“Why are you even worrying about the demons?” she asked.
“You know, maybe we should just get back to work.”
“We should, actually, but I’m not letting you out of this now. What does Bathin getting fake stabbed by his asshole of a brother have to do with anything?”
Okay, maybe she had a few emotions to work through too.
“He chose that moment—my engagement—to tell us a war is coming.”
“I remember. But we’ve been hearing that one way or another from a lot of people over the years.”
“We’ve had bad things happen.”
“Sure. We have. We’ve gotten through them.”
“And I keep thinking, his warning is just like the other warnings, the other things that have happened, and they all turned out fine.”
“Not without injuries,” Myra said. “Not without deaths.”
“I was only dead for like a minute.”
“That is never going to be something I can joke about, Delaney.”
I nodded. “Fair. What if this war with the king of demons, old what’s his name...”
“Brute of All Evil,” Myra said.
“What?”
“It’s one of his names.”
“That’s a terrible name.”
Myra shrugged. “Demons. They come up with the weirdest titles and names.”
“I’m going to ask you how you know that someday. But what I’m getting at, is we’ve been told the Brute of All Evil,” I rolled my eyes, “is power hungry and wants to destroy Ordinary because he wants to destroy all the world, and Ordinary might stand in his way.”
“We do like the world,” Myra noted.
“Maybe he’s not after Ordinary. Maybe he wants something else.”
“The king could be targeting Ordinary because Bathin is here,” Myra said. “He’s next in line for the throne. Or because the queen of the demons and her recently escaped consort are here too. If they left, we wouldn’t have this problem.”
“He’s not leaving,” I said.
“I know.”
“Myra, I won’t let Bathin leave.”
She studied me for a minute. “You couldn’t stop him. No, don’t get all puffed up about it. He’s a demon. He can transport himself to any place in the universe in a second. He can control the inner spaces of any stone in the worlds. If he wanted, he could transport into a pebble on the top of Mount Everest, and that would be that.”
“He loves you,” I said one-hundred percent sure of that and wanting her to know it. Bathin had possessed my soul for over a year. In some ways, it had been a two-way connection. I knew him—the real him—maybe better than anyone. “He won’t leave you.”
“If it meant saving me from a war?” she asked. “If it meant drawing war away from Ordinary?”
“He doesn’t get to break your heart just so he can be a heroic martyr.”
She blinked and for a moment she looked younger, vulnerable and afraid. Myra hadn’t had a lot of relationships in her life because she guarded her heart very carefully.
