Sympathy for the Demons (Promised to the Demons #1) - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,22

at me, wishing me nothing but happiness. “Bevan, I release you from…” She faltered a moment, but it wasn’t because she wanted to keep me there. It was just hard to part. “I release you from our bond. From…this covenant. I don’t want you to die when I die. I want you to…”

“I didn’t mean it like that. You didn’t have to release me from the covenant forever, Hel. I just need to do this.”

Suddenly she threw her arms around me. I was startled at first. Helena and I were never touchy-feely. “I love you, Bev. But we don’t need each other. We haven’t, in a long time. Love never dies, though, and it isn’t dependent on need. It doesn’t matter if we go our separate ways.”

“I knew you’d say something like that,” I said softly. “I’m glad.”

“I know too much about familiars now,” she said. “I don’t want to hold you to me. We can still team up when we need to.”

I nodded, but it wasn’t easy. I loved her in a way that reached beyond sense, and I wondered if Jenny loved her cruel warlock the same way. “Don’t die,” I said. “You’ve managed not to die on so many rooftops and it would really be stupid to end the streak now.”

“I’ll try.”

I went back to my home and started working on the spell that would change the feel of my magical field so I could walk into the magical side of St. Augustine without anyone realizing my true identity. It was going to take a little time, and it had never been so difficult to be patient. I wished I knew a good way to check on Jenny in the meantime. I didn’t have a clock, because time rarely had much meaning to me in Etherium, but now I found myself glancing around for one as the sun set and the hours went by.

I suddenly felt a little wobbly. My vision blurred. Or was it the room blurring around me?

My entire body was tugged out of my own room and into a dimly lit basement somewhere, in the midst of a fight between Helena and her cousin Piers. Piers Nicolescu had always been trouble. As a kid, he was the kind of nerdy and studious wizard with a chip on his shoulder, and now he was on the council. The power was going straight to his head.

I had appeared on my hands and knees and I felt strangely paralyzed.

Okay…I’m going to guess something in this fight is going very wrong. This is a really bad time for it to involve me, though.

“Relinquish!” Helena said. She was trying to get a tablet of stone Piers had in his hands. I felt a connection between my body and the stone tablet, although I had never seen it before.

As if the stone was crushing me. As if, in some way, the stone was me, and as long as Piers was holding it, I was trapped.

What the hell is that thing? Why can’t I seem to move?

“Relinquish the covenant!” Helena cried. She was brave, but she wasn’t a terribly strong witch, and I could sense that she was scared—for me.

That’s the covenant?

That tablet definitely had something to do with my own fate, and the way my life was entwined with Helena’s. Even after she let me go, the ancient words had somehow dragged me back, and apparently she was in the middle of trying to free me once and for all. I wanted to help her fight and I felt like I was being clenched.

Helena pressed the tip of her wand to her palm. She was trying some spell that I expected was beyond her capabilities, and I hoped it wouldn’t hurt her.

Piers, meanwhile, started to chant words that always cast dread in the heart of an Ethereal wizard. He was speaking the dark tongue of Sinistral, spitting out the words, and suddenly, the fabric of the world tore open and an eight-foot-tall, horned demon entered the fray. He didn’t look happy to be there, and I really hoped he wasn’t going to have anything to do with me.

Chapter Ten

Lord Variel

With my favorite horse and trusty bow, I rode through the fen, needing to get out from under the curiosity of my servants. Life was not going as I wished at the moment. If I didn’t find a wife, I would just keep going on and on like this. Did I want to end up like the Withered Lord, spending my