Accidentally Married To A Demon - Mila Young Page 0,53

was a blast of light, and it decimated the head and some of the torso of the hellhound, leaving only an exposed ribcage as it dropped to the ground, oozing the same foul blood as the others.

The fae were joining in the fight, I realized. The rest of the town had come, jumping to our aid. Roots were coming out of the ground all over, grabbing and holding the monsters in place, leaving them open to attack, which came in swarms. The hellhounds could take on a single fae at a time, but not all of them attacking at once.

Cretu ran over to where I was still standing, trying to wipe off the black blood that splattered into me.

"Are you all right?" she asked, trying not to look too concerned.

"Yeah, but these clothes are done for, I think," I complained about the most menial things because this was too much and I barely held it together. "How... how did you know that we needed help?"

"The vines told me. They told me everything."

I nodded. "Of course they did."

"You need to have a little more faith in what you can do, young one. Maybe then you wouldn't have needed my help at all."

"People keep telling me that," I whispered, looking around the vineyard. The massacre was mostly finished, leaving all twelve of the hellhounds dead, and almost without pause, the fae started to clear away the bodies, like their very presence was an affront, something unclean.

My attention turned back to Rog, who was leaning against the house, holding to his stomach, where I could see more of the black blood dribbling.

"Shit." I held my finger up to Cretu, who shrugged her shoulders and flipped her graying hair back again. I ran to Rog’s side, my fear battling into me.

"It's nothing serious," Rog told me as I approached him. "Hellhound wounds take a little while to heal and—"

"Shut up, you big baby, and let me take a look at it," I whispered, pulling his shirt up to reveal the wound. It was deep, but not bleeding profusely. I wasn't going to assume that I knew anything about demon anatomy, but if he said that he would be all right, I knew that he was just playing his macho man card.

"Do you know what you're doing?" he asked as I pulled his hand away and replaced it with mine.

"If there's one thing I learned a lot of, it was healing spells," I answered. Not much of an answer, but even with his physiology, I found that it all came back to me a lot easier than I thought it would.

Odd how now that the battle was over, the power was a little easier to gather up and use.

The wound was closed, and I opened my eyes, seeing a black handprint left where the wound had been.

"See?" I said with a small smirk. "I told you I'd find a way to leave a mark that stayed."

"It'll heal over in a few days," he answered, rolling his eyes. "I think so, anyway."

"How touching."

I scowled, turning to see the vampire sitting on our terrace. If there was anything gratifying about her presence, it was that her porcelain-like skin looked like she had just bitten into the world's sourest lemon.

"You here to finish the job?"

"And go through all that work? Please, there is a reason why we leave all the dirty work to the hounds. It'll be an absolute bitch to summon them up again."

"So what happens next?" I asked, walking up on the terrace.

She eyed me, her eyebrows furrowed and fingers lightly toying with her hair. If I didn't know any better, I would have thought that she was nervous to be around me now.

"Well, considering that you survived, and we won't be killing you ourselves, I suppose the deal still stands."

"You have got to be shitting me," I snapped.

"We can lower it to the forty barrels that you already have, leaving you to start growing this place back its former glory. In fact, I have already laid claim to the forty while you were fighting, and so you may consider our deal completed. You are no longer bound to the demon or his land any longer."

I took another step closer. "If you think that we're just going to let you walk out of here..."

The vampire held her finger up. "You should remember that while we are most definitely not in the mood to enforce deals without our hounds present, we are more than capable of defending