by Stacia Kane
“She’s Gretneg of House Io Adflicta,” Greyson corrected. “She’s not my little anything.”
“That’s not the way I hear it.” He reached out to touch her hair, but Megan, moving with a speed she didn’t know she possessed, grabbed his hand before he could. His skin was cool and smooth, hard like an apple.
“Is touching part of this?” she asked innocently. “Because I don’t generally allow men I don’t know to fondle my hair.”
Greyson’s lips twitched, but he didn’t speak.
Maldon’s eyes darkened. “And I don’t generally allow others to do business in my territory without greeting me.”
“I’m not doing any business. I’m just here for a funeral.”
“Yes, I know about your father. Doubly important, then, that you give me my due.”
“Excuse me?”
“I allowed him to stay here, even after you left. After you defeated the Accuser the first time and handed over your Yezer—some of whom were my Yezer—to him, stealing from me. I allowed your father to run his business, to keep his home, everything he had was due to me.”
“Give it a rest, Orion,” Greyson said. His anger brushed against her skin, then withdrew, but the edge in his voice still seemed to echo in her chest. “Dr. Chase owes you nothing. She’s come here to apologize for not informing you she was coming. She’s done so. That’s all.”
“You know that isn’t true, Greyson.” Maldon’s eyes didn’t leave hers for a long moment, then he blinked and turned away, becoming once again just a wiry little man, vaguely threatening, like a small-time hood but nothing to worry about.
If anyone knew how deceptive appearances could be, it was Megan.
A servant appeared with a tray of drinks. Megan accepted one after Greyson, but did not sip until he’d done so.
“I was just about to sink some putts,” Maldon said, holding out one arm. A servant appeared, or perhaps one of his rubendas, and handed him his coat. “In the yard. Join me.”
Greyson gave her a look that said, I’ll go to the mat on this one if you want. She shook her head. If the demon wanted to play golf at night in the December cold, that was fine. She just wanted to make him happy so she didn’t have to worry about him anymore.
And some of his Yezer? Were the defectors returning to him, as well as to Ktana Leyak?
She wanted to find out. So she followed him, her heels sinking into the tawny carpet, while Greyson rested his hand reassuringly on the small of her back.
Maldon hadn’t been lying about putts. He selected a long, slender steel club from a rack outside the door and trotted off into the yard, where a strip of AstroTurf seemed to glow in the dead brown of the grass.
“This is bizarre,” she whispered to Greyson. “Like Alice in Wonderland.”
He nodded, but his eyes didn’t leave the small form now teeing up in his bulky coat. “Just remember the Red Queen, bryaela.”
“So,” Maldon said when they reached him. “What do you propose to offer me?”
“I—” She stopped when Greyson gave a slight shake of his head. “I’ve already offered it. My apology. I’ll be leaving on Thursday.”
“Not good enough.” Maldon watched the little ball roll down the artificial grass. It missed the hole. “Damn!”
“Why don’t you just tell us what you want, Orion.” Greyson sounded bored, lazy, but his arm next to hers was tense.
Maldon glanced at him. “So curt,” he said. “As if you’re the one giving the orders. As if this is your land.”
Greyson didn’t respond.
“What do you think is an apt price to pay, Greyson? For invading another man’s territory?”
Shit.
“That debt’s been paid.”
“And now I’ll take another one. The human shouldn’t be here. She stole my demons and I couldn’t do anything about it because she bound them to the Accuser. Now they’re bound to her. She’ll pay me for them. In cash.”
“Fine.”
Was he crazy? She didn’t have any money, especially now she didn’t even have her practice. Her radio paychecks weren’t that good.
He didn’t know about her practice, she remembered. She hadn’t had a chance to tell him.
“And she’ll pay for her trespass.”
“She apologized.”
“Not enough.” He looked at Megan, his eyes glowing faintly red in the dim light. “I have another form of payment in mind. An hour in my bed.”
“No—” she started to say, but Greyson’s voice sliced through hers like an icicle.
“Do you want to fight me, Orion? To start a war you can’t win?”
“Those are my terms.” But Maldon’s gaze faltered as he spoke.
“You don’t have the authority to make a request like that of a Gretneg and you know it. You could be censured just for suggesting it.”
Maldon glared at them. Anger thrashed around him, hitting Megan, hitting Greyson. She stood firm, her eyes steady. The thought of this demon’s hard little hands on her body made her stomach clench.
“Fine,” he spat. “But I can request blood. You know I can.”
Silence. Megan wanted to speak, to run, but she concentrated on standing perfectly still. Blood…Greyson’s rubenda had asked if he could have it…she herself had wanted it…
“You can have mine,” Greyson said.
Maldon’s face split into a grin. “No. Hers. I’ve had yours.”
Greyson took her arm and led her away, out of earshot. “You don’t have to do this,” he said. The lights from the windows of the house reflected in his dark eyes. “We can try to talk him down further.”
“But you want me to.”
“Hell, no, I don’t want you to. But he’s not lying. It’s an excessive request, but the bastard’s within his rights to make it.”
She looked at the ground, at her shoes disappearing into the shadows made by her legs. “Is he…why does he want it?”
She thought she already knew, and she was right.
“He’s a blood demon. He wants to feed on it.”
“Oh God.” She pressed her hand against her mouth as the Scotch threatened to come back up. Already in her mind she could see it, the sharp knife, her blood flowing into a silver bowl…Orion Maldon lifting the bowl to his lips.
“I’ll talk him down,” Greyson said. He turned away, but she grabbed him.
“Would he touch me?”
“I won’t let him.”
“What will he do if…if we don’t?”
He sighed. “It depends. He could make us stand out here all night—to hurt you, you know, he knows the cold doesn’t bother me much—and eventually just let us go. Or he could stick to his guns, in which case we either give him what he wants or he talks to his boss, who talks to me, and we have to give in or we have a minor war on our hands.”
“He doesn’t strike me as the giving-in type.”
“No.”
Tears threatened, but she blinked them back. “Okay,” she said. “But I want another drink first.”
Chapter Eleven
This, at least, looked like the lair of a demon. The crimson walls of Orion Maldon’s basement changed from blazing red by the flaming torches to deep and shadowy—the color of blood—between them.
In an odd way, the color, and the ornately carved gilded furniture, had a calming effect on Megan. It would have been utterly bizarre to make a blood sacrifice in the comfy earth-tone living room in front of the plasma-screen TV. The basement felt like a movie set, filming about to begin on a scene in a biopic that grew increasingly more bizarre by the day.
Girded by several more drinks, Megan allowed Greyson to lead her into the corner and set her in a surprisingly comfortable armchair. She’d barely settled in it when Maldon advanced, holding a wicked-looking knife.
“You asked for blood and you’ll get it,” Greyson said, stepping in front of her, effectively blocking her from sight. “You didn’t ask to cut her.”
“It was implie
d.”
“It wasn’t agreed to.”
Silence reigned for a moment while Megan pictured the two men staring each other down. Then Maldon stepped back and stabbed the knife forward.
Megan gasped, but Greyson caught it before it touched him. “Now, now,” he murmured, and turned back to Megan.
Tension laced her muscles, her entire body, as he knelt on the black-tiled floor at her feet.
“Give me your hand.”
It wasn’t the thought of the pain that made her nervous. Pain she could take, and it would most likely be fleeting anyway. Greyson’s healing abilities were excellent, and she doubted he’d let her walk out the door with a bleeding cut, especially in a house full of blood demons—at least, she assumed they were all blood demons.
But then, she’d assumed Greyson’s Meegra was all fire demons and she’d apparently been wrong.
She’d never asked. She’d never asked a lot of things and had ignored Greyson’s casual attempts to teach her. Now it was biting her on the ass—or to be more precise, it was about to slice into her skin with a sharp silver blade.
No, it wasn’t the thought of being cut making her heart pound in her chest. It was the thought of bleeding. It was the memory of the overcooked steak that was in fact perfectly done, of Greyson’s blood on the white marble floor, of the time he nicked himself shaving and she’d been about to lick the wound before she caught herself.
If she asked him about it, he would probably know what was happening to her.
She just couldn’t bring herself to admit anything was, and until she was ready, it was her secret to keep.
His eyes searched her face. “Are you okay?”
She nodded.
Instead of the bowl she’d been expecting, Maldon placed an ordinary crystal wineglass on the floor by Greyson’s knee, then said, in his booming voice, “Kre-nagr hin alishta caercaeris.”
Greyson’s face darkened as footsteps sounded on the stairs, and he glared at Maldon. “You’re not sharing anything.”
“I can share the moment,” Maldon replied. “I can have witnesses.”
“What’s—” she started, leaning forward, but Greyson shook his head.
“Let’s just do this.”
Megan had no idea where in the house all these demons lived, but in a matter of seconds the basement went from a dank underground temple to a kinky convention room, full of demons in various states of undress. A few of them had the high pompadour hairdos Megan had come to associate with demons hiding horn stumps; a few more had sgaegas like Greyson’s down their backs, or third nipples, or odd bony protrusions on their shoulders. All of them looked very pleased with themselves. Sweat trickled down her back.
Greyson picked up her left hand and stared at it for a moment. Megan closed her eyes. Best not to look. Bad enough to be taken with crazy vampire urges when it was the blood of someone with whom you enthusiastically shared other bodily fluids whenever you got the chance, but when it was your own…that was just weird.
Unlike everything else about this situation, which was perfectly normal if you ignored the basement, the torches, the furniture, the knife, the demons, and the goblet. Just an ordinary small-town evening, in an ordinary small town.
Which was apparently run by Orion Maldon, who supposedly knew her father…
The touch of Greyson’s lips on her palm stopped her thought before it had a chance to form. He hadn’t kissed her yet, not once this whole night. The gesture was possessive, romantic even, but the icy touch of his anger and the expectant air of the room told her something was wrong.
The room went silent. Something rustled. Greyson’s fingers tightened around hers, and the blade sliced into her palm, so sharp and fast she didn’t realize it had cut her until she heard the knife clatter on the floor and felt her blood run down her hand.
He turned her wrist and pressed the glass against her palm for a moment, the rim cool and smooth against her skin. It took only a second longer for the stinging to start, and only another before the glass was removed and something soft shoved into her hand instead, her fingers closed over it with a little more force than she would have expected.
Megan forced her eyes open, squinting into the dim room, afraid to see too much. Greyson’s handkerchief was balled up in her palm. She bent her elbow, trying to ignore the pain now radiating from the wound as she used her other hand to apply pressure. Cool in a crisis, that’s what she was. She glanced at Greyson, hoping for a smile, a look, some sort of reassurance, but his face was turned away, as if he were studying the floor.
To her right Maldon lifted the goblet—the goblet now filled about a quarter of the way with her blood. “Caercaeris bochylem!”
Nope, didn’t want to see that. She closed her eyes again while great waves of red and black undulated behind her eyelids. Heat radiated from Greyson’s body against her legs, but he did not touch her, leaving her alone to deal with this. Ordinarily that would have pleased her, as she didn’t particularly enjoy being vulnerable in front of him. But this was too much. She reached out, pressing her injured hand with its wadded-up cloth against her thigh and groping for him, hitting his shoulder feebly until finally his fingers closed around hers so tightly it hurt.
He moved, the scent of his cologne and the smoky fragrance of his skin filling her nostrils, his lips tickling her ear and his voice cold as his energy against her. “Come on, Meg. Let’s go.” He started to lift her from her chair. “Let’s go. We’re done.”
“I wanted to ask him about—”
“Another time.”
Was there going to be another time? She didn’t ever want to come back here.
“Oh come now, Grey, there’s no need to rush off like that, is there?”
Megan opened her eyes. Maldon was smiling, the empty glass still clutched in his hand. Jesus, had he licked it clean?
“You got what you wanted, Orion.”
“Oh yes, I did.”
His laughter followed them up the stairs.
Her healed hand still tingled a little, an irritating itch under the skin she couldn’t scratch, as she lay in bed later with Greyson’s chest against her back and his strong arms encircling her body. The bulky forms of Malleus, Maleficarum, and Spud rested in front of the window, horned silhouettes against the curtains.
Her father was dead.
Funny, it wasn’t until now, as she lay thinking of what the next day held, that it really hit her. They hadn’t been close, not in years.
But in those dim, long-forgotten years of her early childhood, he’d been someone special and so had she. He’d taken her out for long rides in the car. He’d carried her on his shoulders to watch the Fourth of July parade in the center of town. He’d bought ice cream and candy and smiled and laughed. He’d called her his little girl.
She thought she’d mourned those years a long time ago, but it seemed there was still something left of them in her heart after all, because the dim, tobacco-stained wallpaper blurred with her tears and her throat ached. She’d been someone’s beloved daughter once. When did that change? When did she become an embarrassment, something to be hidden?
Not just when Harlan Trooper died. It started long before that. She couldn’t help thinking that if she could figure it out, she would find something important. Something related to why she was here now, why she felt so cold inside despite the heat of Greyson’s body wrapped around her.
She wondered if she’d given up first. If her parents had turned from her because she’d pulled away from them, retreating into a world where the emotions of others didn’t color her thoughts, where touching people didn’t put confusing pictures in her head, because there were no people to touch.
Was she still hiding? She’d become a counselor. Her job was to help people, to reach out to them and try to heal their pain.
But part of that meant shutting herself off from them, meant tuning out of their lives the minute they walked out the door, and not thinking of them again until their next sessions.
>
Part of that meant comforting herself with the thought that she was a good person because she helped people, not a cold person who didn’t care what happened to them. It gave her license to stay uninvolved.
Greyson had asked her once why she did what she did when she knew better than anyone how cruel and inhumane people really were in their hearts.
She didn’t know if she had a good answer for that anymore, because she didn’t know if her choice of profession was really as altruistic as she’d imagined. If that little second heart, that little bit of the Accuser, had nestled beneath her ribs for fifteen years…who was to say she hadn’t been feeding on her clients since the day she started working?
Who was to say she really wasn’t someone so…so bad, her own parents couldn’t even love her? She shivered.
Greyson’s arms tightened around her. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“I thought you were asleep.”
“I was. Mostly.”
It wasn’t a question she could ask, not with the boys so close by. She opened her mouth to say it was nothing, but instead she asked, “What do you feed on?”
He didn’t move, didn’t change his position at all, which in itself told her the question had thrown him. “What do you mean?”
“You heard me.”
“You mean vregonis in general, or me specifically?”
“Both.”
“A lot of us smoke.”
“But you don’t. Not often.” She knew he did sometimes—though not generally around her—but she’d never really thought of it as something he would do for…well, for his health. The thought would have amused her if she wasn’t so nervous.
“Not as a rule, no. Too obvious.”
“But, I mean, how does it…work?”
“It’s energy.” He shifted position, leaning back a little to glance at the brothers. They hadn’t moved. “Some things have more than others, but we all need to consume some of it. Like calories, but power instead.”
“So earlier, with Maldon…it was energy he wanted or just blood? I mean, do blood demons just feed on blood, or do they get energy from other places too?”