Not ever, maybe, by the looks of it, and I waited for more, grimacing when it became obvious there wasn’t any. “Ah, so are you ready for the curse?” I said, and his breathing hesitated a bare instant.
“If you are.”
He was annoyingly short-answered tonight, his mood closed and somewhat stiff, but seeing as I was going to curse him, I didn’t blame him—even if the curse was going to fix his hand. I’d stirred it myself under Al’s eye, and I’d admit that I was more than a little nervous.
Trent slid back into the chair as I lifted my bag onto my lap and dug inside for my scrying mirror. My fingertips tingled as I found it, cramping up as I brought it out and set it on my knees. I had prepped the curse over the course of the week, storing it in Al’s private space in the collective. All I would have to do was tap a line, find the collective, and say the magic words to access it. “If this doesn’t work . . .” I started, and Trent waved me to silence.
“Rachel, you turned Winona back into a human guise. You can repair my fingers.”
I wasn’t so confident, and I settled back, then scooted forward, the scrying mirror making my knees ache with the magic taking notice of where I was. Like a slime mold after the sun, it stretched and dove for the tiny sliver of line that ran not five feet away.
“It shouldn’t hurt,” I added, feeling my fingers slip as I started to sweat. “If it does, just say the words of invocation again, and it will reverse as long as it hasn’t sealed yet. Okay?”
He nodded, and his jaw tightened.
I took a breath. Exhaling, I gently reached for a line, my fingers jerking on the glass as it spilled into me with an icy suddenness. The lines had been painfully sharp since I’d dove through all of them, almost as if their clarity had improved a hundredfold. The glass hummed with a myriad of conversations, whispers on the edge of my awareness, drops and swells of power as demons went about their daily grind of fighting boredom. The collective felt warm, peaceful for once, and I felt my eyes slip shut as the heat of the fire mixed with the blanket of spent adrenaline still holding the collective in a muzzy contentment. Oh, if only it could last.
Leaving the puddled warmth behind, I willed a small part of my thoughts into Al’s storeroom, shocked when my muscles seemed to lose their focus. A heavy lassitude filled me, and I wondered if Al was asleep. I’d never encountered this when storing or accessing spells in Al’s private space before. The way the collective was set up was that private curses were stored in private spaces, and public curses were stored where everyone could access them, be they the stuff to get rid of warts or entire species. Use a public curse, and you took on the smut for its creation—plus whatever smut the maker tacked on to it. It was how some demons tried to get rid of their smut, a dubious attempt at best.
“Here,” I said brusquely, feeling dizzy as I held out my hand across the space between us. “I didn’t want to risk making a charm tailored to you specifically in case the identifying factor could be used against you, so I need to touch you to focus the curse.”
“Does it have to be my right hand?” he asked, and I blinked, trying to focus on him. I felt half drunk—without the mild euphoria.
“It can be your foot, for all that it matters,” I said, and he scooted forward, slipping his left hand into mine. It was cold, and I gripped it tighter. “
I stiffened as the energy spilled up through me, shaking off the smut of the curses around it and shining with a dull gleam in my mind.
His hand spasmed, clenching hard enough on mine to hurt.
“It’s done,” I said, and he let go, holding his right hand up to the flickering firelight. My shoulders eased as I saw five fingers there, five perfect fingers. Exhaling, I flopped back into my chair, relieved. I’d used a modified healing curse to set his body back to the DNA sample stored in the collective, a memento of his time as a familiar. It would have all the tweaking that his father had done, not only preserving his life but extending it.
And then I looked up at him and paled.
The pleasure in Trent’s expression hesitated as he saw my face. “What?”
My mouth opened as I stared at his ears, but I didn’t quite know how to tell him, and my face warmed. His ears were pointed, just like Lucy’s and Ray’s. Shit, I thought that his dad had fixed them by tinkering with his DNA, not cropping them like a Doberman.
“Um . . .” I started, then jumped when the silver bell hanging suspended above the fireplace made a single beautiful peal of sound.
Trent looked up, startled, and then we both flung ourselves backward from the heavy burst of burnt-amber- tainted air that exploded on the hearth. I gasped as Al popped into the room. Shrinking backward, I pulled my legs up onto the chair. Trent had stood, shoving his chair back nearly three feet as the demon in his crushed green velvet coat all but rolled into the fire, arms and legs askew.
“Al!” I shouted when he came to a grunting halt. Then I cried, “Al!” in a panic. “You’re on fire!”
His sleeve flaming, he sat up, blinking from behind his blue-tinted glasses sitting halfway off his face. “Oh, look at that,” he slurred as he set a black bottle down to pat at his arm. “I am on fire.”
“Get him out of here, Rachel,” Trent said in a bad temper as he stood to the side, his expression lost in the shadows. “This is intolerable.”
I winced, glancing at Al when he began to giggle at the flames he was making dance on his fingertips. “I’m sorry,” I said as I unfolded myself from the chair, really meaning it. “There’s no reason for him to show up.” I turned to Al. “Al, you need to leave. Now.”
But the damage had already been done. And it wasn’t like I had a say in the matter.
“Don’t want to go . . .” the demon slurred as he took a swig from the bottle and scooted to lean against the rock next to the firebox, his knees pulled up and his head thrown back. “I heard you tap a line, and I came for a visit. It’s so quiet. There’s no one about, no parties, no one to flay, to torture.” He blinked, as if seeing the ceiling for the first time. “Where am I?”
I glanced at Trent now moving quietly through the room, gathering things up and shoving them into drawers. The candle at the shrine was out. “Oh my God,” I said, peering closer at Al. “You’re drunk!”
Trent shoved a tiny window open in anger, and Al raised his bottle in salute. “No, I’m not,” he protested. Then . . . “Wait, I am. Yes. I am drunk. You have no idea how hard it was to get to this mar-r-rvelous state of disconnection.” Wavering, he looked past me to an open cupboard. “Oh, look, there’s more.”
As I watched helplessly, Al staggered upright, stumbling to a rack holding six bottles of white wine I hadn’t noticed before. At a loss, I turned back to Trent, immediately seeing his ears.
“This is elf wine!” Al announced loudly, and Trent frowned. “Oh, Rachel, this stuff is toxic. Knock you on your ass. Where are we?”
“Somewhere you shouldn’t be,” I said, frustrated. Trent had opened up to me, showed me something important and fragile to him, and I go and bring Al into it. That it was an accident didn’t mean anything. My gut hurt, and seeing my scrying mirror, I scooped it up and held it up to Trent so he could see himself.
Trent frowned at his red-tinted reflection. Then his eyes went wide and he grabbed the mirror from me, holding it closer, tilting his head to see. In the corner, Al began to laugh uproariously, the bottle of elf wine lighter than when he had taken it. “She gave you your ears back, little elf!” he said, and I cringed. The night had started out so nice, too.
“I’m sorry,” I said, miserable. “I thought that your ears were changed at the cellular level, genetically stunted. I didn’t know they had been surgically altered.”
“Pointy ears. Pointy-eared devil,” Al said as Trent held the mirror with one hand and felt his ear with the other. “This is good,” he added, squinting at the bottle. “Ha! It’s your label.”
I couldn’t tell what Trent was thinking, and I cringed when he finally met my eyes. “I can change them back . . .”
“No, this is fine.” He took a last look, then handed the mirror to me. “Um . . . I like it.”
He was lying, and I hunched miserably into myself. From the corner, Al said, “Want me to cut them for
