“Actually, you told me to show up.” She rubbed a hand over her eyes. “Look, I don’t want to fight with you. Not verbally, not physically. Not anything.”
When he still didn’t move, she reached past him to punch the summons on the key pad.
He didn’t flinch away to stop her from touching him. He never flinched, even though touching her—thinking of touching her—burned worse than ichor. He just sucked in his breath to avoid her.
And inadvertently breathed honeysuckle. His body tightened, all senses—man and demon—coming alert.
He kept his voice even. “No one’s home tonight to let you in. They’re on rounds, killing the horde-tenebrae riled up by your coming.”
“My demon’s coming,” she corrected.
He ignored the interruption, just as he’d ignore the promptings of his lust. “At least you’ll learn how to do your part.”
“You told Liam you don’t know what my part is,” she said. “And you didn’t seem interested in learning anything more.”
That stopped him. She was still angry—no, hurt he’d turned away from her. Didn’t she understand how dangerous their intimacy, that uncontrolled spiral going God knew where, had become?
He could deny his temptation; he might refuse any further role in molding her to Liam Niall’s little army of the damned. But the simmering pain in her gaze was too much. He’d take claws over tears any day.
He drew himself up. “I know damn well you can’t go off sulking.”
“I wasn’t sulking,” she flared.
“Where were you?”
She shook her head. “I don’t answer to you. Open the damn door already. I changed my mind. I do feel like fighting with you.”
Just as he’d wanted, he reminded himself when she arrived at the ballroom ten minutes later, her hair in a severe braid, her slender curves defined under slim-fit yoga pants and workout bra.
She stood in front of the windows, her fair skin and hair bright against the blackness of the night. As if his mind needed a frame for the maddening loop of images from their night together.
He swallowed past his dry throat. The destroyer in him offered no subliminal suggestions while he contemplated where he’d put his hands on her. He’d planned to show her all the places a fight could go wrong. She’d already shown him one he hadn’t considered.
Her hazel eyes snapped. “Well?”
“Follow my lead.”
She snorted, but softly, so he didn’t have to respond.
She mirrored him through the tai chi poses, not touching. A little of the ancient harmony flowed through him.
He feinted at her. She blocked him, harder than necessary. He sent the same attack in the other direction. She faltered, stiffening.
“Easy,” he murmured. “Same as before.”
They sparred until her cheeks were bright with color and her hair a wild corona with the tie long gone.
When he paused, she shook the sweat-darkened strands back from her face. “I’ll have to get a cut like yours.”
“That would be a sin.” His fingers twitched with a visceral memory of blond silk wound between his fingers. Shaking off the sensation was harder than sublimating the demon. His body ached even where she’d never landed a blow.
She settled her hands on her hips. “You told me someone else would teach me this.”
“I changed my mind too . . . ,” he said, hesitating, then added, “about some things.”
Her expression was shuttered. “Why?”
She didn’t ask what, he noticed. Just as well.
“This shift in demonic activity since you—since your demon arrived. I wanted to talk to Bookie tonight, about the tests he’s doing with you, about some of the history leading up to this crossing. He knew, from the tear it left in the Veil, that the demon was strong, although he had guessed it would be djinn. Maybe the pendant stone threw off his readings. But if he was wrong about that, we might have to rethink our strategy against this upsurge.”
She took a few steps toward the mirror, as if looking for the demon inside her. “Maybe you can convince him I’m not evil.”
“It would be safer for you if you were. The djinn are damn hard to kill.”
“More than the teshuva?”
“By orders of magnitude. Maybe teshuva are weakened by their repentance, or maybe they repent because they are weak. Whichever, we’re at a disadvantage and always have been, just left to pick up the pieces.” He fell silent until she turned from the mirror to meet his gaze. “Until you.”
She blinked.
“Even before your possession was complete, the demon was strong and your link to it impressive. What you’ll be with time and training . . .” He watched as she turned to pace across the room. “When your demon roamed the city, Zane said the end was nigh. He might’ve been right.”
She spun to face him. “How can there be an end? I thought you said good and evil are endemic to the human heart?”
He hesitated. “But must they be eternally, inescapably bound? Think of other diseases that have been cured.”
“Evil is like chicken pox?”
He grimaced. “Maybe more like smallpox. Something deadly to be eradicated. When you drained that first malice, and later the ferales, something strange happened. They vanished.”
“Isn’t that the point?”
“But they were gone. No shards. No echo. Nothing left in this realm.” He took a slow breath. “Sera, millennia of talyan have just been hopelessly holding back the tide of evil. With that one malice, those two ferales, you turned it.”
She tipped her head to one side. She had hold of the pendant and ran the pale stone along the cord as she considered. He could almost see the gears ticking over in her brain. A sense of calm stole over him. He’d never met as serious and intense a questioner. Her response could only deepen his understanding.
How long had it been since he’d done anything besides destroy? And long for his own destruction? When had he last had an inkling of possibility for an end to his pain?
Sera was his hope.
Her devotion to the last moments, when even loved ones gave up, had given her a clear-eyed resilience of spirit, the opposite of everything he feared he’d become. The realization shifted something inside him, something he didn’t want to examine too closely.
Hope could be crippling in ways beyond mere feralis claws and malice slime. The wounds left by shattered hope plunged deeper than the healing power of the strongest teshuva.
He would’ve sneered at the exaggeration if he hadn’t carried the scars.
She shook her head. “I just don’t know. Dark and light. Evil and good. The dichotomies started with the big bang and somebody thinking to write it all down in a best seller called the Bible and about a thousand other storybooks since.”
Had he thought she’d agree with him so easily? In a way, he was glad she hadn’t. If he could convince her, maybe he could convince himself. “Then we’ll just have to go back to the big bang and do it again. Without evil this time.”
She smiled. “You don’t want much, do you?”
“Oh, I do,” he said softly.
Her smile faded.
He gave himself a shake. “I think we’re done here for the night.”
“You bring up a host of mysteries and then disappear? Lovely.”
He cocked his head. “Did you want something else?”
“Answers,” she snapped.
“I left a message for Bookie with some suggestions to jump-start his research, and I borrowed a history on—”
“I was thinking of something a little more today, now, this instant.”
“You are young and impatient, grasshopper,” he said, just to watch her scowl. “I also asked Ecco to bring back a malice. I want Bookie to record you draining it. He finished his father’s work on an etheric shunt to drain demonic emanations, which rather than metaphysical garbagemen, makes us metaphysical waste-treatment specialists. Not really progress. But what you do . . .” He shook his head.