"I know." He squeezed my arm lightly, his fingers warm against my skin. "I don't mean to downplay the danger, but it's a danger I've faced before. I'm a paranormal and occult news investigator, remember?"
"You've never faced this sort of danger before," I muttered, glancing up at the floor indicator as the elevator came to a bouncing halt.
The doors swished open. "Perhaps not," he agreed. "But it doesn't alter the fact that I always do whatever is necessary to get my story."
And one of those necessary things was hooking up with me to get a story on my mother. While I knew not everything about our relationship had been faked, it had certainly been more real to me than it ever had been to him.
The elevator opened directly into what Lucian had planned to be the living room of his penthouse apartment. It was still filled with building debris, although many of the plastic sheets that had defined the different areas the last time I was there were gone. But the new walls hadn't yet received a coat of paint and cables hung everywhere, looking like a network of intertwined snakes.
Snakes were better than spiders, I thought with a shiver. And then wondered whether that was clairvoyance or merely paranoia speaking.
"Wow," Jak said, looking around. "This place is huge."
"And this is just the living area."
"Obviously, Lucian wasn't lacking in cash."
"No." I picked my way through the building rubbish, heading for the newly constructed doorway into the kitchen area. "But considering he'd had centuries to accumulate it, that's no real surprise."
"Centuries?" Jak said, surprise in his voice.
"At least."
I paused just inside the doorway, quickly scanning the vast kitchen-dining area. It still held the remnants of the old kitchen – an oven, a fridge, and the bare bones of two small counters – but the framework for the new kitchen was in place.
The folding chairs we'd briefly used the time I'd met Lauren here were propped up against an outer wall. I'd asked her – against Azriel's warnings and my own misgivings – to create a spell that would nullify the device the Raziq had placed in my heart. She'd subsequently presented me with a cube designed to prevent magic escaping its boundaries. The idea, supposedly, was that once the cube had been "tuned" to my aura, it would prevent the device in my heart activating. But the cube hadn't been created from the magic of this world. It hadn't even been created from blood magic. That, perhaps, I might have risked, even if only as a last resort.
The source of the cube's power had come from hell itself. While I might have made some very stupid mistakes lately, and had often placed too much trust in entirely the wrong people, even I knew better than to use a device created by a woman who not only considered it natural to play in hell's fields, but perfectly normal to draw on its energy to create her magic.