Angie Fox - ADS 03 - A Tale of Two Demon Slayers

“You can’t tell me whether I should be with you. I’m not something you can control. Love isn’t controlled, Lizzie.”

“I just want to have some kind of handle on my life.” I’d had so little of that lately.

“If you’re going to give it up because it doesn’t fit into your idea of the way things ‘should’ be, then you don’t deserve it. But I’ll give it to you anyway, because I love you.”

I choked up and felt the tears, wet and awful on my cheeks. I hated to give this up, hated to lose my control.

But at that moment, I also realized I couldn’t live without him—without this .

It was like when he’d given me the emerald. I had to accept it freely. I never thought of him giving it freely, but the truth of it slammed into me. It was about free choice and acceptance, two things I’d always craved but never truly had in my life to that point.

“I’m sorry,” I managed.

He kissed away my tears, his lips touching my cheeks, my chin. “I don’t want your apology,” he said, his voice like velvet. “I just want you to trust in yourself and your worth.” He pulled away. “My love exists, just like your powers. It’s yours and you have to accept that.”

“I do,” I said, crying, laughing, wrapping my arms around him.

His hands slid down me, held me, drove us together as his mouth seared mine. I poured all my love, my fear, my sheer desire for him into that kiss.

He made a low sound in his chest, base and primitive, as he demanded everything. But that was Dimitri. He gave as much as he took.

And he loved me.

Not because I deserved it, but because it was simply so.

He was hot and slick as I stripped him, easing the black T-shirt over his head, my mouth finding the pulse at the base of his throat.

There was no teasing this time. No pretending we didn’t know exactly where this was going.

We’d torn away our defenses, cast out our pretty notions. What we had left was base desire.

Naked and panting, he took me up against the wall.

He held his body tight, his neck steely tense. His breath came in sharp pants, his eyes glittering shards. I wrapped my legs around him as he drove into me again and again.

Tears streaked down my cheeks at the sheer pleasure of letting go. It was wild and raw and it didn’t fit at all into my view of how things “should” be.

Afterward, as I slid bonelessly down the wall, my mind was more settled than it had ever been.

I ran a hand down his arm and he wound it around me, kissing me on the top of the head.

For as long as I could remember, my life had been a muddle of trying to cover all my bases. I was everything to everyone, with color-coded file folders to prove it.

But at that moment, I saw what it was like to let go and just be .

In that space, I unlocked a part of my power I’d always held back. I hadn’t even known it existed. It was like it was waiting for me to acknowledge it and I never had.

I hadn’t looked because I didn’t trust it.

The enormity of it filled me, and I suddenly saw the thread of myself that had gone missing. It was trapped on the estate, exactly as Amara said.

Only it had taken on a life of its own. The dark-haired woman I’d first spotted in the woods had grown stronger. She was gaining strength with every hour that passed, just as the sisters lost their power.

I gasped and sat up straight. I squeezed my eyes closed. Just like that, I could see it.

She was on the move. She had an entire army behind her, waiting just outside the wards.

I could feel Dimitri’s eyes on me. “What is it?”

“It’s the dark-haired woman.” She ran through the trees, laughing, snapping branches, charging forward. She tilted her head and I choked when I saw her face for the first time.

She looked exactly like me.

I shoved my palms into the rock, elbows shaking as the realization swept over me. “I know who’s been sabotaging the estate.”

Dimitri crouched in front of me. “Who?”

“Me.”

He leaned forward. “Lizzie?”

“Well not me.” Not exactly. “But a mirror of me.” I could feel her, see her. She was growing stronger. “She’s so evil. Whenever I’m in her head, I feel pure hate.”

I leapt to my feet. “That’s who I saw in my dreams stealing from Diana, crushing the Skye stones!” Holy Hades. “How could something so awful come from me?”

“It didn’t,” Dimitri insisted, standing beside me. “This came from me. I didn’t safeguard your magic well enough. God, Lizzie. I’m so sorry.”

I touched his cheek. “I know why you did it.” It was for the same reason he did everything—to keep the people he loved safe.

Well he was going to have a doozy of a time with my double.

“This thing, this evil twin, knows what I know. If I have her thoughts and memories, she has to have mine. She’s done terrible things. And she wants to do worse.”

“She also has switch stars,” Dimitri said, grim.

“What?”

“Five are missing from my supply. They were here last night.”

I shivered. So she had found this place.

“But what does she want?” I searched through my memories of her. What was her ultimate goal? “I need to see her again.”

I closed my eyes and fought to bring the image of her to the surface once more. I could feel her outside in the forest—slinking through the trees, her movements barely a whisper. She was stealthy, at one with the estate. And she was very, very angry. I felt her rage and her suffocating darkness as she rested a steady hand against the five switch stars at her belt.

H-e-double hockey sticks. I didn’t even want to try to imagine what kind of destruction she could wield with a belt load of switch stars, not to mention the rest of my powers.

She’d already hurled a switch star at my head.

“Training’s over,” I said. “We need to find Rachmort.”

He had to have some idea of what had happened to me. He’d been an instructor for hundreds of years.

“This way.” Dimitri turned and roundhouse-kicked a hole into solid limestone wall behind us. I jumped back, my eyes watering from the dust of the impact.

“What the—?” I stared at him. He’d kicked a foot-wide opening in a rock face as thick as my arm. I could taste the broken stone.

“Don’t worry,” he said, his boot coming around and bashing an even wider opening in the rock. “The ceiling is strong here. There’s no danger of a collapse.”

Yeah, that’s not where my mind had been going.

He spun and gave the Lizzie-sized opening a final slam, the muscles in his legs and thighs taut with the effort.

Not to mention his firm backside. “Now you’re just showing off.”

He grinned, breathing heavily. “It might have been quicker to go out the front, but this way”—he reached out and yanked away a few vines that had fallen over the hole—“you get to use your powers.”

“Jesus, Mary, Joseph and the mule.” I poked my head out of the opening. The cliff face fell straight down, at least twenty stories, into a dried-up stream filled with shards of volcanic rock and petrified tree trunks jutting out at odd and rather sharp-looking angles.

“Think of it as a test,” he said behind me.

“One that could turn me into a demon slayer shish kebab. My favorite.” I cocked my head back over my shoulder, ignoring the twinkle in his impossibly green eyes. Um-hum. Green. Not brown anymore. The man was feeling positively devious. “You know most boyfriends like to open car doors or make dinner…you know, do nice things.”

He gave me a smoldering look. “I’m nice.”

My heart sped up. “Oh really?”