time in which her temper might mellow and she might not attack him on sight.
He couldn’t though.
He needed to see her. He needed to know if he really was falling in love with her.
He pulled a clean black tunic from his wardrobe and slipped his arms into it, fastened the silver buttons as he paced to work off some energy and form a plan. When every avenue he explored ended with Mackenzie attacking him, he gave up. If she lashed out at him, he would take whatever blows she needed to deliver to unleash her anger, to release the rage he had felt in her back in the alley.
When she had accused him of being in love with another and, like an idiot, he hadn’t denied it.
In his defence, he had honestly believed his feelings for Iolanthe had remained constant, when in reality they had slowly died, had never been strong enough to survive the centuries they had been apart.
He had the feeling that if his growing love for Mackenzie was real, it was the sort that endured. Gods, he was going to need it to be that kind of love, the sort he wanted, because it was probably going to take decades, if not centuries, to convince her that his love for her was true. Constant. Unwavering.
He finished buttoning his tunic, ran his hand through his hair again to neaten it, and focused.
Faint light shimmered over his body and then darkness embraced him. When it receded, he was stood in the square of a small town in the far north of the free realm, surrounded by black stone and dark wooden buildings that all towered two storeys tall, with a third level set into their pitched tiled roofs.
It had been a long time since he had visited this town and he hoped it was home to the guild where Mackenzie lived. Every other guild he could think of refused to employ females or only employed females from particular species, like witches or dragon shifters. One guild even preferred to employ succubi, using them to target unwitting males who were then killed while in the throes of passion.
Hartt made his way along the main street that made up the bulk of the town, nodding to a few of the people coming and going along it. Beyond the buildings that lined it, smaller homes stood. They numbered less than fifty.
He turned down an alley between a tavern and a store selling colourful fabric.
Growled when someone slammed the flat of their hand into his chest and drove him backwards, forcing him to take steps back into a square. Whoever they were, they were strong, and angry. The sharp scent of fury laced the air as they shoved him in the chest hard enough that he felt sure it would leave a bruise.
He bared his fangs and lifted his gaze, pinning it on the one who had dared to block his path.
A female demon stood before him, her huge black leathery wings obscuring his view of the alley and the small building at the other end of it. She casually fluffed her silver-streaked black hair, twisted a few of the shorter lengths around crimson-tipped fingers, making them stick out even more. Her black horns gleamed in the lamplight as she advanced on him, her amber eyes glowing with sparks of fire as those horns grew, curled around her pointed ears to flare past her lobes.
“You stay the fuck away from Mac,” she growled, small fangs flashing between her scarlet lips as she scowled at him.
He frowned right back at her. Mac. Mackenzie. The demoness knew her, which meant this was the right place. It also meant that this was probably the demoness who had come to the bastion of the First Legion and had given Grave the impression she wanted to remove Hartt’s intestines.
Hartt got that impression too as she squared up to him.
“I need to speak with her,” he started.
She jabbed a finger into his chest, hard enough he was sure his sternum cracked, using it to punctuate each hard word she hurled at him. “You. Stay. The. Fuck. Away. From. Mac.”
He went to seize her hand when she prodded him again, but she was gone in the blink of an eye. His senses blared a warning as he felt her behind him and he tried to move, but she was faster, grabbed him by his neck and dug her claws in.
She hissed in his ear. “Men like you deserve to be