Page 16 of Stolen By the Gargoyle
I took a breath, needing to get this out. “But I can’tbehere. I’m a person. A human. I have needs. I can’t be…” I waved my arms around, as if to encompass the entire cave.
I couldn’t stay here. Where there was no toilet or plumbing. Where I had no hair care products or clothes or blankets. No pajamas or underwear or clothes. I was emotionally attached to my things at home, and suddenly, it had all been ripped from me. I’d been deposited here. And he expected me to mate with him and be his wife.
He hadn’t even asked me how I felt about it.
He hadn’t even asked me my fucking name. I’d had to offer that up to him and he hadn’t even seemed to care. He called me ‘wife’, and even though he said it with reverence, it felt impersonal.
My throat suddenly clogged.
“I don’t even know your name,” I whispered.
He stared at me for the longest time and I stared back, like we were taking the time to decipher one another.
Finally, he responded, “I am Nazzar, First General and Demon Commander of the Lord of Death’s armies.” He thumped a fist against his bleeding chest in a beat like a war drum. “Honored Commander of the Underworld,” he went on, bowing low like he was a gentleman in a historical romance novel. “And I am at your service.”
It was so ridiculous. So fucking ridiculous to see, that I couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled from my throat. Everything I’d been feeling the last few hours piled on top of me and it was like a dam bursting. I covered my face with my wet hands, laughing and laughing until it scraped my throat raw. Until that knot in my throat tightened even further, and mylaughter faded into actual cries of sadness and anger and pain. I began to cry, and I couldn’t stop, no matter how hard I tried. It belted out of me, the tears streaming down my face so fast, I couldn’t catch them.
I pulled my hands away from my face, seeing his alarmed expression to my crying. He waded into the water, and it washed away the blood from his body, making his skin gleam like freshly polished stone.
I cried even harder then. I was aware of his voice speaking, but not of the words he formed. He seemed to hesitate until finally he picked me up and took me out of the water. I wasn’t sure when he dried me off, though I could feel myself being wrapped in warm blankets and furs, and his voice soft, and concerned.
But I couldn’t reply to him.
There was nothing left to say to Nazzar, First Commander of Demon Armies.
So I just turned away from him to face the wall of my new prison, and I cried myself to sleep.
I had seen tearsbefore, and they had always confounded me. Tears when men died and begged for their lives, the fear living in their eyes because they knew they would find no mercy in me. I had not understood them, their necessity. They had known cruelty and shaped their innate selves into monsters and yet could not endure to face what they reaped into the world when their time finally came.
But her tears, my wife’s tears? I’d given those men no remorse and relished in their cries, but I found I could not bear hers.
She looked at me like they did. Like I was… like I was ripping her apart, slowly dismantling her body and soul and finding joy in it. And she could do nothing but beg for mercy with her eyes.
I could not stand it. Nor could I understand why she felt that way, when I had done nothing but prove my devotion to our union. She did not say. Instead she just lay upon the nest of pillows I made for her and fell asleep.
Even in her dreams, she wept.
The tears kept pouring out and there was nothing I could do to stop them.
A restlessness stirred inside me, needing to move, to do something to put an end to the tears. I shadowed over her body, moving my claws softly through her hair, stilling when they snagged in the coils, trapping themselves there.
I let out a rumbling curse and pulled my hand back, but her hair kept me trapped. I yanked a fraction harder–
Her body jerked away from me, and the action pulled at her strands. I let out another curse as they came apart in my claws. Winding strings of hair that made her whimper, but she otherwise kept her body angled away from me curled into herself.
Almost as if she were afraid of me.
Fool, I told myself.
I just yanked her hair out. An accident, and yet I had still hurt her.
After pulling the hair from my claws and laying it gently back in her nest, I backed away. I drank her in, recalling the words she had said before she burst into laughter and tears.
“I’m a person. A human. I have needs.”
Butof course.
Oh, but I was afool.
