Page 42 of Speak No Evil

I gesture to the lords to stay quiet and lead the way into the next room. Why they’re humoring me, a thirty-year-old witch when my life experience pales compared to theirs, I’ll never know.

But they fall in line behind me, anyway.

Before entering the next room, I sense it.

Malevolence. The desire to consume. To kill. To rend flesh from bone.

In my whole summoning career, I’ve never felt such darkness from a demon.

So when I finally catch a glimpse of it, and see for myself it’s not a demon that I know of, I’m not surprised.

My wraith demon has captured the creature’s wrists, pinning them behind its back. The creature strains against the wraith, but every move it makes, the wraith counters by shoving the creature’s serrated claws into the back of its legs.

I’m purely focused on the creature, trying to decipher its strange appearance, as I give orders for Ryker and Thorne to tend to the victim. Its height is comparable to my demon form with a curving, hunched spine, and a single eye on its non-human face, skin stretched tight and ripping around the mouth.

Oh.

And it’s got a lovely gaping hole in the center of its chest, sucking at the wispy strands of my wraith.

“Is that how you ate my witch-killer-ball without flinching, mayor?” I ask, drawing the creature’s attention. I nod at the sucking, vacuous hole in his chest. “You should probably get that thing looked at. It looks infected.”

The mayor, or the thing masquerading as the mayor, screeches at me with its whole face. He just opens the whole thing up like his damn jaw is on a hinge and screeches.

His chest-hole joins in too, making an awful whistling sort of howl. Strangely, the sound makes a perfect-third harmony with the noise emanating from its mouth.

See, that’s why I don’t need more space in my brain. It’s just more room to get sidetracked.

What’s odd, is the creature has no scent. Not one I can determine anyway.

“Mistress, might I go now?” the wraith asks.

The mayor grins, like he wants me to let the wraith go so he can use those serrated claws on me.

“Go on, friend. You’ve met your end of the bargain. Thank you.”

The wraith vanishes, and the instant the mayor’s hands are free, he does exactly what I predict.

Aims them at my neck.

Luckily, I’ve had a lot of practice with demons who like to ring my neck.

Before a single claw gets near enough to even move the air around me, I land a horse kick right to the mayor’s nuts.

He lets out a prolongedooof.But he doesn’t double over. He doesn’t grab himself in agony.

Does he not have nuts in this form?

Fuck.

Did he keep his nuts somewhere else?

“What the hell are you that you don’t have nuts where nuts go?” I yell as it rears back to attack again.

“A woman, maybe?” it answers with a screechy, hissing voice, and before I know it, its arms are growing, lengthening so fast the claws that perfectly match the ones AJ depicted, are about to break through my personal bubble.

Vrahs clears his throat beside me but doesn’t offer any help. Dick.

He’ll probably say he wanted to see my new form in action and...

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