“It is not working,” said Lord Ha’an.
“Grant can manipulate energy on a cellular level to induce healing. Broken bones, cancer, gunshot wounds. But this is different.”
“Poison,” he murmured with disgust.
I wasn’t so sure we were still dealing with a poison; and that terrified me. Ha’an didn’t seem to be picking up on the same clues—maybe, because his people had never fallen ill before. “You’re sure none of them munched on those dead humans?”
“I am certain. They cannot lie to me.”
“And you? You ate the hearts of the Mahati who consumed them. How do you feel?”
He hesitated. “No different.”
I held his gaze. “Really.”
“I am not deceiving you,” he muttered. “But there is a . . . darkness . . . dimming the energy I share with my people. My strength comes from them. If this continues, it will affect me.”
I looked back at Grant. Deep shadows surrounded his eyes, and his tight white knuckles had cracked, bleeding. Other parts of him were cracking, too: I saw a blister forming on his lip, and parts of his arms and face were mottled red, as if capillaries were bursting beneath his skin.
You are being cannibalized.
A child in the womb is the ultimate cannibal. As a mother, I was more than happy to be consumed. But the demons were not unborn children—and Grant was being deconstructed before my very eyes.
He needed help. More than I could give him. It hit me, suddenly, who I could ask. But the fact that it had taken me this long to realize that possibility said everything about my reluctance to engage her.
First things first. I backed away, gesturing for Lord Ha’an to follow. “We need to see what Jack can tell us.”
“The murderer.” The demon lord’s voice dripped with disgust, and his long fingers made a violent, striking gesture that could have easily taken out my eyes if he’d been aiming his hands at me.
But it still seemed directed my way: all the frustration, anger, and humiliation I’d seen in him at rare moments over the last three months. Finally, now, reaching the tipping point.
We found Jack in the same spot where the human bodies had been discovered the previous night. The only difference now was the silence. No Mahati had remained in the vicinity—and that had everything to do with my grandfather.
Jack was crouched, scratching his beard—which was rustling with far more vigor than his fingers should have accounted for. He didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the rotting corpses surrounding him. Humans were just meat. Clothing his kind slipped on and off.
Mary stood behind my grandfather, fingering her dagger and staring at the back of his head. I half expected her to stab him. She didn’t seem particularly bothered, either, by the dead.
She’d been waiting for us on the edge of the camp—an old human woman standing unafraid amongst demons who thought she smelled tasty. She didn’t need a bodyguard—the woman was the fastest decapitator this side of planet earth—but she’d had a dozen small demon children buzzing around her like she was their fairy godmother, and I couldn’t see any of the adults wanting to fuck with that.
Her secret, as far as I could tell, was that she’d been sneaking those little demon kids into my farmhouse kitchen for months, baking them cakes and cookies, and basically buttering up their homicidal little hearts with the two most potent human drugs ever: sugar and chocolate.
Sweets for sweets, she would say—totally nonplussed by the claws and tails and inhuman eyes.
Jack, on the other hand, always generated a very different response from her. No fucking treats for him. If he made it through the next hour with his heart still beating inside his chest, it would be a miracle.
“I do not like this,” Lord Ha’an murmured. “I am allowing one of the architects of our imprisonment to walk freely amongst us. He is Aetar. His kind committed genocide against mine. Against all the clans who were imprisoned.”
“Get in line,” I muttered. “We’ve got bigger problems.”
Lord Ha’an did not answer me, his long fingers continuing to twitch violently against his massive thighs. He stared at Jack, who had picked up one of the skulls, staring into its empty eyes as though a voice were speaking to him. He didn’t seem to notice the blood smearing his hands.
Mary knelt just behind him, poking the dark cavity of an empty eye socket with the edge of her machete. Her brow furrowed, and she went down on her knees, sniffing the remains. Her upper lip pulled back, baring her teeth in a snarl.
“Old Wolf,” she whispered. “Fool wolf.”
Jack frowned at her, then snapped his gaze back to the skull. He drew in a deep, quick breath. “Maxine.”