That was what stopped her. She did not want people to think of her as demon spawn. She did not want to be hunted, nor for Justice to be proven right in anyone’s eyes. She had to find another way to escape.
And when she did, she would kill him.
“There are some who suspect you for what you are,” she said in return. “Are you so confident of what I am? If I do burn, more will begin to doubt you. They will watch you.” Her glance flickered to the amulet he wore around his throat. “And eventually, when the goddesses fail to return, no matter how many so-called spawn you torture and kill in their name, the people will turn from you.”
Justice hooked the wooden jailor’s chair with his foot and swung it around, favoring his injured leg, then sat with his arms folded across the chair’s spindled back as if he had all the time in the world. He planted his chin on the crook of one elbow and studied her.
She had never fully understood the way he watched her until a few short nights ago. Now, she read raw hunger in his expression and thoughts. Her dinner rebelled at the memory of his touch on her bare flesh.
“It seems people have already turned from you,” he observed.
He, too, spoke the truth. Raven had not believed that people she’d known her whole life would not speak out against his plan. She had hoped they would see the wrongness of it long before now. Sundown, however, had already passed.
Despair settled in with the night. No one had come to her rescue. Creed, her best hope, was in training at the Temple of Immortal Right and oblivious to her situation. She had only herself now. But that meant releasing a dark and dangerous presence inside her she had never before allowed to be free. There would be no turning back from it if she did.
The ugliness of her stepfather’s thoughts decided it for her, though. She would not burn, and she would not live in fear. She would not be broken by him as her mother was.
She would save herself.
She wore the same dress he’d deemed indecent two nights prior when the nightmare began. Tracing a finger along its prim neckline, she let her eyelids droop to examine him from beneath a dark fringe of thick, curling lashes. Her golden-toned skin gleamed in the lamplight as she pressed against the bars of the cell.
Justice swallowed, then with unsteady fingers, gripped the amulet he wore around his neck. Once, a long time ago, he had been a goddess’s favorite. The amulet she’d given him protected him from the seduction of another immortal and warned him when he was in the presence of a full-blooded demon.
But it did nothing to protect Raven from him.
“Whore,” he spat at her. With that single utterance, she knew she had lost.
“Enjoy your final moments of glory,” she said, dropping her hand to her side. “Women can’t all be whores and spawn, and Faith will not remain silent forever. Not after tonight.”
It had been a wild guess on her part, based on what she’d read of his ugliest desires, but her words struck home. His face reddened, then paled. Fear flamed in her chest—not for herself, but for the frail, timid woman she had named.
What had she done?
“Undertaker!” Justice shouted, half turning toward the door. It opened at once, and a tall, gaunt man stuck his head into the room. “It is time.”
Raven watched her stepfather lift a heavy black key from a hook on the wall behind the desk, then move to insert it in the lock on the cell door. She held her breath, waiting for the right moment to strike.
Justice drew his hand back without unlocking the cell door and regarded her thoughtfully. He turned to the battered desk, then rooted around in a drawer. He hauled out a shining pair of handcuffs crafted from a silver metal that had been mined in the nearby mountains and hardened with a special alloy. “Hold out your hands.”
She did not want to be bound. “No.”
“If you do not”—his tone was harsh and deliberate, his eyes hard—“I will burn the jail down around you.”
She felt the truth in him. He would do it. Stunned into obedience, she held out her hands, and he snapped the cuffs in place. Then, he opened the cell door.
Undertaker reached in to capture her arm.
“Don’t touch her!” Justice snapped, slapping the other man’s hand aside. Undertaker turned to him, his bushy black eyebrows raised in silent surprise. “She’s a spawn. If you touch her, she can claim you.”
The lie came so easily to him.
And yet, it was not quite a lie. Raven could not claim a man, but she could cloud his thoughts long enough to defend herself from him. Justice had the knife wound in his leg to prove it.
“Ask him how he knows that,” she said to Undertaker, her gaze never leaving her stepfather. “Ask him how he touched me and for what purpose.”
Justice slapped her hard across the face, and her head snapped back. Pain blossomed as the world darkened.
“You disrespect your mother’s memory when you speak like this. Columbine was an innocent, lured by a demon—just as you tried to lure me. She raised you to be better.”
Raven’s eyes watered, the pain now more than physical, but she refused to shed tears. He had not married her mother out of love or respect for her innocence. She had been a beautiful woman, a master artisan, and an asset for him to own, nothing more. And he had destroyed her.
Raven touched the back of one shackled wrist to the corner of her mouth and wiped away a trickle of blood. It left a dark smear on her skin in the fading light. Undertaker had given her candy when she’d been a child, yet now he’d neither made a move to protect her from Justice’s blow nor uttered one word of protest against it. Pity for him displaced the hurt in her heart. He was simpleminded and easily led. She read no malice toward her on his part.
Her chin went up, and she gazed steadily at both men. “There is no need for either of you to touch me. I will walk on my own.” She displayed all the dignity she possessed as she crossed the small jailhouse and stepped into the cool embrace of the night.
Inside, she was shaking with anger. She did not want to die. But living would come at a heavy price she had no wish to pay.
…
He had been wrong. No celebration was planned in Goldrush.
With his angular face freshly shaven, his shoulder-grazing black hair damp and tied back with a worn leather thong, Blade noticed the increased activity in the dusty, darkening street the instant he stepped from the bathhouse.
He’d bought a change of clothes to wear, leaving what he already owned to be laundered at the rooming house where he’d rented the night’s lodgings. A wool-lined coat of soft, supple leather fell to his hips, allowing for easy access to his knives. It was his one major investment against the cold that ruled the mountains.
While he was happy to be clean again, he disliked the feel of his knives in their new and unfamiliar hiding places. He especially disliked it now, when night was falling and people had gathered in tight little groups, their hushed voices filled with unmistakable tension.
Years of training—received long ago but never forgotten—had him react to it out of instinct. He inched the knife in his sleeve closer to his palm as he pressed deeper into the shadows. Invisibility was an assassin’s greatest weapon.
He eavesdropped on the conversation of three men who were standing around the corner of the building from him, on the street.
“She’s always been strange.”
“Perhaps,” a second conceded. “But being strange does not make her spawn.”
Blade’s interest spiked. The goddesses had disappeared from the world nearly thirty years before. More recently, demons had been scoured from the earth. During the years in between, the shape-shifting demons had ruled the desert, luring mortal women to them for pleasure. Half-demon spawn, like their fathers, were male—monsters born in demon form to mortal mothers who had not survived their delivery. Demons, in turn, killed spawn at birth. Blade knew of only one true, living female spawn in existence—and her mother had been a goddess, not a mortal woman.