Page 74 of Thane's Demon
A soft movement.
A scrape.
Just a breath from behind the door.
Every muscle in Thane’s body snapped rigid. His head turned with unnatural stillness, his eyes narrowing to slits of cold bluefire. A low growl built in his chest, so deep it vibrated through the floorboards beneath my feet.
His attention locked on the door with such complete focus that it felt as if the rest of the room faded from existence. For a long moment, the only sound I could hear was my heartbeat thudding painfully in my chest, followed by a distant murmur of voices rising through the stairwell, too low to decipher but unmistakably hostile in their tone. My breath caught as recognition hit me with icy clarity. Someone was coming. Someone dangerous. Someone who should never have found this place.
Then he grabbed my wrist, pulled me behind him, and positioned himself behind the door like a shield made of darkness and muscle.
His voice came low, deadly, so calm it made chills break across my spine.
“If you want to keep trusting me without fear, close your eyes. Do not open them until I tell you.”
I nodded, breath shaking, and shut my eyes tightly. But the silence afterward made the tension unbearable. The anticipation crawled across my skin like static. The moment stretched razor-thin. So, when the door exploded inward with a violent crash, instinct ripped my eyes open.
What I saw was nothing I was prepared for.
Thane moved with impossible speed, his body blurring in and out of shadow as though the darkness itself obeyed him. His eyes glowed an electric, unnatural blue, burning with cold fire. His teeth, no longer human, had been replaced with fangs. A threat bared in a snarl that belonged to something not of this world. His fingers curved like claws as he struck the first man.
The sound was horrid.
A crunch, a choke, a body hitting the wall with sickening force.
Another man lunged with a knife. Thane twisted, grabbed him by the arm, and snapped the bone with a single flick of his wrist. The scream that followed barely lasted a breath before Thane silenced it with a brutal thrust that sent the man sprawling across the floor.
A gunshot rang out, and Thane disappeared from its path, reappearing behind the shooter with frightening swiftness. He lifted the man by the throat, pinning him to the wall with inhuman strength. The man’s feet dangled helplessly, his eyes bulging in terror.
Thane’s voice broke across the room then, deeper than before, layered with something ancient and monstrous, as though another entity growled through him.
‘You dare enter my home.
You dare touch what is mine.
I will tear the marrow from your bones.’
It was not human.
Not even close.
It sounded like a demon.
The voice vibrated through my bones, ancient and cold and filled with violence so potent it stole the air from my lungs. The man choked against Thane’s grip, a wet gasp of terror the only sound he made before Thane threw him across the room like discarded paper.
Three bodies fell.
Three threats eliminated. All three lives extinguished and shattered in seconds. But it looked like more were on the way.
I stood frozen, unable to look away, every muscle locked with terror as Thane tore through the next lot of intruders with a ferocity I had never witnessed in my life. He was not fighting. Fighting implied struggle, effort, and hesitation. This was something else entirely.
This was destruction, pure and simple. It was annihilation. A force of nature ripping through fragile bodies as though they were made of paper. I watched as he slammed one man into the floor hard enough to splinter the boards beneath him, as he shredded another’s weapon with his bare hands as he roared again, the sound shaking the walls and ripping through my chest like a physical force. He continued to fight, and in the end, I had to close my eyes to hide from the brutality of it all.
It was only when the moment the chaos finally silenced enough that I opened them again. And in that brief, shattering moment, that instant was all it took for the world I knew to collapse beneath my feet. His eyes, once stormy and human and achingly beautiful, now blazed with a Hellish, demonic red, no glowing blue in sight. Now, they glowed like twin embers pulled straight from the heart of a furnace.
His pupils had thinned into sharp, predatory slits, flickering with a hunger that did not belong to any man. But it was not just his eyes. His skin had darkened to an ashen, shadow-drenched tone, almost black in places, as if the darkness inside him had risen to the surface, trying to tear its way out. Thick, pulsing veins glowed beneath it, molten red like rivers of fire carved through stone. And from his temples, two great curved horns spiraled upward, ridged and jagged like ancient obsidian, casting twisted shadows across the room.
Spikes erupted from his shoulders in violent angles, tearing through skin and muscle as though his body could no longer contain the creature living inside it, each one dripping with the blood of the men he had just destroyed. His chest rose and fell with a rumbling growl, and the air around him warped, trembling with the force of the demon’s presence. In that single horrific heartbeat, I saw him as he truly was… not a man with anger, not a protector with shadows, but something monstrous. Something ancient… something hauntingly real. A creature bornfrom nightmares, wrapped in the remains of the man I had kissed. A demon made of flesh and bone.
