A Demon And His Witch by Eve Langlais Page B

while those brief moments left her unsatisfied, she allowed them for love.
    How foolish of her to not recognize the signs of his selfishness.
    Amidst the mound of pillows and bedding, he snored softly. In repose, his features were smooth, his tousled hair dark and silky to the touch. A pang of longing struck her. Why did things have to turn out this way? What evil had she truly done other than to love this man?
    She must have made a sound, or the chill of her presence alerted him, because his eyes flicked open. For a long moment, he stared at her unblinking, then confusion set in and his brow creased.
    “Ysabel?”
    “Funny how you remember me now, yet couldn’t when you watched me burn,” she replied with a bitterness she couldn’t stem.
    “I had nothing to do with it. It was my mother.”
    The excuse angered her. “And you did nothing to stop it! How could you? I thought you loved me?”
    Shifting his body, he sat up. “Love you? A peasant with no dowry? No land or title?” A sneer tilted his features into someone ugly. Why had she not noticed the cruelty in his face before? Not recognized his lies? “Is it my fault you were stupid enough to believe I would tie myself to someone like you?”
    A part of her must have known he didn’t care, known he led her on falsely, yet to hear him so baldly state it… To have him throw her stupidity in her face. She struggled against the tears at her naivety, and let the anger at his duplicity take over. “You miserable excuse for a man. I can’t believe I ever let you touch me with those lying lips.”
    “You did. And you loved it. It’s a shame mother found out about us. While inexperienced, you were quite an eager learner. At least she saved me the trouble of ridding myself of you later.”
    Any last doubt at her choice evaporated. “Stupid, stupid man. Did your mother never teach you not to mess with a witch?”
    He dared to mock. “You’re dead. You can do nothing to me now. Go ahead. Moan to your heart’s content or shake your chains. You’re dead and buried in an unmarked grave. Although, you can find it by looking for the dead grass that I’ve killed pissing on it. Go back to Hell, evil spirit, where you belong.”
    His attempt to rile her up didn’t make her explode with anger. She went past that straight into glee. She laughed. Not a nice laugh or a hysterical one. A low chuckle, a fearless one, tinted with a touch of madness, slipped past her lips. “Oh, I’ll return to Hell, Francisco, but I’m not going alone.”
    The knife she brought, an ebony etched blade her new friend gifted her, flashed down before he could even grasp her intent. And she thrust again and again until he gurgled his last. Seeing his soul rise from his body, still wearing a look of surprise, she blew him a kiss.
    Finally losing his arrogant expression, he called her foul names and reached for her. His ghostly fingers grasped at nothing as Hell’s reaper came for him. Panicked, he tried to evade his fate. But no one escaped Death on a mission, especially not a soul as dark as Francisco’s. Oh how he screamed as he left the mortal plane.
    But even hearing his screams, sometimes even causing them, never erased the pain of his betrayal. Never restored her ability to trust. But it sure did make her smile.
    Memories of her past were interrupted as someone knocked at her repaired, and now steel reinforced, door.
    “Go away,” she muttered, lifting herself from the tub with limbs that reflected every one of her five hundred years. Funny how getting burned alive could make her feel so old.
    She grabbed a robe and wrapped it around her frame before tottering into her bedroom. The pounding came again, along with a muffled shout. She ignored it in favor of scrounging through her underwear drawer. Yanking on her black briefs and matching athletic bra, she’d just turned to her closet when the loud bang occurred. It didn’t surprise her to see Remy in her bedroom doorway a moment