I Tamed the Demon Girl Who Killed Me

Chapter 3

MY FIRST ENEMY IS HUMAN

The man with the scar did not look like someone who enjoyed his work. That made him worse.

“Captain Roderic,” Adrian’s borrowed memory supplied. Head of the household guard. Taught you to hold a sword when you were nine. You hated him because he never let you win.

Great, Adrian thought. A man with a long history of disappointing me.

“Young master,” Roderic said. There was no warmth in the title. “You are supposed to be dead.”

“Disappointing, I know.”

The captain’s eyes sharpened. It was not the answer he had expected. “Your father’s orders were clear. The heir who summoned a forbidden demon was executed by it, and every trace of that disgrace is to be destroyed. The chamber. The demon. The body.” His gaze rested on Adrian’s bloodied shirt. “I was told you would be cold by the time we arrived.”

“That’s very thorough of him.”

“Silence.”

Roderic raised a hand, and the soldiers fanned out in a quiet half-circle. Eight swords. Eight shields. Eight men who had been told in advance that this was an unpleasant job and had accepted it.

Adrian’s mind was running very fast and getting nowhere. He had no weapon. He could barely stand. The only dangerous person in the room was lying on the floor and had very recently tried to kill him.

So don’t fight. Talk.

“Captain,” he said, and he heard how steady his voice came out, which was baffling. “Before you do anything, ask yourself why I’m alive.”

“A fluke.”

“Is it?” Adrian pushed himself to one knee, planting one hand on the stone to hide how badly it shook. “A boy with a hole in his heart sits up and has a conversation. And the demon who did it is lying on the floor looking like a wet cat. Doesn’t that seem strange to you?”

One of the soldiers shifted uneasily.

“The demon is bound and weakened,” Roderic said. “That is all I need to know.”

“It’s weakened because I weakened it.” Adrian let the lie settle into the air, then added the garnish. “She’s still under my control. If you kill me, the binding breaks, and she comes after the next person in the room. Which would be you.”

He didn’t look at Nyra. He felt her go very still on the floor behind him.

Roderic studied him in silence for several seconds. Adrian held the stare and tried not to blink. He had once talked a furious supplier out of a lawsuit by pretending the contract said something it didn’t. This was the same skill with considerably higher stakes.

“No,” Roderic said at last. “I don’t believe you.”

Of course you don’t.

“Kill the boy first.”

Two soldiers broke from the line and charged.

Adrian had perhaps two seconds. He used them to look at the walls.

The golden outline from his Insight was still faintly visible, lines of power tracing from the circle to the six crystals in the niches. The nearest one sat directly behind him, no more than three steps away. It was the size of his fist. It pulsed like a heartbeat.

Those aren’t just feeding on her. They’re holding the whole thing together. If one of them goes…

He threw himself backward.

The first soldier’s blade whistled over his head. The second hit the stone where he’d been. Adrian rolled, grabbed the fallen dagger from the floor, the one Nyra had dropped, and slammed the pommel into the crystal with every ounce of strength his ruined body had left.

It cracked.

Light screamed out of it in a white sheet. The circle shrieked, a sound like a hundred hinges tearing, and a pulse of raw magic rolled across the room. The soldiers cried out and flung their arms over their faces. Shields clattered. Someone swore loudly in pain.

Roderic stumbled back, one hand over his eyes. “He’s tricked us! Take him—”

Adrian didn’t wait for the end of the sentence. He scrambled across the floor, ignoring the white-hot protest from his chest, and dropped to his knees beside Nyra.

She looked up at him. Her face was pale and her breath was ragged, but her eyes were completely lucid, and furious.

“You broke the crystal,” she hissed. “You idiot, do you know what that did?”

“Made everybody blind for a few seconds?”

“It nearly tore the contract apart with me still attached to it!”

“But it didn’t.”

She stared. He realized that beneath the fury, she had been counting. Counting how long the chains had held, how long the circle would hold, how long she had to live. And the answer had just shifted.

“Final offer,” Adrian said, low and fast. “You can stay chained to the floor until the circle drains you dry, or you can help me stay alive for the next five minutes. After that you can hate me as much as you like.”

“You are asking me to fight for you.”

“I’m asking you to fight beside me. There’s a difference.”

“Is there?”

“It’s the difference between a servant and a partner. I’m offering the second one.”

Behind them, the soldiers were blinking back tears, shaking their heads, and fumbling for their swords. Roderic was bellowing orders. Eight men were about to remember that they had a job.

Nyra closed her eyes. For a terrible moment, Adrian thought she would refuse, and he would die here with a stranger’s name and a stranger’s blood and nothing to show for either.

Then she opened them.

“Free my hands,” she said.

“What?”

“The left chain. It runs through the crystal you cracked. The link is weaker now. Cut it.” She held up her wrist. “Quickly.”

He didn’t ask how. He slashed the dagger across the glowing silver at the base of her wrist, right where the light met her skin. The chain screamed, flared white and snapped.

Nyra let out a ragged breath. A rush of heat rolled off her in a wave, bright and wild, and in that instant the room felt too small for her.

“Thank you,” she said, with the enthusiasm of a woman swallowing a nail. “Now get down.”

Adrian dropped.

The first soldier lunged. Nyra rose into him in one fluid motion, caught the sword arm in both hands and twisted. Bone cracked. The man’s scream cut off as she slammed him into the wall hard enough to crack the stone. The second soldier hit her from the side, and she took the blow on her forearm and answered it with a kick that lifted him off his feet.

She wasn’t at full strength. Adrian could see that. Her breathing was labored, and she favored her right side, and twice she stumbled and recovered with a snarl. But even half-chained, she moved like something that had been born for killing, and the soldiers had not been trained for that.

Adrian couldn’t match her. What he could do was watch.

A soldier moved toward Nyra’s blind spot. Adrian shouted, “Left!” and she turned just in time to catch the blade on her bare hand and snap it in two. Another tried to get behind her. Adrian hurled the dagger at the man’s knee. It didn’t kill him, but it made him stumble, and Nyra’s elbow did the rest.

“Is that all?” she called. She was grinning. It was an awful, joyful grin. “I was promised a fight!”

Roderic himself came at Adrian then, and that was the moment things stopped being clever. The captain moved with the economy of a man who had been doing this for thirty years. He knocked Adrian’s hands aside, drove a boot into his stomach and slammed the hilt of his sword into his temple. Adrian hit the floor and the world went white at the edges.

He saw the sword rise.

Then Nyra’s hand closed around Roderic’s wrist from behind, and she pulled him off his feet and threw him across the chamber.

Silence.

Eight men lay groaning on the floor, or not groaning at all. The candles guttered. Nyra stood in the middle of the ruined circle, hair wild, chest heaving, a smear of someone else’s blood on her cheek.

She looked down at Adrian, who was lying on his back and bleeding in at least three new places.

“You are very bad at this,” she told him.

“I know.”

“You almost died.”

“I know.”

“You also saved me.” She said it as if she’d found a stone in her shoe. “I don’t like it.”

“You can add it to the list.”

She snorted. Then she crouched and offered him a hand. It was a small, grudging gesture, and he took it before she could change her mind.

“I kept my side,” Nyra said. “Now keep yours. The chains. You promised.”

“I did. Give me a minute to not die.”

“You have until sunrise.”

While she paced the room, he dragged himself over to the shattered crystal and the broken edge of the circle, looking for anything he could use. His fingers brushed a small patch of carved stone near the base, half hidden under the grime. He wiped it with his sleeve.

Letters. Tiny, precise ones, cut into the rock in a cramped, hurried hand.

Kill the heir. He knows too much. Make it look like his own doing. — Do not fail me.

Adrian read it three times.

His new body had not summoned a demon out of arrogance. Someone had used the boy’s stupidity to cover a murder. Someone had stood in this room, given Nyra an order and then sent eight men to clean up the mess.

Someone inside House Vale had wanted him dead.

And whoever it was, they were about to find out that he wasn’t.