Demon's Fire Read Online Free PDF

things that shamed him in order to avoid becoming a “demon’s boy.” Other street children had sold their etheric force to the Yama in return for food. Charles had only sold himself to his own kind. He’d thought it the lesser of two evils, but he’d ended up here all the same.
    He was obsessed with them. Aroused by them. Tossing in his bed each night and wishing he could physically peel off the taint. Yes, he wanted things besides to feed the demons, wanted clean, warm, normal things. Hell, he wanted Beth enough to ache. He simply couldn’t exorcize that old dark desire. It was embedded, like coal dust, deep in his erotic nature, and had been since he’d known what it was to feel any arousal at all.
    Those three years, before Roxanne rescued him at fifteen, had scarred him for life.
    “Boss?” said his head dishwasher, finding him staring blankly at the now cold grill in the dig’s cook tent. “It’s time to close up.”
    It was time. Battered tin plates stood in tall, clean stacks ready for tomorrow, the utensils no one but Northerners used shining now in bins. The dishwasher was holding the tent’s flap open. He had pulled on his outer robes in preparation for leaving, and—to Charles’s eyes—the garment turned his polite gesture into a regal thing. The idea of Southland being conquered occasionally amused him. Charles’s people were simply the latest who’d convinced themselves that they’d mastered this country.
    Charles liked knowing they were wrong, liked the stubborn differences of this place. He’d been coming to Hhamoun every season for the last six years, grateful for the job at first, and then grateful for the escape. He felt less of a freak in Bhamjran, less of a broken, twisted misfit trying to fit in.
    Wolf, he thought, blinking at the waiting dishwasher. I’m a bloody wolf who wants the sheep to love him.
    “I’ll be along,” he said out loud. “You can go.”
    “Miss Philips leaves her tent around this time,” the Bhamjrishi remarked slyly. “Maybe she’ll want to ride back to the haveli in your motorcar. Maybe she’ll want to celebrate today’s success with you.”
    “Miss Philips know how to suit herself,” Charles said crisply, not knowing what success there was, but tired of the staff trying to push him and Beth together.
    “Right, boss,” said his underling, “but here in Bhamjran she may realize she doesn’t need to wait for a man to chase her.”
    Charles snorted through his nose, too aware of the desires pulsing deep inside him, desires a girl like Beth would have been appalled to hear about. He only wished he had the right to chase her, only wished he might deserve to be more than her friend.
     
    Beth wasn’t certain when she’d fallen asleep at her portable camp desk. The heat was drowsy-making and her copying dull—especially since the novelty of the demon-invented “scanning” machine had worn off. Some days, the draftsmen brought her interesting drawings to slide into Herrington’s magic recording box, but this morning there had been nothing but dry descriptions on the preprinted forms. Scrap of sandal leather found with Old Kingdom sherd, two meters from stone doorway.
    If she’d found the artifacts herself, Beth might have been excited, but she was stuck in this stuffy tent with the prohibited technology, hardly close enough to the action to hear the diggers’ shouts.
    This wasn’t what she’d dreamed of doing when she’d bullied her way into coming to the site.
    Somewhere in the distance jubilant cries rang out, but they did not penetrate her doze. She woke just a little at a camel’s bray, but only enough to turn her head the other way. Her lackadaisical village schooling lay at fault. Well, that and her equally lackadaisical response to it. None of her siblings were as poorly read as she, and her older brother, Adrian, could be quite brilliant. Beth, on the sad other hand, wasn’t qualified for more than babysitting paperwork.
    That