“Charlotte!” It was a gruff reprimand bitten off of the tip of his tongue. And yes, he did have a tongue. It was just… different.
It was different because everything about Dom was different. In this form, his rugged but handsome features were swathed in shadow, distorted and rearranged until they made a ghoulish mask with a jagged opening for a mouth and two endless black pits for eyes. Only the tiniest sparks of amber remained in those black sockets — two winks of sinister flame in the face of a monster.
Even his antlers were bigger. They arched up and over his head in jagged spikes that flickered in the hot sun. It was as if every part of Dom had been amplified, brutalized, torn open to reveal the core of every vicious beast that roamed the dark mashed into one being.
It was fucking terrifying.
It was also incredibly hot.
For a long moment, all Charlotte could do was stare at his terrible, moving visage and try to reconcile it with the man who picked up every tiny shard of glass on the motel room floor with his bare hands so she wouldn’t hurt herself. They were, somehow, the same being.
Somewhere far away, her wings buzzed hard through the gaps in the back of her hoodie — calling out to him without a hint of self-consciousness or fear. Come closer, her wings sang. Come get me.
“Get back in the truck,” Dom grated, breaking the spell that held her frozen against the door.
Charlotte gave her brain and her desperate loins a hard internal shake before she straightened her shoulders and took a purposeful step forward. A low rumble filled the parking lot — a hair-raising, nearly inaudible sound that immediately quieted all the bugs and low creatures stirring in the surrounding greenery. “Don’t you growl at me,” she huffed. “Did you really think I was going to stay in the truck while you handled things for me?”
Dom’s big, rippling form shifted to keep his bulk between her and the suspended feyrunner. “Char—”
“Shush.” She stepped beside him and, ignoring the now much louder growling coming from the center of his chest, she gave his side a small pat. Charlotte gave him a good once-over before training her eyes on Millie, who appeared to be about half a step away from a heart attack. “Did I hear a bolt gun go off? Are you okay?”
“I’m fine.” As soon as she was close enough, coils of shadow extended from Dom to curl around her waist, her shoulders, and her thighs. They didn’t have a weight to them, but she felt the power of them, the brush of raw magic against her senses as he drew her in close.
It was hard to discern emotion when nothing about his face was human, but Charlotte got the sense that her demon was deeply annoyed with her when he continued, “I didn’t want you to see this.”
“What? My well-earned revenge? What didn’t you think I’d like about that?” She turned her attention to the struggling feyrunner. “Did I hear something about tracking?” Charlotte clenched her fists so hard, her small claws bit into her palms. “It wasn’t enough that you stole my life and imprisoned me for over a year. You put something in me, too?!”
She didn’t realize that she’d taken a step forward, her anger rising and crashing in a furious tide, until Dom’s shadows pulled her back with a firm yank. “Too close,” he bit out.
“You’re lucky he’s holding me here, asshole.” Charlotte strained against her bonds, every injustice Millie and the feyrunner had committed against her a vicious bite in her hide. “You both are lucky! Do you have any idea what it’s like to be trapped alone in a fucking jar for that long? Do you know what that kind of isolation can do to a person?”
It could shatter them. It did shatter them. Charlotte wasn’t immune to the damage isolation could wreak. She was just barely strong enough to keep putting all those broken pieces together every time she fell apart.
But those poor people who were spelled into windowless containers, who were chucked into drawers or locked in safes — those who were used so relentlessly for magic that it drained their very marrow — those were the people she lay awake at night thinking about.
These people… Millie and the feyrunner, they didn’t care about any of that. It was probably pure happenstance that Charlotte got lucky enough to be in a lush little prison. It wasn’t like they cared about being humane, or what it would do to the psyches of the people they trapped. They were a thousand times more monstrous than she or Dom could ever be.
And Charlotte wanted them to hurt for it.
Leaning hard against the insistent pressure of Dom’s shadows, she continued, “What did you put in me? A chip? A tracker? What was the plan? Sell me off and then steal me back when my owner wasn’t looking?” She made a wordless, outraged sound. “Gods, you both are the fucking worst!”
The feyrunner gurgled as his eyes roved madly around the parking lot. They briefly landed on the discarded gun, bulged, and then swung back to Millie. He made another choked sound and flailed one arm in the direction of the gun. “Mil— Get—”
“Marc, I-I don’t know how to— you said this would be easy! I told you he was a demon but you didn’t listen!” Millie fell back onto her hands in the gravel and began to crab walk backwards, toward the SUV. Her glasses, already barely hanging on to the tip of her nose, fell off and bounced off of her thigh to land in the dust and crushed rock. “I’m not the one who shoots people, Marc! I’m not gonna stay and get strangled by a fucking demon!”
“Do not move.” Dom turned his head to regard the fleeing shopkeeper. He pinned her with his terrifying stare, freezing her in place against the filthy tire of her vehicle. “You are going to answer my mate’s questions. Now.”
“I don’t do that side of the business,” she cried, throwing up her dusty hands. “I just sell the things and Marc does all the other— he’s the one who makes the product!”
“Makes the product?” Charlotte hissed out an expletive from between her fangs. “We’re people, you two-bit feyrunner trash!”
Millie gave Charlotte a bug-eyed look of pure, unfiltered derision. “It’s not my fault you got caught. It’s a predator eat predator world out there, fey! You can’t blame me for doing what I need to survive in this world. Do you have any idea what it’s like out there for us arrants? We have to fight to keep up with all you m-types every godsdamned day!”
“You’re working with a witch! What kind of arrant solidarity is that?” Charlotte gestured sharply to the dangling feyrunner, whose eyes continued to dart between the arguing women with increasing desperation.
“So?” Millie jerked herself into a more upright position and slowly pulled herself up against the side of the SUV. She sniffed hard, like all of this was somehow everyone else’s fault. Even though she managed to mask most of her fear, her hands still shook when she smoothed them down her thighs. “We work with the tools we’re given.” She cast her struggling companion a withering look. “Even sigilworkers who don’t know when to let merchandise go.”
Charlotte gaped at the shopkeeper. “That is the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever—”