Jilly smiled sweetly and sipped her tea.
Liam cleared his throat. “Of course not. After all, you did tell Jilly the bracelet is good luck. And she sure needed it.”
Lau-lau nodded. “True, true. And good luck for you too that she brought you to me for your little . . . ailment. I have an infusion for that.” She rose to poke through her herb cabinet. With each drawer she opened, another scent wafted into an invisible whirlwind of florid and dank that puckered Jilly’s sinuses.
Over the scuttle of dried leaves and paper packets, Liam whispered, “This won’t kill me, will it?”
“If not, maybe I will. ‘Sweetheart’?”
“ ‘Little dragon’?” he shot back.
She shrugged.
“Chinese knot work does more than bring good luck,” Lau-lau said over her shoulder. “But confusing demons won’t help your problem either.”
Jilly and Liam locked glances.
“What kind of demons?” Jilly kept her voice as casual as when she asked one of her kids if they really thought getting double-digit piercings would help with their job hunts. And speaking of hunts, the stark pattern of Liam’s marking blazed as he fixed the old woman with an intent stare. “Just bad demons?”
“All demons are bad.” Lau-lau dumped the ingredients she’d collected into the hollow of a marble mortar. She tapped the matching pestle briskly against the bowl. “But little-dragon syndrome is caused by poor circulation, not demons.” She chuckled.
Jilly managed a weak echo. “Confusing demons. How quaint.”
“In the old stories, demons get lost in the intertwined patterns of the knot and bother you no more.” Lau- lau crushed the herbs, releasing a scent unlike any that had gone into the bowl. The faint musk evoked moonlight on rumpled bedsheets.
Jilly shook her head. She certainly didn’t believe in that herbal crap.
Of course, she had to believe in demons now too. She held her breath until the leaf dust had settled. Or until her hormones had.
Lau-lau whisked around the counter and dumped the contents of the mortar into the remains of Liam’s tea. “There. That’ll put the snap back in your New Year dragon firecracker.”
“Why, thank you, ma’am.” He smiled, looking only slightly less green than the contents of the cup.
As Lau-lau cleared away the soup, Jilly smirked at Liam. “What are you waiting for? I thought talya fighters were immortal.”
He peered doubtfully into his tea. “We don’t die, but we can be killed.”
She snorted. “Lau-lau has only been a person of interest in one poisoning.”
“Oh. Well, then.” He downed the tea in a gulp, then set down the cup.
A droplet lingered on the center of his bottom lip, and Jilly realized she was staring. Worse, she wanted to brush away that drop. She dropped her gaze guiltily and tucked her hands under her seat.
He huffed out a breath. “Not bad. Tastes like . . .”
She glanced up and caught the flicker of his smile. If he did that more often, smiled like he had a secret he wanted to share, she might actually be in some trouble here. “Tastes like what?”
“I’m not sure. Maybe you should take a sip.”
“You finished it all.”
He just looked at her.
Heat flashed through her, sudden and overpowering. Only Lau-lau’s return kept her from leaping to her feet and . . . she wasn’t sure. Even if the knot-work bracelet was capable of leading demons like hers astray, that still didn’t explain the waywardness of her purely human response to the man sitting just out of arm’s reach.
Lau-lau glanced at his cup. “Good man. You don’t fuck around.”
Jilly swiveled on her seat to goggle at the old woman.
Liam inclined his head solemnly. “Ma’am, indeed I don’t.”
“Up you go, then.” Lau-lau grinned at Jilly. “You can pay me later.”
CHAPTER 6
They left the shop and climbed the steep, narrow stairs past Lau-lau’s second-floor apartment to Jilly’s garret loft on the third floor.
Liam hummed to himself as she unlocked the door. “A knot-work labyrinth. The Celts had similar stories in their mythology.”
So the calm, cool, and collected commander wanted to ignore all the irrelevant stuff that had happened downstairs. How very calm, cool, and collected of him.
“Sacred path or trap,” he continued, all professorial, “depends on what you find in the center.”
God knew what happened in her center every time he turned that deep gaze on her. Butterflies, felt like. Butterflies couldn’t be evil, could they?
She opened the door and stripped off her jacket. She paused, looking down the entry hall, past the cheap pine table with its collection of random papers and knickknacks to the kitchen doorway and the living room visible at the far end. Lately, whenever she stood here, it seemed that the place should be different. She had changed so much over the last year.
The attack. Rico’s subsequent trial and conviction. More recently, her firing. And now the demon.
“What’s wrong?” Liam’s hand was a solid, warm pressure between her shoulder blades. “Is something out of place?”
Besides her? For a weak moment, she was glad he stood there, a convenient focus for her confusion.
“I found the bracelet on the floor here. After I . . .” She turned back to the hallway table. She rummaged through the catchall bowl. The etched glass chimed with the discordant music of spare keys and loose change. “I tossed it in here somewhere. Ah.”
She lifted the bracelet. The matte silvery metal was an intricate design of finer strands woven over and under each other, coming together and separating again, doubling back to form a flat cuff just wider than her two fingers when she held it aloft. The convoluted weave, glimmering between the strands, made her eyes ache.
“It needs polishing,” she said.
“Nothing in this realm would touch it.” He showed no inclination to, peering at it from a short distance. A flicker of violet deepened his blue eyes to a midnight storm. “Gangue—that’s the waste rock around a mineral deposit—and fluorspar. See the shine? But it’s a demon artifact, all right. The etheric mutation is strong enough that the base matter of it isn’t even rooted in this world anymore.”
She clenched her fist, and the edges of the bracelet bit into her palm. She wanted to drop it, punt kick it back to whence it came, along with the demon who’d presented it.
“I came home late after the homeless outreach at the park. That was the first time I saw you, wasn’t it? I didn’t remember until I saw you in the alley last night.” She wasn’t sure why she was telling him. Except who else could explain the beginning of this end she had come to?
He lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “We talyan have a knack for blending into the shadows. Occupational hazard.”
“I think I was still furious that Envers had fired me and then been so kind as to ‘let’ me work the event. Anyway, I went out for a drink after.” She hesitated, then met his gaze levelly. “Maybe it was more than one drink. When I came home, you were here.”
The violet flare in his eyes was unmistakable this time. “I wasn’t.”
“Yeah, I figured that out already. At the time, though, I wasn’t thinking quite right. I wanted a fight. Or something. And then here was this guy, too skinny and sad looking to be scary.”
He pursed his lips. “Definitely not me.”
The violet highlights of the demon overlay in his eyes almost distracted her, but underneath, she caught a glimpse of the imaginary man in her apartment whose ass she’d hesitated to kick that night. What had the demon teased her with? A lie? Or some deeper truth?