“Yet you’ve turned them with argument, or so I must assume as you bandy words at me.”
“Haven’t you ever lost someone you loved?”
His silhouette stopped moving entirely for a second, maybe two. In a low, brooding tone, he said, “That is the first time anyone has ever suggested I could love.” He turned his back on her and resumed bathing. “You ought to take some pride in that. I don’t stumble on many firsts anymore.”
“I loved my mother,” Lan said. “She was the only thing I had in the whole world that was really mine. And you didn’t just take her away, you turned her into something else. Something that didn’t know me. Something that had to be destroyed.”
“Is this your plan, child? To appeal to my sympathies?” Azrael climbed out of his bath and selected a new mask, the black one in the shape of a snarling wolf’s head. He fastened it on, then walked out from behind the screen to dry himself by the fire, otherwise naked. Lan watched his feet, only his feet. “I can’t say I think much of your chances.”
“If you didn’t want to hear what I have to say, why did you have me brought here?”
“You cannot be so stupid as to think I summoned you to my bed for conversation. Why be coy?” asked Azrael, leaning up against the mantel. “We both know why you came here.”
“I was carried here in chains.”
“You,” he said, pointing a claw at her, “came seeking me in my home. You dangle words such as audience and speak of war and peace, but you brought nothing with which to curry favor and sweeten trade. No, your true intent was that I should see you, find you fair, show you mercy…and where should that end but here? Oh, do not pretend surprise at me. Did you imagine you were the first ever to think of enduring my bed and so raise you out of wretchedness?”
“That isn’t why I came.”
“Mm. I hear no lie in that. Intriguing. I choose to believe you. So,” he said thoughtfully. His fingers tapped at the mantelpiece. “Shall you?”
“Shall I what?”
“Lie down with the Devil.”
She could not quite understand that. She ought to, and a part of her knew she ought to, but she couldn’t. It was like trying to patch together a broken glass in which some of the pieces were from a clay cup. “You mean…” Even the word seemed slightly ridiculous in her mouth. “You mean you want me for your dollygirl?”
“I daresay it’s easier work than farming.”
“You’re serious.”
“I am.”
She could only stare. She had imagined every possible outcome of this encounter, every possible death, but not this.
“You seem skeptical. Am I not a man, whatever else I may be? Is it so impossible that I might have a man’s desires?” His gaze moved down over her body. “The Great Jester, in His infinite wisdom, has seen fit to deny me a form that invites seduction, but of negotiation—” He held up one claw, smiling. “—I have both aptitude and resources. Consider that I am in a position to provide you with a far better life than that which you left in Norwood. Certainly now,” he added with low twist of a smile.
“Now that you’ve sent your Revenants, you mean.” She caught that thought and all the grim imaginings that came with it, and used it to anchor her. “Is this how you get all your women? With murder?”
“One baits a hook for the fish one desires. For some, a sparkle. For others, carrion. But for you…” Tap-tap-scraaatch went his claw on the mantel. “If the luxuries of my palace are not enough to lure you, you might do well to think of the horrors that await you in the world outside, should I choose to release you.”
Against her will, Lan’s eyes crawled up Azrael’s legs as far as the relaxed club of his cock. It hung like a dark promise, almost but not quite human in form, twisted out of familiarity. She looked back down at the tiles. “I didn’t come here to escape those horrors. I came to end them.”
“Oh?” Interest sharpened his tone; amusement blunted it. “Is this an assassination after all?”
“No. I came for an audience,” she said stubbornly. “Please. The war is over. You have got to stop killing us.”
His face behind the mask hardened. “I don’t kill anyone.”
“Oh, that is such pigshit! When I set a trap and a rat walks into it, I don’t stand there and say I didn’t kill it. I used a trap, but I killed that rat. You can sit here in Haven and pretend you’re innocent, but you raised those fucking Eaters and they’re killing people, and that means you are killing people!”
Azrael snorted. Through the muzzle of his mask, it came out as more of a growl. “This is how they negotiate in Norwood, is it?”
“Stop making fun of me.”
“No, no, I think I prefer your method to the others I have known. An audience…” He folded his arms, tapping one claw against his bicep, then shrugged and nodded once. “So be it. Who are you?”
Flustered by this easy capitulation, Lan told him her name again.
He stopped with a raised hand, shaking his head. “Who are your people? Not the farmers of Norwood, but the greater sum? Whom do you represent as you kneel in chains to beg my mercy?”
Lan hesitated, then said boldly, “All of them.”
“No, no, truthfully now. The New Earth Alliance? The Republic of Aryan People? The Holy Soldiers of Rome? When I summon your leader to negotiate the terms of your surrender, whom shall I summon?”
Lan said nothing.
Azrael came toward her and bent low to look her over. The eyes she had first seen as pure white, she now saw were full of colors after all, buried beneath the pale glow and difficult to see: greens like swamp water, browns like clay, greys like water-logged flesh. These were death-colors, Lan realized, having believed all her life that death came in midnight blacks and blood reds, but no. Now she saw clearly that blood was life and night was only what there was when the sun went down. Death had its own color and it was the color glowing out of Azrael’s eyes.
He finished his inspection and smiled at her through the teeth of the wolf’s-head mask. “Did you come alone, child?”
Lan refused to look away, but she could feel the burn of a blush in her cheeks. “Someone had to.”
“And it was you. What a splendidly useless gesture. No matter. There will be no negotiations. I have already defeated you. I do not care if you surrender. Enough of this.” He reached out and caught her by the chin, putting their faces very close together. His gaze was hard to meet, not just for their color or the unnatural heat that came from those white fires, but for the hunger she saw there. “Shall you?” he asked quietly. “Say no and the game is done. I’ll not force you. I’ll not starve you or whip you or have you thrown screaming to the mindless dead that scavenge without my walls. I’ll put you in a car and send you home. Say no. Spit.” He shrugged with his chin, his eyes never leaving hers. “I have endured too much offense to be easily offended anymore. All you have to say is no.”
“And if I say yes?”
He inclined his head slightly. “We negotiate.”
“What do I have to do?”
“All that I ask. It will be unpleasant, but you will be well-compensated for your compliance.” His hand opened slowly and just brushed at the line of her jaw. His fingers were rough, rough as stone, but his touch was gentle. “I’ll take nothing you do not give me.”
She could see herself reflected in the dark surface of his mask, distorted, grotesque. Her eyes were bulging sockets. Her mouth, a clownish leer. She couldn’t do this—wouldn’t do this, but what she saw her malformed reflection say was no heated refusal, only a small, stuttering, “I don’t…know if I can.”