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The most important rule for an Apprentice Consul is simple: Don’t get involved with daemons.
Zwi was a cat-sized, dragon-esque creature with mottled gray scales, leathery wings, and a silky black mane that ran down her back to a tuft of fur at the end of her tail.
Sahar Stone—the most coveted lodestone in existence that any daemon would kill to possess—without
So maybe she had lost the Sahar in the end. But she’d saved her uncle’s life and cleared her and her father’s names.
Based on his reaction after she’d told him the Sahar had been stolen by a harpy that most likely worked for Samael, she was guessing no, it didn’t count.
The ruthless warlord of Hades was the last daemon who should have access to a magical we...
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“If you weren’t wearing those little shorts, I would be a happy pervert. Instead, I’m just a thwarted would-be pervert.”
Daemons were hard to injure.
His eyes, though, were what sealed the deal: dark-flecked amber, intense, intimate, expressive. Those eyes could look into her soul and whisper every luscious fantasy she would never admit she had.
Because of their history of secrecy from the general human populace, Consulates were almost always in private locations outside cities.
Seven decades of decay had reduced them to crumbling walls and scattered debris. Nature was quickly reclaiming what had been abandoned after the Third World War had devastated the modern world.
Of the surviving population, the majority had dispersed to the countryside to form small, safe communities that subsisted on a barter-based economy and lived without the luxuries of decades past. A few larger cities had come out of the war in one piece, and the rich, the smart, and the desperate had quickly migrated to them.
She couldn’t imagine a worse fate than a life without a higher purpose.
Consuls, above all, were peacekeepers. They kept the peace between individual daemons, between daemon castes, between daemons from different worlds, and most importantly, between daemons and humans.
Her father was a haemon—the offspring of a daemon and a human—as was her mother. This rare combination of having two haemon parents was normally lethal.
To save Piper from the two magical bloodlines she’d inherited from her parents, a daemon healer had sealed her magic before it could kill her, leaving her alive but without magic and, in the eyes of daemons and haemons, powerless.
The Styx was a nightclub that celebrated inhibitions of all types.
Daemons usually disguised themselves with glamour, but the regular rules didn’t apply at the Styx.
Gaians, the group that had attacked the Consulate, unintentionally framing Piper for stealing the Sahar.
Lilith, the stunning woman—correction: stunning succubus—had
Five weeks ago, after escaping the Gaians and barely surviving a choronzon attack, Ash had disappeared without a word.
Most daemons believe that draconians are vicious by nature and the Hades family likes to hire them as mercenaries because they’re good at killing. But certain factions of Underworlders suspect something quite different.”
“They don’t think the draconians are willing employees of the Hades family. They believe the Hades have been keeping draconian ‘pets’ since the Taroth family fell five hundred years ago.”
Either way, according to the rumors, the Hades have kept a handful of draconians as expendable henchmen for centuries.”
Draconians weren’t a common caste; they’d mostly died out after their ruling family had been murdered and their territory taken over. After five hundred years, there weren’t many left.
They say Samael kills them once they’re too old and difficult to control.
His survival was the least important of everything at stake that night. Saving his life cost him everything. He will never forgive me.
Ash’s voice, laced with bitterness, whispered in her mind: If that bastard had just left me and taken her instead … Piper’s head slowly came up. Taken her, he’d said. Not healed her.
That’s what Ash told me. He wanted Vejovis to take his sister to safety but Vejovis wouldn’t. He healed Ash instead, and by then, it must’ve been too late.
The Amity Gala was the biggest political event of the year. Every wealthy politician, government official, influential Consul, prominent diplomat, and powerful daemon attended the extravagant party to mingle, forge relationships and alliances, and suss out competitors and rivals.
Somehow, Piper had tapped the Sahar’s power. She hadn’t done it on purpose. She didn’t even know what she’d done. One moment she’d been about to punch a harpy in the face with the Stone in her fist. The next moment, the Sahar had flashed with light, turning white-hot in her hand—and
No one but that one harpy knew the truth: Piper was the first person in living memory to successfully harness the Sahar.
Shading was the common term for a purely instinctual state of mind daemons entered when angry or afraid.
“We call it the Nightmare Effect. It’s a self-defense mechanism. Draconians exude a sort of mental aura that triggers irrational fear in everyone in their vicinity. It’s manufactured terror but works as well as natural fear.”
“Underworlders, rather derisively, call it the Fairy Effect. It makes the daemon seem so beautiful and awe-inspiring that it dumbfounds everyone nearby.”
The Hades family’s caste was known as reapers; she never knew draconians were more powerful.
Magic was imagination and mental alchemy put together.
All she knew was that it was physically draining, took boatloads of concentration, and required a heck of a lot of knowledge for anything beyond the basics.
So much of what Vejovis had said made sense now. When Ash had tried to escape with his sister, he’d been injured too badly to go on. Vejovis had had two options: save Ash’s sister by taking her to safety, or heal Ash, thereby condemning him and his sister back to the very hell Ash had risked everything to escape. No wonder Ash hated Vejovis for his choice.
“Samael is a master of breaking spirits.”
“Death is easy. Living is difficult.”
The instant the rod had touched her, it had felt like her arm had shattered. Though the agony had quickly faded, the intensity had been soul-tearing.
It has three purposes. The first prevents a change in form; he cannot release his glamour. The second drains his magic and feeds it back into the collar, making him weaker and the collar stronger. And the third”—she sighed happily—“causes pain. Far more than you can even imagine. His own magic feeds the pain, along with whatever I add to it. So every time I touch him with this”—she waved her rod—“the pain will be on top of what he is already experiencing.
A terrible, alien something rose up inside her. Her mind split in two as another presence shoved its way in. Lightning erupted inside her body in a flood of heat and power. Thunder split the air, shattering the nearby chair with its force. Following the arc of her fingers through the air, white light flashed in four glowing blades. Blood sprayed hot across her face. Raum slammed back into the wall. The arm he’d used to shield his face was split open to the bone. Three more diagonal slashes cleanly opened his torso. Shock stopped her for only a second. She whirled, teeth gritted, power coursing
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Piper collapsed on the floor, trembling from the sudden cessation of the power that had charged her blood with electricity.
He turned his head, pressing his face against her neck as he once had when they had been trapped underground, minutes away from death.
Samael now knew for certain she could use the Sahar. And yet, she wasn’t sure she’d actually used it. It had felt more like the Stone had used her. Just like last time, she hadn’t been trying to draw on it. She’d been trying to claw Raum’s eyes out. The Sahar had … mimicked her. Only with a thousand times the force.
“The Sahar hasn’t been used in almost five hundred years, ever since its creator slaughtered an entire town. Hundreds of innocents died. The Sahar is too powerful to be used. It is limitless. It is a weapon of mass destruction that shouldn’t exist.”
“It means,” he said slowly, “that you are now the weapon.”
“You are to the Sahar what a gun is to a bullet. The bullet is what kills people but it’s powerless without the gun.”
