“It wasn’t revenge for being summoned,” I said, feeling a need to fill the silence as I worked it out. “I mean, not totally. You saw an opportunity to take away his advantage. Kill the two who were bound to him.”
He tilted his head back and closed his eyes, inhaling deeply. “It was not so simple as that,” he said. He looked toward the summoning diagram, and for an instant I could have sworn I saw agony mar his beautiful features, but it was gone before I could be sure. “I slew them for revenge,” he said, voice so low I could barely hear him. “But not for the errant summoning. I sought to hurt Szerain in the opportunity presented to me, by destroying his summoners and slaying the ones who would have supported his plans.” I was shocked to see his hands tighten into fists as anger slashed across his face. “It was the only vengeance I was allowed to take, and so I did, even though it was paltry and insufficient.” His eyes returned to mine, and the anger in them faded. “The women did not suffer in their deaths. I give you my oath on that. I simply freed their essences. They felt no pain.”
My throat felt tight and hot, and all I could do at first was manage a short nod to acknowledge what he’d said.
“What did he do?” I was finally able to croak out. “What did Szerain do for you to want revenge?”
Rhyzkahl moved to me, gently placed his hands on either side of my head and kissed my forehead in a move so tender I could only stare at him in complete bafflement.
“You have already asked your questions, dear one, plus a third,” he said softly. “But I will answer this one as well. Szerain stole something from me. Something deeply precious and priceless. He stole it, and then he willfully destroyed it, because he knew what the loss would do to me.” And with that he took a deep breath, kissed me on my lips, then straightened and was gone.
Chapter 7
I stayed down there, sitting in the armchair and staring at nothing in particular until my legs threatened to fall asleep and the rest of me as well. For once I’d come away from a session of “two questions” feeling almost overwhelmed with information—very little of which made any sense. Szerain had been some sort of asshole and took something from Rhyzkahl. In turn, Rhyzkahl killed the summoners to disrupt Szerain’s plans—out of revenge. So, what were those plans? What did Szerain take?
Fragments of memory spun in my head like leaves in a breeze, coming to rest in patterns I could almost begin to recognize. A name shouted in a moment of desperation. An ice cold visage.…
The house was dark and quiet when I made my way back upstairs. Eilahn’s motorcycle helmet was by the front door, which told me she was back from wherever she went, but she didn’t seem to be in the house. Maybe she sensed that I needed to be alone with my thoughts for a while. My jangling, chaotic thoughts.
If so, she was wrong.
I went out to the living room and sat on the couch. I tucked my bare feet underneath me and pulled the throw over my legs. “Eilahn…â???”
Less than a minute later I heard a soft thump, the front door opened, and the syraza came in, followed by Fuzzykins. The demon gave me a soft smile as she closed the door, then settled into the recliner, tucking her own feet up in an echo of my pose. The cat jumped onto the back of the couch and proceeded to wash her butt in my direction.
“You must not have been far,” I said to Eilahn.
“I was on the roof,” she replied. “The sky is lovely tonight, and the air is fresh.”
I started to ask her how the hell she got onto the roof in the first place, then realized that was a stupid question. “Is it anything like this on your world?”
“Similar,” she said. “The air is a bit drier there, and it gets much colder, but there is much forest. There are mountains not far away. And we can see more stars.”
“No ambient light,” I replied with a nod. “You must not have big cities full of light pollution.”
She tilted her head. “There are cities. But they do not cast as much light.”
A tug of longing pulled at me. I’d been to the demon realm only once, after Rhyzkahl brought me there to live out the last few seconds before I died—allowing me to return to this plane of existence in one piece, much like what happened to demons when they were killed on this world. I’d spent less than a minute there, but what little I’d seen had left me wanting to see so much more. “Did you leave any, um, family behind to come here?”
“I am unmated,” she replied, a slight smile curving her mouth. “I would not have agreed to come had I other commitments.”
“Oh, so, you had a choice?” I said, then instantly hated how it sounded. “I mean.…” I trailed off, grimacing. “I’m sorry. I guess I’m completely ignorant of how things work over there. With the demons and the lords.”
She pursed her lips and was silent for a moment. “It is a complex dynamic,” she finally said. I waited to see if she was going to elaborate on that, but she remained silent.
Time to get to the meat of things. “When we were out at the landfill,” I said, “fighting the golems…when that one golem hit me, you yelled to Ryan. That’s when he turned around and, um, saved me.”
The demon was still as stone. She didn’t nod or acknowledge my statement.
I was suddenly nervous. Little things were starting to click into place, though I knew I was still missing most of the big picture. It was like the moment when working on a picture puzzle that you put three pieces together and suddenly realize it’s a face. Maybe you still don’t know where it’s supposed to go, or what the final picture looks like, but at least you have something more than hundreds of scattered pieces.
I knew that once I started putting it together, I wouldn’t be able to stop until I had the whole picture, whether I liked the end result or not.
“You didn’t call him by his name,” I said, taking the plunge. “I mean, the name you yelled wasn’t ‘Ryan,’ was it?”
She shook her head, a slow deliberate movement. Her eyes never left mine.
My pulse beat an unsteady staccato. “It was ‘Szerain,’ right?”