I waited. I had time on my side. Either he’d get close enough I’d be able to kick him again somehow, or Delaney and Jean would find us and break this stone.
He could talk all he wanted.
“You’re right,” he said. “I’ve been using her soul as a way to stay in Ordinary. I have never made a secret of that. But what I haven’t told you was why I wanted to stay in Ordinary. Why I was in that stone to begin with. Why I caught your father’s drifting soul like a feather in the wind and drew it into the safety of the stone with me.
“I am the demon king’s son.”
I just gave him a steely stare. I knew that already.
“He wants me dead, has wanted me dead for years. I am not his only son, but I am the only one of his offspring to defy him.” He scrubbed at his face, then wrapped his hand at the nape of his neck.
“I’ve been running for a long time. Eons. He always finds me. Tortures…and lets me go. He likes the chase, my father. And the pain. And the blood. And the agony. Demons.” He nodded once, his eyes locked with mine, as cold as a surgeon’s knife. “There is no evil like them.”
“So, what?” I wanted any excuse to look away from the raw honesty behind his gaze. I could almost feel his pain, his desperation, his hopelessness as if it were my own, scratching at the walls of my heart. “What do you want me to do about it?”
“Did you just feel that?” he asked.
“What?”
“My…my feelings?”
“No.”
He nodded. “That’s a lie. We can both tell when the other is lying here. This is an Amazonite. The stone of truth. Here, there is only truth and clarity. Try it out.”
I pulled at my wrists and feet, but the Amazonite still held me strong. “Try what?”
“Ask me something and I’ll lie. You’ll be able to feel it.”
“Just because of the stone?”
“Yes. You’ll feel if I’m lying just because of the stone.”
His expression was calm, his gaze steady. There was absolutely nothing about his body language showing any indication that he was lying. But I knew. I knew it as if I had uttered the words. As if his answer was a part of me that didn’t fit.
“You’re lying?”
“That was a partial lie, yes. I’ve been telling the truth since we’ve been here.”
I waited for that wrong puzzle piece feeling to hit me again, but it didn’t.
“Well, hell,” I muttered.
He nodded. “I couldn’t think of any other way for you to believe what I’m going to tell you. So here I am, putting it all out there and on the line in a way that you will know if I am telling any kind of untruth at all.”
“So I can ask you anything, and you’ll have to answer me?”
“No. I don’t have to answer you.”
That felt like a truth.
“But I will.”
That felt like a truth too.
“Is Xtelle your mother?”
“Yes.”
