“This isn’t a democracy,” stated Maddox, his voice hard and deep. “Sit the fuck down or get the fuck out.”
Euan’s face flushed, but he stiffly sat. Raini’s inner entity snickered.
A descendant in the front row sighed at Raini. “I get that you didn’t ask to be put in this situation; that it isn’t your fault that you know too much. But the fact is that you do know too much.”
“I do,” Raini allowed. “I get why you’d fear an outsider possessing your secrets. I don’t much like the feeling either. But you’d be fools to ask that Maddox erase my memories, and you know it. Because you also know you could use me; that no more of your lair would have to suffer through another haze if I was on hand.”
“And you’d be fine with us using you?” challenged Marcella.
Raini wouldn’t piss on the woman if she was on fire, but … “I’d be fine with doing my anchor a favor. I don’t really much care about any of you, purely because I don’t know you. But if Maddox asked me to spare someone the torment of a haze, I’d do it.”
A pretty redhead spoke up. “How can we trust that you won’t … ”
“Destroy your anchor bonds? I guess you can’t.” And that was why no one liked being around someone with Raini’s ability. Not only could a huge blast of psychic hellfire liquefy a person’s brain, a simple well-aimed zap of it could do the very thing that no other demonic power could do. It could incinerate an anchor bond.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
When it became apparent that Raini could wield psychic hellfire, the first thing she’d been taught to do was strangle the ability. Her parents had explained how important it was that she never use it. It wasn’t until she was much older that Jolene decided it would be best if Raini learned how to control it rather than simply suppress it.
Perhaps the Prime hadn’t liked that she’d asked Raini to effectively cut off a small piece of herself, but Raini hadn’t minded. It was better to have spent years suppressing it than to have accidentally destroyed an anchor bond. Once destroyed, there was no way to restore it. Worse, the unnatural severing of the bond could trigger the affected demons to turn rogue.
The entity that lived within every demon was a heartless psychopathic predator. The only thing that gave it a sense of balance was that it shared its soul with a person. If it no longer had that person’s sense of goodness touching its soul, it would be a being of pure darkness. The ultimate evil.
Rogues weren’t insane, but they cared nothing for logic. They felt no need to curb their desires, no matter how cruel those desires were. They’d kill indiscriminately for no other reason than that they felt like doing so—and they wouldn’t care if their actions caught the attention of humans.
The dark satisfaction they attained from inflicting pain and misery was like a drug to them. So, yes, it was never good to have a rogue on the loose. The death toll would always be high.
Only one other person in the history of Raini’s lair had ever possessed the ability to wield psychic hellfire, and that person had left behind awful scars that taunted the lair even a century later. On losing his own anchor in a tragic accident, Doyle had been so utterly devastated that he’d withdrawn from life, leaving his demon in charge.
The entity had wreaked havoc— cremating anchor bonds here, there, and everywhere. The result? Their Prime and a high number of others turned rogue.
Just one rogue could cause utter chaos. A whole horde of them were practically impossible to defeat. They had not only attacked the others within their lair, they targeted outsiders and humans—causing an epic clusterfuck.
Several of the other Primes had united to destroy the rogues, leaving the lair so small and vulnerable that some of the larger lairs had taken advantage—bullying them and trying to steal away the more powerful members, even if those members were children.
Jolene worried that if the rest of the lair knew of Raini’s ability, they’d demand that she leave for fear that history would repeat itself. And so they’d kept it quiet, hoping there never came a time when the information fell into the wrong hands. That time might now have arrived. The fact that she possessed the descendants’ secrets should still the tongue of anyone who felt like causing trouble for her. Should.
“I say we trust her,” said Celia, to which Gunther nodded.
Euan bristled. “And what if she breaks her word?”
“She hasn’t done it so far, has she?” Maddox pointed out. “If she was a person whose word meant nothing, she wouldn’t have come to me the day after I healed her friend. She wouldn’t have allowed me to place the psychic tag in her mind. She wouldn’t have stuck to our deal every step of the way.”