast of soul, drew back to let Corvus pass.
    “Peace,” he whispered. “There will be more soon. Many more.”
    Awareness crept back like dawn’s faint light. Sera smelled leather and wool and something wilder. Once again, the dream hadn’t quite gotten to the point where she had sex with Archer since they were interrupted by . . .
    As if someone had booted the sun in the ass, consciousness came blazing back. Sera jolted upright on the unfamiliar couch.
    Across from her, Archer straddled a hard-backed chair. “Back with the living.”

    She remembered the eerie wail, the black monstrosity, Archer’s lips on hers. It seemed more like a dream than life.
    “Where are we?” She swallowed against the dryness in her throat. “What was that thing?”
    “We’re at a safe house. And that thing was a feralis. A lesser demon from the horde-tenebrae.”
    “If that was less, I’d hate to see more.”
    He made a noncommittal noise and pushed to his feet, spinning the chair to face her properly, as if he no longer needed its shield.
    She shook her head at the strange fancy. She’d been unconscious. Why would he need a shield from her?
    She tracked his path across the industrial warehouse- cum-upscale loft—spare and unpolished, just like him. “This is your place, isn’t it?”
    “It’s both. Safe and mine.” In the foyer, he tapped at the keypad. Lamps came on around the room, though the disconnected pools of light hardly brightened the darkness.
    She pictured vignettes of his life in the isolated circles. The low couch of leather and steel where she was still half reclining under a wool blanket. A computer workstation against one brick wall. A weight bench on the only rug softening the concrete floor. A kitchenette with one white coffee cup turned upside down on the rack beside the sink. Shielding the bed, a freestanding accordion of white plantation shutters, as if a chunk of destroyed Tara had landed in Chicago.
    She slanted a glance at him. “So I take it demon-ridden don’t have girlfriends. Or interior decorators.”
    He gazed impassively around the room. “Do I need one?”
    “Decorator? Or girlfriend?”
    “You tell me.”
    Suddenly, lying unconscious in a strange place seemed
safer than sparring with him—definitely safer than remembering that kiss, the rough silk of his mouth, and the raw grind of his body. . . .
    She swung her feet to the bare