Demon Forged by Meljean Brook Page A

statue.
    She was . . . hiding, he realized. That outburst had not been for him. He thought of what he’d already learned of her history. Thought of how she might have been overpowered. She hadn’t been overpowered by a demon or nosferatu; if she had been, she’d be dead.
    So it had been a man—or men. She’d been a slave, and he had no doubt she’d been a vibrant, strong woman. Who wouldn’t have wanted her? What man wouldn’t have wanted to prove his strength by overpowering her?
    His hands fisted, as if to hold his own rage within them.
    “Then what shame would you accept?”
    “If you stopped fighting.” Her gaze swept over him, and with the next pulse of her Gift, the statue’s fists closed. “Even if you cannot physically struggle, if you stop fighting you should feel shame.”
    She honored defiance, then. He knew well how she appreciated his—not thoughtless defiance, but resistance to anything that went against his core. In the first days of training, her eyes had gleamed when he’d told her how he’d burned, tied to a wooden post. The gleam hadn’t been pleasure, and he’d been surprised that he’d understood it: The pain of his execution had faded a hundred years ago, but he would always have his moment of defiance, his refusal to betray his family to save his life. That was something a man could take pride in. Something she’d admired.
    But he’d not done much worth admiration in the hundred years since. Only study and train.
    Why, then, had she promised more after his training was completed? She was twelve hundred years old. One of the strongest in Caelum, with stories, battles, and victories attached to her name. She’d had lovers and feuds with Guardians, humans, and vampires all. But she did not carry her age like Michael did, in quiet and grace. No, she was rough, in a sleeveless, backless tunic that could barely be called a covering, and a man’s leather breeches, her bare feet on the dirt floor. She was barbaric. A pagan, who could not read or write despite the library open to her in Caelum and the thousands of Guardians who’d have been willing to teach her. He did not understand his fascination for her, and couldn’t see why she might be tempted by him.
    Did she toy with him? That first day in the courtyard, had she recognized his desire and used it to keep him in line while he trained with her? She did not even look at him, naked, with interest in her eyes.
    And her hands only touched a limp replica of a man.
    Her fingers traced the statue’s biceps. Her nails were short, her hands square. A snake’s thin tail wound around her wrist, increasing in size as it wrapped the length of her arm, joined by other serpents, all intertwined around each other. He often thought they changed and shifted with her mood, but he’d never been certain. He could not see any difference in them now, only felt that the serpents winding her arms were at rest.
    The statue was not. She stood at its side, and her hand slipped down its bronze back, over the sculpted hip. The posture hadn’t changed, yet the muscles beneath the metal skin weren’t at ease now, but taut. A man, with his hands clenched at his sides and poised to fight.
    She stepped back and raised her arm. The light from the fire flickered over the blue scales on her arm. “You look at these?”
    “Are they a warning?” Do not touch.
    “They were, once. An incomplete one.” Half the tattoo suddenly disappeared from her skin, as if she’d vanished the upper part of a sleeve. There was no softness in those arms, in her limbs. He’d never seen any woman built as hard as Irena was. “We were only to my elbow when the nosferatu came to kill us.”
    To kill the tribe of slaves that had escaped Rome . . . and Irena had died saving them.
    “To what purpose?”
    The upper half of the tattoo slowly appeared again, winding around the sleek, pale skin until one of the heads rested on her shoulder. The others tucked their heads beneath her