Ties That Bind: A Muse Urban Fantasy (The Veil Series Book 5) Read Online Free PDF

lifted my clawed hand—dainty in comparison—and placed it inside his palm.
    His magnificence silenced my panicked thoughts. There was no choice here. The veil had to be restored and the demons once again locked away behind it. Whether Asmodeus was the answer or Jerry was, I had to find a way. I couldn’t run from what I had to do or from my father. I’d come too far. Changed too much. The solution was in the netherworld, not in Boston. I had to go back.
    He closed his hand around mine. Heat swelled. Our elements combined. We were bloodkin. The lava in my veins flowed from his source.
    His lips peeled back in a broad shark-like grin. “Amanat, Daughter.”
    From one liquid moment to the next, he shifted us from my modest apartment to a place that smelled of pine and wood mulch. Not the netherworld. Not yet. Not Boston either. Stars swirled in the night sky as I sought to steady myself. Asmodeus released my hand and strode toward a ragged outline of a house hunched in the dark. His great wings fanned outward, glowing white along their trailing edges. The musculature of his back rippled under the weight of those wings. Among demons, wings were a sign of status, of power. Whether consciously or not, his display told me not to fuck with him.
    As my eyes adjusted to the dark, I recognized Blackstone’s luxury decor strewn about the once-manicured grounds as though a tornado had torn through the house, gobbled up Akil’s opulence, and spat it back out. The windows and doors hung open, funneling a cold wind through the building. I’d expected it to be bad, but not like this. Sharp wind hissed through the trees and blazed the embers dancing across my skin. Head and wing held high, I followed in my father’s footsteps. At least there wasn’t any sign of the thousands of demons who had made Blackstone their temporary home. They’d fought for Akil, against their own kin, and I’d probably killed them all when I’d burned the battlefield clean of anything demon.
    Asmodeus didn’t venture inside Akil’s house but stopped on the deck, wings spread, and turned.
    I burned to ask him why we were there. But until I knew what I was dealing with, I opted for silence. I watched, listened, and studied.
    “Open the veil,” he ordered, his deep voice a bass growl. He could do that himself just as easily, but I obliged with a flick of a mental switch. It hadn’t always been so easy to cut open the veil, and it shouldn’t have been. One day—soon, if I had my way—it would be difficult once more.
    To my right, smudges of blue, green, and violet licked and twitched.
    “Home.” The colors of the veil danced in his ochre eyes. “Go.”
    There had been a time the netherworld had chewed me up and spat me out, a time I’d run from everything out to kill me, a time when the netherworld would have destroyed me had I stopped hoping for a better future. If you ceased fighting your other half, you’d have your answer. Akil had been so damn right about so much. Well, I no longer held back, not any more. My demon was me and I her.
    I stepped through the veil onto a carpet of writhing foliage. My veins throbbed with fire and pulsed, aglow. Ash rained from my fingertips. I flexed my wing, drew the sickly netherworld air into my lungs, and bared my fangs.
    “Momma’s back…” I purred.
    Thunder rumbled, or perhaps it was the groan of some monstrous demon. The sound snagged my attention, drawing my gaze to where a battlement embraced the outer fringes of a sprawling castle hewn precisely from black rock. Only this fortress was bigger, so large in fact, I couldn’t see it all from outside the walls. Akil—Mammon’s fortress. I’d recognize it blind. As the lessers howled and chittered in the night, I devoured the sight of Mammon’s home. I hadn’t been back since the night he’d saved me. This was why my father had taken me to Blackstone. Akil’s house overlaid the same location as his netherworld fortress.
    Asmodeus’s heat pushed