Chapter 2 HOUSEGUEST FROM HELL

The bread was a total loss. I pulled it out of the oven anyway...pitch black on the bottom...and set it on the counter like a small, sad funeral. I just needed something to do with my hands that wasn't pointing at the six-and-a-half-foot demon currently trying to punch a hole through my wall.

"Stop that," I snapped.

"I am testing the perimeter," Malachar growled. Which was just a fancy way of saying he was trying to smash my kitchen plaster.

"You're going to shake the shelves down! My good teapot is up there!"

He whirled around to glare at me, looking like my concern for a ceramic teapot was the most insulting thing he’d heard in five hundred years. Given the morning he was having, it probably was.

He didn't hit the wall again, but he started pacing...broad shoulders tight, fingers trailing along an invisible barrier only he could feel. He made it to the edge of the kitchen, near the back door, and stopped dead. His hand hit empty air, and I watched his back go rigid.

"How far does it stretch?" I asked, leaning against the counter.

"To the border of your property," he gritted out, his jaw clenched tight. "Every single inch. I can feel the line burning against my skin."

"Honestly, structurally speaking, that’s kind of impressive. I didn't even mean to..."

"Impressive?" He threw the word back at me like it tasted like poison. "I have leveled entire cities, witch. I have made warlords drop to their knees and weep. And you have chained me to a rotting cottage with a leaking roof using sage."

"I told you! The cat ate my rosemary!"

"I don't give a damn about the cat!"

"Well, maybe you should! Because if you’d been summoned properly, none of this..." I cut myself off and pressed two fingers hard against my temple. It wasn't even seven in the morning, and I was screaming about gardening with the Lord of the Ash Plains. "Look. Can we just sit down? Please. I need coffee, and you need to stop flexing like you're about to tear my house apart."

He didn't sit. He stood right in the center of my small kitchen, arms crossed over his massive chest, radiating the specific, lethal fury of a man who had never once been told what to do in his entire existence.

I made coffee anyway. My hands were shaking, but I managed to pour myself a mug. I didn't offer him any, mostly because I only had one clean cup left and it said WITCH, PLEASE on the side. I couldn't picture him holding it.

"So," I said, taking a hot sip. "What now?"

"Now," he said, stepping toward me until the heat rolling off his skin hit me like a wave, "you break the spell and release me."

"I tried that! Three times!"

"Then try harder!"

"I don't know how! I don't even know what I did wrong!" My voice rose, the panic finally leaking through. "You were supposed to vanish, and you didn't. I have to open my shop in two hours, so unless you've got a brilliant idea..."

"I do not have ideas, mortal," he growled, crowding into my space. "Things simply happen as I command them. I have never been trapped. I have never been held."

Up close, the raw anger in his dark golden eyes had something else buried beneath it. Something tighter. Darker. I recognized it because I’d felt it plenty of times myself...standing in a cold room, broke and overwhelmed, realizing things were completely out of my control. It looked a lot like panic, even if it was wrapped up in six-and-a-half feet of muscle, horns, and terrifying magic.

I didn't call him out on it. I wasn't suicidal.

"Okay," I whispered, holding my ground even though my pulse was hammering in my throat. "Well, while we figure it out, you can't just stand around my house looking like... like that."

His eyes narrowed. "Like what?"

"Like you're planning to eat the next person who walks through the door."

He dropped his gaze to my mouth, his breath warm against my cheek. "I might."

"You will not eat my customers! We are not doing that! I have a reputation..."

Jingle.

The little bronze bell over the front door rang out, cheerful and totally oblivious to the nightmare unfolding in my kitchen.

"Yoo-hoo! Clara, dear!" Mrs. Danby’s voice echoed from the front counter. "I know it's early, but I need my sleeping charm before the market crowd gets here!"

I froze. Malachar froze.

For one terrifying second, we just stared at each other. Two total strangers who had been enemies for less than an hour, suddenly dragged into a desperate, silent truce.

"Closet," I hissed under my breath.

His golden eyes flared with pure outrage. "I am not hiding in a..."

"Closet! Now! Go!"

I grabbed his heavy forearm. His skin was burning hot, his muscles hard as iron, a shock of static magic zapping right through my palm. I pulled him sideways with everything I had...and to my absolute shock, he actually moved.

He didn't fight me. He folded his massive frame into the tiny pantry between my winter coat and a wooden broom. Six and a half feet of ancient nightmare, packed into a space meant for a mop bucket. He looked down at me from the dark, his jaw tight, looking genuinely stunned that he was letting me push him around.

I slammed the door shut right as Mrs. Danby rounded the corner.

"Morning, dear! Oh my, something smells completely charred."

"Bread," I said, my voice cracking slightly. "Long night."

"You look terribly flushed," she said, squinting at me over her glasses. "Are you coming down with something?"

"Never felt better!" I grabbed her charm off the shelf, my hands trembling as I wrapped it in twine. I pushed her through a fast transaction, nodding along to some story about her granddaughter that I didn't hear a single word of.

The entire time, I could feel Malachar behind that thin wooden door. A heavy, dangerous presence humming through the wall, like a storm waiting to break.

The second the front door clicked shut and the bell jingled her out, I threw the closet door open.

He hadn't moved. He stood there, wedged against my wool coat with a tiny speck of flour on his dark shoulder, staring down at me with an expression I couldn't read at all.

"You didn't fight me," I said softly, leaning against the doorframe, trying to catch my breath. "Why didn't you throw me across the room?"

Malachar stepped out of the closet slowly, uncoiling his huge frame until he was looming over me again. "I don't know," he growled low in his throat. He sounded deeply, genuinely unsettled by his own words. "I have never once obeyed anyone."

He reached out, his thick, warm fingers hovering just an inch from my jaw, his thumb brushing the air near my skin. The heat rolling off him made my breath catch in my chest.

Before either of us could say another word, a loud, violent CRACK echoed from the front garden.

We both whirled toward the window.

The protective wards on the cottage...the ones I had been trying to fix in the first place, the whole reason I'd messed up the spell...didn't just flicker. They shattered completely. All at once, the faint blue glow vanished like a candle blown out in a hurricane, leaving the cottage completely exposed.