Adrian sighed a long, put-upon sigh, one that had me smiling to myself. I knew how hard he struggled to maintain his bad-boy image, but I also knew that his Betrayer days were over. It was time he realized that he'd been dealt a bad hand, but now the deck had been reshuffled and I was dealing. "For a Dark One to Join with a Beloved means his life is bound with hers. Their souls are entwined and cannot be separated."
I ignored the pointed look he gave me and nodded.
"Thus any decisions he made would affect her, and vice versa. The type of power Saer seeks would require him to forfeit not only his soul, but that of his Beloved as well."
"And he doesn't want to damn an innocent woman that way," I said, nodding again.
Adrian shook his head. "I would like to believe that Saer could not hand over his Beloved, even without having Joined with her, but the truth is simply that only she can make the decision to submit to a demon lord. Saer, on his own, cannot force her."
"Oh." I thought about that for a few minutes as the train stopped at a station, a couple of people leaving, but more getting on. Adrian peered at each person intently, relaxing only when everyone settled into their seats. "So he hasn't Joined with her because she won't give herself up to a demon lord, and Saer needs to be able to do that to get the power he wants. Got that. But why is he trotting off to see her now?"
"He has the ring," Adrian answered grimly, glancing out the window. There wasn't any sun to be seen, it being a typical rainy English day, but the gray outside was lightening significantly. "He will Join with Belinda, then use the ring against her to force her into compliance with his plans. It is the only way he can do so."
My heart sank. Not only had I screwed up royally in failing to rescue Adrian's nephew, now my stupidity had damned an innocent woman to an eternity as a demon lord's slave? "Crap!"
"Exactly," he agreed, watching as the next station's advance warning signs flashed by. "We will get off here. I cannot risk being caught out in the full light of day."
"Do you know Saer's Beloved?" I asked, more to distract myself from wallowing in guilt than because I really wanted to know. I followed Adrian off the train and through the small suburban station.
He shot me an odd look as he pulled up the collar of his coat.
"You called her Belinda," I pointed out. "I wondered if that meant you know her."
"Yes, I know her. She is… she was… I mated with her. You will please go ask that taxi if he is free. If he is, I will join you and we will go to Belinda's pub. If we hurry, the light should not harm me."
I grabbed his arm and shoved him into a corner of the room, out of earshot of the few people trickling in and out of the station. "You mated with her?"
He frowned, just as I knew he would, but at that moment I wasn't overly concerned about his emotions. "Yes. Did you think I was a virgin?"
"No, of course not, but you don't just blurt out something like that. And especially you don't use the word mated. It sounds so… so… animalistic."
"It was animalistic," he answered, still frowning. "I thought at first she was my Beloved, but as soon as I merged with her"—I ground my teeth, pushing down hard on the need to rail at his cavalier manner of flaunting his ex-lovers at me—"I realized she was not. We engaged in sex for a few months. That's all there was to it."
"New rule," I said, releasing his arm to shake my finger at him. "No introducing lovers without warning. No using the word 'mating' in a sentence mentioning said lover. And absolutely, positively no warm remembrances of your fun time in the sack with her!"
"You are overreacting," Adrian said. "You were not a virgin, and yet I did not demand to know everything about the two men you were with before you gave yourself to me."
"How do you know it was just two men?" I asked, momentarily distracted from my diatribe.
His eyebrows rose.
"Dammit, you poked around in my brain without asking if you could look in my former-boyfriend folder!" I took a deep breath and reminded myself that wasn't the issue at hand. There were much more important things to do right now than harry him over a few poorly chosen words. "Right. Your relationships before we met are no more my business than my past relationships are to you, but I would appreciate it if we could exclude mentions of sex when referring to Belinda."
Adrian tipped his head toward the door.
"Fine. I'll go see if a taxi is free. But no more sex-with-Belinda talk! I'm serious, Adrian! There's only so much a girl can take before she goes totally and completely insane."
"You are jealous," he said, satisfaction rife in his voice.
"You bet your boots I'm jealous! And green isn't a good color on me, so stop looking so smug."
Three minutes later we were zipping through the streets of High Wycombe. It had been raining, but it looked as if the clouds were clearing as the sun started to rise. Adrian had pulled a soft wool fedora from his bag, and with that on his head and the collar of his duster turned up, he didn't seem to be suffering any undue effects.
He slid his hand along my arm until his fingers encountered the bare flesh of my wrist. Why are you staring at me so avidly, Hasi?
I'm just watching for smoke, I answered, sliding a quick assessing glance out the window. It's almost fully daylight. I don't want you to start burning up.
A warm blanket of gratitude fell softly over me. No one has ever worried about me. No one has ever cared if I suffered, but I will not have you concerned unduly, Hasi. Although I cannot help but wish you had not done it, our Joining has given me a slight tolerance of weakened sunlight. As long as I remain covered and out of the direct light, I will not be damaged.
"Good," I said as he removed his hand from my wrist. He answered the taxi driver's question about which pub we were going to, ignoring the driver's comment that the pub wouldn't be open at this time of the morning.
My curiosity got the better of me. "So… um… this Belinda. You said you thought for a little bit that she was"—I glanced in the driver's rearview mirror—"right for you, but she wasn't, she was meant for Saer. Does he know that you and she were an item at one time?"
"Yes," he answered, his face and voice grim. "We were never close, but my history with Belinda drove him into a fury of hatred that left him swearing vengeance on me. For the last ten years, he has attempted by all means possible to destroy me, hiding his true reason for wishing me dead behind the fact that I am the Betrayer."
"What a bastard," I growled, thinking of a couple of particularly juicy curses mentioned in the charm book. "Just let me have five minutes alone with him, and I'll take care of him."
Adrian didn't bother to tell me the obvious—that as long as Saer had the ring, there was nothing either of us could do that would seriously harm him. "I will admit that at the time I thought he was overreacting to the situation with Belinda, but now…" He brushed a strand of hair off my face. "Now I understand the feelings that I must have stirred in him when he found me with his Beloved."
"Wait a minute," I said softly, ignoring the spurt of jealousy that rose every time I thought of Adrian with another woman. "You said you two were never close. I know you're the B-man and all, but Saer's your twin! How can you not have ever been close to him?"
Adrian's eyes were the color of underwater icebergs. "I was bound into service to Asmodeus when I was less than two years old. My father bartered me in exchange for the power to mesmerize women."
I stared at him in horror, fully aware but uncaring that my mouth hung open for a few seconds while I tried to get my stunned brain to function again. "Your father gave you to a demon lord? When you were just a baby? That's how you were cursed?"