“I’m glad he’s gone,” Damien told her, starting off into the forest again. There were other options to free her, and Damien still had associates eager to help, ones that were not even very far off.
Kaz, more comfortable in his imp form, grunted out an agreeable noise from behind.
“But you miss him,” Amma ventured carefully. “You look sort of sad, and I know he’s your friend.”
“Xander?” Damien scoffed, maneuvering over a log with the infant in hand. “Amma, we have only known one another, what, a moon? I would hope then that you, of all people, would understand length of acquaintanceship does not equate to depth of friendship. ”
Amma gasped, falling still. “Damien, are you sayingI’myour friend?”
He groaned, but did not stop alongside her. Being Amma’s friend was preferable, he supposed, to her adversary, but it didn’t feel quite right. At least, it wasn’t exactly what he wanted. Not that what he wanted mattered. “I did kick someone I’ve known since birth into a hole through existence and space at your behest, so you may define that however you see fit.”
She quickly caught up and gave him one of those smiles that made him bite the inside of his cheek to keep from returning, then swiftly shifted her features, groaning herself. “I was going to say friends don’t usually kill friends to get talismans out of them, but seeing as you and Xander are always talking about killing one another, your version of friendship might be very different than mine.”
Damien chose to ignore the mention of the talisman. “It’s not exactly that simple. Xander and I are at odds because it’s in our blood. We were raised together for a short time, but that only managed to instill a deep, mutual hatred. This is how villainy and dark lordship work, after all; one needs rivalries and nemeses and grudges.”
“That seems sort of silly.”
“Does it?” He pulled the spawn away from his shoulder to assess it as it had made a little fussing noise. When it grinned at him, he smirked back, lifting his voice to mimic the one that Amma used when speaking to the infant. “Almost as silly as ridiculously fluffy ball gowns and pretending to be kidnapped so you can go outside for once in your life and being betrothed to a self-absorbed bastard that you don’t particularly like very much, eh?”
Amma’s voice fell low. “There is a certain unkindness to our duties in life, isn’t there?”
The spawn’s face squished up, reddening. He looked about to scream, but then broke into a squeal and a smile. And then he suddenly smelled absolutely foul. “Indeed, quite unkind,” said Damien, handing him off to Amma.
She took him then gasped. “Oh, no way, Damien, this happened on your turn!”
“But you’re already holding him,” he said as if that were it, continuing through the forest. Kaz gurgled out a laugh at their feet.
Amma planted herself before him, pulling shoulders back and standing up to her full height which was not at all formidable, but how she glowered up at him from under a pinched brow still made him stop abruptly. “Damien, I am abaroness. I don’tdothis.”
He appraised her, how she jut out her chest, how her eyes had darkened, how she stood there so defiantly. He would have liked to run that defiance right off of her features by tying up her hands behind her back and whispering half-hearted threats against the shell of her ear, though not because her brazenness vexed him—just the opposite. Instead, he only smirked. “I imagine it was painful being unable to wield your title against me our entire trip down from the infernal mountains.”
“Oh, you have no idea.” She chuckled, pressing the baby into his chest, and he had no choice but to take it.
He dropped his voice to its lowest, most villainous pitch. “Well, I am a dark lord, Lady Ammalie. The son of Zagadoth the Tempestuous, Ninth Lord of the—”
“Your dad’s stuck in a crystal,” she said, waving at him and wandering off. “Save it for next time.”
He would have argued if he didn’t realize her flippant tone could have very easily been, instead, a rebuke for the not-so-small, secret prophecy he’d been keeping from her, so Damien resigned himself to his fate. He considered having Kaz deal with the mess instead, but only for a moment, knowing the imp could never be gentle enough. It was lost on him that he would have thought the same about himself not so long ago. But learning a sort of base tenderness didn’t come with inherent child-care techniques, so Damien assumed a quick dunk in a nearby river took care of things well enough, and he went to rejoin Amma, finding her staring up at a tree.
Her head was tipped back, the light breaking through the branches shimmering on her, lost in whatever thoughts were running through her mind. She reached a slow hand out to touch the tree’s trunk, but just before connecting, pulled back. As if she felt his eyes on her, she turned then and smiled like she hadn’t been up to something.
He considered prodding her about the temple and the arcana she’d performed, but instead just held out the slightly-damp-if-mostly-clean spawn. “The forest thins ahead and Durendreg is just on the other side.”
Amma had kept the scroll with the names of the presumed parents, and she was careful in walking them through the town, asking quietly after who they thought should have the child. The village was still coming down from the chaos of only an hour or so before, but that seemed to be a boon, no one wondering why two strangers with a baby were looking to find the parents who had lost their child to the very temple that had been raided, though Damien assumed the priests wouldn’t put the word out immediately that their sacred relic was missing—the panic of shadow imps and a blood mage was great enough.
When they found the home the parents were said to be in, Damien insisted on waiting outside. Amma was gone just a short time, and when she came out was wiping at her face. She sniffled only once then put on a bright smile. “Okay, let’s go!”
It was a dash then for the border of town, the more space between them and the place they’d brought a certain ruin to, the better. Avoiding the direction Xander had taken them through the woods, they chose instead the southern path out of the village on a well-traveled road.
Amma was quiet as they went, lips drawn down since they’d gotten rid of the smelly, loud thing. Damien waited until they put enough distance between themselves and the village that turning back would be a problem. “Please don’t tell me that you miss the spawn.”
She snorted and shook her head. “Oh, no, nothing like that. We have Kaz anyway.” She reached down to pat the imp, and he recoiled and hissed, taking a swipe that he was very lucky missed. “See? Almost as good.”
“But you are still melancholy. You feel bad about the fires and things, don’t you?”
Amma’s eyes widened at the road ahead like she just remembered. “That was a little our fault, huh? Well, I guess so, yeah.”
“It’s not Xander you miss, surely?”
