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The Scholar broke eye contact to frown at Pepshaw. “She’s joking. She wouldn’t actually be interested in your blood,” he growled.
He sounded possessive enough to shock some sense into me. I slipped my hand away from his and turned to my book. This was a problem, several problems, actually. I had no idea what was going on with it. It had been happy in the library’s vault for years, and now it was leaking infernal magma and heavenly marble? I couldn’t transport it anywhere like that, and it if was actually turning into something even close to the Book of Fates that everyone was looking for, I definitely couldn’t take it to Cross to give to Mother Mercy and whoever she was working with.
“If only there were an expert on Books of Fate that I could speak to,” I said, crossing my arms and walking closer to the mess of lava.
He held me back when I got in range of the little spitting volcano bubbles, hands on my upper arms in a way that shouldn’t have been so delicious. “Careful, Miss Morell. This is the kind of book that can harm you, isn’t it? Shouldn’t you put on some gloves? Maybe a Hazmat suit?” His breath was warm, delicious, absolutely delightful, and I wanted to sink back against him.
I shook my head and stepped away. “It might have to be destroyed.” The thought of destroying one of the two things that I had from my father hurt my heart, but it wasn’t worse than rolling around a bed of oranges like a lunatic. I could give up what I wanted to get what I needed, like the Scholar.
“How do you intend to do that?” His low voice was so close to my ear that it made my skin prickle. This wasn’t the time to get distracted by my awareness of him, but for a moment I wavered, almost turning around and tasting his voice, but then a big drop of infernal magma dropped on the pale book.
“First, containment. Pepshaw, bring your salt if you have any left.”
It took hours working with the strangely eager-to-be-sacrificed goblin to get my book under control. The Scholar had managed to transform the magma on the poor book into ebony, which didn’t blend very well with the book’s leather cover, but I wasn’t going to mention that. I tried not to speak to Michael, or look at him, or notice him at all, but it was impossible, because he had dead poetry in his head, just waiting for me to ask him to give me. What kind of poem would he come up with for this situation?
“Scholar, tell me a poem,” I said before I could stop myself.
He chose Ancient Aramaic, something about the torment of unrequited love being like the eternal flames of hell. Maybe I was mistaken. Either way, it was a very long poem, and his voice speaking dead languages made my mouth water and my whole body tense for the opportunity to tackle him to the ground and taste his words and breath and…
“Is it finished?” he asked, ending his poem while I stood staring at the innocent-looking book on the table. He’d transformed everything from magma into basalt, which was a good choice as far as a recurring magma disasters were concerned. He could do transformative spells while quoting dead poetry. Was anything more attractive?
“For now.” I carefully opened the book, and there was the treatise on morality, but as I was turning the page, it grabbed me and split into a dozen books of itself with me holding each one, and then there was a very disconcerting and hallucination-like sequence of reading spells of destruction in a language that wasn’t heavenly or infernal, but I recognized the symbol for fire. I knew that symbol. It’s what I’d drawn with my last desperate breath on the top steps of the porch where the house had been before it became the Square of Immolation.
I’d had no blood to bring the rune to life, at least that’s what I’d thought, but there were so many others filled with my blood, and for a moment I could see it, and then the connection between the rune and my blood created fire.
It wasn’t more than a moment that I was out of my body, in those different weird realms before I was back, the Scholar looking at the book over my shoulder.
“You can read angelic and demonic?” he asked, his words slow before time sped up to normal.
I slammed the book closed and stood up, turning to face him. “I need to talk to Horace.”
He raised his brows. “You’re right, he might have some insight into this kind of book. I assure you that this is not a Book of Fates. I’ve never seen anything like it before. Books of Fates are always created by one side using the blood of the other, but this is a collaboration as messy and unique as Singsong City itself.”
“What does that mean?”
He smiled softly. “I’m a dragon-vampire, and you are a demon-angel.”
I stared at him, waiting for the punchline. “I may have trace amounts of demon blood, like most humanity at this point, considering the existence of succubi, but I’m hardly a demon. You said yourself that I have angelic blood. It would be impossible to be both.”
He nodded soberly. “It is impossible, like your fire.”
I inhaled sharply while my limbs froze up and broke off, shattering on the floor in a million chunks of ice. Not really, but it felt like that. His words had sucked all the heat and oxygen out of the room, casting me into deep space without anything to hold.
I grabbed the only thing steady enough to hold me up, and there he was, right where I’d left him. I gripped his forearms and took a careful breath. It hurt to breathe around the shock and terror. “What are you talking about?”
“A Book of Fate could bring hell or heaven to earth, at least a small piece of it, but you, your book, you could bring both.”
I shuddered and released him, wrapping my arms around myself instead. I’d known that I was always weird, but hearing that I was a demon… Wait, why should I believe him? “I’m not a demon.”
“Then you didn’t use your demon to compel Marshall and myself the other night? That was somebody else’s demon?”
I glowered at him. “If I had a full demon, it would have worked.”
“You say full demon like that means something. You are likely more angel than demon, but there is enough demon for you to attract the absolute worst creatures.”
I swallowed hard. “Like you.”
He smiled softly. “Like me. My nature isn’t who I am, but I admit to being drawn to you as inevitably as any other creature of the darkness. What compelled me to remain was something else, not the angel, not the demon, but you. Your love of dead languages, Hammurabi’s Code, and sushi. The way you throw crayons and death spells with equal impunity. The way you think until you have found a solution, and it’s always remarkable, unique, beautiful. I could search for the rest of my extremely long lifetime and never find another woman as charming, beguiling, entrancing as you are to me.”
