I turned back to him. “Is it time to pay the piper?”
“If I am the piper, then yes.”
“Seriously?” Mac glowered at him. “Can’t you just do something out of the goodness of your heart for once?”
“Perhaps. If I had a heart.” His slate-gray eyes were so cold that I believed him when he said it.
Yet I’d felt the heat in him, so deeply buried beneath the ice.
There was a heart in there, albeit one that no longer worked. Sure, it pumped blood—vampires weren’t undead like I’d believed when I’d known nothing about this world—but his heart was probably as shriveled as he seemed to imagine.
Almost.
Mac crossed her arms over her chest. “What do you want, O Heartless One?”
“Carrow’s help with the issue that I requested earlier
.”
My mind raced. “Will you let me go if I don’t help you?”
“No.”
Still, he might let me go. I knew he wasn’t a total bastard. There’d been a connection when he’d bitten me.
But I had a big problem with the Council, and it seemed to all stem from my lack of control over my magic. I had to learn how to control it. I could feel it inside me, growing.
Mac and Eve had tried to help, even Quinn. But they hadn’t understood it any better than I had. The tricks they used to control their signatures didn’t work for me.
But the Devil…
He was powerful. And old. He would know all the tricks.
“Help me learn to control my magic,” I said. “I don’t know how you got me out of there, but I can’t imagine it’s permanent. You’re right. They want me for something, and I need to learn how to hide my magic. I don’t want them to give them anything.”
“You’re very clever,” he said.
“Of course I am.”
A grin tugged at the corner of his mouth. “As it happens, that is one of the conditions of your release. You must learn to control your magic—not only so you follow the rules of Guild City, but so you might join a guild.” He inclined his head to the side. “And from a more practical standpoint, you don’t want them to know how powerful you are.”
“You’ll help me?”
“Indeed. You’re under my protection, as it were.”
“Control, you mean.”
He shrugged. “Semantics.”
“Control. You got me out, and you can convince them to throw me back in.”
“Not if you become proficient enough in magic that you enter a guild. Then you’ll be a law-abiding citizen, and they can’t touch you.”
“That won’t stop them from trying,” Mac said.
“Perhaps. But they’ll have less of a leg to stand on.”
Mac looked at me and the Devil, her expression calculating. “I want you to promise you’ll have her back with the Council even after all of this is over.”