Revealed in Fire (Demon Days & Vampire Nights)

“Kinda the same with your daughter, though, right?”

“No.”

He and Penny should get along well. They both had the radical honesty thing down pat.

I set the yellow-orange glow of the faux-sun, only then remembering it was actually nighttime. So I took the sun out, but then I didn’t really know how it was supposed to rise in the daytime. Did I, like, put it on a timer or something? Could I do that?

“I probably shouldn’t have torn this down,” I murmured. “This’ll be a dead giveaway that I came through.”

“Yes, most likely.”

“Good, yeah. Honesty. Very refreshing,” I said dryly, stitching the flowers back in and laying the cobblestone path.

“You clearly don’t have a mastery of the intricacies of your magic, but your fighting prowess is exceptional.”

“Thanks. I have a lot of experience.”

“It seems so, yes. The colors of the trees and flowers are completely wrong, by the way. The type of cobblestone is not accurate either. This color scheme will never work.”

“What do you mean? The flowers were purple, red, and yellow. That was the color scheme. And how many types of cobblestone are there? It’s brown. Wasn’t the other stuff brown? Or was it gray? Crap, I can’t remember.”

“The flowers were heliotrope purple, carnelian, and butter yellow. These are—”

“Whoa, whoa…wait.” I tried to pour over the words he’d used for colors. “So…deeper purple…maybe?” I changed those out.

“Now you are using majorelle blue.”

“Blue?” I dropped my hands. “What are you seeing? I’m seeing purple.”

“No.”

I gave an exasperated sigh. “Well, hell, I don’t know. Obviously this is not going to work. I don’t know colors.”

“It is not your specialty. There is nothing wrong with that. In the Realm, a master gardener usually works with a magical structuralist to create the designs, and then lesser structuralists to maintain them. Your imagination is very vivid, but your gardening…”

I left the flowers as they were. Hopefully no master gardeners would be wandering through anytime soon. The trees were easy enough, even though Romulus’s tsking when I added the leaves indicated they were the wrong green. The gold filaments came next, and since those were annoying and I had no idea why they were here in the first place, I didn’t bother. Maybe they’d get the hint.

“I do wonder, if you were fae, what your contribution to the community would be,” he wondered aloud.

How did you politely tell someone they were starting to get annoying?

“Demolition. I’d give all your masters something to do.” I finished up and surveyed my handiwork. “The colors look kind of like a circus.”

“Yes. It is quite hideous. I think you should pass it off as making fun of the elves. It’s the only way to avoid public ridicule.”

“Wow. Don’t pull any punches, huh?”

“You don’t seem like the type of person who would appreciate it if I did.”

“You’re not reading me very well.” I put my hands on my hips as Darius sauntered over, just as freshly pressed as ever, with his suit jacket buttoned and a hand in a trouser pocket. He didn’t believe in dressing down for the occasion. How he was comfortable traveling—or fighting—in a suit, I did not know.

“They are going to know someone messed with their scheme,” he said.

“We’ve established that, thanks. Maybe get on my team for a moment.”

“What I mean to say is, if you can’t join them, beat them. Make your father proud.”

I studied his handsome face for a moment, seeing the glitter of mirth in his eyes. This was a plot of some kind. It was part of his strategy, the one he’d probably just developed after the elves showed their cards.

Given it sounded like an amazing idea, I didn’t question him. I just tore the illusion down again.

“Can we help?” Emery walked over. “If you’re going to mess with them, let’s really mess with them. I have some experience with that.”

He certainly did. It was why they were so eager to hang him. Grinning, I nodded at him.

“Are you sure we should be doing this?” Penny asked, standing behind us. “Won’t we get in more trouble?”

“What more trouble can I get into?” Emery asked. “What are they going to do, hang me twice?”

“They’re not going to hang you,” Penny said with grit in her tone. “My mother would not send us to the elves to be hanged.”

“You, no. Me…” Emery let his words hang.

“They will not hang you, Mr. Westbrook. Their bounty on you is a gross miscarriage of justice. We will rectify the issue,” Romulus said, and his arrogance was on par with that of any vampire.

It didn’t seem like he’d learned much from the meet-and-greet we’d just had with the elves. Thankfully, he clearly had no problem with extreme violence when things didn’t go his way. I assumed it would be no different at the castle. Our best bet was to believe the Seers and stick together. Otherwise they could pick us off one by one.