to manipulate humans to do things against their will. Remember that, she told herself fiercely.
“So this is like Limbo?”
“If that is what you prefer to call it. It is just a name, a label. As I said, we call it Halfway.”
“Nice trick with the fake-Demian on stage, by the way. While I was dancing with fake-Xan, I mean.”
“Thank you.” He bowed, echoing the sarcasm he could surely hear in her voice. He unbuttoned his jacket and Donna held her breath, her eyes fixed on how his black shirt clung to his slender frame.
“Stop it,” she said.
“I am not doing anything.”
“I mean it. I’m not going to talk to you if you keep messing with my head.”
Demian’s eyes flashed coal-bright. “And I tell you again, this is simply who I am. I cannot change it.”
He gestured to the crimson chair behind her. The chair that hadn’t been there moments before. “Sit, Donna Underwood. Hear me out.”
Donna set her shoulders, knowing that her stubbornness could be the death of her, but, in that moment, not caring. “And you really couldn’t have done this at the ball? Or somewhere else? I thought we were supposed to be having a meeting. With all the alchemists. But, oh no, you had to prove how manly you are and whisk me away to an in-between world that I probably can’t escape from.”
Demian raised both eyebrows in a disturbingly human gesture. “Why would you want to leave? This is where the negotiations will take place.”
“Well then, where’s everyone else?” Donna’s heart lifted at the thought of seeing her mother.
“Through there.” He gestured at a solid-looking door that definitely hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Or, they will be soon. I had to bring you here so that we could join them.”
He was up to something, she just didn’t know what it was. Yet. Or maybe he was simply playing games—he was a demon, after all. That’s what they did.
“Fine,” was all she said. “Let’s go.”
Donna gazed around the meeting chamber and hoped her jaw wasn’t dragging on the floor. She couldn’t help it; the paintings that covered three of the walls were so vivid—so visceral—that it hurt to look at them too long. The one that kept pulling her attention back, despite her best efforts to turn away, was of a young man, painted in an almost-photographic style to look as if he were inside a giant aquarium, staring into the chamber. He was pressed up against the glass of the tank, fully submerged so that his long black hair waved around his head like tentacles, and his eyes were wide with terror. Those panic-filled eyes seemed to move back and forth, watching her. She tried to convince herself that it was just one of those freaky illusions, that there wasn’t really a man trapped in a painting, drowning for all eternity.
She sat down at a long table, and the Demon King took his place at the head of it. The guy in charge of the seating arrangements was the goat-faced man she’d seen speaking with Demian during the ball. His mask was one of the more realistic ones Donna had seen, and it seemed to move with his face as he talked. Watching him suspiciously, she wondered just how much of a “mask” it truly was.
Perhaps most surprising of all were the demon shadows, drifting back and forth around the peripheries of the room as though keeping watch over their master. They were completely silent, and Donna shivered every time she felt one of them move behind her. She suddenly hoped that Robert wouldn’t come, after all—she didn’t know what he’d do if faced with a group of these things again.
Then Demian’s steward, the goat-faced man, began announcing each person in turn as they walked through a doorway that had simply materialized in the center of the only wall empty of demonic “art.”
“Representing the human alchemists, Simon Gaunt, Magus from the Order of the Dragon, he whom we call Demon Slayer.”
As he walked through the door, Simon removed his Venetian Plague Doctor’s mask and smiled, showing the edge of his teeth. Donna shivered. How could she ever have found this man someone to be laughed at? Spending the past month with an ocean between them had been a luxury; but now she could see, more clearly than ever, how truly dangerous he was.
“Also here on behalf of the alchemists, Miranda Backhouse from the Order of the Crow, and her apprentice, Donna Underwood.”
So it was just Miranda