A Touch of Madness (A Recipe for Disaster Novel 1)

It will hold my hand

“His name’s Edward and he is very much aware in there.” I was doing my best to keep my eyes squeezed shut against the tears. I heard uncomfortable silence from Nikka. At least she didn’t ask me how I knew, just took my word for it. “Do you know what he meant about his owning me?” I asked mental fingers crossed.

“Did he mix his blood in with yours?” Nikka’s guess was astute.

“Yah.” The dread in my gut warned that no matter what that would never be a good thing.

Nikka’s sigh confirmed it. “All demons can all share their innate skills with each other. Demon Lord Marcus can heal almost any wound instantly, thus your Edward would be able to do the same when Marcus is in reach. What he did to you is a low level blood bond.” She fell silent for a moment. “It means you get his healing but it also means that if his will to dominate you is stronger than your will to resist, then he can take you over the same way Marcus took over him. Even without that the blood connection will be able to aid him in manipulating you, and it marks you.”

I gave a humourless laugh. “Oh.” Made sense, but my mind was my own. No way was I just going to let anyone, not even Edward, take away my ability to think for myself. “You sound like you know what you’re talking about. Are you an expert or just a ferocious autodidact?”

I kept half my concentration on Nikka and the environment around me, but the other half went to focusing on the tangle wire. I could in fact escape it, if my magic would work. I managed to slowly focus on the feel of the construct’s energy signal but Nikka stayed silent on however the hell she knew the theory of magical nature in the Granite Realms. I could feel the humming of the construct’s energy as I snapped myself into it, hiding my own magical self inside that signal. The tangle wire loosened immediately and I nearly hit the floor as a wave of exhaustion rolled over me. Normally I can do something like that without even thinking about it but here it took almost everything I had. At the very least I confirmed that I could do it, so I pulled the tangle wire back on and slipped myself out of its aura, for the lack of a better term. The wire engaged immediately and sometime after that I must have dropped into a stupor because my next real memory is of Edward banging my door open.

He grabbed the tangle wire and jerked me to my feet so I lashed him across the face with my elbow and slammed my foot onto the top of his. I felt the little bone in the foot snap as he howled at me. A devilkin guard prodded me with an innocent looking rod and I jerked as if I’d been electrocuted; my muscles went haywire and I hit the ground roughly. That close, I could hear the bone in Edward’s foot snap back into one piece. How was it that his magic worked fine while I bumbled along without mine? Edward straddled my chest, using his knees to pin my shoulders on the floor as he hit me in the face. They were only open handed slaps but he kept it up for a couple of minutes so that I was only able to see blurry figures for far too long of a while once he stopped. He got up off of me and I could hear in his voice that he smiled. “Bring her.” He commanded the devilkin guards. So my caring captors then dragged me out by the tangle wire around my wrists; it wasn’t a fun feeling as the metal quickly dug into my skin and I started to bleed.

I was dropped off on a cold marble floor near where Marcus was. Despite his brother’s flare for the melodramatic, Marcus was sitting at a simple desk. No throne, no ornate setting at all, I was the one thing that didn’t belong. Though on closer inspection, every item in this office was of very high quality material. He seemed to enjoy his creature comforts. As soon as I could, I rolled off of my backside to my knees. Both devilkin moved to jab me back to the prone position but Marcus waved them off.