“Tobias Caine,” he responded.
“Or maybe you would.” Betty’s full lips formed a pout. She lightly smacked his thigh. “How did you know that?”
“I have people.” Lucifer smoothed one palm over Betty’s springy curls, then looked at Nix again. “You must have a low opinion of your own kind to think we’d be so stupid as to be behind this bloodbath.”
“As a matter of fact, I’ve been saying that demons aren’t behind it.” Nix sat back and crossed her legs. This guy intimidated the hell out of her, but she wasn’t about to let him see it. “Not because demons aren’t stupid, because let’s face it, you have some pretty dull swords in your arsenal.”
He grimaced and lifted one shoulder as if to agree she had a point.
“But I don’t think demons are behind it because you’d have no reason to hide it. If things had gotten bad enough to start killing vamps out in the open, everyone would know about it.”
“Yet here you are.” He rested his arms along the back of the couch. “Questioning us.”
Betty turned accusing eyes on her daughter. “Just like we’re suspects.”
“Quite so.” Lucifer stretched his legs out beneath the coffee table.
If she wanted his cooperation, Nix couldn’t go off on him like she had with her mother. “I’m sorry, I don’t mean to treat you that way. I’m just trying to do my job.”
That seemed to placate him, because after a few seconds his lips tilted. It was such a slight movement that she wouldn’t exactly call it a smile, but one of his dimples peeped out, softening his face. She’d take what she could get.
Being the dogged investigator she was, she asked the question she’d already asked three times and had yet to get a straight answer to. “Have you sanctioned, officially or otherwise, a blood feud against vampires?”
“I have not.” His black gaze pinned her to her seat. “Nor have any of my kind, your kind, gone rogue.”
Why was it, when it suited people, demons were her kind, and her humanity, something she fought to hold on to every day, was conveniently overlooked? Lucifer looked upon her being a demon as a good thing, the council as bad. She was always in the middle, being pulled in one direction or another. No wonder the possibility of insanity was so great. All hybrids, regardless of their parentage, had a continual struggle to find where they belonged in both the human world and the preternatural one. When neither one wanted you, it could make life excruciating.
She stood. “Okay. Thanks.”
“There is something else you should know.” He gestured toward her chair and waited until she sat back down before he added, “Word has come to me that there are dissatisfied preternaturals who have made a device that opens a mini rift between the dimensions.”
“What?” Nix scooted forward to perch on the edge of her seat and stared at Lucifer in complete stupefaction. She glanced at her mother.
“Why haven’t you told me this?” Betty asked him, drawing back slightly from his side.
“I just heard it today, darling,” he muttered, giving her a pat on the knee. To Nix he said, “There have been transmissions shared through this rift.”
“Transmissions. What kinds of transmissions?” A pulse started thumping fast and hard in her throat.
“Radio transmissions.” He lifted one foot and rested it on the coffee table. “Someone here on Earth is talking to someone in the other dimension. And before you ask, I don’t know who.”
Nix’s heart thumped against her ribs, a dull, shocked beat. “Just how do you know this?”
He shifted his position, crossing his legs again. He hesitated as if wondering just how much to tell her. He glanced at Betty then back at Nix. “As I said, I have people.” He waved a hand. “How I know isn’t important. What’s important is that someone here is communicating with someone there.”
Nix’s mind went back to the scrap of paper they’d found at this last scene. The words “dimension,” “radio,” and perhaps “transmit” had been written on it. Had it been some sort of note passed between contacts? Or a diary entry? A confession, maybe?
“And the council knows.” Lucifer’s next words brought her back to the present.
She straightened, once again dumbfounded. “The council knows about the transmissions? You’re sure?”
“Some of them at least, yes.”
“And?”
“And what?”
Nix raised a hand to the pulse in her throat, pressing down, trying to force it to behave. “Are they doing anything about it?”