Dee carefully set the painting down on the table and looked to Riley. Her throat was aching, too full, and she barely managed to say, “What are you holding?”
Riley was looking down at her own discovery in confusion. “A complete set of the Harry Potter books,” she said. “No idea why, though. I mean, who hasn’t read these?”
A laugh escaped Dee. She closed her eyes for a moment, drew herself together.
There was a knitted heart resting at the bottom of the box. It was worn, one edge knotted together. Dee forced herself to touch it, to stroke the soft yarn.
“What’d you find, Gremma?” asked Dee, if only to distract herself.
Gremma had a dark, semitransparent plastic sheet in her hand. She was holding it up to the light. “It’s a CT scan,” she said, squinting at it.
Well, that wasn’t what Dee had expected. She walked around the table, trying to get a better look. “Why would there be a CT scan?”
Gremma’s eyes flicked over the sheet. “Listen, I’m not an expert, but I think… well. It’s a brain tumor,” she said.
Dee felt the breath freeze in her lungs.
Gremma frowned. “I’ve seen stuff like this before in some of my medical textbooks.” She tilted the scan. “Notes on the bottom say it’s malignant.” Her mouth scrunched up in thought. “Based on my limited medical knowledge, I’d say this person would only have four to six months left.”
Dee looked down at the scan.Lancer, James.
Her gaze fell to the small painting, the one of herself. James had gotten two things out of the demon’s deal: art skill and a body frozen in the moment that his heart was taken.
She felt the words as they left her mouth. “Two years, actually.”
FORTY
There was a demon knitting outside of the beach house.
He was beautiful, because fairy-tale creatures always were. Red yarn tangled around his long fingers, and his features were sharp and pale beneath the moonlight. Dee approached him without fear—a Red Riding Hood who had faced the wolf.
He sat upon the sandy bluff, knitting steadily. Still dressed in a suit, he looked laughably out of place. Dee strode across the sand, her feet bare, past the seaweed and the skeletons of driftwood.
Dee sat beside the demon. He kept knitting.
“You knew,” she said. “That James was dying.”
He did not look at her, nor did he bother with any denials. “Yes. He tried to change his deal shortly after he met you. Asked if he could give back his art talent if I removed a tumor. But once deals are made, they cannot be unmade.”
Her hand drifted to her own chest; he saw the gesture.
“And you have slipped free of your own deal,” he told her. “You are no longer heartless, despite not truly owning your own heart.” A soft sigh. “You have escaped our bargain—as your kind would call it—fair and square. What shall I do with your heart? It is not as if you truly need it anymore.”
The Rumpelstiltskin clause, she thought, with a stab of pain. James had outwitted the demon, and it was she who would reap the benefits.
“Give my heart to Riley—free her from her contract now,” she said impulsively.
He looked at her.
“This troop is finished,” she said. “Either give my heart to Riley or else give it back to me and I’ll do it myself. Of course, I’ll probably end up putting it in upside down or something.”
The Agathodaemon tilted his head slightly, as if in acknowledgment. “Pull the wrong string,” he said, eyes going to his knitting needles, “and everything unravels.”
She didn’t think he spoke of knitting.
Dee watched the play of moonlight on the waves, listened to the metallic clink of his knitting needles, and the sound of the heartbeat in her chest.
“Is it over?” she asked. “Are the voids gone? No chance of alien invasion?”
