“The glorious one.”
Eric shook his head, and my hand went to my stiletto. There was nothing physical going on, but I could see that this was torture for him, a reminder of what he’d gone through before. And the unwelcome certainty that it hadn’t ended with the release of Odayne.
“Why?” Eric asked, his voice low and dangerous. “Why are you bowing before me? Odayne is not inside me anymore. I’ve been unbound.”
The demon tilted his head to one side then lifted his nose to the air and sniffed. Slowly, a smile spread across his face. “The scent is still on you. Did you think it was only Odayne? The one she created? Do you think it is he that makes you what you are?”
“No.No.”He swallowed, his jaw tense. “Do you think I don’t understand what you’re doing? Do you think I don’t realize the mind games you’re playing?”
The demon rose, then took a step closer to Eric until they were only inches away. I stood frozen, unsure what to do, but my knife was still at the ready. If I had to, I’d use it.
But the demon spoke, and the entire world seemed to shift. “It was you, Eric Crowe,” the old man said. “You whose blood runs dark. They are in your debt, and you will be rewarded.”
CHAPTER 9
“Consort? Rewarded?”
I heard the rage in Eric’s voice as he took a step toward the old man. “I’m nobody’s consort,” he snarled, the unfamiliar violence coloring his voice matched only by the fury with which he lunged forward.
In an instant, he’d kicked the rubber cap off the end of his cane, revealing the steel point. Then, in one lightning quick move, he whipped the cane up and sank the tip deep into the demon’s eye. “You can keep your damn reward,” he added, as the body of Henry Blankenship fell lifeless to the sand.
“Eric!” I grabbed his arm and yanked him toward me, then stepped closer until I was right in his face. “What happened to interrogate? Hello? Things we need to know. Like whose consort you’re supposed to be? Lilith? Because if that’s the case?—”
I shook it off with a shiver. “But no,” I continued. “We kicked her ass back to hell, maybe even for good. But even if she’s not permanently banished, she can’t be back again so soon. Can she?”
He said nothing, and I rattled on. “But if not her, then who? And why? For that matter, when?”
I was spewing out questions, but dammit, I was pissed. Not to mention scared. “Do they want you alive? They seem to, but, again,why? We don’t know, Eric,” I said, finally winding down. “We don’t know, because you just killed the demon who could have told us.” I gave his chest a shove out of pure frustration. “What the hell were you thinking?”
I expected him to look frustrated. I expected him to run his hands through his hair, to pace back and forth on the sand, to tell me that we needed to hide the body and get someplace safe where we could talk.
Instead, I watched as this man I loved reached up, pressed his hands on either side of his head, then fell to his knees with a guttural howl that seemed to curdle my soul.
When he looked up at me, all I saw was fury in his eyes. “It never ends,” he said. “I mean it just never, ever ends.”
He released a low, sour string of curses, and when he stood again, his eyes were filled with infinite sadness. “Kate, I?—”
I held up a hand. “Not now. We have to get rid of the body.” I bent down to hook one of the old man’s arms around my shoulder. “Now,” I said.
For a moment he stayed as he was, his expression a reflection of pure misery. Then he drew in a breath, squared his shoulders, and took the man from the other side. Together, we dragged him through the sand, trying to make it look as if we were just two friends helping our drunken third buddy stumble along.
Once we were around the bend, the ocean on our left and the cliffs on our right, we shifted the angle so that we were dragging his feet even more. We were leaving a trail, but we’d take care of that when we left, and what we didn’t cover, the tide would take care of.
By unspoken agreement, we maneuvered him into the first cave, far enough back that he would be in the shadows even once the sun came up. “It will look like an accident,” Eric saidas I turned on my phone for light. And though I knew that both Mr. Blankenship and the demon were gone and we were holding nothing but empty flesh, I still flinched when Eric slammed the face against one of the barnacle-covered rocks in the cave.
We had to do it. Had to make this look like something other than a stake through the eye. An old man, lost and confused, had stumbled into the cave, tripped, and fallen on the rocks, the body left to the ravages of the weather and the tide.
I looked at the body and then Eric. Then crossed myself. To be honest, I wasn’t sure if I was crossing myself for the old man, for Eric, or for all of it.
I sat down on another barnacle-covered rock near the cave entrance that would be under water when the tide came in. “We need to talk.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” He drew in breath, then sighed, long and low. “I’m sorry. I lost it out there. I’m so, so sorry. I just—” He lifted his shoulders in a shrug.
“You want answers. So do I.”
He took a step toward me, then fell to his knees in front of me, almost as if he was supplicating himself to me. Begging me for forgiveness.
Maybe he was.
