Pike was silent for five heartbeats, then, “Do you have anything to read?”
I ignored him, jaw clenching when he rose and started for my bookshelf. “Sit,” I almost growled, then stretched to get him a cookbook. “Enjoy,” I said as I handed it to him.
He looked at the title, then down at me, weight all on one foot. Tossing the book onto a box, he went to look out the window at the graveyard. “I’m bored.” Pike bent over, his elbows on the sill to show off his behind. “I’ve been here all day, and nothing is going on.”
“Take a nap,” I suggested, and he pushed himself up again, eyes going from Etude asleep on the peak down to the book on my lap.
“Is that a spell or curse?” he said, and I stiffened when he sat on the box beside me.
My fingers running down the ingredient list curved under into a fist. “Curse. I’m going over it to make sure it doesn’t violate my rules for white magic. I don’t do black magic.”
Pike’s eyebrows rose. “I thought all curses were black.”
“You and everyone else,” I complained, then added, “No. Most curses cause smut, which is basically a mark of how badly you are screwing up the balance of nature, but smut isn’t bad. Actually, it can be useful.”
He nodded knowingly. “To curse someone.”
Save me from armchair practitioners. “I suppose, but it’s easier and not against the law to get someone to take it willingly in exchange for something they need. The amount of smut for a curse varies by how far you’re stretching the laws of nature. For example, if I did a curse to immobilize you, there’d be only a tiny fraction of smut because being still is a natural state except in two-year-olds and pixies. But one to, say, fill your lungs with water and kill you would leave lots of smut because putting water in your lungs is not natural.”
Pike ran a hand over his smooth cheeks. “Death is a natural state,” he offered.
“Not when it’s caused by magic,” I said. He was too close. Damn it, my entire side was tingling. “This curse checks out,” I said, rising from the boxes and going to the marble-top dresser. “Do me a favor and stay out of my way, huh?”
“Sure, okay.”
It wasn’t a complex curse. The hardest part was to get your victim to drink the potion and thereby be unable to jump the lines without the countercurse. But the hair on the back of my neck began to prick when he stood to follow me, standing at my shoulder as I began sifting through my ley line equipment. Some of it was brand-new, a gift from my mom when she upgraded her spell box. I was sure I’d seen a Klein bottle in here somewhere, and I almost forgot Pike was beside me as I opened boxes and unwrapped metal and glass.
“Ooh, a crystal,” Pike said as he held up one the size of my fist. “Kind of hocus-pocus, new-age crap, isn’t it?”
My eyebrows rose at his obvious mockery. “Crystals can accentuate vibrations to make your blood boil or freeze, blind you, or drive you mad. If they’re perfectly cut as that one is, they do the opposite, letting you separate things that should never be separated. Like auras into their shells, or maybe your soul from your body and mind.”
Brow furrowed, Pike carefully wrapped it back up in its silk scarf and replaced it in the box. “How close are you and Trent?” he said, catching me off guard.
My eyes rose to his. “Other than we love each other?” I said belligerently. “Sit down. You’re getting in my way.”
Pike made a soft sound of recognition. Taking a book from one of the boxes, he retreated to the fainting couch. His fingers were lumpy from being broken too many times, and I thought of his brothers. “I read up on you,” he said, his knees almost to his ears on the low couch. “Know-your-enemy kind of thing.”
I breathed easier with him on the other side of the room. “That’s nice.”
“You hated him,” Pike said lightly as he idly flipped through the book. “He tried to kill you. Repeatedly. Word is, he put you in the rat fights. What is that a metaphor for?”
There you are, I thought, finally finding my Möbius strip, safely wrapped in a gold silk cloth. “It’s a metaphor for turning myself into a mink to steal from Trent Kalamack, getting caught, and being put in the rat fights.”
Pike looked up from the book, following me with his eyes as I set the twisted metal on the dresser top and returned to the boxes. “Fuck,” he finally said, and I frowned.
“You’re smart,” I said, not liking his language. “Be more creative in your expletives.”
“Fuck that,” Pike shot back, and I smiled, reminded of Kisten. Kisten, though, had been far more submissive. Survivable. Pike would be . . . anything but.
My smile faded and I shuddered at the thought of him between the sheets. Head down, I searched for my diamond dust among the stubs of candles. Damn vampire pheromones. Keep talking, Rachel. And maybe open another window.
“My dad and Trent’s father worked behind the law to find a cure for the elves’ cascading genetic failure,” I said, pleased when I found the Klein bottle and set it with the Möbius strip. “When I was born with a common but deadly genetic flaw, Trent Senior used the same illegal genetic tinkering that had been keeping his species alive to fix it, accidentally breaking the elven curse that his way-back ancestors created to commit a slow genocide on the demons. There were two of us, the first demons to survive since the curse was put on them over two thousand years ago.”
Pike stared at me, his eyes an even brown. “So . . .” he prompted, clearly not getting it.
Head down, I rummaged for something of mine not DNA oriented to target the curse to me. Nothing seemed appropriate. “Witches are stunted demons,” I said. “Able to breed true, but when things line up right, a demon is the result. Until Trent’s dad, it was always fatal, but because he fixed the cure to my mitochondria, I can pass it on.”
I jerked when Pike snapped his fingers, the light of understanding in his eyes making me grimace. “That’s why you have so much influence with the demons,” he said. “They can’t kill you until you have a couple of brats.” His lips parted, and I could almost see reality hit him as he looked at me, to the stuff assembled on the dresser, and back to me. “Holy shit, you really are a demon. I thought it was propaganda.”
“Hard to tell, isn’t it,” I said sourly. Yep, that was me. A demon who couldn’t travel the lines on her own or tap a ley line over water, and had to use a supplemental curse to keep from being tossed into Alcatraz by my disgruntled . . . teacher? Mentor? Frenemy? I didn’t really know what Al was anymore. Most treasured pain in the ass?
“You’re going to live forever,” Pike said, his speculative tone surprising me. “Not a few hundred years.”