Chapter 6Heat hit first, hard as a gut-punch out of nowhere. Kris stumbled over nothing, gulped in a breath, seared lungs with supernatural air.
But he was breathing; he could look around; he wasn’t dead, despite being a human swept off to the realms of demon existence. The sky glimmered and roiled in disconcerting violent purple and crimson and gold, but the sand under his boots felt like a desert, not that he’d ever stood in a desert. He thought it’d feel like this, though. It would taste like this: dry and flickering and laced with spices and flowers that he couldn’t name.
They stood at the edge of a lake, except the lake was also fire; it glowed from deep within, red as blood or lust or passion or hunger. It swelled and tugged at him like compulsion. It promised whatever he wanted, t
