you dare imagine. But she will twist the answer to your prayer into something worse, something to benefit her at your detriment—for her amusement. You escaped her once. Tell me I lie. It’s for this that we forbid anyone to draw her attention to us, lest we again find ourselves slaves to the elves because she’s . . . bored.” His thin lips twisted. “That law is still on the books, by the way.”
My grip on my coffee tightened. Familiar territory. “You’d rather I had let you all die?”
Dali sighed as a group of twentysomethings came in, all of them probably wanting complicated, syrup, whip cream, sprinkle monstrosities. “No.” He stood in a sliding scrape of chair. “Which is why we ignored it. Don’t do it again, or we will not.”
“Then Hodin is dead.” I held my cup to warm my fingers, startled when Dali loomed over me—far too close.
“Is he?” he asked, eyebrows high. “Have you seen Hodin . . . Rachel?”
“How would I know? I don’t even know what he looked like,” I stammered, and Dali frowned at the register. The new group was ogling the sandwiches, slowing everything up.
“When not himself he favored a crow or black wolf,” Dali said. “But he survived the elves by amusing them with his shape-shifting and can be anything. It’s said that the reason pixies kill their dark-haired children even today is so they’ll recognize Hodin if they see a dark pixy.” Dali shuddered. “He was dangerous beyond belief, privy to the dewar’s most secret magics, having borne the brunt of them as they were developed. Becoming animals to play the toy and escape his torment was his only relief.”
“Oh.” My gaze went to Jenks, who shrugged. He’d refused to kill his son, Jumoke, and now the dark-haired, brown-eyed pixy lived in Trent’s gardens, where he wouldn’t be stoned.
“Elves are so unforgiving of nonconformity,” Dali said with an old hatred. “But whether demon or animal, there was always a lie upon Hodin’s lips. Perhaps that was why he understood the Goddess so well. Still, it didn’t serve him in the end.”
Dali vanished behind a haze of line energy to reappear in his apron. “When it became obvious that the dewar would fall, the elven holy man killed Hodin to prevent him from using the magic they’d practiced on him against the dewar. Hodin had belonged to the dewar’s most holy man, you see, and was said to have known all their secrets.”
Which made sense, if not morally right. As versatile as it was, demon magic couldn’t best the elves’ Goddess-based magic, though in reality, they sprang from the same source. It would likely be the Rosewood babies who’d ultimately bring the demons back to their full-spell capabilities, as yet unbiased against the Goddess. But that wouldn’t be for ages. My eyes flicked to Dali. And maybe not at all if the demons passed their hatred on to them in turn.
Still standing above me, Dali twitched his lip as he looked at the conspicuous circle etched into the floor at the back of the store. It was intentionally kept clear of tables and chairs, making a casual in-out jump spot to prevent accidents. Dali’s interest in it was the only warning I got as the surrounding people gasped at the ear-thumping shift of air. Jenks inked a startled gold when a demon popped in: blue smoked glasses, late-fifties bowler, black pin-striped suit, imposing height, and wide shoulders. It was Al, and by the looks of the suit, he was working. Not on the deadly domestic disputes for the FIB, though, and I felt a pang of sympathy.
“Ra-a-achel?” Al bellowed, and Dali smirked when the people coming in changed their minds and left.
Crap on toast, how had he known where I was? But Al was a social media junky, and the shot of me sitting at Junior’s sipping a latte with Dali and a pixy had probably landed in his feed.
“Hi, Al,” I said, and he strode forward to set a thick-knuckled hand possessively on my shoulder. A wave of relief spilled from him to me as his almost identical aura supplemented mine, and I sighed in thanks.
“It’s about time you got here,” Dali said sourly.
“You called him? Why?” I said. My latte went sour in my stomach. Not because of Hodin’s threat that I not mention him . . . exactly. Hodin had been imprisoned for the crime of doing Goddess-based elf magic, the same thing I kept finding myself being forced