“Tell me I didn’t screw it up for Allie,” he said when he finally lifted his head. “Tell me she’ll be?—”
“She’s going to be fine,” I said, because he needed to hear it. “And you didn’t screw up anything. It was your parents. It was those renegades in the Church.”
He dragged his fingers through his hair, then tilted his head back, so that his neck was stretched as he looked up at the dark rock above. “They thought they were doing good,” he said, possibly to me, possibly to his dead parents, possibly to God.
“Maybe. But they were playing God. And that never works out well.”
He brought his head down, his eyes locking on mine. I saw the pain, and knew I’d put it there.
I slid off my rock and sank to my knees in the sand before him. “Except maybe once,” I said gently, taking his hands. “Despite everything they did to you, you turned out fine, Eric.”
He made a guttural noise. “Now you’re just being kind. Or blind. I’m not sure which is worse.”
“Eric—”
“Don’t play games, Kate. And don’t try to sugarcoat this. You can’t erase what just happened. What I did.”
“What you just did? You killed a demon. That’s what we do. And, yes we’d planned to interrogate him, but I understand why you lost it. He blindsided us.”
I bit back a frown.Didn’t he? Had Eric understood what the demon meant? Why he revered Eric? Did Eric know whoshewas?
Considering his reaction, I didn’t think so, but was he putting on a show for me?
Mentally, I shook my head, telling myself not to let the past poison the present. He’d been possessed by a demon when he’d lied to me before, when he’d hurt both me and Allie. Now though … well, now he was back to being just Eric.
Wasn’t he?
“I mean I should have controlled my temper,” Eric said. “I got mad, and then I went and killed our best lead as to what’s going on. And now I can’t even blame the demon living inside me, because he’s long gone and now I know it was never just him.”
“You’ve always had a short fuse,” I agreed. “But I think anybody would be angry when they’re accused of being the consort to a demon. Especially a demon they don’t know.”
“It must be Lilith. She’s back. Somehow, she’s come back.”
I shook my head. “No. We killed her.” I spoke with more certainty than I felt, but it couldn’t be true. I wouldn’t let it be true.
“Not in her true form. She was in Nadia.”
“But she was bound to Odayne,” I reminded him. “He died, she died. And even if we got all that wrong, she still has to regroup. That should take generations of our time. Not weeks or months.”
“So we were told. But where was the proof? Ancient texts? Runes? Hieroglyphics? No one really knows. They only think they know.” He shrugged. “Maybe we’re about to get the proof of how it all really works.”
“I don’t care how it works,” I told him. “The bottom line is she’s not corporeal. We would know. We would have gotten word somehow. We know she can’t move into any old body like lower demons. Her energy would burn right through them. And I have to believe there aren’t too many like Nadia willing to timeshare. It’s a rare person who both wants to share their body with a demon and is strong enough to house their energy.”
Of course, I’d witnessed exactly that twice within the last two years, so my certainty that it hadn’t happened again was a bit misplaced. But, dammit, I didn’t want that bitch back in my life.
“We’ll do the research,” Eric said. “We’ll figure out if she’s back. But that wasn’t what I was talking about.”
I frowned. “Oh?” Try as I might, I had completely lost track of the conversation. “What do you mean?”
“I said I couldn’t blame the demon for my temper. For losing my shit. It was never just the demon.”
Dread prickled my skin. “What are you talking about?”
“That time in the house,” he said, his voice cold and harsh. “With you. What I did.”
I didn’t want to, but I tensed. “I remember.”
“It didn’t feel like me, but it must have been because I remember it. In the house with you—what I did. And then with Allie at the theater. In the street. Dear God, Kate, I almost hurt my daughter.”
