I would have expected that question from Ian. Telling me to do my worst and actually seeing it were two different things. But this wasn’t Ian’s voice. It was feminine, and it was speaking in Mandarin.
I turned around, confirming Xun Guan was indeed behind me, as close as the encircled pentagram would allow. She wasn’t alone. No fewer than four council members were with her, with an additional two Law Guardians and six demons flanking them.
I let out a short laugh and turned back to Dagon. “That was the call you made? You had your demons teleport Law Guardians and some of the council here?”
Dagon’s grin was back in all of its cruel glory. “Yes, and”—he raised his voice so those watching us could clearly hear him—“I know demons aren’t usually the ones to do this with the vampire court, but I’d like to lodge a formal complaint.”
Chapter 43
I actually looked behind me again to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. How dare Dagon bring the police to a demon-and-death’s-daughter fight! He truly was an asshole.
“Veritas!” Haldam’s voice cracked the air like a gunshot. Of course, Dagon had made sure the council’s official spokesperson was among those here. “What is the meaning of this?”
“Let me go, and you can make up any story you like,” Dagon hissed, now too low for them to overhear. “Kill me, and they will all see you for the traitorous abomination that you are.”
I’d often feared that one day, I would slip up and be caught. Turns out, my fears hadn’t been ambitious enough. You didn’t call pools of darkness pouring from me and wrapping around Dagon while magic crackled the air and my silver gaze cut through the ephemeral darkness a slip. It was more like a landslide.
Yet, oddly, I wasn’t afraid. Maybe the ice-cold calmness from my newly blended nature was overpowering the more volatile emotions of my vampire side. Maybe it was the fact that deep down, I’d always known this day would eventually come, so now that it had, it was almost freeing.
Dagon’s gaze gleamed with malevolence. “You can thank Ian for my finding out what your vampire identity was. If he hadn’t sued the council when you left him, it might have taken me months to realize that the bitch I sought and the spouse-abandoning Law Guardian named Veritas were one and the same.”
As if he’d summoned him, Ian appeared. This was the first I’d seen him since we’d been freed from the circles, and I was appalled.
“Taken quite a lot,” he’d said of the effort it took to break down the wall. That didn’t begin to describe the damage. His severed right arm was only a small stump protruding from his right shoulder while his left arm was stripped of all flesh, the horn still wrapped around his knuckles as if it had fused with his bones. His left shoulder only had some rough sinews attaching it to his collarbones, and his whole body looked shrunken, as if it had cannibalized itself for energy during his battle to take the wall down. Worse, he didn’t appear to be healing.
Please let him just need lots of blood. Or time for the magic’s ravaging effects to leave him. Please, let this not be the cost of him saving me!
Whatever his body looked like, Ian himself hadn’t changed. “Who called the bloody cops?”
“Dagon,” I replied, looking back at the demon.
His soul might be swimming right beneath his face, but it didn’t lessen the venom in his smile. It enhanced it.
“Long ago, you stripped me of all my power and position,” he said in a caressing voice. “Take my soul now, and you will know what that feels like, Veritas. And you will rue it.”
He’d never called me by a name before. I’d only ever been “girl” to him. Now, my name left his lips as if it were a curse.
I glanced back at the council. If I tried very hard, I might be able to do what Dagon said and pull off a “this isn’t what it looks like” defense. I could say my eyes and the darkness billowing behind me was the result of a spell Dagon had hexed me with, and point to the dead Anzus and all the damage done to Ian as proof of what the demon could do.
Or, I could think up a cleverer defense. I could literally say anything to persuade them to believe that what they saw wasn’t caused by a forbidden hybrid lineage