“I’ve heard rumors. Samael?”
I nodded, scanned the vicinity, and slid my gold-decorated hand onto the bar.
“Wow. It’d be beautiful if it wasn’t so deadly.”
“My thoughts exactly.”
“Be careful,” Meredith warned. “If there’s one thing I know about demons, it’s that they’re as territorial as they are unpredictable. Especiallythatdemon.”
“Yeah. Honestly, the only thing getting me through is the thought that if I solve the murders, I can break this bond by the end of next week.”
“Good luck,” she topped up my drink and turned away to serve a female goblin who was tapping her long claws on the bar impatiently.
“Danica?”
I turned at the familiar voice, my mouth dropping open.
“Harriette?”
The light fae laughed, her eyes bright, and I took her in. Harriette had been good to my mother right before we left Durham. She’d taken us in for a night and spent hours speaking with my mom in hushed voices, handing her a stack of cash when we left.
She stumbled slightly and her grin widened. “Apologies, I’m here celebrating with some friends— one of them just got a promotion. Wow, it’s been so long, and you’re so grown up.” She blinked furiously, as if holding back tears as she scanned me. “You look like her, you know.”
I disagreed. My sister looked like my mother. I looked like the father I’d never met.
Harriette smiled. “Your eyes,” she said. “You have your mother’s eyes. Not the color, but the shape. Tell me everything,” she instructed. “Are you married? Charlotte always dreamed of watching her girls walk down the aisle.”
I shook my head and attempted a smile. “Single and ready to mingle,” I joked lamely, and she shook her head.
“You girls today. How’s your sister?”
The smile froze on my face. “She’s good.” I assumed she was, anyway. She sure as hell wanted nothing to do with me.
Harriette blinked and swayed slightly on her feet, obviously intoxicated enough that she couldn’t tell exactly how much I wanted to get out of there.
“Let me get your number,” she said. “We should catch up.”
She waved her hand and her phone appeared as I rattled the numbers off automatically.
“I’ll call you,” she said. “We can do lunch. Your mother would’ve wanted me to keep an eye on you. I left town shortly after you did and recently returned— it’s fate telling us we need to be friends.”
I was no demon, but even I could tell that Harriette stunk of guilt. It wafted from her in waves, evident in the hunch of her shoulders and her inability to meet my eyes without immediately glancing away. The question? What kind of guilt was it?
There’s the guilt that’s normal when someone you care about dies. The little voice in your head that insists if you’d just called them at that exact moment, they wouldn’t have gotten into their car and died in a car accident. It’s the guilt that whispers in your ear that maybe if you’d been a better friend, sister, daughter, they’d still be here.
Then, there’s the other kind of guilt. The guilt that chokes you when you’re directly responsible for another person’s death. When youknowthere was something you could have done to prevent their death. Or, when something you did caused that death in the first place.
Something about the frantic look in Harriette’s eyes made me want to investigate exactly what she’d been doing for the past few years and why she left Durham when we did.
“Take my card too,” she pressed it into my hand. Then she froze.
“What’s this?”
She knew what it was, and I stayed silent while she filled in her own blanks. “A demon bond?” she inhaled and choked, speechless.
“It’s not what you think.”
“You didn’t bond with a demon?”
