Page 103 of A Serpent in the Garden

“Who’s this?” Finn said suddenly, though he didn’t sound very alarmed, his voice oddly inflected. I looked around to find a prowling shadow slipping through a stand of trees. When he heard me climb to my feet, Finn glanced over his shoulder. “It won’t hurt you if you’re with a demon.”

“I know it won’t hurt me,” I said, gazing at the hulking black mass of the young hellhound, the slightly oversized paws, fur tousled like a black dandelion. Same expression of polite curiosity he’d worn when last we’d met. “I’ve seen him before. He was hurt. I healed a wound on his leg with faerie blood.”

Finn gave me a longer look over his shoulder this time. “He let you touch him?”

“Probably only because he was so injured and sensed Remy was with me. I hadn’t been able to get near an animal in years before I met this one.”

Finn crouched, holding out a hand for the hound, who didn’t move an inch, though his red eyes kept returning to me. His tufted ears flickered.

“Remy said he must have gotten hurt during training. That he’d gotten on the bad side of a demon. It was a nasty gash. He might not trust any of you anymore. Will he just live out here for the rest of his life?” I didn’t like the thought of him alone in this wood. It seemed, to me, like the sort of moody place I’d only return to if I had a death wish. Smoky wooded twilight, the forest closing up over my head. I shivered despite myself, realizing a beat too late that the chill had come from Remy. He didn’t like when I pondered my own death.

The hound sat back on his haunches. Twitched an ear.

“He might need some convincing to come back into the fold,” Finn said. “Demons aren’t famed for their patience, and hounds have strong wills. Well, they’d have to. They need minds of their own to guard the gates. It’s in our best interest they think for themselves, but tell that to some of the cretins tasked with training them. They’re not all like Riquin, unfortunately.”

Finn gave it a few more moments but the hound didn’t approach, so he rose, dropping the satchel from his shoulder, and held out a hand to me.

“I want the dress, I’m not hoping for a dance,” he said dryly, when I looked askance at his outstretched hand.

I tossed it over and within seconds the dress and satchel were ablaze, smoldering into cinders. Finn’s eyes were hazy behind a veil of blue smoke. Before he blinked us out, I turned to say goodbye to the hound, but he’d already gone.

An arm in black armor reached out and snatched me by the wrist as Finn and I headed for the unmarked side entrance we’d left through hours earlier. I whirled around to find a guard looming over me, his face hidden by the closed visor of his hellhound helmet.

“Where’ve you two been off to?” His voice was muffled.

“Out.” Finn loosened the guard’s hand on me with a mild smile. “Is there a problem?”

A creak of metal as the guard turned to gaze at Finn. “Your regent’s been looking for you.”

“I’m sorry I missed her. Did you need anything else?”

I felt the guard’s eyes back on me though I couldn’t see them, and I dropped mine to my boots.

“Get back to Flame,” was all he eventually barked, and Finn led me by the elbow inside Hell.

He walked me back to Remy’s room, where two armored guards stood on either side of the door. I doubted that boded well. They offered no comment as we slipped inside, and Finn closed the door behind himself with a snap. The candlelight roared halfway up the walls at his appearance, flooding the room in red and gold.

“We were out on that chimera hunt,” he said, smudgy gold shadowing his eyes. “I got word one had been seen mucking around somewhere east of here, hours away. I felt your frost might come in handy; I burned off the ice at her ankle and spirited her away.”

“That’s a weak story,” Remy said flatly.

“Perhaps I wanted to take her somewhere private,” Finn said with a tired half-twist of a smile. He looked like sublimity and chaos, his hair in disarray, red with firelight. “And a chimera hunt was my ruse. Would that be more believable?” He took a few backward steps toward the door, reaching blindly for the knob. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to go get berated by my regent.”

The sconce flames shrunk back like they’d been chastised once he’d gone.

My knees went loose a moment before I sank onto Remy’s bed, abruptly exhausted, despite not having done much of anything.

You did plenty, he said, and I felt him relax too, reclining in his chair. I don’t think I could have summoned so much as a snowflake if I hadn’t thought you were going to die.

Without realizing it I’d seemed to leave behind reality and enter some strange, dreamy land where everything was backward and upside-down: a demon I had yet to meet cared about me and I clearly felt similarly, enough that it made my stomach crater to think what his mother might do to him for yet again stepping out of line.

I curled into myself atop the blankets, suddenly afraid. How angry will your mother be?

With you? Probably not very. He directed my hand to the silver chain around my neck. She made you make that promise already. She wouldn’t have done that if she wasn’t going to let you go.

My finger ran down the links of the chain. It was curiously cold, hadn’t taken on any of my body heat, and lay upon my flesh like an icy, docile snake.

How angry with you will she be? Two guards at the door; clearly she was aware I’d been gone. Would she storm in here in a swirl of frost and bestow some fresh hell upon me, us?