managing to move the sword before I impaled him with it. A hard body slammed me the rest of the way to the floor before I could recover, and warm breath was in my ear. "You're not sure?"
"Haven't had reason…to find out yet," I said savagely, trying to buck him off. Of course, it didn't work.
"It's a good trick," Pritkin said, not letting me up, "but of limited use if it's the only one in your arsenal. We're going to have to work on—"
I gave a final heave, and when it had no more effect than the others, shifted once more. It was perceptibly harder this time, and the dizziness on landing was a lot stronger. I'd aimed for the far side of the room, but by the time I recovered, Pritkin was almost there. "Enough, already!" he yelled. "Making yourself sick isn't going to—"
"You're just…a sore loser," I panted, trying to get my breath back. Shifting the first time had been like running up a couple of stairs; this one had felt more like ten flights.
"I wasn't aware that I had lost," he replied, sword point getting friendly with my ribs. But he wasn't taking me seriously, wasn't watching my body language, probably expecting me to shift again. So I didn't.
A twist and a step took me inside his reach, the pommel of my sword caught his chin and my foot hooked around his ankle. With a pull we were on the floor again, but this time I was on top, with a wooden blade against his neck. He made a choked noise of surprise, or maybe it was protest over the fact that I had pressed a little too hard. It wasn't enough to break the skin, but it left a mark, red and raw-looking. I rolled off, my heart threatening to pump out of my chest, my legs rubber.
I leaned back against a mirror, chest heaving. I would have liked to gloat, since I'd likely never have the opportunity again, but I didn't have enough air. "I win. So talk."
"What would you like to hear?" he asked, sitting beside me. His tone was even—the bastard wasn't even breathing heavily—but he dragged the sword point across the floor hard enough to scratch the wood. "That that creature forced himself on my mother, knowing she would die in childbirth like the hundreds of other women he'd assaulted? That only the small amount of Fey blood she possessed gave her the strength to survive until their child was born? That I exist solely because of his perverse curiosity to see if such a thing was even possible?"
I blinked. I'd had a mental list of arguments lined up to talk him into telling me something, all of which now had to be trashed. The one thing I hadn't expected was for him to just come out with it like that, with no embarrassment, no twitching. And therein lay the problem with every single conversation Pritkin and I had ever had.
I was used to the way vamps quarreled, in convoluted, subtle conversations, a dance of lies and hidden truths, more silent than spoken. I knew that dance, those steps. But with him, there were no convoluted discussions, implied threats or discreet bargains, just blunt statements of fact that left me oddly confused. I kept looking for the hidden meaning when there wasn't one. At least I hoped there wasn't.
"I'm beginning to understand why you hate demons," I finally said.
"I hate demons because they exist solely and utterly to plague humankind! They have no redeeming qualities—they are pests at best and scourges at worst—all of which should be hunted down and destroyed, one by one!"
"You're saying that in an entire race there isn't one good—"
"No."
I knew what it was to grow up feeling that something important was missing from life, to have no reason to mourn people I never knew, yet to feel their absence like an ever-present ache. Pritkin certainly had reason to hate Rosier, maybe even demons in general, but I thought genocide might be taking things a little far. "And you've met them all?" I asked, trying not to flinch under that burning green gaze.
"You grew up with vampires," Pritkin said savagely. "Would you care to guess where I spent my formative years?"
A little late, I remembered Casanova saying something about Pritkin being thrown out of Hell. I'd assumed he was exaggerating. Or not, I thought, as Pritkin jumped up and began pacing, his face redder than when we'd finished