Vengeance of the Demon: Demon Novels, Book Seven (Kara Gillian 7) (16 page)

For being an enforced guest, Pellini wasn’t a bad housemate at all. I had no idea if he was sucking up or naturally neat and helpful, but as soon as we finished eating he pitched right in with cleanup without batting an eyelash. Bryce got a pass on dishwashing since he’d cooked, and he marched out to do battle with the Malibu engine. Pellini impressed me even more by knowing how to load the dishwasher—wedging light items against heavier things so we didn’t end up with cups full of dirty water.

Idris slammed up from the basement as I scrubbed cookware that couldn’t go into the dishwasher. “There’s bacon if you’re hungry,” I told him. “Or, if you want eggs or toast, that’s no trouble.”

I expected him to head straight through the kitchen and out the back again, but apparently his need for sustenance overpowered his dislike of Pellini’s presence.

“Yeah. Thanks,” he muttered. “Bacon sounds good.”

“The plate’s on the stove,” I said. I rinsed the frying pan and handed it to Pellini for drying. Idris stuck bread into the toaster and did his best to pretend Pellini didn’t exist. Pellini slid a look toward him, mustache twitching as though he held back a comment with effort.

This shit needed to stop here and now. I’d allowed a similar veiled antipathy between Ryan and Eilahn to fester for too long before I put my foot down. Learned my lesson. I was sorely tempted to let my snark-monster out and say, “Now, boys, play nice and shake hands,” but decided that might be counterproductive.

“We’re living and working in the same house,” I said instead. “
My
house, though I like to think of it as
our
house. You two are going to indulge me with a civil conversation if it kills you.” I nailed both with a steely glare.
Common ground, here we come.

Idris frowned as he settled at the table with bacon, toast, and juice. I ignored the frown and turned to Pellini. “I’ve been thinking over what you told me,” I said and passed him another pan to dry. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for you to see the arcane and not have
anyone
you could share it with. I mean, I had my aunt from the very beginning to tell me what the deal was.”

Pellini hesitated, face bunching into a scowl as he decided whether or not he’d play my game. “It sucked. Not going to lie.” He dried the pan with harsh swipes of the towel.

“Have you ever told
anyone?
”

“No humans. Not once.” He glanced at Idris then to me. “It was cool at first, y’know? Like being accepted to Hogwarts. I was
special.
” He snorted. “But imagine going to Hogwarts and being the only student there. Oh, and you still have to go to regular school but can’t tell a soul about this other cooler shit.”

Idris kept his eyes on his food, but I didn’t miss that he had yet to take a bite from the bacon in his hand.

“Idris, you learned from a neighbor, didn’t you?” I asked.

He blinked, dropped the piece of bacon back onto his plate. “Um. Yeah.”

I waited to see if he had more to say, but he remained silent. He wasn’t going to make this easy, but at least he hadn’t stormed out. “You were what, fourteen?” I asked. “Fifteen?”

“Fourteen,” he said with obvious reluctance then blew out a breath as if accepting my refusal to give up. “I’d been with the Palatinos three months when this dude moved in across the street. A week or so later I started seeing strange glimmers around his house. He noticed me gawking.” Idris jerked his shoulders up in a shrug. “Started training as a summoner not long after that.”

Did Pellini know Idris was adopted? Probably so, I decided. He would have researched everything he could find on anyone related to the Amber Palatino Gavin case. Idris had been adopted twice, once as a baby, and then by the Palatinos when he was fourteen after the first couple died in an automobile accident.

Pellini tugged at his mustache. “I swear to god I’m not trying to stir shit,” he said, “but doesn’t it strike you as awfully
convenient
that a summoner moved in across the street right when you started seeing all the woowoo crap?”

For an instant I thought Idris would respond with a snarl, but instead he picked up his fork and jammed it into his bacon. “Yeah,” he said, jaw tight. “My
convenient
neighbor and mentor for the first year was Anton Beck—one of Katashi’s inner circle summoners.”

A chill shuddered through me. “That explains how you ended up training under Katashi so young,” I murmured. Truths I’d avoided up to this point clarified into a lump of ice in my gut. “If my dad hadn’t
conveniently
been killed by a drunk driver, Tessa wouldn’t have raised me, and I wouldn’t have become a summoner.”

“It sounds premeditated,” Pellini said with dark suspicion. “Who orchestrated it and
why?
”

Idris shoved a mangled piece of bacon into his mouth. I rubbed the back of my neck, rankled that I didn’t have a satisfactory answer for Pellini. “We’ve each been molded and exploited to suit the goals of others,” I said. “And none of us know why, though at least Idris and I had context for most of it.”

Idris glanced at Pellini then dropped his gaze to his plate. Good. Harder for him to paint Pellini as the devil incarnate when he had something in common with him.

“I’m going to take a walk with Sammy,” Pellini announced before heading outside to cope with the shit in his own manner. I dried my hands, refreshed my coffee then took a seat at the table. My horrific exploitation pissed me right the fuck off but, until I scraped up more info, further brooding was a waste of time and energy. Besides, my focus needed to remain on my current goal—a cease fire in the Pellini-Idris war.

“Don’t say it,” Idris said as he slathered jelly on toast.

“Don’t say what?” I asked.

“Don’t say whatever you’re planning to say about how awful it must have been for him never being able to tell anyone.”

I shrugged and took a sip of my coffee. “Okay, I won’t say it.”

He gave me a withering look and took a savage bite of toast and jelly.

“What?” I asked innocently. “You told me not to say it, so I didn’t say it.”

“You might as well have. You do that thing with your eyes.” He licked jelly off his fingers.

“
What
thing with my eyes?”

“You do this sort of narrow-eyed smug disapproval thing,” he said.

“You’re insane.”

“And now you’re doing it again.”

I threw my hands up in defeat. Bryce unwisely chose that moment to step through the back door. “Bryce, Idris says I do a weird narrow-eyed smug disapproval thing with my eyes,” I said. “Tell him he’s imagining it.”

Bryce stopped, frowned, looked from me to Idris and then back to me. “Sorry. No can do.” He continued to the sink to wash grime from his hands.

“Afraid Idris will turn you into a newt?” I asked with a lift of my eyebrow.

Bryce shook his head. “No can do, because he’s right.”

“Traitor,” I growled.

He dried his hands, challenge glinting in his eyes. “You want to get Pellini’s take on it?”

I started to say yes, that was exactly what I wanted, but stopped before the words left my mouth. “No. He’ll agree with you both.”

A sound that might have been a chuckle came from Idris, but he took another bite of toast before I could be sure. Bryce gave me a wink then headed down the hall to the computer room. I masked a smile. Bryce was a damn good addition to the team.

“For what it’s worth,” I said to Idris after a moment, “apart from being victims of the overall machinations, you and Pellini have at least one common goal.”

Idris shoved up from the table, took his plate over to the trash can and scraped his crusts into it. “Fine, I’ll bite. What’s our common goal?”

“He’s hell-bent on nailing the perps in his latest case—your sister’s murder.”

He went still, fork poised above his plate. “Okay,” he finally said then took plate and fork to the sink. “Will you tell Bryce I’ll be ready to go in fifteen minutes?” It might have been wishful thinking on my part, but I detected less of the jagged edge in his voice than before.

“Sure thing.”

He met my eyes and nodded once then went down to the basement. When the door closed I blew out a breath. It was a truce of sorts. I hoped.

I headed to the computer room—formerly a junk room that I’d pretended was a home office. The majority of the equipment was Paul’s from when he was briefly our resident computer supergenius. Unease whispered through me. Paul was with Kadir. But for how long? He was “out of phase” and would die if he left the matching out-of-phase-ness of Kadir’s realm. Would he ever be able to return to Earth or was he damned to spend his entire life kneeling at Kadir’s feet?

I pushed the unsettling questions aside. The answers would be worse than not knowing.

Bryce sat at the desk, fast-forwarding through surveillance video from my driveway gate and fence-line cameras.

“Idris will be ready in fifteen,” I said then lifted my chin toward the screen. “Anything good?”

“Family of raccoons on the northwest side. Nothing else of interest.”

“Baby raccoons?”

“Three of ’em. I took a screen shot.” He pulled it up so that I could make the obligatory
awwwww
noise. He snorted. “Adorable rabies factories.”

“I’ll gush over them from a distance,” I said as I settled in the chair beside his.

“Agreed. That’s why I’m not . . .” He trailed off, eyelids fluttering as he stared off into space.

Seizure? Worried, I grabbed his arm and shook him. “Hey, Bryce! You still with me?”

“Yeah, sorry,” he said to my relief then smiled wryly. “Seretis. Checking in, so to speak.”

Releasing him, I replayed his words in my mind, but they made no more sense the second time around. Why would a demonic lord be checking in with Bryce? And how? “Huh?” I asked oh-so-brilliantly.

Bryce
beamed
then swiveled his chair to face me. “The connection you have with Mzatal?” he said, leaning forward. “I, uh, kinda have that with Seretis. It’s not like we
talk
with words, but we can sense and understand each other.”

I stared at him, stunned. I’d have been right on board if he’d told me Seretis had placed a sigil on him or given him an artifact. But comparing it to my unique and
intimate
essence connection with Mzatal? A number of possible explanations ran through my mind, though none seemed to fit the scenario. Seretis and Lord Rayst were partners, but that meant little since the demonic lords weren’t much into the whole jealousy thing. After a few thousand years of existence, those sort of insecurities went out the window—if they’d ever had them in the first place. However, Seretis was bisexual and, as far as I knew, Bryce was firmly heterosexual. Not that it had ever come up. More than possible that I’d jumped to conclusions.

“Oh, okay,” I said as I readjusted my assumptions. “You and he are . . . lovers?”

Bryce laughed. “No,” he said, sitting back. “There’s no sex. But we hit it off from the start—like that childhood friend you wanted to do everything with and couldn’t imagine living without, only as adults.”

“Gotcha. A major bromance.”

“I guess,” he said reluctantly, “though I wish there was a more, er, macho description.”

“A sweaty bromance?”

“That’s worse.”

“A machomance?”

“Oh god, please stop,” he said with a laugh. “Anyway, now we have an essence bond. A conscious one.” He shook his head. “I realize now I should’ve told you earlier, but I’m still getting used to the concept, and things have been crazy since I got here.”

“Nah, it’s cool,” I said as I tried to shuffle pieces of info into a picture that made sense. Mzatal had what he called an essence bond with the reyza Gestamar, and Turek, an ancient savik, was essence-bound to Szerain. Maybe my bond with Mzatal was the same as that? Except, y’know, with sex.

The rest of Bryce’s words filtered into my brain. “You said that your bond is ‘a conscious one.’ What do you mean?”

“That’s kind of an odd story,” he said. “It didn’t start out conscious.” He ran a hand over his hair, blew out his breath. “After Paul went to Kadir, Mzatal sent me to Seretis’s realm. Considering all the shit I’d gone through with the plantation, Farouche, and everything else, I needed the mental health break and a change of scenery. For most of the first day everyone left me alone, and I wandered around or sat out on the beach. But that evening Seretis came out to talk to me and, well, we clicked.” A smile lit Bryce’s face. “We were damn near inseparable after that—like we’d known each other forever.”

I couldn’t help but echo his smile as his joy in the friendship resonated through his words. And holy shit, did he ever deserve it. Bryce had spent the last fifteen years as a reluctant hitman and muscle for Farouche—a tough and terrible life that had ripped at his essence. Though he’d committed terrible crimes while in Farouche’s service, Bryce was one of the most compassionate and empathetic people I knew. Farouche had turned a kind and caring man—who’d been training to be a veterinarian, for fuck’s sake—into his personal monster. For that alone, I was glad Farouche was dead.

“On the fourth day we were on his veranda,” Bryce continued, “and Seretis initiated a bond—and not in a figure of speech way. Spontaneous. Instinctual. It felt like a linking of minds at that stage. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I didn’t want to stop it either.” He grew serious. “Right in the middle of the process, a chunk of masonry the size of a Volkswagen fell onto the veranda not even a dozen feet behind us.”