Page 2 of The Demon Crown
Curious. So curious.
Greed wanted to see where this went. He wanted to know their deepest desire, because they wouldn’t be in his kingdom of thieves if they were good or righteous. If they wanted something from him, they would have to take it. And he wouldn’t make it easy on them.
A few of the others stood from the fire, all their attention focused on him and their leader. The man tilted his head back and laughed. The sound boomed through the cave like thunder.
And Greed might have focused on him if not for a small shadow slipping across the rocks behind them all. He blinked, thinking perhaps the sledgehammer had done more damage than he’d thought, but the shadow kept moving no matter how many times he fluttered his lashes.
A little thief, he realized. A creature who had seen the opportune moment to slip into these villains’ camp. Unaware, they all continued to watch him and their leader without ever noticing the movement at their backs.
The thief was using his capture to their advantage.
He almost felt dirty knowing that. He was a decoy in whatever this person’s plan was. They slid over the rocks, as silent as Greed himself might have been. But then the light illuminated the padding around their shoes and he realized this had likely been the plan for some time. This thief hadn’t wandered across this camp. They knew exactly where these people were going to be and how to steal from them without getting caught.
“You are going to feel pain,” the man in front of him snarled. “For all that you have done. And then you are going to tell us exactly where the Beastmaster’s Horn is.”
That got his attention.
Greed snorted and looked their leader in the eyes again. The man really should notice that Greed hadn’t been paying attention until this moment, but he obviously didn’t. “Absolutely not.”
“You will tell us after the pain I cause you.”
Arching a brow, he replied, “That would require more pain than you are capable of.”
The Beastmaster’s Horn was legendary. It had taken Greed almost three hundred years to track it down. The stories about it claimed that it could control even magical creatures. It summoned them, the sound wriggling through their minds until they were completely under the control of the summoner.
It was not an artifact that needed to be in the hands of a warlord idiot who thought he could trap a demon for long. Still, it was an interesting request and Greed was curious to see how much pain the man thought he could cause.
Greed had spent his entire life fighting. He’d been in this form for a thousand years, and the first memory he had was pain. When he and his brothers had taken on their mortal forms, turning spirit into flesh, he’d been the first to fight off those who tried to stop them.
The taste of metal had never quite left his mouth since.
The shadow moved again. It snuck closer to the fire as the remaining few dirty scoundrels stood up and approached his cage with the others.
He almost growled at them to move. He couldn’t see behind them and watch what was happening with the little thief. Clearly, they were all idiots who were about to lose something important and he wanted to watch.
Then the firelight cast its glow upon golden hair that slipped out from underneath a hood, and all the breath in his lungs caught. Bright blue eyes flicked up, staring at him with wide shock from across the fire. Her face was covered with a strip of dark green fabric and her body was encased in matching leather, hugging her perfect, curvy form.
By all the seven kingdoms, he’d found a goddess in a cave. Maybe he was already dead.
She moved lithe and cat-like over one of the stones the bandits had sat upon. And then, to his surprise, she sat down and pulled one of their bags in front of her. Dismissing him like he was nothing interesting at all.
Even if he hadn’t been Greed himself, he still was a man in a cage. And she wasn’t even going to look at him for more than a brief flick of her eyes?
He should tell them she was there.
But the moment he had the thought, she looked at him again. A pale face with glowing chips of sapphire that widened for a moment and then narrowed as if threatening him. As if saying that she would kill him herself if he let them know she was here.
And so his attention returned to the leader of these bandits, and for the first time in his life, Greed distracted someone so another person could steal.
“I don’t know why you’re laughing,” Greed snarled. “I’m not joking.”
“Neither am I, Greed.” He held out a hand and one of his cronies placed a knife with a silver hilt on his palm. “Do you know what this is?”
“No.” He didn’t have to try to sound bored. He was.
“This blade is known as Bonescraper.” The man held it over his head and drew it out of the scabbard. The light gleamed on the faint yellow edge. “I think you know it well.”
Damn it.
