Rosalind stared at the unconscious male lying on the stone slab in the middle of the cell. Torchlight from the corridor beyond the thick metal bars lining one side of the dank windowless room flickered across his battered and bruised body, darkening every ugly mark and deep gash, and all the blood that stained him.
Was it his or had he hurt the bastard demons who had put him here?
She liked to think he had given them hell. Mostly because she couldn’t.
He hadn’t stirred in the five minutes she had been kneeling beside him, transfixed by the sight of him. He lay as if dead. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest was indication otherwise.
His hands rested on his stomach, his wrists bound by the same heavy metal cuffs that held hers. She wanted to find whoever had discovered this metal and how to impregnate it with a spell and blast them to hell. The manacles weakened her, stripping her of her powers. The only one available to her was the ability to heal, and she only had that one because the new Fifth King of the demons had given it back to her so she could heal all of the warriors who had been injured in the war with the Third King.
A war the Fifth Realm had lost when the old Fifth King had lost his head.
A war she had fought in on the side of King Thorne of the Third Realm.
A war that had changed her forever.
Since returning her ability to cast healing magic, the new Fifth King had used her whenever he had needed someone fixed, forcing her to do his bidding, and up until today, all of her patients had been demons belonging to his army.
But this man was no demon.
Her knees ached from pressing into the damp uneven stone floor but she couldn’t take her eyes off him. He radiated dark energy that warned her away, telling her that he was dangerous, even as she felt drawn to him, snared by an unbreakable pull towards him.
Shuffling caught her attention and she looked across the unconscious man to the cell opposite his. A handsome man with long dark brown hair flecked with gold tied back with a thong and an unkempt beard leaned against the thick stone wall close to the bars of that cell, as bare-chested as her companion, although his skin was flawless with the exception of the fae markings that tracked up his arms and over his shoulders.
An incubus.
Rosalind muttered a protection spell beneath her breath, even though it wouldn’t work. It was a habit with her. She preferred to arm herself against an incubus’s charms before he could use them on her, luring her under his spell and having his way with her. Code of honour, her arse. These men pretended in public that they upheld their vow to never use their powers to seduce a woman who didn’t want to be seduced, but in private they employed those powers without a flicker of regret or care about their victim. She had seen it.
The man eyed her patient, blue and gold spotting his green irises, a sign of his incubus nature as much as the markings that announced his lineage.
“Let him die,” the man said, his voice a low growl of warning without a shred of compassion, and the swirls, dashes and spikes of his fae markings shimmered in hues of dark blue and burnished gold. Not anger. She knew that an incubus’s markings flared crimson and obsidian when they were angry. Judging by the look in his green eyes, this was something more like apprehension.
Why?
Rosalind glared at him and flicked her knotted blonde hair over her shoulder in defiance. “It isn’t in my nature to ignore the needs of another, especially if I feel I can help them, and I do feel I can help this man.”
He was gaunt though, sick and not from his injuries. His skin was sallow and grey, and he was too thin, the bones visible in the backs of his dirty hands. Many of his nails were cracked, caked with grime and dried blood.
“Let him die,” the incubus whispered. “This one isn’t worth saving, Little Girl.”
Rosalind turned her glare on him again. “Why do you say such nasty things? Do you know him?”
The incubus dropped his green gaze to the man, narrowed it, and then shifted it back to her. “Only by reputation, and if I were in your place, I would kill him and not save him. By killing him, you could be saving many lives, one this man may take if you allow him to live.”
Rosalind looked at the man in question, a cold heavy feeling pulling her insides down. She knew he was dangerous, but she knew nothing else about him. She didn’t know the incubus from Adam either, and for all she did know, he could be a compulsive liar or a sadistic bastard itching to get a hit of pleasure from watching her kill an innocent man.
She lifted her hand with the intent of touching her patient’s arm and funnelling a spell into him to sense whether the incubus was telling the truth about him, and remembered that such spells were beyond her right now. Locked away. She had never been without her magic. It was unsettling, strange, and left her feeling vulnerable.
The man on the cold stone slab before her twitched and moaned, the sound strained and filled with agony that tore at her and compelled her to help him.
“I don’t have power over this man’s life,” she whispered to him in reply to the incubus, her eyes fixed on his face, taking in the dark circles beneath his eyes and the hollows of his cheeks. “I don’t have the right to choose whether he lives or dies.”
“Because the demons told you to heal him?” the incubus said.
“No.” Rosalind shook her head and looked across at him. “Because it isn’t in my nature to do such a thing. I will heal him.”
The man scoffed. “And you will live to regret it, Little Girl.”
“I’m not a girl. I’m over one hundred years old… and do I look like a girl to you?” Rosalind stood and ran her hands down her tattered black dress, the traditional garb of a witch on duty.
The incubus’s eyes followed them, the blue and gold in his irises increasing, and he muttered, “No.”
He turned away, pressing his bare back against the bars of his cell and revealing the twin lines of markings where they joined between his shoulders and formed a line down his back that ended in a diamond above the waist of his low-slung black jeans.
At least he would be quiet now. She hoped. Healing always required focus, and something told her that this time it would need the highest level of concentration she could manage.
Something else told her that the incubus might be right. She might regret healing this man. If he was as dangerous as he felt, he might well kill her upon waking.
But maybe that would be what she deserved after the things she had done.
She had vowed to protect lives, to do all in her power to tend to people’s needs, and she had been protecting lives in the war between the Third and Fifth Realms, but she had also been taking them.
If this man was a killer and deserved death because of it, then surely she deserved the same fate in order to maintain the balance and order of the world?
She closed her eyes against the memories that welled up, lashing at her. She hated that she now knew how to kill. She hated knowing she was capable of that darkness. It scared her.
She feared becoming like her sister, a dark witch drawing on the shadowy other side for her power—the realm of death.
But worse than that, she feared that now she knew how to kill, she could do it again if she had to, and next time it would be easier.
Rosalind opened her eyes and focused on the man in front of her, on the present rather than the past or what might lay ahead in her future.
The aura of danger clinging to him was growing stronger. He was healing himself. Was he one of the warriors from the war? If he was, what side had he fought on and what species was he?
The only way to find out the answers to those questions was to complete the task she had been sent here to do.
She blew out her breath and held her hands over his bare chest. As she lowered them, bringing them almost into contact with his skin, she channelled the only power available to her into him, seeking out his wounds and fixing them as best she could. There were so many.
Her power drained quickly and she had to take regular breaks to avoid overtaxing herself and passing out. She didn’t want to lose consciousness in a cell with this dangerous stranger, not when she didn’t have the power to protect herself.
The fast drain on her power confirmed something for her though. This man’s injuries and wounds ran deeper than those of the flesh that she could see. He was weak for a reason, whether that was a sickness of the body or of the mind.
His eyelids fluttered and she withdrew her hands again, her breath lodging in her throat as she waited. His long black lashes lifted, revealing steel-blue eyes. His dilated pupils swiftly narrowed and his hands shot up above his head. He snarled at the cuffs and pulled his wrists apart, tugging the chain between them taut. He heaved harder, his muscles tensing and rippling beneath his bloodstained pale skin, and growled when the chain didn’t break.
“They dampen our powers,” she said.
His gaze darted to her and narrowed, steel blue-grey that burned into her, sending a fierce shiver of awareness through her that drew every drop of her focus to him. What species was he? Vampire? Werewolf? Both of them had a human appearance and she had met many of their kind in the past, but none had affected her as this man did.
He struggled harder against his bonds and the metal sliced into his wrists, spilling blood down his arms. It didn’t stop him from fighting the restraints.
“Stop!” Rosalind snapped, her voice echoing around the stone cells.
He turned a murderous glare on her and flexed his fingers. His demeanour changed instantly, becoming distraught as his eyes went to his wrists and he flexed his fingers again. Over and over. He did it at least ten times before he began to growl and try harder, struggling against his bonds at the same time. Was something supposed to happen whenever he flexed his fingers?
He kept trying, clearly convinced that if he just kept doing it, whatever he was expecting would happen.
It wouldn’t.
She could sympathise. After the demons of the Fifth Realm had captured her during the battle and she had awoken in her cell, she had tried for hours to blast the bars and every demon who had strolled along the corridor and smirked at her.
She had been convinced that she could find the trick to get around the spell embedded into the metal.
This man was too.
His eyes went glassy and he sagged against the stone bench, his cuffed wrists dropping and slamming hard into his heaving chest.
Rosalind inched closer.
The man managed to slide his gaze her way, and passed out.
She sighed, carefully moved his hands back down to his stomach, and went back to work. She held one hand over his forehead and the other above his heart, closed her eyes, and shut the world out as she channelled as much energy as she could spare into him.
“Let him die,” the incubus whispered, a seductive proposition when healing the man was weakening her, leaving her more vulnerable than ever.
She lifted her head and gave the incubus a sorrowful smile. “I cannot. I must heal him. I took a vow.”
His expression turned solemn. “I understand the power of a vow, but if he wakes and kills you, I will say I told you so.”
She smiled properly for the first time in weeks. “I can take that.”
The incubus smiled too and muttered in the fae tongue. “We’re all fucked if he wakes up.”
Rosalind ignored that, sure that he knew she could understand the fae tongue since most witches could speak the language as they worked closely with his kind. He was doing it on purpose to distract her from her work. One tiny mistake and she could kill her patient.
She had to maintain rigid control over her healing spell. They were dangerous, with a tendency to go awry if the controlling witch’s link to it broke.
Awry being a polite way of saying inflicting crippling pain on the patient by attempting to heal anything and everything, even functioning organs and joints, before it fizzled out.
When she had no more energy to expend, she sat back on her heels and her shoulders sagged as she wiped the sweat from her brow with the back of her hand. He was looking better, but was nowhere close to being healed. She couldn’t do anything more for him right now. She needed to rest until her strength returned, and then she would begin again.
She stared at him, the incubus’s warning ringing in her tired mind.
Who was this dangerous and deadly male?
She willed him to wake and tell her.
She wanted to know him.
