Anzu swooped on him and caught Nick’s face in his hands.
“You care so much about humans, traitor?” Anzu crooned at him, saying the word “traitor” as if it was an endearment. “I’ll have them all. And that precious brother of yours, I’ll have him first. I’ll eat his heart. I’ll make you
Nick glanced at Anzu and smiled.
“I’m not worried about you. Liannan’s the one who eats men’s hearts. You’re the one they write songs about,” Nick continued, turning back to her, turning her hair around his wrist. “Nightmare lover.”
Liannan smiled. “You remember.”
Nick’s voice went dark. “What did you do to Alan?”
“Why don’t you ask him? Surely you don’t trust me more than your own brother?”
Nick stared at her, then threw her hair from him as if he was throwing away a weapon he might be tempted to use, and vanished.
There was just the shimmering garden then, and the two demons in it.
Liannan turned and prowled toward the doorstep, smiling as if now she got to play a game.
“Hello, pretty thing,” she said to Mae. “I remember you. Talk to me.”
“No, thanks,” said Mae. “I don’t have any questions just now.”
“Liar,” Liannan said, laughing. “Humans always have questions.”
She was slinking toward Mae, but Mae didn’t get up, just sat there hugging her knees on the step. Liannan was not deterred for a moment. She dropped until she was at eye level with Mae and then came forward, moving not like a human on her hands and knees but with the fluid grace of an animal on four legs, swift and predatory.
Anzu did not come forward, but he turned his head in her direction, hair shining like newly discovered treasure.
Mae raised her eyebrows at him. “You’re not my type.”
Anzu gave her a long look like a parody of a normal flirtatious look, lashes fluttering over hungry eyes, sinister under the sweetness.
“I’ll be seeing you, sweetheart,” he said. “I’ll be your type then.”
Mae flashed him a brief, cold smile, her mother’s, which said better than a frown that she was neither amused nor impressed. “I’ll be waiting.”
“I’ll be thinking of you,” Anzu told her. “Your soul in the palm of my hand. About to be crushed.”
He kissed the palm of his hand, then blew her the kiss. It floated to her, shining, a demon’s mark made of light, and blew apart like the seeds on a dandelion clock when it hit the edge of the circle.
Anzu disappeared the same way, turning into motes of light in the air that hung for a moment and fell like bright dust.
“Just you and me,” Liannan said, crawling to the edge of the circle, body moving in S shapes like a snake. “Can’t leave until Hnikarr comes back and releases me, you know. He called me by name. Keep me company, and I’ll give you some answers. For free.”
She was wearing a necklace, Mae saw, shimmering and dangling in the shadow cast by the front of her white dress. There seemed to be a charm hanging from the silver chain, but the charm kept changing shape, from a silver rendering of a demon’s mark, to a world in a jeweled cage, and then to one of Nick’s quillon daggers.
“So if I asked you about Gerald,” Mae began.
Liannan laughed and rolled over onto her back, the silver chain streaking like lightning across her white skin.
“Not useful questions, my darling girl,” she said. “But those questions that humans ask, as valuable as tears in the ocean. Will we be happy, is it too late? Does he love me?”
“How human can a demon be?”
Liannan’s eyes narrowed to bright slits like fissures in ice. She licked a pink tongue across her razor-sharp teeth.
There was silence in the garden except for the hiss of the balefire, magic brimming against the garden fence, and the urge running all through Mae’s body to lean forward just a little when Liannan whispered, to hear the words slide soft into the space between them.
“Being human,” Liannan murmured. “And what is that? Being attached beyond all reason, being too easily hurt.”
“Yes.”
Liannan laughed and bowed her head, the ends of her hair blowing against Mae’s cheek. The strands tingled against her skin in a kiss that seemed balanced between frost and fire.
“I know a demon like that.”
“Do you?” Mae breathed.
Liannan showed her sharp teeth. “It isn’t Nick. It’s Anzu.”
She paused to savor Mae’s reaction.
“Of us all, Hnikarr was the least human,” she continued softly. “I never in a hundred centuries saw him show the smallest sign he had warmth in him. He is not like you. He is something entirely different. Would it make you feel better about wanting him if I said he was not like the rest of us, was the one shining example of our kind, that
