Читать книгу Demon mentor. Crypt of the Seven Angels - Natalie Yacobson - Страница 3

The house was old and abandoned. There was nowhere even to camp. There is almost no furniture left. The empty rooms stretched into the distance in some strange labyrinth, as if going underground.

Blaise sat down on the edge of something that looked like a chest. Damian took a short break, leaving her to survey the gloomy space. He returned with a bottle of excellent wine. Where did you get it? Stole, perhaps. Blaise has never drank before. She used to feel sick from the very smell of alcohol. But now even he turned out to be not as bitter as the sediment left by life. And she kissed the bottle.

«This is how friends become enemies, and enemies, on the contrary, become allies?» he looked out the window, as if looking back at the past. Her past. He didn’t seem to have his own. Unless he left him in hell. From where it seems and came. If you believe his words. To the words of a madman.

«You mean the enemies of the whole human race? Demons? Because I won’t make peace with people.»

«As, however, they are with you,» he aptly faked.

«I know.» Her own neck suddenly seemed very vulnerable to her, as if it were about to be cut with a blade. «I hate them! Everyone!»

It was worth a drink for it, and she took a long gulp.

«How old are you? Seventeen?»

«What’s the difference?» she felt one hundred percent. Or rather, she felt dead. After the experience, she simply was gone. The shell remained, but it did not have the same feelings. The cheerful young girl no longer existed. In this world, only a beautiful fragile body continued to exist, as empty inside as the statues from the crypt.

Blaise took another sip. The alcohol burned like poison. Like dragon fire. She regretted that, having drunk it, she would not be able to open her lips and breathe a stream of fire into the face of her enemies.

It would be stylish and beautiful. It is a pity that all the witchcraft remained only in the family chronicles of de Rozier. In life, magic, alas, did not exist. Although if you think about it…

«Damian,» Blaise called out to him, for the first time using the name that she herself had given him. Well, at least something like that.

«Would you like another bottle?» A voice from the darkness immediately responded.

«Do you have a whole cellar here?»

«Don’t look at how wretched this building is. Inside, in the dark, there is much hidden.»

She did not expect, of course, that he would now unfold his palm and sparkle on it gems from the dragon treasure hidden in the basements, although given her current financial condition, that would be pretty good. She, the heiress of the family’s immense wealth, was suddenly left penniless. And as soon as she declares the rights to her property, it becomes clear that she survived, and then she will be killed. For sure already. The mysterious friend showed up at the right time. He was a thread of hope in total darkness. Most likely a madman, not a demon. But in his company, the feeling of complete hopelessness suddenly disappeared.

Maybe she’s going crazy too. Match him. And psychos, they say, are very attracted to each other. So he began to pester her. He felt that she was as crazy as he was. But still…

«Where did you come from?» Blaise flinched as if she were speaking a forbidden question.

«Consider that from heaven. Or from hell.» He was as careless as ever.

Blaise remembered that he had indeed jumped down from somewhere above. Yet the second answer seemed far more truthful.

«And what do you want from me?» this question she asked, probably for the hundredth time.

«What do you want yourself?»

She shrugged her shoulders.

«Don’t bother yourself with nonsense,» he suddenly said so calmly, as if the whole world around was nonsense.

«Do you want to light a cigarette?»

In addition to the battered pack of cigarettes, she noticed in his hands something like an old snuffbox or tinderbox, but stubbornly shook her head.

«That won’t awaken the dragon inside of you, right?» He grinned guiltily and dismissed both. «Do you feel the strength inside you?»

«Not?» Blaise remembered a painting that once hung on the wall in her room. A samurai woman, very seductive in a greenish-white kimono, with two swords in her hands: a long one and a short one. Around her was an ornament of frothy cherry blossoms, crumbled over her head. Nice picture. So beautiful that, looking at her, you think more about the charm of the warrior, and not about the danger hidden in the blades of her swords, made for battle.

To become like her. The woman from that picture. Blaise stared at the empty wall in front of her, as if the image was still hanging there. She really had seen her before her. It was a hallucination, of course, but beautiful. And in her greenish-white tones were filled with bright red.

Blood! Blaise unfolded her hand. Imagined in it the weight of an ancient sword and the sharpness of the blade. Recently, the blood began to fascinate her. But not so long ago, before the events of that night, when she lost everything, she fainted from one kind of scratch.

Damian was suddenly there in the dark like a ghost. He seemed to have grown out of the ground near her feet, knelt down in front of her, and their faces were almost level. He did not breathe fire, like a dragon, but his breath, however, like his very appearance seemed somehow unnatural to her. This is probably what a modern demon should look like. There seems to be nothing special about him, but in his presence you feel as if you got inside a fire. It burns you all.

«There’s a beast inside everyone, you know,» he whispered confidentially, actually just quoting a phrase from some book about psychology and dreams that Blaise had read a long time ago. «It only takes a little human cruelty to awaken this beast.»

«And then?» she already knew the answer, read it in the same book, but she was curious how Damian would formulate the thought. His answer was unexpected.

«Then there will be chaos.»