Slaying Monsters for the Feeble - Annette Marie Page 0,95
across the sofa, ankles propped on one end and his head cushioned on the opposite armrest. As I peered intently at him, he reached over his head for the small bowl on the side table, filled with chocolate-dipped grapes rolled in crushed almonds, flaky caramel, and butterscotch chips.
He plucked a grape and held it above his mouth. One eye opened and his dark pupil, nearly invisible in the glowing crimson, turned to me.
I narrowed my eyes to slits, straining my brain as hard as I could.
“That is not how to hear inside my head, drādah.”
Damn it.
His husky laugh rolled through the room—as usual, he had no problem hearing my thoughts—and he dropped the grape in his mouth. His jaw moved as he chewed through the chocolate layer before swallowing.
Sighing, I returned my attention to the textbook. The coffee table was spread with old leather tomes, textbooks, and scattered papers. In the center was the grimoire, open to page sixteen. That was as far as I’d gotten in the last week.
In a neat stack beside the grimoire were half a dozen pages of my mother’s translations, the paper crinkled and the ink smudged. Zylas and I had searched the mountainside for half an hour to find them, but not knowing which grimoire pages they went with, I hadn’t yet made much sense of them.
I peered at the textbook again—an exhausting, brain-destroying breakdown of the Arcane jargon used in Ancient Greek—then gave up. As I stacked my reference books, my attention returned to the demon hogging my sofa. Or, actually, the demon and the kitten.
Now that she’d recovered from her injuries and the shock of a new home, Socks was friendly enough with me and Amalia, but she did not deign to cuddle with us, probably because we were intolerably inferior to her favorite sleeping spot.
That spot being anywhere on or beside Zylas.
At the moment, she was curled into a furry donut right in the middle of his stomach, blissfully dreaming cat dreams. When his magic was fully charged, he ran a couple degrees hotter than a human, so it didn’t surprise me that she’d want to sleep on him. What surprised me was Zylas’s tolerance of it.
I hid my smile and continued packing up my work. Looking back on it now, I wasn’t sure Zylas had ever intended to torment the injured kitten, even when he’d perched on top of her crate. A cruel demon terrifying her for his own twisted satisfaction?
Or a curious demon who had no idea how to interact with a small, easily frightened creature of another species?
In some ways, that applied to me as much as it did to Socks. Small, easily frightened … and he had no idea how to handle either of us. He was figuring it out as he went along, just as I was figuring out how to interact with him.
As I scooped up a stack of books, the grimoire resting on top, he opened his eyes again.
“Where are you taking my grimoire?” he asked with a sly gleam in his gaze.
“To its usual spot.” I rolled my eyes. “You don’t need to ask me every time I move it.”
An amused flash of pointed canines. I rolled my eyes again to make sure he’d noticed, then stalked into my room. At every possible opportunity, he pointed out that the grimoire was his. I had given it to him and he got to decide when and where and how I got to use it. He’d even tried to convince me that I had to ask his permission to take it out of its box, but I’d put my foot down on that one. He’d settled for constant reminders.
Annoying demon.
“Drādah mailēshta,” he called from the living room.
“Get out of my head!” I yelled back. The grimoire’s case lay open on my bed—the metal box that only an Athanas sorcerer could open. I wrapped the book in brown paper, settled it in place with my mother’s translations resting on top, and closed the lid. White runes flickered across it as magic sealed the box shut.
I slid it under my bed, then sat on the mattress and heaved a long sigh. In the week since we’d killed Vasilii and reclaimed the grimoire—or rather, most of the grimoire—we’d found no sign of Claude. Not that we’d really searched. Christmas had been on Tuesday, and it was hard to worry about a dangerous summoner and his demon with all the holiday cheer going on.