Chapter 13

Caspian

I stood, unable to blink as I watched Zazie look in the mirror and begin to scream.

Her shock seemed very real, and that made me feel a lot better. I didn’t think I’d ever been so shocked in my life.

Because Zazie Henderson was a djinn.

It figured. I find someone I can actually mate with, and it ends up being an evil creature. Probably I shouldn’t even be surprised; I was well acquainted with how poor my luck was.

But I couldn’t help being surprised anyway. I was scanning my own brain for any beings at all that could have eyes like that besides djinns, but then I stopped torturing myself with the mental exercise, because besides the eyes, I could look at her clearly and realize that not many creatures were that drawn to gems and gold besides dragons and djinns, because our world was rife with such things.

Unlike dragons, djinns were assholes. In my experience, they were ruthless, determined, and frightening. They were dangerous.

Still, Murtagh didn’t hesitate long and stepped forward to put his arms around Zazie, who was still shrieking, because she had started to scratch at her own eyeballs. Apparently seeing all the color drain from her eyeballs had never happened before and was a very unpleasant surprise.

She didn’t fight him as he pulled her out of the bathroom and carried her body quickly into the bedroom, where he sat on the edge of the bed with her on his lap. He began to rock her, to try to soothe her.

But Zazie wouldn’t be soothed, couldn’t be soothed. She was still screeching with horror from what she’d seen in the mirror.

Even Miles came to make sure we weren’t eating her after all, but he left a little shellshocked. He had never seen a djinn—they were a scourge on my home realm, but here they were only stuff of very ancient legends, and Miles was unused to seeing other otherworldly beings; had only been cognizant of non-human people since 1917. Needless to say, he had to go have a sit-down somewhere, and I didn’t blame him.

I felt like I needed a sit-down too.

I lowered myself eventually to the edge of the bed and waited for Zazie to quiet down before I looked over at Murtagh. “What do we do now?”

“I don’t know.” Murtagh looked very distant, which I wasn’t comfortable with. Murtagh always knew what to do. Normally what he decided to do wasn’t something I was going to approve of, but he was a dragon with a plan.

“What do you mean you don’t know?” I demanded.

He looked at me wearily. “I didn’t know that djinns existed here, Caspian. Give me a second to think,” he pleaded, sounding like he was on the teetering edge of a nervous breakdown.

“Who would?” I asked, and I didn’t expect an answer. I meant it as, ‘Of course you didn’t, but what do we do now?’ and expected his answer to be something along the lines of chaining her up somewhere.

Instead, he straightened and seemed to absorb the question. “I need to make a phone call.”

“To who? Do you know many djinn-tamers?” I demanded sarcastically, gesturing to her.

Even I hated to admit it, especially out loud, and especially since I could still remember quite well what she felt like on the inside, but djinns were dragon-killers. We were toxic to them, and they were fully equipped to kill us, unlike most other things in creation. Sitting in a bed with one, and having my cock inside one, was not even something I thought was possible until now.

I’d seen djinns tear dragons to pieces.

I was lucky to still have my dick.

“Well, yeah,” was his grumbled response. He put the djinn on my lap—she seemed to need to be held, but I was still completely unnerved—and then scootched himself off the bed. “Where’s your phone?” he demanded after looking around the corners of my room as if he fully expected a landline phone to be in any of them.

I sighed and pulled my cellphone out of my pocket and threw it at him. “Push ‘send’ to dial,” I instructed.

“How do you turn it on?” he grumbled with frustration.

I had a deadly creature trembling on my lap, but somehow Murtagh was able to make my exasperation stronger than my worry. “Swipe up.”

“Huh?”

I looked up at the ceiling. “Take your finger, press it on the screen, and swipe up.”

“Wait, I think I got it.” He looked over the screen and fiddled around, the sides of his mouth pulled into a frown. Apparently, he didn’t get it. “Does this make calls? I just see boxes!”

Zazie was now hiccupping and shivering; she was making me feel really badly for her, and that was an uncomfortable position.

With my familiars being the exception, I didn’t often feel ‘badly’ for people. I had lived among the most awful type of humans for the last thousand years, and when something bad happened to one of them, it was normally easy to shrug it off and go, ‘Que Sera Sera’ and move on to the next human.

But damn it, Zazie was in a bad situation. I certainly wouldn’t have wanted to come into the sudden realization that I wasn’t a dragon, for example. She was living out a nightmare.

Thus, I was living out a nightmare, and Murtagh’s luddite tendencies weren’t exactly helping.

“Just give it to me,” I demanded, putting out my hand. He gave me a number to dial, and I put it on speakerphone.

As it was ringing, I looked at him peevishly. “What do you think this person knows?”

Murtagh was pulling on his pants as he huffed angrily. “I don’t know!” he snapped. “All I know is that she seems to know everything about everyone. If she doesn’t know, she might know someone who does! She’s that witch I mentioned to you earlier. The one that gave me that list for opening a gate back to Daconia.”

“She?” for some reason, the fact that we were calling a female felt suspect.

I’ll be the first to admit, I didn’t normally surround myself with women unless I was planning to fuck them or if I was selling something to them.

In fact, out of all the women on the planet, the creature on my lap possessed the most of my respect, even if that was because she had the ability to steal from right under my nose, and that was no delicate undertaking. And she knew her gems.

A woman did not answer the phone on the other line. “Well, hello.”

The voice on the other end was, in fact, somehow unsettling. It was confident, masculine, had a Southern accent, but there was something to it that struck me as eerie. I imagined this was how FBI people felt when they were interviewing serial killers.

And the male seemed to know who was calling. “Don’t worry about how rude it is to be calling at two a.m.,” he added. The casual phrasing should have made the voice feel a little warmer, maybe, but listening to him still unsettled me with the feeling of ice bolting through my veins. “I assume that you’re the dragon she’s been hiding, and you don’t know any better, having been raised in a cave.”

If Murtagh was confused or disturbed by the voice, then he hid it very well. He glared at the phone and gruffly grunted, “Where’s Wendy?”

The male voice drawled crisply. “I don’t see how that’s any concern of yours—get back into the corner!” he snapped at someone on his side of the connection before turning his attention back to us. “I’m afraid she can’t help you at the moment; we’re in the middle of something.”

“It’s an emergency,” Murtagh assured flatly.

The male voice on the other line made a skeptical sound, and his tone was far from sympathetic. “It’s always an emergency. With you, with Lycans, with goblins, with demons, with vampires, with girls with boy problems, and with boys who fall in love with her at parties because she stuffs her tongue down the throat of anyone with a dick and a pulse. Everybody has an emergency.”

Zazie finally stopped hiccupping and stared at the phone with narrowed eyes. She then looked up at me and mouthed, ‘What?’ seeming to be incredulous that any and all of the creatures the voice had just casually listed existed. I was also surprised, but for different reasons. Firstly, I had never known any of those creatures could have alliances with each other.

But secondly, the simplicity with which the voice had put it out there was so off-putting. How was there anyone that moved in so many groups? And how was Murtagh able to find this person?

“My mate turned out to be a djinn. I need advice,” he said succinctly. There was silence on the other end for a minute, and eventually Murtagh added, “And if it makes you feel any better, Wendy’s never stuffed her tongue down my throat.”

There was an exhausted sigh followed by a rattling round over the line.

Eventually, a girl’s voice did appear on the other line, youthful and playful and not creepy at all. “You must be in the shit if Big Daddy gave me the phone,” she said. The voice was distinctly Cajun. “Come on, spill it to Lil’ Mama. What’s got y’all all stirred up?”

Murtagh explained what had happened, somehow only taking about five minutes to get through all the details.

When he gave me a nod and hiked his thumb towards the hall, I took the phone off the speakerphone, and Murtagh walked out of the room with it and into the hallway. I could hear him pace back and forth and discuss something with the girl on the other end of the line.

Zazie made eye contact with me. “What happened to me?” she whispered, seeming to shake with worry. “What did you do?”

“I didn’t do anything. We don’t know. There are so many things we don’t know. But we’re trying to find out, alright?” I stroked her hair down her back, petting her to keep her calm.

I was beginning to feel silly. She didn’t want to hurt me. I was unsure if she knew how. I imagined that if she’d known how to fight me, she wouldn’t have let us dominate her all evening. She had seemed to try to fight back at several points, and she had never succeeded. Had never even come close.

I rested my cheek against the top of her head as I waited, wondering what I’d do now. I was so close to having everything I wanted…

Murtagh eventually came back into the room. “She’ll take about three hours to get here, but she says one of her partners will be here in five minutes, give or take, and not to get spooked by him.”

“Why would we get spooked?” I asked him, finding myself still rubbing soothing circles across Zazie’s naked back as she pressed her body against mine, her eyes distant, thoughtful, and unhappy. “And how can he make it here in five minutes if she takes hours?”

“Because I ain’t got a body,” said a deep voice that was suddenly right next to me.

When I leave my human form, I can become the size of a house. Not many things can kill me. I heal quickly, even if by some crazy circumstance I do get injured, and Murtagh is the same way.

Yet, we both screamed—like women—when we heard the voice. I immediately crossed the room, taking Zazie with me and pulling her as close to my chest as possible. She might be a djinn, but I wasn’t going to let whatever fucking boogeyman that had just come into the room eat her!

We stopped screaming after a second, and we searched in the direction of the voice only to find a giant man-shaped shadow on the wall. It was frankly ghoulish. I didn’t like it at all, and I didn’t let Zazie turn her head to see it. It was too much; I didn’t want her to go catatonic or something; for God’s sake, she had just started to calm down!

“I thought she told you not to get spooked!” said the shadow defensively.

“W…w…” I tried to form words to ask what he was and why he’d come into my house without knocking and ‘What the fuck?’, but words weren’t forming in my mouth very well. I was hoping they’d start to form in Murtagh’s.

“Aw, I thought you were a dragon,” the shadow said with disappointment easily audible in its scratchy, deep, spooky voice. “She promised I’d get to see dragons, but you’re just as scared as anyone!” He flicked his shadowy arms up with exasperation, and then seemed to plop down on the shadow of one of my armchairs. “So which one of you is the dragon?”

Murtagh found his words first, I’m embarrassed to admit. “We’re both dragons, actually. Me, and my partner-mate, Caspian,” Murtagh said, his voice raspy. He gestured to me.

“So you say!” it said, sounding amused. “You know that lady you carry? She has fear comin’ off her so thick, I can’t even think. It’s making me feel a little crazy. Don’t you worry, though. Not one bit—Lil’ Momma is comin’ with The Boss Man, Samael. And there ain’t much Samael can’t figure out—he’s seen just about everything in creation at least once. But he isn’t gonna want to deal with a shaking little lamb like that. Not only that, but it’s gonna be hard for him to ferret out her story if she smells so much like dragon jizz.”

I curled my lip at this crudeness, but his words made me feel better. For some reason, when the shadow spoke, it humanized him more and more. He was not at all like the voice on the phone—if I closed my eyes and pretended really hard, I could almost imagine he was just a human playing parlor tricks.

“If she looks at you, she’s not going to be any less frightened,” I assured him firmly. She was literally shaking in my arms so hard that my own teeth were rattling.

“Well, I ain’t goin’ away,” the shadow said, almost apologetically. “Boss always sends me ahead when he’s afraid about safety for Lil’ Mama, and I stay until she goes.”

“You know I’ve met with her a half-dozen times now, and she’s made it out fine? She and her ‘cat’?” Murtagh put up finger quotations around the word ‘cat’.

I whipped my head towards Murtagh. He hadn’t said shit about cats! Where did cats come into this equation?

My lip curled with disgust. “Cats?” I demanded, incredulous. I fucking hated cats.

Murtagh ignored me.

The shadow shrugged his shoulders. “Well, it ain’t Lil’ Mama making the decisions right now. When she saw you before, it was behind Boss’s back more or less. You’re a card she keeps close to her chest on account that demons and dragons rub each other the wrong way. You know, traditionally-speaking.”

“Oh God…” I was so distracted by talking to the big creepy shadow and listening to it talk back like it was a person that I had completely forgotten that I had been trying to keep Zazie from looking right at it. Her body felt firm now, stiff, and I almost worried she had actually died of fright.

I looked down to see her stare at the being like the boogeyman that it was.

“Don’t worry, don’t worry. Obviously, this is something we can handle,” I cooed to her—complete lies. I had no idea if this creature could even die. How could it die without a body? There were a lot of questions there, even for me. But I pet her hair, trying to soothe her like a spooked horse. “Shh, shh…”

“That’s normally the reaction I get,” the shadow admitted, seeming to turn his head to stare at us. It then stood from its shadow-chair and seemed to dig around in its pocket. “Here,” he seemed to plop something onto the shadow of the nightstand. “I have one of these from Lil’ Mama’s.”

I looked at the table and saw a little bag. Murtagh and I exchanged expressions, our eyes full of questions we wanted to ask but didn’t, but then Murtagh slowly walked forward and cautiously picked up the bag.

“What is it?”

“Little Mama’s ‘T’en fais pas’ bath tea,” Murtagh read aloud from its label, frowning with confusion. He looked at the shadow quizzingly.

“Add that to a hot bath. Just have her soak in it a spell. She’ll be right as rain,” the shadow explained. “That shit’s hard to get, you know. Our shop sells out of it the first hour we get it up on the shelf. We’re having problems keeping any stock with them.” His raspy words were filled with pride, like he was being beyond gracious by giving us a sample.

I tried to imagine this creature as a shop purveyor and was really having trouble getting my brain to go there.

Still, after a short debate, I carried Zazie out of the room and towards another bedroom, into a bathroom with an empty tub, and filled it with warm water. We put the tea bag inside of it, and then I lowered her in.

She was shaking at first, her body trembling, but then we watched her settle. It was like watching a marshmallow melt and expand in a cup of cocoa. And even as we watched, her irises and her pupils returned back to her eyes. She looked like she was waking up out of a bad dream and settled her look on us as she curled her legs up to her breasts as if covering herself.

I had no idea why she’d bother to cover herself at all. Maybe she wasn’t certain that we’d fucked her thoroughly less than an hour ago. I certainly hadn’t forgotten; my dick didn’t care that she was a dragon-killing monster spawn. All it saw was what it saw when she walked into my mansion yesterday—the girl I wanted to put babies in.

What a disappointment. She still smelled amazing, still gave me goosebumps of pure pleasure, yet my mind knew better.

Her eyes were able to lock with my own. “Did I fall asleep?” she finally asked pointedly.

“No,” Murtagh assured her, seeming to force a smile, as if delivering some very bad news.

She seemed to let this land gracefully. “So. The eye thing?”

“Happened,” I admitted.

She raised her eyebrows. “And the sex?”

“Oh, that definitely happened.”

“That explains the way my asshole hurts, then,” she admitted, the corners of her mouth tugging down. “And the boogeyman?”

I sighed and answered, “Is probably waiting right outside, if he’s not in this bathroom watching and hiding himself.”

“And a witch and her handler are on the way,” Murtagh added. He was probably thinking that he might as well tell her all the news while she was in the bathtub. Apparently, the bath tea did work after all. “From what I understand, he might be a demon.”

I looked over at him with a hard expression. “They’d better know all about djinns, that’s all I can say,” I told him firmly. “It’s like you invited a whole circus in here!”

Zazie had undoubtedly heard about a possible demon coming to visit, but as I watched her, she was merely lying back in the oversized tub, looking comfortable. Like this was a normal bath, on a normal day, and we were in the middle of normal circumstances.

“Well, it’s been quite a day,” she mentioned flatly.

“It has been,” Murtagh nodded.

“Did you make me into a monster?” she asked pointedly.

“No!” Murtagh and I said at once, in the same defensive tone. My back straightened at the thought.

She nodded, seeming to take this in. “So this is just a part about me I’m discovering. Interesting.” She did say ‘interesting’ like our life had turned into a documentary about a murder spree. As if her life was now something she wanted to turn off.

If that was the case, then I perfectly understood the sensation. But there was no turning this off. We were in for the full ride.

We couldn’t get rid of her. We couldn’t! She was just a sweet, albeit thieving—little female. She smelled like home, she smelled like the first actual female we could pair with since we got to this realm. We might not see anyone like her for millennia, if ever at all.

Because there was a chance we were never going to get home. Murtagh had explained that he had a method written out for him, but the ingredients needed for that method contained stones that I didn’t think existed, and if they did, they were probably long forgotten about, settled deep in the earth somewhere.

Zazie looked up at the ceiling, relaxing, then hummed, “I should call my brother.”

Her brother was probably a djinn too, I thought to myself.

“Why?” I asked.

She looked up at me, confused. “Because he worries, and he has cancer. So I don’t want him to have called me, me not answer my phone because it’s lost somewhere in your limo, and then him freak out because I’m not answering my phone and then… you know, die. Or you know… I worry about him, and I like to check in every day, and I hadn’t done that today.”

I frowned. Well, at least I knew he wasn’t a djinn. Djinns, as far as I knew, didn’t get cancer. Being cancer-free was a perk of not being human.

I found myself feeling a little softened by her thoughts and smirked. “The witch will be here soon. After that, you can call your brother. If he’s not already worried, then he’s surely asleep,” I reminded.

She nodded, seeming happy about this, and rubbed soap over her body. Within a couple of minutes of doing this, and her letting us just watch, we heard a noise come from outside.

“They’re here,” Murtagh said, going to the window and pulling the blinds apart enough to look through.

I joined him and saw, walking up to the house, a very tall blonde man wearing sunglasses despite the night being at its darkest point. His body was lithe, seeming almost feline despite his height, and holding onto his arm was a little black-haired young woman, who was tiny yet wearing a very vibrant, long skirt. If she was a witch, then she didn’t look like what I’d had in mind. She looked like she was a teenager. She tilted her head, looked right up at our window and waved. I think I saw the sight of glittery-gold eyes.

“How they got here in forty minutes is a fucking mystery,” Murtagh grumbled. “Unnatural is what it is. Their town is three hours from here…”

“Why did you invite them?” Zazie asked, trying to stand up in the bath water. I walked over and wrapped a towel gently around her shoulders. “Can they take away my monster-ness?” she asked hopefully.

Murtagh shook his head. “No. I want to make sure we’re not in danger,” he explained honestly.

“From who?” she asked, her eyes rounding as she stepped onto the ground, holding onto my hand to steady herself.

“From you.”

She jerked her head up to look at us, surprised. She did make me feel a little pathetic, but she hadn’t seen anyone torn apart from her kind before. Murtagh and I both had—that was one of the only ways we died. Djinns had evolved alongside us, knew our weaknesses, knew how to penetrate our scales. We enjoyed gems the same amount, enjoyed the same resources, ate similar foods. We were always clashing with them.

“Come on. Let’s get in there,” Murtagh said, directing her by the small of her back as she kept the towel close around her.

“Do you guys have any spare clothes?”

“No,” I replied.

“I’m glad you put a lot of prep-work into my kidnapping,” she grumbled as she let us guide her out the door.

The shadow creature had let the witch and her sun-spectacled companion into the room. The witch was even smaller than I thought, and as she came up close, I realized she was a whole head smaller than Zazie. The witch had a cat in her arms, a big, black, yellow-eyed hairball that was obviously shedding.

Disgusting.

Cats were the worst. Sometimes I’d lie and say I was allergic to them, because for some reason nobody could see how they weren’t house pets. They were wild animals; they were not tame. They clawed even their owners, they always seemed to leave messes. A hundred years ago, they were a necessity—everyone had a rat problem. But now cats weren’t even mousers. They ate birds, and only the birds that I liked …

“You definitely let a demon into my house,” I informed Murtagh, and I wasn’t talking about the shadow man. Honestly, I had no idea if he was a ghost, or monster, or demon, or what. But when I looked directly at the blond man, I realized he had nothing showing at all on the other side of the sunglasses. Just empty, inky blackness.

The witch plopped the cat right at her feet, where it then licked his paws and washed its face in its own saliva. Urgh.

“And a feline,” I was too busy curling my lip with disgust that I almost missed the witch coming animatedly towards me.

“Oh, cher! I’m downright overjoyed to finally meet y’all. Been knowin’ you was ‘round, mais—” the witch said, ignoring my comment to Murtagh and slinging her arms around me like we were long lost cousins.

I didn’t return it much—she’d just been holding a gross animal and there was probably loose fur on her now… Dear lord, it was probably on me now… My stomach was churning.

“A second dragon, hoo-wee!” The little witch looked up at Murtagh and waved her hand towards the blond man in an introduction, “An’ this here’s my Big Daddy, Samael. He’s come to help out—though that might be hard to tell, judgin’ by his face,” she added with a smirk at the tall, blond demon.

Samael let out a sigh, like being here was a chore.

“And, lawd, ain’t you somethin’! You smellin’ like sunshine in the mornin’,” she said, approaching Zazie and hugging her as well. “I’m big on embrassades,” she noted, still hugging her for a long moment without getting hugged back. Zazie looked at Wendy like she was a trick-performing bear. But the witch didn’t seem to mind at all. Pulling back, she said, “Allons, let’s get a gander at ya.” She scanned Zazie up and down. Then her face lit up with a grin. “Just as spooky as I thought, yep.” She turned her head to grin at Murtagh with this teasing smile. “You even had Sam thinkin’ you might be in a fix!”

“We are in fix,” Murtagh assured firmly.

The witch seemed very excited to argue. “You done found yourself a mate, cher! Just look at her—all ripe and bloomin’. Smells of your realm, so you ought to have no trouble with the works! I tell ya, y’all be hatchin’ baby dragons quick as a gator snap! I can’t fathom what the fuss is about,” she put her hands on her hips.

I had to admit, I did like the witch’s old-fashioned commitment to marriage and childrearing. From what I’d seen, this didn’t seem like an easy conversation for most women in their teens or early twenties.

“Just because they can mate with this female does not mean that they want to,” Samael explained to her with exasperation. He had a serious sort of tone, only slightly less off-putting than it had been over the phone.

“I jus’ don’t get it,” the witch said, shaking her head. She had very bright eyes the color of liquid gold, and she looked at Murtagh, then me, then Zazie, and then back again. “She doin’ college or something? What’s the hold up on gettin’ together?”

“She’s a djinn halfling, baby. They’re dragons. Can you pretend to not be yourself for a moment?” Samael demanded of her, looking quite put out. “Possibly you can show a little respect for the millennia that dragons have been at war with djinns?”

“No, I can’t show respect for that! That’s there! This is here! Don’t be ridiculous!” she refused stubbornly, her hands seeming to physically push away the thought with a flourish. “They cain’t be so damn picky, Sam. Makes no sense!”

I didn’t know if I should laugh or be annoyed with her reaction. Obviously, she didn’t know her ass from her elbow concerning djinns, but she had an adorable sort of thought process, at least. Samael seemed to look towards me, and we exchanged an exasperated, almost compassionate look. He took pity on us and ignored her and stepped in front of Zazie.

“Come here, sweetheart,” he told Zazie, reaching out his hand. His hand was pale, but had fingernails painted with black polish. “I’m going to need some of your blood to check something.”

Zazie looked at him straight on. “To check what?”

“Oh, well. I’m going to check a few things,” he assured her as if he was a doctor talking to a child. It wasn’t as if his words were pedantic, but he seemed to be going far out of his way to not be intimidating, and it seemed to be working well, despite the fact that there was definitely something off about him, and I could tell that Zazie could see that he wasn’t quite right. “Like who your Daddy is. Do you know who your Daddy is? Because djinns aren’t born by mistake. It is an undertakin’.”

“I… I thought so,” she replied.

“So you met both your parents?” he asked, looking surprised. “They still around, darlin’?”

She shook her head, looking confused. “No… They died. Um… I was eight.”

“How’d they die, then?” he asked, taking her hand into his own.

“Um…” Her eyes rounded as she looked at her hand, then back into his sunglasses. She was looking at her own reflection in them, it seemed. “Um. A fire.”

He leaned forward. “Did they die in that fire?”

She shook her head. “I don’t really want to…”

“Talk about it?” He straightened and seemed to smile.

Honestly, the smile seemed more predatory than anything. But he seemed to be trying?

“Of course you don’t, darlin’,” he said. “I’m sorry to ask. Just let me give you a poke here.” His thumb nail turned into a black, sharp talon and stabbed into the center of her hand. Blood gently pooled around that claw and Zazie gasped and grabbed her hand away from him.

Murtagh and I both stepped forward aggressively, though the demon stepped back and put up his hand as if to tell us to calm down. It was hard to calm down—he’d just stabbed my possession. If nothing else, it was rude. He should have asked for permission.

And then he licked the blood on the tip of his claw against his tongue, and tasted it. I didn’t like that either. I didn’t like anything of my female being inside him.

The demon couldn’t have missed the rising tension in the room, but he sat down on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up and walked to the nightstand and sat on the edge of the mattress as he rifled through a drawer. Inside of it, he found a small pad of paper and a pen and wrote something down.

“So, good news and bad news,” he began. He looked straight at me. “What do you want first?”

“Good news,” Murtagh said immediately.

“Good news is that she is from your realm. Well, her blood is, in any case. I’d say she is a shit ton more than a half-blood. Feels like 90 percent, which is not an easy percentage to acquire. Although that’s what I figured she was when I came in. Do you know how hard it is to breed one this close to the real thing? Probably took centuries and a lot of tries.”

He ripped off a piece of paper. “That is not part of the good news, by the way. Got sidetracked. I was never born, but I imagine that having the same creature take up so many branches of my family tree would make me shudder at night, to be sure. So let me get back to the good news. She’s from your realm, there ain’t no reason why you can’t stick your dick in her. Djinns and dragons are close enough to breed.”

“What?” Zazie asked, horrified as she was still cradling her hand. “That’s not what they wanted to know!”

She had no idea what we wanted to know.

“With djinns on the line? Sure was,” Samael told her firmly. “Djinns are dangerous, sweetheart. Their lines are descended from dragons, but they went their own way, and their way tends to be quite violent and wily.”

“Aren’t djinns like… genies?” she asked, blinking at him, still aghast.

He snorted. “No. The One Thousand and One Arabian Nights story took a lot of liberties with the lore. Look—full-blood djinns are powerful. They could take out whole ancient armies. But you are not full-blooded. That human blood in you, darlin’, well… It’s gummin’ up your works. You taste to me like you got some gifts, so you ain’t empty-handed, but you’re not going to be kickin’ anybody’s ass anytime soon.”

“Anything else you found out?” Murtagh asked as I was thinking through this.

I was busy being relieved. She wasn’t dangerous. I could work with this; I’d just keep a watchful eye on her. She could at least give us more than any human woman could.

“Sure did,” the demon said. “You’re not gonna like the next part. Wanna have a sit?” he gestured at the bed.

There was a noise of breath getting sucked in through teeth, and we looked in the direction of the shadow. “Ooh. It must be bad if he’s having you take a seat,” the shadow warned.

“It’s the reason I came down,” admitted Samael, sitting down himself. “Look, everybody’s heard Seraphus had a daughter out there he’s been searchin’ high and low for the last so many years. Luckily nobody’s dumb enough to take up the bounty on his kid’s head and cause the end of the world as we know it. The rumor on the ground is?—”

“Seraphus?” I asked, my eyes feeling like they were going to bulge out of my head and roll across the floor.

Seraphus had nothing on the boogeyman on the wall. We didn’t have things that went bump in the night back on Daconia. We had Seraphus.

The witch-king of legends was so frightening, and so evil, that even most djinns were scared to shit by him.

“Seraphus is here? In this realm?” Murtagh asked, clarifying.

“Oh, sure. Has been for a millennia, just sort of biding time. Creating, slowly but surely, her,” he gestured to Zazie, who was tilting her head with confusion. “Probably came here the same way you did—called by witches. Hell, she’s living proof of his existence.” He pointed his black-fingernailed index in the direction of Zazie, who stared at him with rapt attention, but not horror.

Murtagh and I slowly turned our heads towards the female.

How could something so beautiful have the blood of the most evil creature in the universe inside of her?

“How it happened, I don’t know,” Samael said, shrugging his shoulders. “But I do know that it takes a lot of power to take over this realm. It’s protected. If he had a power-boost and a lot of help, though, he might take it on. At least try. A power boost to go for Godhood. And The Maker wouldn’t like that. He’d send down angels. Then the demons rise. Huge war, scorch-the-earth style. And then we’re looking at the End of Days.”

We just blinked at him. It felt like the room was getting both darker and hotter. Either way, I felt very uncomfortable.

“The only way to get that sort of power boost is an old spell that takes a human sacrifice. Now, that won’t do for him, because he wants to quadruple his power permanently, impossible with a human. That spell would barely raise his powers and wouldn’t for long, since humans aren’t immortal. And he only has one shot at making this sacrifice. So he’d need that sacrifice to be as close to his own blood as possible with just enough human in there for the spell to work, but not so close, or else his body would reject her when he consumed her.” He shrugged and added offhandedly, “It’s actually pretty brilliant. Psychopathic and horrible, you know. But shows he’s thinking outside of the box.”

“Wait… like… he wants to eat me?” Zazie clarified, looking at Samael like he was just a nutty hobo telling scary stories on a street corner.

“Yes. And you better hope he doesn’t.” He groaned and pulled a cigarette out of his pocket and seized it between his teeth. “Although you’re in luck. This is not his realm, and there are forces at stake that don’t want him to win. So you might just get lucky.”

“Don’t smoke in another person’s house, Sam,” the witch suddenly snatched the cigarette out of the demon’s mouth before he lit it. “That’s rude as hell.”

His expression at her was murderous. “Excuse me,” he told her crisply. “I’m talkin’ End of Days over here! Power this realm can’t handle without bustin’ the order of things all up! You need to start using your ears, girl.”

The witch waved her hands at him as if shooing him away. “Oh, shush. I read the tarot this morning and it said nothing except to talk about good luck comin’, and you read it right along with me!”

Samael glared at her for another moment but then looked at Zazie dead-on. “Now, I’m just gonna say,” Samael said, putting the pack of cigarettes in his pocket. “I could get rid of your dragon problem, your djinn problem, and any other problems that you might have for the price of?—”

“Samael,” the witch said in a warning tone.

“One soul. She may not be a whole lot human, darlin’, but she’s got a soul, and she can do what she wants with it,” he finished, and then justified immediately, smoothing down the front of his black, button-down shirt, “she has that smell of being overwhelmed and frightened, and it’s making me salivate. So sue me. Sides—it would be a fix.”

“Can’t you just do it without the soul-taking?” Zazie demanded, looking incredulous. “You don’t want this guy to eat me either, right?”

Samael shrugged. “Unfortunately, that’s not how my powers work.”

Zazie passed me a very alienated expression that I would have found hard to duplicate. It was emblematic of someone who was at their breaking point mentally right before someone made an offer for her soul.

I realized she was back to trembling, and so I drew her close to my body as if to warm her.

“Well, I’m just saying, there is an easy solution. But if that’s not for you,” Samael continued as if we were the ones being foolish. “Then ya’ll would do best getting her out of this realm. Preferably back to your own.”

“It’s going to take ages to find what we need,” Murtagh growled.

Zazie suddenly pulled her face away from my chest. “Huh? What do you need?”

“A few gems and artifacts that are very lost to time,” I admitted with a growl.

Zazie straightened and then looked at Samael, but then the witch, probably because she had the friendlier face. “I think I can help.”

“You can, huh?” The witch smiled, not seeming surprised. She picked her cat back up in her arms and scratched it behind the ears. “How so?”

“I have a gift,” she said. She then turned to us. “There’s nothing much I can’t find.”

Wendy smiled and then looked at Samael with a gloating expression.

“I’m not bringing you into the middle of a godforsaken desert,” I assured her, swiping my hand through the air. “I’m keeping you safe. Figuring out some sort of fortress situation!”

Yeah, that would work, I decided, now that I’d said it. She wasn’t dangerous, and she was one-of-a-kind. I was going to protect what was mine.

I hadn’t even known her for long. I had only been inside of her once. But she represented a dream that I’d dreamt every day for the last thousand years.

And I wasn’t giving that up.

Yes, she was very, very worth it.

Come hell or high water, we’d have to keep that girl safe.

“All I want to do is keep her safe. You’re a witch—tell me how to make that happen,” I told the girl, who was smiling a strangely serene smile. “Spare no expense.”

“Oooh! Spare no expense?” the cat suddenly chimed excitedly in her arms. “Wendy, did you hear that? A dragon said to spare no expense!”

The talking cat was a little much when my nerves were already working at maximum capacity.

And really, it made me nauseous. It was like something out of a disgusting nightmare.

The cat looked me over with his huge, yellow eyes. Eyes the color of moonlight and rotting pears.

This, I couldn’t handle. I had to run out of the room to throw up, hearing in my wake, “Was it something I said?”