Sympathy for the Demons (Promised to the Demons #1) - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,40
blanket over her shoulders.
Chapter Nineteen
Jenny
“Piers, you ate your cake! I hope you liked it,” I said, pulling out the empty dish.
No reply.
I got on my hands and knees and looked under the cabinet, but it was such a tight, dark space that I couldn’t see him.
I peered around the corner and saw that Lord Variel was still sleeping. Then I changed into a toad and took a tentative hop under the cabinet. “Hello?”
“What the fuck do you want?” a dry voice spoke from the shadows.
“To check on you! And you sound like you need water! I’ll get a dish, okay?”
Suddenly legs came skittering at me and Piers’ eyes flashed golden in the shadows, and then he hissed at me, “Just let me die.”
“Why would I want to do that?”
“I’m sure Bevan told you what I did. Maybe half of what I did. I’ve devoted a lot of my time to ruining his witch and her brother. I knew I was headed down a dark path, and I didn’t really care. Dark paths usually end either in terrific power or in something absolutely terrible, and it seems I drew the short straw, so just let me get to the end of it.”
“But you ate the cake,” I said. “If you really wanted to be left to die, you wouldn’t have eaten it.”
“Because it was—!” He started shouting and then cut himself off.
“Delicious?”
“Yes,” he rasped.
“You’re just going to have a very hard time dying if you can’t stop eating cake,” I said. “I’m sure that you’ve done some awful things and it won’t hurt you at all to stew about it, but dying is even more pointless, so I’ll keep giving you cake. Anyway, if all you ever eat is cake, I guess you will die eventually.”
“There you go,” he said. “Give me a damn heart attack.”
“I’m hoping to make creme brulee today,” I told him, and then I hopped back out and changed into a girl, which was also a good excuse to change my dress. I went with a practical brown dress with stripes of plaid and a white collar. It was just like one of Jenny’s dresses, and I didn’t think much about it, until Bevan came in from outside with some fresh water and firewood, and he was dressed nicely for the market, I assumed, in black jeans and a looser gray cardigan over a dress shirt and tie.
“You look nice! Very human!”
“Too human?”
“No—I like it! It’s so modern!”
He smiled. “I can’t wait to take you to the Fixed Plane. Specifically, I want to take you to New York City someday and watch your eyes fall out of your head.”
“New York City?” I whispered. “With humans all around us everywhere?”
“Yep.”
“Have you been there?”
“Yeah, several times. Hel’s family went there shopping twice a year and we’d usually sneak off at some point and get hot dogs or ride the escalators at Macy’s and touristy stuff like that.”
“Do they look at you funny?”
“No, not if I look like this. I can pose as a human very well.”
Goodness. Why did that make me feel so absolutely excited? I was fervently dreaming of Bevan in New York City pretending to be a human and fooling everyone.
He handed me a basket. “Come on. Let’s just go before he gets up. I’ll leave him a note.”
“What about in Etherium? Am I dressed all right here?”
“It doesn’t really matter. Anything goes. It’s not like all the rules in St. Augustine. I guess showing up in black leather with skulls for shoulder ornaments might get some attention…the same way being a massive horned demon would.”
“I do feel a little bad for Lord Variel. He seems pretty decent for a high demon.”
“Be careful,” Bevan said. “High demons aren’t much like us. You can’t trust him, but hopefully we can use him to help our kind. Demons are transactional. They’ll do something good if they get something in return, so we just need to convince him that it’s worth his while to help us.”
I swung the basket in my arm. The path ahead seemed to promise endless adventure, weaving alongside a creek through the autumn leaves and evergreen pines. “That sounds so…”
“It’s just a fact,” Bevan said. “When you summon a demon, they want to trade. He’ll never do anything for us out of the goodness of his heart.”
“I probably seem very naive.”
“It’s charming,” he said. “I just don’t want you to get hurt.”
With every passing moment, I was starting to feel closer to him, as I grew