I reminded myself that my body was still frozen — still held in the thrall of his magic. Kaden could do anything he wanted to me, and I’d be powerless to stop it. The thought sobered me at once. But he merely placed those incredible hands over the burns along my arms, healing those, too.
I felt it the instant his magic released me. As soon asthat invisible force disappeared, I lurched toward the ground. I threw a hand out to stop myself from face-planting and reached for my dagger as I surged to my feet.
“Glad to see you’re feeling better,” said Kaden, still in that amused tone. “Where were we?”
He straightened to his full height, and I took another half step back. The scent of ash filled my airways, and I glanced behind me. The hellfire had burned out when the demons vanished, but thick black smoke still billowed from the open door. Julian’s body lay where it had fallen, facedown on the pavement.
“He’s dead,” said Kaden. “The demon broke his mind before he vacated.”
He said it as casually as someone talking about the weather, but there was an underlying bitterness that brought reality crashing back.
The fire. The stone. Silas’s bag of blood.
Fresh panic welled in my chest, mixed with fury and devastation. Julian had tricked me — or those demons had. There was no apokropos stone. It had all been a ruse, which meant —
“What is your name?” Kaden asked, snapping me out of my disastrous train of thought.
“I’m not tellingyou.”
Those strange silvery-gray eyes flashed, and his sensuous lips stretched in an almost feline smile. “Why not?” he asked. “Don’t you trust me?”
It was clear from the mocking lilt to his voice that he knew I didn’t.
“I just saved you from those two demon bastards.”
I bristled. The petty, prideful part of me wanted to argue that he hadn’tsavedme from anything — that I’d hadeverything under control. But we both knew the demon that had possessed Julian had been inside my head when he’d arrived. If Kaden hadn’t shown up when he did, the demon probably would have broken me, too.
“It’s nothing personal,” I said truthfully. “I don’t trust anyone.”
Kaden snorted. “So you’re an equal-opportunity flavor of paranoid?”
I shrugged. “You’re fae. I’m a hunter. You have every reason to want me dead.”
Kaden’s eyes narrowed. He didn’t look offended — not exactly — but there was a predatory edge to his expression as he took a step toward me. “Do you think I’d expend the energy to save you from those demons if I wanted you dead?”
I bit down on the inside of my cheek. It was hard to argue with that logic, but I knew better than to assume he was being honest. Faeries couldn’t lie, but they were masters of trickery and half truths.
Before the Euroshean crusades and the unification of Anvalyn, there had been thousands of fae races, but I knew dark fae descended from the Drathen line. The Drathen fae were one of the few races that remained, and there were countless stories of them luring mortals to the Otherworld and tricking them into an eternity of servitude.
One of my foster fathers had warned meneverto bargain with a faerie. And although Kaden and I hadn’t made any kind of agreement, I was indebted to him for saving my life.
The stormy sea in Kaden’s eyes seemed to churn as he watched me squirm. “If you won’t tell me your name, at least answer me this: Where did you get that blade?”
I licked my lips. Surely there was no harm in telling him that much. After all, my mother was dead, and I knew nothing of my father’s whereabouts — if he even lived. “It . . . belonged to my father.”
Kaden frowned. “Your father was a witch?”
“No. He was a hunter.”
“And where didheget it?”
“I don’t know,” I said, a bit defensively. “I never met my father.”
“And your mother?”
“She died when I was young.” I didn’t tell him that she’d been killed — murdered by a blood-drunk vampire.
“Soshewas the witch.”
