“Your point is taken,” Nigellus allowed.
I sat forward in my seat, grasping the backrest in front of me so I could get a better look at Nigellus’ profile, as I asked the first of many questions I wanted answered.
“Tell me about this war. Rans said you know about this stuff, right? Because I’ve been dumped headfirst into the deep end of a world I knew nothing about until a couple of days ago.”
Dark eyes caught and held mine through the reflective medium of the rearview mirror. Again, I felt the odd sensation of kinship, of fascination. I bit the inside of my cheek hard.
“You’re demonkin,” he said, “though the trace is fainter than I’m used to sensing. Your existence poses something of a conundrum for those of us in the nonhuman world, Ms. Bright.”
“Call me Zorah,” I shot back, “and answer the question, please.”
Nigellus cocked an eyebrow and returned his eyes to the road. “As you wish. Before you can understand the war, you must understand that there are different realms occupying the same space as the Earth you know. Each is populated by a different... species, I suppose you’d say.”
“Like... alternate dimensions?” I asked, digging deep into my brief flirtation with being a sci-fi nerd girl as a teenager.
“If you like,” he agreed. “There is overlap between the realms. Weak spots in the fabric, where things can pass through. The human realm had the unfortunate luck to be a fertile, productive land with many things of value to those in the other realms.”
“Go on,” I prompted, trying to keep half an eye on Rans while also focusing on the answers I was finally getting. My vampire companion seemed to have gone very silent all of the sudden.
“As often happens, greed overcame the better natures of those in Hell, and in the Fae realm of Dhuinne,” Nigellus continued. “Both the Demons and the Fae began to infiltrate the human realm in search of wealth and power.”
“Wait,” I said. “You’re saying Hell is a real place?”
Jesus tap-dancing Christ. My fundamentalist grandmother would be having a field day with this if she were still alive.
“Indeed. Not to disappoint you, but it’s relatively free of fire and brimstone—though it is a rather barren place. I fear demonkind was on the losing side of the propaganda war that the Fae waged on Earth, as well as the actual war.”
I took a moment to wrap my brain around that. “What... so faeries started a smear campaign against demons to make humans hate them? That’s...” Crazy? Ridiculous? Unbelievable? “... pretty smart, actually,” I finished.
“Smart, and quite effective, as it turned out,” Nigellus agreed. “The earthly realm was caught between two forces made up of individuals both good and bad—inasmuch as such a moral framework has relevance outside of human society. But over the millennia, humans learned to fear and hate demons. Not that the Fae didn’t command fear as well, but they also commanded a kind of fascination.”
“But no one much believes in faeries anymore,” I pointed out. “While a lot of people still believe in demons.” With a shiver, I remembered the description of the message scrawled on a jail cell wall in blood, the night my mother’s assassin had hung himself.
Kill the demons.
It was Rans who spoke. “Since the end of the war, the Fae have been going to great lengths to erase themselves from human consciousness. It’s easier to infiltrate than to conquer.”
“Certainly, it’s easier to rule from within than without,” Nigellus agreed.
“When did all of this happen?” I asked. “I mean, was the war a recent thing, or...?”
“Oh, yes—quite recent,” Nigellus said. “There was no official declaration of hostilities, but the conflict began around the fall of the Roman Empire, and the treaty ending it was struck in the late eighteenth century.”
I stared at his profile for a moment, in case he was joking. He didn’t seem to be.
“The late eighteenth century,” I echoed. “Okay, so... talk to me about this treaty. I guess it says the faeries can fuck over humans to their hearts’ content? That’s totally awesome.”
Nigellus paused for a moment as though choosing his words. “The end of the war was less of a clean victory and more of a... messy draw, shall we say. In addition to gaining control over Earth’s resources, demonkind had also sought to gain control over the Fae themselves. Obviously, it didn’t work out that way.”
“So I gather.”
“Under the treaty, the Fae retain their independence with a single exception—they must pay a tithe to Hell. In exchange, demonkind agreed not to interfere in the human world anymore... all of which makes your existence a rather interesting conundrum, as I said before.”
I was still struggling to keep up. “In what way?”
“You’re part succubus,” Rans said, rejoining the conversation even though his shoulders were still tense. “That was considerable interference on someone’s part.”
I blinked. “And all of this is my fault how, exactly? Assuming it’s even true in the first place... and I haven’t conceded that point yet.”
“Fault isn’t precisely the point,” Nigellus said.
“So I’m... what? Some kind of political football?” I pressed.
“An inconvenient political football, yes.” Nigellus might as well have been discussing the weather, for all the emotion in his tone.
Again, I worried why I was so drawn to him when by every objective measure, he came across as one seriously scary mofo. Though I suppose he deserved points for taking us in, not to mention driving sixty miles on short notice to pick us up from the airport.
He glanced in the mirror, but this time his gaze landed on Rans. “How did you discover her in the first place? The signs are hardly obvious.”
I let my gaze fall heavily on Rans, as well, wondering if he’d admit to committing wholesale shed destruction and unprovoked neck molestation.
He looked irritated. “Hardly obvious? We’ll have to agree to disagree on that, I think. As it happens, I fetched up in
