She turned to him, incredulous. Turned to look at the wreckage. Turned back. “Yes. Just like that.”
“Cool.” He scratched an ear. “Not really sure I got the pitch, though.”
The Javits Center crew foreman and the on-site medics were hurrying over now, even as the embarrassed couple tried to make their escape. Steve stood up, all professionalcharm, greeting them, starting to spin a story about a deal gone sour and an attendee who maybe should have had few fewer shots of Baileys in his latte from the free barista bar up the aisle. The Shadow Council was great at damage control. She wondered if Hawk would even get to remember any of the last few months when he woke up. She didn’t want to be involved. No, she hadn’t really seen anything, no, she didn’t want to make a statement. Please excuse her, her CEO had a demo presentation in a few minutes.
Her phone buzzed. She looked—it was Luke.
“Where did you go?” he whispered, sounding frantic. “I’ve got Brad and Bel’aliol, and they’re both looking for you!”
31
They had to kick a would-be influencer out of the alcove where he was on his fifth take of a ‘best of show’ post to find somewhere to make the call to Bel’aliol. Fortunately, Luke had expected to report in on how things went down with Valefar and had brought the chicken hearts.
“I thought we were going to do this in one of the little conference room things,” Luke said as he put down a plastic tablecloth for easy clean-up.
“I don’t think anyone’s doing anything over there for a while,” she replied, laying out hearts as fast as she could.
“What the hell?” asked a random older conference-goer, appalled.
“TikTok,” Morgan said brightly.
“Friggin’ Gen Z,” the poor middle manager said, looking nauseated and hurrying off.
“Pull that plant over and see if we can block the sight lines,” Morgan told Luke in a lower tone.
Huddled behind an underwatered ficus tree, they opened the connection.
Bel’aliol was wearing a truly impressive war helm thatsomehow incorporated his horns. She hadn’t thought he could look more terrifying. She’d been wrong.
“Well, that’s quite the fuss you’ve managed to stir up,” he said. He was not nearly as pleased as she had been hoping to see him. Beside her, Luke’s breathing sped up.
“We’ve evicted Valefar from New York,” Morgan spoke up when the silence had lasted too long. “Berith’s territory is secure. Umm. Sir.”
“Oh, we noticed,” Bel’aliol said. His voice was not as bone-rumbling through the scrying spell as in person, but it was still enough she could see passersby glancing at their inadequate ficus. Fortunately—or maybe because of a demonic luck spell, she didn’t want to ask—the morning session let out at that moment and the facility turned the background music up to full. The high-energy yet somehow wildly inappropriate tones of the Black Eyed Peas wailing about how good a night it was going to be covered their conversation. Bel’aliol looked appalled, and she guessed that he did not want to jump off that sofa.
He tried to recover his dignity, which shouldn’t have been so easy to lose while wearing that helmet.
“Not all parties are happy to have come so close to battle and have to pull back at the last moment,” he said finally.
“Niseraz is disappointed?” she joked weakly.
“The parties Upstairs,” he said.
“Duke Berith is upset?” Luke breathed.
She’d known that Berith was on the list of demon lords from antiquity, but somehow she’d thought of House Berith as a multigenerational thing. Like the House of Windsor. But no, there was no reason that Berith wasn’t still around, lording it up. And now he was pissed. At them. And she wasstill on the hook to go to Berith’s realm when she died. Where Berith was. Who apparently scared even Bel’aliol, from the expressions on Lucareoth’s and his boss’s faces.
“This plan of your client’s? It had better work,” Bel’aliol said, his words dripping with menace. He leaned forward. “Which is why I’m calling in your debt.”
“What?” For a moment, she didn’t understand. Then she gasped. “You can do that?”
“You signed the contract,” he said silkily, holding it up and pointing to the relevant paragraph, which apparently allowed him to change the terms in the case of “substantial change to business conditions.” The paragraph she hadn’t read, in the contract she’d had to sign while he stared her down, without the chance to run it past a lawyer. There were lawyers for that, she knew, if she’d been willing to tell her mother, which she wouldn’t have wanted to do but never got the opportunity to anyway. “You have one hour to deliver a soul contract to my desk, or I claim yours. Unless, of course, this demo proves the concept.”
An hour? It was impossible. Even if she threw herself begging at her mother’s feet, there was no way that was enough time. Unless her mother signed the contract. And Fiona would, Morgan knew, if that was what it would take. And she could never live with herself if she damned her mother for her mistake.
At least she didn’t have to keep waiting for Luke to move on and leave her. She hoped her mother got him amnesty anyway. She hoped Gisele found another roommate who could be kind. She hoped her mother forgave herself.
“Wait.” Lucareoth found his voice. “What about mine?”
