Sympathy for the Demons (Promised to the Demons #1) - Lidiya Foxglove Page 0,48

had to do, to remove myself from all temptation, and show them who owned their lives.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Lord Variel

“The cabin is really coming along!” Jenny’s voice snuck up behind me a few days later when I was cutting saddle joints in a batch of logs to fit them together. “I’m surprised you know how to build log cabins, Lord Variel. It seems like such an odd skill for a high demon to have.”

Why aren’t you afraid to approach me? I thought, as she came even closer with a plate of chocolate chip cookies in her hand.

“Hot out of the oven,” she said.

This is why one lives for nine hundred years. To see the day when chocolate chip cookies were invented. Sometimes Sirio made them around the time of the holidays that we did not officially celebrate, but that many of the servants remembered from their old lives. His were all right. I knew Jenny’s would be better.

I had been trying to avoid her, and to be gruff with her when I had no other choice, but she remained maddeningly generous.

It only sharpened my resolve to show her who I really was and shatter her kind heart, at least when it came to me.

I took a cookie and bit into it with a small shrug of thanks. “I’ve always been interested in building. Many lords are. One must keep up with one’s castle and grounds. I have been meaning to put in some additional stables for my horses, for example, and then I have been planning a new labyrinth full of wicked traps and dangers for all who enter. There is no excuse for everything not to be just right, so I model everything out first down to the last bush, including constructing little buildings with accuracy. So I’ve built some log cabins before, just small ones.”

“That sounds fun, actually, like a doll house.”

“Not like a doll house, you smidgen of a girl. An architectural model.”

“I’d like to see it anyway,” she said. “And some dollhouses are very architectural. When I was a little girl, Bernard went to a party at Sophia Solano’s house and she had a dollhouse that looked exactly like her own house, with tiny shutters and shingles and all the gingerbread trim on the porch. She wouldn’t let us touch it.”

I had to admit that this sounded impressive. But only to myself, of course. I snorted. “Go away.”

“I will go away. I have other things to do. I just thought you might want a cookie and a glass of iced tea. Do you? The tea is in the house.”

“No.”

“You look very sweaty again. I’m afraid you might get dehydrated.” Her eyes drifted down my arm and then she caught herself.

So, the girl had noticed that I was a much more attractive specimen than Bevan, even if Bevan did have admittedly better hair. Or at least, something was causing her to assess my physique.

Maybe my dratted servants really did tell her about the prophecy.

“I suppose I will have tea,” I told Jenny.

“Okay! I’ll leave the rest of the cookies here so you can snack on them.” She put down the plate and hurried back into the house, her little hands in purposeful fists as she ran.

“She is a delight,” Jameson said behind me.

“Jameson, did you tell her?”

“Tell her what?”

“You know what.” I shot a bolt of magic at him and forced him to quickly flutter out of the tree down to the ground.

“What does the prophecy matter now?” Jameson said. “You obviously find her attractive. So what if she turns into a toad? She would make a very good wife, I’d think; at this point I’m far more concerned as to whether you would be a good husband.”

“And you might make a good holiday roast,” I growled. “Of course I would be a good husband—to the right woman. But she is absolutely not the right woman. I need a powerful woman who will teach my heirs the ways of chaos. A Lord Devourer must be ruthless, not raised by a mother who gives them cookies. Could you even imagine what the other demons would say? What they would do to her and our children?”

Jameson sighed a little. “I wish I could say you were wrong. But will you ever be able to return to Sinistral in the first place?”

“Do not even speak such words.”

Jenny was coming back, so I waved him off angrily and took her tea. It was an unspeakable horror that I might never be able to