Desire Unchained

“Where have you been?” Wraith crossed his thick arms over his chest, obscuring the raunchy phrase on his T-shirt. “We know you were in pain, and we know you were shielded.”


“Shielded? Yeah, I guess that makes sense. I couldn’t feel you. Wondered why you guys didn’t come rescue me.” Roag would have been smart enough to install a damping spell around his castle to keep demons inside from sending out telepathic pleas for help, as well as to weaken the waves of misery that would be felt by those sensitive to it.

“Wraith nearly came out of his skin, he was so stressed.” E made it sound like he hadn’t worried, but the puffy shadows beneath his brother’s bloodshot eyes said otherwise. “Everyone here was worried about you and Skulk.” His voice lowered. “She is okay, right?”

“No.” Shade’s chest tightened around the empty hole Skulk’s death had left. “The ambulance run we went on was a trap. Skulk and I were taken by Ghouls.”

The temperature in the room plummeted as his brothers went dead still.

“Skulk?” E’s voice was barely a whisper.

Shade couldn’t say it. Not with the way his throat had closed up.

“Ah, fuck,” Wraith rasped.

Eidolon said nothing, merely closed his eyes and hung his head. He’d be offering up a prayer in the tradition of his Justice demon upbringing, a prayer asking for fair judgment of her soul and a satisfactory return to a new physical body.

Shade, whose religious upbringing had been less fundamentalist than Eidolon’s, wasn’t sure what to believe about the state of Skulk’s soul, but like many demons, humans, and vamps, Wraith didn’t pray to anyone or anything, and curses began to fall from his mouth, nasty invective in several different human and demon languages.

“I’ll kill the bastard who did it, Shade. I swear to you, I will mount his head in the specimen room.”

More curses spilled from him as his rage gathered. Wraith had two switches—I-don’t-give-a-fuck and I’m-going-to-kill-something—and any intense emotion threw one of them.

A voice screamed inside Shade’s head—Roag’s crackling, hoarse words saying that Wraith had been his target, not Skulk. “We’ve got to find him first.” He patted his shirt out of habit, seeking a pack of gum.

“Tell us everything,” Eidolon said, and Shade braced himself for their reactions.

“I woke up in a dungeon. Runa was with me.”

Wraith scowled. “Runa? That human you were boning last year?”

“Yeah. She’s not so human anymore. And now I’m bonded to her.”

“Why? How?”

This was so humiliating. “We were forced into it. By someone who knew about my curse. Someone who wants us all to suffer.” He patted his shirt again. First chance he got, he was putting in an order for a damned vending machine in this place.

“It was a vampire, wasn’t it?” Wraith asked.

It was a logical conclusion, given what had gone down between vamps and Seminus demons thanks to their father’s insane indiscretion. The vampires considered what he’d done to be the worst kind of offense, and Shade had to agree. What kind of sick bastard raped a woman during the transition between human and vampire, impregnated her, and then used his gift—the same gift Shade had—to keep her body alive so the fetus would grow, until she gave birth? He’d violated her repeatedly during her pregnancy and kept her in what had to have been a hellish stasis, not quite human, not yet vampire.

Not surprisingly, the female had gone mad, and Wraith had paid the price. Eventually, so had their father, once the vamps caught up to him.

“I wish the fiend responsible was a vampire.” He realized his hand was still at his chest, but he was rubbing it instead of patting for gum. The hole Skulk had left hurt, and talking about it only made it ache more. “It was Roag.”

Wraith’s eyes narrowed, and he waved a hand in front of Shade’s face. “E? Did you order a CT scan? Did he hit his head?”

Shade swatted his brother’s hand away. “Roag lives. And he’s more twisted than ever. He’s been behind the black market operation for the last couple of years.”

Eidolon went taut, his expression haunted. Wraith took a second longer to absorb the announcement, but when he did … shit. Shade had never seen his brother go so deathly white.

“Not funny, Shade.” Wraith’s voice was a harsh growl. “Not. Fucking. Funny.”

“Do you see me laughing?” Shade exhaled slowly, needing a moment to make sure he could keep his shit together, mainly because as unstable as Wraith was on a good day, this could get real ugly, real fast. “Roag survived the fire. I don’t know how. He’s damaged—skin like beef jerky, no nose, missing half his fingers.”

Eidolon, ever the logical one, shook his head. “We felt him die. We’d feel him if he was alive.”