“It’s got nothing to do with that. He’s evil, and I love you. And I don’t want you hurt by him.”
“He’sevil?”
Valentina—Devina—whatever the fuck she was calling herself—paced around, her outrageously tall stilettos making a soft pattern of noise on the short-napped purple carpet.
“I’m not who I used to be. I’m not who you used to know.” She stopped and stared at the closed door as if seeing through it, seeing all the humans who had gathered around her. “You may think that what I do on the stage is an act. It’s not.”
When he didn’t respond, the demon glanced over her shoulder. “I mean every word—”
Dev clapped slowly a couple of times. And then dropped his arms. “You want your Oscar now? Or should we wait until later.”
Those gleaming black eyes stared across at him for the longest time. “There’s such darkness in you.”
“Have you checked out our family tree? You think I’m going to show up as the goddamn Easter Bunny?”
“Why did you come here.” She turned fully around, and smoothed her purple dress. “Tell me. Whatever it is, I’ll do it. I’ll give it to you. Name it.”
Dev’s brows slowly lowered. Then he laughed. “Damn, you’re good. I’ll give you that—”
“What can I do for you.”
When she just kept looking across at him, going nowhere, patient to wait as if she didn’t have anything else in the world to do, he felt the strangest pull at the center of his chest. Oh, but he wasn’t stupid. His mother had the superficial charm of a sociopath, and the follow-through of an atomic bomb—
A vibration went through the still air, causing a distortion similar to heat waves rising off asphalt, and then…
Dev gasped. It was gone. All the beauty, all the artifice, all the masking. Instead of a gorgeous, sexy woman in a purple dress and black heels…
His mother was a twisted, ugly creature, with skin like the bark of an old tree, a deformed face where the nostrils and the eyes were on the same level, and claw-like hands to match toes-in hoofed feet. No more with the lovely locks of mahogany and copper, there were only sprigs of spiky gray tufts on the top of her head, and she didn’t have any ears.
She was… indescribably ugly. To a degree he never would have guessed at.
“I lie to them,” she said in a guttural distortion laced with sadness, “because it serves my need to help. To speak. To move them. If they saw who I really am, they would run from me for all the good reasons in their world. Devlin, I have stopped pretending I am someone I am not. I am not who you once knew.”
All he could do was stand there and refresh, again and again, the hideous vision before him… the monster who had mated with pure evil and brought him into existence.
She never, ever would have displayed this true nature of hers before.
“I am what I am, Devlin. I know that now, and having accepted my truth, I’m not interested in hurting anything anymore. It’s impossible to hate others when I no longer hate myself.”
“What happened,” he demanded roughly. “Why…”
“I lost you. That’s what happened.”
A single, glistening tear appeared in the corner of her fleshy eye, and seeped over the uneven, mottled skin of her sunken cheek.
“So I ask you again. What can I do for you? I know you didn’t come here for yourself—you’ve avoided me for a decade now and I can’t imagine you want to be here. It’s that vampire, isn’t it. She’s touched you somewhere deep, and she’s the reason you came. So say your purpose out loud for the both of us. Something tells me you need to hear it, too.”
When he spoke, he released the feelings he’d been repressing since the moment he’d looked into a vampire’s eyes in the middle of a cold, snowy street.
“I want you to tell him to stop it.”
The demon cocked her head, the bones cracking in her neck. “The war.”
“Yeah, the war. I want you to tell that asshole you mated with to stop going after vampires. Stop hurting them, stop killing them. Tell him to slaughter humans if he needs prey. Fuck knows there’s more of them around, and if he wins, he can rule the world. That’ll give him something to do for a couple of years.”
His mother’s disgusting stare searched his face.
And then in a soft voice, she whispered, “You love that female, don’t you.”
