Page 45 of Hellish Witch

I gave him a rueful smile. “Nothing. They’re too small. What could fit?”

He chuckled, and smoke trickled from between his lips like a dragon. “You’re the smartest person in our kingdom.”

“What realm do you live in?” I scoffed. “I’m our uselesshuman,” I muttered, scratching at the bark on my seat, half-hoping he wouldn’t hear my embarrassing self-pity.

A low snarl ripped from Killian’s lips. He pointed a claw at my face. “Don’t ever say anything like that again.”

I blinked rapidly, taken aback by his sudden intensity.

“Why the fuck not?” I snapped, irrational anger igniting like hell-fire. “My magic is twisted,” I hissed. “Broken. Just like the rest of me.”

To my horror, angry tears blurred the edges of my vision.

Killian leaned over, forcing me to bend back on the log, or that salve I’d carefully applied to his chest would smear mine.

“Fires burn it, Eve.” Killian snarled, gripping his precious drug tighter with his tail. “You’re notbroken.”

I glared at him, blinking rapidly as my stupid emotions churned like a dark ocean. “How can you say that after all I’ve done?”

Guilt rose up to tug me down into its murky depths.

The incubus straightened, one vertebra at a time, lethal precision in every slight movement. “Because.”

I huffed a bitter laugh. “Because what?”

His eyes pinned me with the sharpest focus, slit pupils like blades. “Because you’re perfect. Every damn inch of you. Inside and out.”

He might as well have roared the words. His measured intensity was overwhelming and all the more captivating for it.

Because I felt every syllable like he spoke them against my skin.

He puffed a lungful of blackness into my face. Fragrant haze muddied my senses, and when the smoke cleared, he was gone.

Chapter 16

Cookie lifted her head, cocking a tufted ear to the lightening sky. For the past half an hour since Killian had disappeared, she’d been lurking within the hell-fire Alpha had lit, much to his irritation.

I never knew a hellhound could pout.

Something pulsed through the tendrils of my magic that snaked around me, like a disturbance in the currents of power. I followed the ripples overhead and squinted out at the winding pink river, bathed in the first rays of dawn.

Killian dropped to the grassy riverbank on silent wings. His white feathers still held a damp sheen, painting them almost silver like the flecks in his eyes when he felt particularly violent. He folded his wings and strode towards our makeshift camp.

A small brace of spear quails, already plucked of their sharp feathers, dangled from his raised hand.

I quirked a brow, but my stomach rumbled, betraying me.

Killian’s eyes ran over me, some tightness around them easing a fraction.

I hadn’t moved from the log where he’d left me, throwing out his confusing words and vanishing like a cloaked bone-kin. I was exhausted, both physically and mentally, and when I’d tried to grab the wrapped boar from my pack, it was no longer there, even though I’d seen it when I’d fished out the salve earlier.

I hadn’t seen the hellcat take it, but I just knew it was her. I didn’t call herCookiebecause she baked.

Killian busied himself setting a spit over the hell-fire, shooing the hellcat like a misbehaving kitten. Within minutes, he had the four game birds roasting nicely.

The scent of cooking meat filled the area, ridding the last of the bloody tang leftover from the bone-kin massacre.

I was half-surprised he hadn’t just hauled one of them over to cook up, but then again, just because I was immune to most poisons with my healing abilities didn’t mean anyone else was safe.

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