The Demon's Song - By Kendra Leigh Castle Page 0,77

much sadness?”

Phenex didn’t say anything for a long time, watching the sun make its way into the sky and turn the waves gold. Finally, though, he spoke, and with a raw honesty that was new from him. There was no sarcasm, no anger. Just the truth.

“It hurt,” he said, “to give your kind beautiful things and then watch them focus on destruction. Themselves. Others. Or sometimes just the beauty itself. I was supposed to be calm, detached. To focus on what I was made for, and let the humans do as they would. I could only inspire them, they said. Not save them. And certainly not from themselves. But I tried. I tried to save peasants. I tried to turn the hearts of kings. For every triumph, though, there were terrible losses. And so much of the music just…vanished. I stopped wanting to help them. I started wanting to hurt them the way they had hurt me. And one day, when an exceptional young musician lay dead, his unfinished masterpiece stolen by a rival, I put down my instruments. I walked away without another word. Everything hurt. How could it hurt any worse? So I tried to escape it. I fell.”

It was the most he’d ever told her about himself, about what had driven him to become what he was. And the strange thing was, she wasn’t surprised that the Angel of Song had cared more deeply for humanity than most. But it had made him that much more bitter when he’d finally turned his face away.

Sofia pressed a kiss to Phenex’s bare back.

“I’m sorry,” she whispered.

“I stopped being sorry a long time ago,” he replied, so still. “But it’s all coming back. That, the joy, everything. I didn’t know it was all still in there. I didn’t know I could still sing about it. It’s been a long time since I was the Phoenix, Sofia. I didn’t want to take that form and not be able to use the voice that came with it. But I can. I woke up and just knew. The song came back.”

She didn’t know what to say to him, how to respond to the pure wonder in his voice. So she simply held him silently and let his joy warm her. He’d lost so much in his Fall, Sofia realized. More than she could have guessed.

And she loved him.

The realization sank in slowly, then opened like some rare bloom in the early morning sun. As broken and difficult as he was, as much as she’d warned herself against it, she’d fallen hard and fast. She loved him, with every bit of her heart. It rose and fell within her, bittersweet joy accompanied by a dull ache that she worried she wouldn’t be able to banish. Because she was well aware that loving Phenex was no guarantee of keeping him…or if truly having him as her own was even possible.

She closed her eyes, breathed him in.

“It’s you,” she heard him say, and he turned in her arms to face her. It stunned her to see the unshed tears glittering in his eyes, making them reflections of the morning ocean beyond. In that instant, he was ethereally beautiful, neither human nor demon, but a vision of what Sofia knew he had once been. What she realized he could be again.

That was the moment she knew that no matter how much she loved him, she wouldn’t be able to hold him. He was eternal. She was just the blink of an eye. And she couldn’t embrace the darkness to change that, because eventually, it would kill parts of her she would never be able to get back.

Then it was Sofia’s eyes that stung and burned. Rather than let him see, she pulled him into a fierce kiss, trying to tell him without words everything she wanted to say.

Phenex responded instantly to her kiss. He slid his hands into her hair, cradling the back of her head while he teased her, tasted her until Sofia could feel nothing but him, his touch, his presence wrapped around her.

When he’d kissed her so thoroughly that Sofia’s knees were shaking, Phenex lifted her, carrying her to the bed where he lay her down. She shed the robe quickly, and Phenex covered her, his heated skin against hers provoking a shock of pleasure that had her arching into him. She slid her hands down his back, feeling the muscles bunch and shift as skin gave way to feathers, his wings emerging to