Demon scraped the tomatoes into the big mixing bowl and grabbed another. This time, he began to thinly peel it like an apple, flicking the skin in Steel’s direction.
“I think it would be fun if Kubrick came in and gave language lessons,” TB joked.
“Or how about Gem teaching them to crawl through the ventilation shafts to ambush people?”
Steel felt his eyes narrowing. He figured it out. TB was ignoring the elephant in the room, and Demon was assisting. They were hoping to push him into cracking by drowning him in inane discussion because they knew how much that shit pissed him off.
“Um… think she and Nemo might already be doing that. Watch yourself in enclosed spaces. The other day, I sat at my desk, and Catalina attacked me with a fun noodle from underneath while Liliana got me with silly string from the cupboard above my head.”
He realized he was gritting his teeth. His jaw was already hurting.
“Feck. Nowhere’s going to be safe from those little monsters.” The smile on the man’s face belied the words.
A sharp pain poked him in the back of his eyeball.
“Those kids are going to grow up to be assassins, you just watch. Every single one of us is contributing to their delinquency. Caught Axel playing with the string things on his playpen the other day. I’ll have him tying knots by the time he’s two.”
“Nice.”
Okay. He could handle this. They’d run out of material eventually.
“Did you hear that Flame’s already planning a book series based on the kids? Each one’s going to be a different type of shifter, combined with assassin techniques. She wants to try something more romantasy genre-based?—”
“Holy hell, horseshoes, and hand grenades!” Steel broke out, using his favorite swear phrase from Kubrick. “Just ask me already!”
Yeah, what was the saying? He folded like a cheap suit.
TB threw his knife with force into the cutting board, then leaned on the island with his arms locked. “It took three fucking onions to get to him. Do you know how hard it is not to cry chopping that shit? Pay up, motherfucker.”
Demon glanced at his watch, then brought a slice of tomato up to his mouth on the edge of the blade. “Damn. I figured he’d give by the time Kubrick was mentioned.”
“You two seriously suck,” he muttered under his breath. “You don’t need to use your interrogation techniques on me. Just ask the fucking question. I’ll either answer it or shove a sharp stick in your eye if I don’t want to tell you.”
“I was trying to avoid the stick part,” TB told him. “Besides, I’ve been feeling rusty. Haven’t had a chance to interrogate anyone lately. Everyone I need to ask a question of does something stupid and ends up getting himself killed before I can even get a word in.”
“Well, we all have our little problems, then, don’t we?” he sniped.
“Your ‘problem’ is more interesting.”
Demon snagged a full jalapeño off the cutting board and popped it into his mouth. “What he said,” Demon agreed from around the pepper.
“Guys, we really should be focusing on Waters?—”
“Stop deflecting. I don’t like his situation any more than you do, but we can’t do anything about it right now. We have to stay the course, hard as it is to not rush into that shithole and grab him. He knows what he’s doing. We can’t afford to fuck it up. Nerdboy out there will call us if we’re needed.”
Hot anger. Fear. Frustration. In all of his life, he’d never felt this out of control. He wanted to throw something. Hurt someone. Scream.
Demon reached into the sheath at his hip, withdrew his knife, and handed it to him.
A second later, a roar emitted from the depths of him, and the knife went flying past TB’s ear and into the wood cabinet behind him.
Chest heaving, breath powering in and out, he stared at it.
TB, to his credit, didn’t flinch. Didn’t blink. “Feel better?”
“No,” he ground out.
“Now do you see why Waters followed you out into the jungle that night? You don’t lose control. Ever. You’re ready to erupt, and it’s not going to be pretty. So fucking start talking.”
