“Generally.”
“Myra?” he said.
“Give me a minute,” Myra said. “He’s the…King’s Knight? Is that right?”
“It is,” Bathin said. “It means something different in the Underworld.”
“He rules over thirty-six legions of demons,” she added.
“Yes,” he said. “The hidden texts, those we demons don’t let slip our grasp, explain he is not only brother to my father, the King of the Underworld, but he is also the king’s right-hand man. A confidant. A guide and counselor.”
I watched Xtelle while he listed these demony secrets. She still appeared bored with the conversation.
“So what does that make him to you?” I asked her.
Her gaze flicked up, held mine for a moment. I saw something there. It wasn’t vulnerability. Demons weren’t made that way. Soft and vulnerable was something demons had to learn. But it seemed close to that, maybe the demon version of those things.
Her gaze drifted to Myra. But it was Bathin she was looking at when she answered. “He is not anything to me. Can not be anything.”
That last part was a big fat lie. Even though I hadn’t known her for long, I could hear it in her voice, along with doubt and longing.
“He is your confidant,” Bathin said, “as well as the king’s.”
“As if I would trust him with anything I didn’t want to reach the king’s ear.”
I didn’t know if it was because we were in the middle of a stone made for communication or wisdom or whatever, but there was something more she wasn’t saying. Something important.
Bathin frowned. “What plans have you made with him?”
She scoffed. Then too quickly for me to track, she had a knife in her hand. I had no idea where she’d stashed it when she was in unicorn form—
—the horn,my brain supplied—
—but it was long and slender and deadly as hell.
Bathin tensed, all muscles set to shut that shit down.
Myra stepped back—a prudent decision in the face of possible demon-on-demon violence. But Xtelle took a step backward and cut her own palm.
She turned her palm down, and her blood—blacker than it should be, and thicker, too—dripped to the ground, sending up puffs of pink smoke that smelled of strawberries and fire.
“I do not have anything planned with Avnas.”Drip. Drip.“I am not a part of his coming to Ordinary, nor the spell, nor whatever intent he has to bind Delaney.”
She tipped her hand back up, drew the blade across it again. Instead of cutting and bleeding, it burned, sealed, smoked. It looked like her flesh had never been broken.
Bathin dropped his hands which he had lifted, poised for something. Maybe more of that snapping he had done that had stopped Avnas cold.
He crowded Myra a bit, as if he needed to know she was near, she was safe, she was there.
Her hand caught his wrist for a moment, a tactile assurance, and then she shouldered him aside.
“Is that the truth?” she asked.
“It’s the truth,” Bathin said.
“All right,” I said. “He told me he wants to report a crime.”
They all turned to stare at me.
