Demon's Revenge_Daughter of Winter Read online

  Demon’s Revenge

  By Skye MacKinnon

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  DEMON'S REVENGE

  First edition. December 20, 2017.

  Copyright © 2017 Skye MacKinnon.

  Written by Skye MacKinnon.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Demon's Revenge (Daughter of Winter, #1.5)

  Now

  Before

  After

  This is a spin-off from Winter Princess, the first book in the Daughter of Winter Series. It can be read as a stand-alone, but I’d recommend reading the novel first before reading this story. Or maybe after, if you like the characters in Demon’s Revenge.

  Enjoy!

  THIS IS NOT A CHRISTMAS story. Don’t expect any baubles, fuzzy feelings or hugs from Santa. This is a sad, gritty story with demons and death. I give it to you as a Christmas present, but I repeat, this is NOT a Christmas story.

  Now

  Gone.

  Dead.

  Aodh is dead.

  My man, my beautiful man. Who pulled me from the darkness and gave me a chance of a life in the light.

  Now he’s gone. And with him, all the goodness in me has left.

  I’m going to have my revenge.

  The world is going to burn.

  Before

  They say demons cannot love but I’m proof of the opposite. I loved with all my heart. Two hundred years ago, a Guardian named Aodh was sent out to kill me. I’d been a naughty little demon, trapped in the belief that all I could be was evil. I’d been told that demons are bad all my life, so no wonder I turned out that way. I enjoyed the scent of burning flesh, the sound of screams as they fled from me in terror. But deep inside, I knew this wasn’t really me.

  Then Aodh came and my life was turned upside down. Instead of killing me, he captured me and made me his prisoner. Over time, I became his apprentice, and finally, his lover. I think we were the first demon-Guardian couple in the world. And with that I mean the human world and all the Realms of the Gods. It was unheard of, but for us, it was the most natural thing. For us, it didn’t matter that we were different species, that we were meant to be enemies. All we felt for each other was pure love.

  It can’t have been easy for him. Some of his friends shunned him and eventually, we decided to move to Earth, away from the judging looks and nasty words. We found a quaint little cottage in the Western Isles in Scotland, something so mundane and normal that I was totally overwhelmed by it at the beginning. I was a demon, I wasn’t made for quaint.

  But I saw it as a challenge that I took on with all the enthusiasm of a frenzied demon. I started knitting, I made tea cosies, I learned how to bake. I became the perfect little house demon.

  Aodh never said but I think he missed his old life. I loved him even more for giving it all up for me. Who would have thought that a Guardian would fall so he could be with a demon who had risen from hell. That’s metaphorically speaking, there is no hell. There’s only the Demon Realm, but I guess you may call it hell. It’s a fiery, violent place but it holds a lot of good memories for me.

  Demons can be violent, but they can also be passionate. Oh the nights of feasting and indulgence... Let’s ignore the fact that a lot of those parties involved human blood and sometimes body parts. When Aodh captured me, I resented him for it. I hated him. I’d been torn from my home, the only family I knew. Killing was my job and without it, I felt useless. Empty. A demon without blood on her hands isn’t really a demon.

  I’d gone cold turkey. Cold human? It took several years before I realised that I could live without the bloodshed. I still don’t know how Aodh managed to be so patient with me. Or why he didn’t kill me. I asked him a few decades later and he admitted that he had killed demons before. I was the first one he spared. Maybe he saw the spark of goodness inside of me. That it had been nurture, not nature that made me into the monster I was.

  He kept me locked away in his house, leashed with spelled chains that prevented me from leaving but gave me enough freedom to move around. I trashed his house a few times when I couldn’t stand the emptiness inside of me. It hurt, not being able to fulfil my purpose.

  But Aodh never punished me. He just looked at me in disappointment and that was enough to make me regret my actions. His patience and belief in me was endless. How did I deserve such a man?

  One day, he removed my leash and told me that I was free to go, as long as I didn’t kill again. If I did, he would end me. He said it with great sadness, but I could see the hope in his eyes that I had indeed changed. I left – and returned after two days, not sure what to do with my life. I didn’t have a job, a calling, a home.

  He smiled when he opened the door for me. “I was hoping you’d come back,” he said and gave me a hug. It was the first time someone had hugged me. It felt... good. Really good. It was a feeling I wanted to have again and again. So I stayed.

  He gave me a room in his house, this time, one looking less like a prison. He taught me to read – I can’t believe how savage I was back then, not being able to read or write – and I soon began to devour his library. He had an entire room filled with books, complete with a fireplace that never extinguished. His element was fire, and there was always warmth in the house and in his eyes.

  Oh, those amber eyes. Beautiful, soft, knowing. Like he could look inside of me and only see the good. It wasn’t that he ignored the evil in me, he just didn’t perceive it as important.

  And just like that, I became a reformed demon.

  Of course there were falls back into my old habits, but Aodh always helped me get back on track. One disappointed look of his usually snapped me out of my fits of rage. It’s incredible to think back and see the power he had over me. I loved him and wanted to be good for him.

  When did friendship develop into love? I’m not sure, maybe about fifty years into our strange relationship? I had never loved before. I’d had sex, I’d had orgies, I’d felt passion and desire, but never love. That was something reserved for humans and Guardians – or so I thought. Only when I discovered a stack of romance books in Aodh’s library did I realise what it was I felt for him. That it was more than friendship.

  Our relationship had been strictly platonic, until the day I told Aodh that I loved him. We ended up in bed pretty much immediately. Turns out, he’d been feeling the same for me, but he hadn’t been sure if I was capable of returning his love.

  The years that followed were full of passion. We got to know each others bodies, smells, tastes. He learned to cope with my wings and I got good at evading the sparks that sometimes flew when he came. We always had a bucket of water by the bed, just in case he set the bedding on fire. Once, he burned down our dining room table – after that, we had buckets everywhere in the house. We were hungry for each other and almost insatiable. Whole weeks passed without either of us leaving the house.

  Over time, we managed to restrict our appetites to once or twice a day, but our love never faltered. It wasn’t all about the physical, it was the emotional bond that had formed between us.

  The only thing I missed was having a purpose besides being Aodh’s lover. Then one day, he told me of an idea. A demon rehabilitation centre. It sounded so crazy that I started to laugh, but he only looked at me until I realised that his methods had been successful with me.

  “But no falling in love with any of them,” I told him sternly.

  “There’s only one demon I love,” he replied and so it was settled.

  He continued to hunt demons – it was his job, after all, to bring them to justice – bu
t he gave them a choice. Be killed or come to our rehabilitation facility. Aodh got a mage to create a pocket of magic-less space near our house – a place where no human could go and where demons couldn’t access their powers. It would have been too dangerous otherwise.

  The first demon didn’t like me. He saw me as a traitor. He spat at me, cursed me. I ripped out his tongue. He became a little more respectful later, but eventually, even Aodh realised that he was a lost cause. So where the next dozen or so demons that came into our centre. They didn’t want to be rehabilitated, they didn’t see anything wrong in what they’d been doing all their life. They enjoyed the killing and bloodshed.

  Aodh’s idealism never wavered, though. He kept believing in the inert goodness in everyone, including demons. And finally, after half a year of failures, we finally had success. Two female demons fell in love with each other, and through that, left their old ways behind. It sounds easy, but it took about two years.

  Amara and Jamie were both young, only a few decades old each. Maybe that helped in getting them to adjust to a life without violence. I think at the beginning, it was lust, but later it developed into more. I sneaked some romance novels into the facility and just like me, they slowly realised what they were feeling for each other. Turns out books and love really do change a person.

  They became inseparable and we gave them their own shared room in the centre. With Aodh being gone a lot to capture more demons, I spent a lot of time with them and at some point, we became friends. Amara’s temperament was just as fiery as her looks. Her red wings were the colour of strawberries and her black hair was streaked with burgundy highlights. She was loud, wild and a lot of fun.

  Jamie was a lot quieter, but no less lovely. She was a rare white demon with almost feathery wings that made her look like an angel out of some of the human books I’d read. Her pale blond hair was a stark contrast to Amara’s, and when they cuddled, it was as if darkness and light came together. Jamie had a naughty streak as well, though, hidden behind a sweet smile and innocent eyes.

  They were cute together and it was endearing to watch their young love grow. Stolen kisses in between therapy sessions, a quick hug while waiting in the lunch queue... it warmed my heart to see them like that. Aodh was just as amazed at the sight of two demons being together not in lust, but in love. I think it proved his theory that I wasn’t the only demon who could be brought into the light.

  After a few years, Jamie and Amara left us and moved to Australia to start a greeting card business. Both of them were skilled in glamour so it wasn’t a problem for them to live among humans. Just like us, they didn’t feel at home in the Demon Realm or any of the other realms. Earth was an in-between place where they could hide and thrive.

  We stayed in touch and probably saw them as something like our children. Our first successful conversion. There were not many after that, but Aodh never gave up. He continued to bring demons to our rehab facility and I continued to lead by example, showing them that it was possible to live without the thrill of the hunt and the kill.

  Our life was perfect.

  Until Wyn arrived.

  The Demi-Goddess came with her four Guardians, halted in their journey to her mother’s realm by demons beleaguering the Gate. I believe they really only wanted to stay for the night and make plans for the upcoming fight, but Aodh, selfless as ever, offered that we would fight with them. How could I have refused my lover.

  It was to be my first fight in over a century and I was scared. Scared that the bloodlust might return, scared that I might fall back into the darkness, scared that Aodh would see the evil in me and leave.

  But if he was going to go into battle, so was I.

  And I quite liked Wyn, she reminded me a bit of myself. Feisty, curious and a bit unsure about herself and her feelings. Her magic was strong though and I knew even then that she was going to be unstoppable one day. Best to get into her good graces now while she was not quite aware of her powers yet.

  On a cold winter morning we left for the Gate. We lived not far from it, saving Aodh from having a long commute to the Demon Realms. There were seven of us: Aodh, Wyn, her four Guardians and me. They were in one car while my lover and I shared another. It was to be the last time we were alone together. If only I’d used it better. Told him how much I loved him. Thanked him for all he’d done for me. Instead, I sat in silence, preparing for the upcoming battle.

  I didn’t even fight on Aodh’s side. I was assigned to accompany Arc, a Guardian I’d met a few times before. He was cute, in a Scottish way.

  I don’t remember much of the first half of the battle. At some point Wyn attacked me, caught in a blood frenzy that clouded her mind. Luckily, Arc snapped her out of it before I had to defend myself. But not before she killed most of the demons around us. There were only one or two left for me to dispose of.

  Taking a break, I sat down on a corpse.

  "Did I do all that?" Wyn asked in confusion. She really didn’t have a clue about the extent of her powers.

  "It was so magnificent that I'd almost forgive you for attacking me." I got up and poked her in the chest. "But only almost. I'm going to come up with a nice punishment for you, little princess. Maybe I'll steal one of your Guardians."

  Of course I was only teasing. I had my Aodh. But that was the moment I felt a familiar tug in my chest. My bond to him was calling me. Something was wrong. I whirled around to where I felt him, on the other side of the battlefield. A small fireball exploded in the sky; a flare to show us where to go. The other two started to run but I leapt into the air, my wings extended, flying to him as fast as I could.

  He was surrounded by demons, kneeling on the ground. I landed on his side, killing two demons with the sharp tips of my wings. Protectively standing above him, I used my sword and my wings to give us space. Aodh was groaning in pain. I couldn’t look down, I needed to keep an eye on the demons, but when he leaned against my legs, I knew it was bad.

  “Get up!” I shouted, but all he did was wheeze. Storm joined my side and we fought back to back, protecting Aodh. Wyn’s Guardian used his sword, cleaving through the horde of demons, while my main weapon remained my wings, sharp and deadly.

  The others finally arrived and joined the fray, but they never even got close to us. There were too many demons, and a new one came for every one we killed. It was hopeless. I wailed my despair into the air as I dismembered a fiend in front of me.

  A demon sliced into my wing from behind and I screamed as I felt blood trickle down my back. I killed him a second later. But the injury made me sluggish and it would be at least half an hour until it was fully healed.

  "We could use some help here!" Storm yelled and Wyn shouted something back that got lost in the sounds of the fighting. A moment later, a black flash raced around the battlefield, crashing through the chests of the demons. They fell to the ground, lifeless.

  But I had no time to admire Wyn’s destructive powers. I fell to my knees, hugging Aodh’s body to my chest. He didn’t respond to my cries, he didn’t move. Blood covered my hands as I stroked his beautiful face.

  He’s dead.

  Gone.

  After

  I take his body into my arms and jump into the air, carrying us away from the battlefield. I don’t care what happens to Wyn and her Guardians. They got us into this. They killed Aodh.

  He’s dead.

  He will never again smile at me. Never again kiss me. Never again hug me.

  He’s gone.

  Forever.

  Darkness boils up in me, only increased by the pain of my injured wing. They killed him. The demons killed him. I may be one of them, but that won’t stop me. They will suffer for what they did. I will find out who sent them and then I’m going to torture them, slowly, ripping their skin off bit by bit until they whimper for mercy.

  I could go after Wyn who led us into the battle that killed Aodh, but even in my grief I know that would end in my death. I’m not ready to die yet. First I will have my revenge,
and then I will join Aodh in the never-ending sleep.

  Guardians and demons are immortal in as far as there is no disease that could kill us, nor are we affected by age. But a sword through your body... that’s a different matter. Aodh was almost eight centuries old and now he’s dead. Such a long life ended by such a banal metal thing.

  I fly back to the cottage where I spent the best years of my life. All the love those walls have seen... no, I can’t enter. It’s too painful. But I know where I will leave Aodh until I can properly put him to rest. I land in a clearing not far from the house. A single push of magic opens the hidden door between two trees, leading to our rehabilitation centre. It’s his life’s work, his passion. There are no occupants at the moment; we’ve been on a sabbatical for the past year, enjoying some time together rather than working around the clock to capture and work with demons.

  I lay him down on the large oak table in the office. Bookshelves line the walls and an empty tea cup tells stories of long evenings spent in here. There’s a jar of biscuits on the desk, it’s probably still full. Aodh never said it but he hated the biscuits I made. I tried to bake but usually the fruits of my labour looked good and tasted horrible. I love – loved – him for still trying them every time I made a new batch.

  I arrange his body so he looks like he’s only sleeping. His hands are covering the wound on his stomach and I use my shirt to wipe the blood off his face. There’s nothing I can do about the blood in his hair though, nor about all the cuts and bruises on his skin.

  It’s only his shell though, his spark has left.

  I crumple to the floor as I realise I will never hear his laughter again. He had a beautiful laugh, deep and melodious... a tear rolls down my cheek.

  He shouldn’t be dead.

  Why is he dead?