Luke scoffed. “I’m not jealous,” he said petulantly. He even poked his lip out.
“Then you’re childish.”
After considering that for a few seconds, Luke nodded. “That, I’ll cop to. Especially if you want to spank me for misbehaving.” He flashed that grin at her.
This time, it didn’t work. She was too pissed at him. “Ugh. We so need an HR department.”
“Wouldn’t do any good. I’d only make Helly take the boring class.” He sat up. “So…Detective. What fun shall we get into now?”
Something in his tone made the hair on the back of her neck rise as she imagined the evil he could do. “Guess we need to find something to do before you get arrested again.”
“Well, so long as it’s for something I actually did, I don’t mind. It did piss me off to be arrested for someone else’s bullshit. Makes the beast in me want to hunt down the bastard responsible and rip out his throat. Which I just might do before everything is said and done.”
“How do you know it’s a man?”
“Women want me for other things…so do some men. But I haven’t met a woman yet who wanted to frame me for a crime…that smacks of male assholery.”
“You say that, but women can be exceptionally petty. It would make sense to me that it’s a female culprit.”
“Fine. I’ll keep my options open.”
His reversal confused her. Especially given the lightning quickness of it. “Just like that?”
He shrugged nonchalantly. “Why not?”
Now she fully understood Rory’s complaint about Luke. He was hard to have a conversation with when he got into this mood.
And speaking of Rory…
“Can I clarify this for my sanity so that I fully understand it?”
Luke put his hands behind his head as he leaned back in his office chair. “Sure.”
“You’re a…hellhound not a demon.”
“Yeah.”
“Helly is an imp. Your mother is a full-blooded hellhound.”
“And Jesus is Lord, what’s your point?”
Narrowing her gaze, she smirked at his blasphemous question. “When we met, you said that I wasn’t fully human, either.”
“Correct.”
“And you know for a fact that Rory is a cambion? Nephilim?”
“You’re on a roll.”
She ignored his sarcasm. “Is this like a TV show where every other person in Savannah isn’t human?”
He made a deep, guttural sound of irritation before he answered. “No. Cambions are rare. Well, not so much rare as they don’t normally survive childhood.”
“Why?”
“We’re abominations. Part of the world, but not really. Most things that go bump in the night would rather mixed breeds not exist, so they tend to hunt us down and eat us before we learn to protect ourselves. The fact that the Snozzle is still alive means that his non-human parent is protecting him vigorously or he has powers he’s not letting us know about. Either way, it pisses me off because he’s either lying to everyone about his origins, or his head parent is outside my ability to detect them. And I don’t like things hanging about that I can’t sense.”
Understood. That whole prospect was unsettling. And Rory’s words about not fitting in took on a whole new meaning.
