Reap the Wind (Cassandra Palmer 7)

“Do you always whine this much?” Rosier demanded, slip-sliding his way through the mud. And barely managing to avoid a rapid descent into the valley below.

“I was making . . . an observation. And this damned wool doesn’t help.”

“It’s what people wore in this era. Wool and flax—”

Rosier cut off when he abruptly went down on his ass, which was funny. And then started sliding toward the cliff, which was not. I grabbed him and jerked back, but forgot about the mud—and my lousy excuse for shoes with nonexistent traction. I ended up going down myself, and planting an elbow in his stomach, or possibly something slightly lower, as we thrashed away from the edge, rolling and cursing and covered in mud.

But we ended up over beside the cliff face, so I guessed that was something.

Furious green eyes met mine, out of a slimy brown mask.

“So couldn’t . . . we have had . . . some more flax?” I asked him after a minute.

“Why has Emrys not killed you? Why has everyone not killed you?”

“They’ve tried.”

“Not hard enough!”

• • •

“I thought you didn’t believe me,” he said when we stopped under a dripping tree to gulp down some water. How it could be simultaneously rainy and hot in Britain, I had no idea. But it was managing. And slowly steaming us inside our lovely wool.

“About what?”

“About your mother.”

“I don’t,” I told him, wiping my mouth on my dress, because it wasn’t as if anybody was going to notice. I’d slipped in the mud three times, the last one face-planting, and the garment was beyond filthy. And I had a rock in my “shoe.” I sat on a really uncomfortable root and pulled it off, shaking the thing.

“Then what was that quip?” Rosier demanded.

“What quip?”

“About me using my son!”

I shrugged. “Just that you can’t have it both ways. You can’t react like Mom’s the Antichrist for supposedly trying to use me, and then turn around and declare yourself lily white when you’re doing the exact same—”

“I am not doing the same thing!”

“Oh no. Of course not.” We’d somehow gotten onto the subject of Pritkin’s mother, and Rosier had gotten defensive. And so, of course, he’d started to attack mine. But considering everything, I didn’t think he had much cause to feel superior. “You just impregnated some woman you knew was going to die—”

“I did not know that!”

“Because the last fifty dying in childbirth after their half-incubus kids drained them dry was a coincidence?”

“It wasn’t fifty, and women died from childbirth all the time in this era!” he said irritably. “Along with a thousand other things. At first, I thought I was merely unlucky.”

“Unlucky?”

“I didn’t have anyone to tell me otherwise. It’s not as if anyone had tried this!”

No, I didn’t suppose so. Incubi, like all demons as near as I could figure out, tried to improve their line by mating up the power chain. So demon/human crosses were actually pretty rare. It would have to be a pretty sad excuse for a demon to find a human a decent match.

Of course, this was Rosier we were talking about.

But he hadn’t been after Pritkin’s mother for her power, had he?

“But when you finally noticed, you didn’t stop,” I pointed out.