My Demon Husband novel · Chapter 16 of 32

Chapter 16: Wings

Malphas stood between us at the foot of the stairs.

The three hounds stood in front of him, side by side, with their heads low.

Their eyes were the only light in the room.

"Get out of my house," Malphas said.

"I was invited." Andras folded the glove and put it in his pocket. "Somebody here signed a lovely paper. In this building, at a kitchen table. Your wards are very old. They can't tell a door from a door."

Behind me, the stairwell was filling up.

Phone lights. Bathrobes. The young father with the baby on his chest.

The boy from 4D, holding his mother's hand.

"Everybody upstairs," I said.

Nobody went.

Andras looked past me at all of them, the way Royce had in this same lobby.

Like a man adding up a bill.

"Mrs. Malphas," he said. "I'll make this simple. I don't need your husband. I need the hearth. And the hearth is half yours."

"It's half mine and I'm keeping it."

"You'd be surprised what people let go of," he said, "at the end."

He lifted his bare hand toward me.

I felt it before he touched me.

It was like the cold out of an open freezer, pulling at my chest. Pulling at something deeper than my chest.

My knees started to go.

The big one moved first.

He launched off the floor without a sound and hit Andras in the chest, the full weight of a pony.

Andras didn't even step back.

He caught the hound by the scruff with one hand and threw him.

The big one flew across the lobby and hit the brass mailboxes.

The whole wall of them crumpled. Mail went everywhere.

He slid down onto the tile and didn't get up.

"No," I said.

Then the dark in the lobby moved.

It came off Malphas like smoke off a fire, and went up, and spread.

Wings.

Black wings, crow wings, so big they brushed the walls on both sides and blotted out the stairs.

His eyes were red all the way through and burning.

He wasn't a tall man in a coat anymore. He was taller than the ceiling should have let him be.

Every tenant on the stairs saw it.

Nobody screamed.

The boy from 4D whispered, "So cool," and his mother put her hand over his mouth.

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