Page 73 of A Serpent in the Garden

I was woken by three smart raps against the door and jerked up against the headboard, sorting fuzzily through a disordered heap of thoughts and images that must have built up in the night: Serich dead, likely on my account, and would I ever know what had become of him? Sharp fangs and Fury, a sleek, sly voice asking to play with me, knives and cold snaps and, with a painful clarity, the palest eyes I’d ever seen, surrounded by spikes of iced, spidery lashes; a little girl’s eyes and I knew her name—and then it all rushed away from me with a sickening speed as the knocks on the door started up again.

It was Its room—Remy’s, actually; I had woken in Hell and I had no idea what would be done with me. It wasn’t that my prospects were simply bad but incomprehensible, a dark void on a frozen horizon.

“Come in,” I croaked, somewhat surprised anybody would even bother to knock.

Torchlight from the hallway spilled into the darkness of the bedroom. It was a woman who entered, maybe a few years older than me. When I gave her a hesitant hello, she shook her head as if I’d offered her something she couldn’t accept.

She can’t speak, It—Remy—said. She tends the apartments up here sometimes. A domestic worker. And when, with a touch of her hand against a sconce, all the candles sprang to life and she looked at me with amber-orange eyes through a swirl of sparkling dust motes: Her mother is Flame.

So they’ve made her a servant because she has no voice? It seemed distinctly unfair.

Not every demon wants to work in a circle. Riquin never liked it. He chose something else. There’s always work that needs doing here, just like at Lord Fletcher’s. Someone has to do it. If my mother ever deigns to let me out, I might be the one on cleaning rotation.

The woman offered me a distant smile, ostentatiously running her fingers through her hair like some sort of pantomime, and I realized as she drew closer that what I had taken for sparkling dust motes was actually her skin, a vague, ruby luminosity, like dying embers on a log.

I think she wants to run you a bath. My mother probably asked for someone to tend you. I shouldn’t be surprised she’s forgotten to feed you. She doesn’t eat at all.

I don’t need help bathing. I wasn’t a lady; I had no need for attendants to do what I was perfectly capable of getting on with myself. Plus I was slightly afraid of being lit aflame by her touch, which Remy found amusing.

So I assured her I could do it myself, and when I emerged from the washroom wrapped in a sheet of linen to dig through Remy’s drawers for something to wear, I found the old dusty bedding had been removed from the floor and the woman working on scrubbing years of dust from the room.

I hurried into his overlarge clothes, sticking myself a few times with the pins in my haste to secure the wrist and ankle cuffs. It felt foreign to me, not helping her when I was so used to housework. I couldn’t just loaf around and watch when my hands were so familiar with the motions.

At my approach, her ocherous eyes were shy as she shook her head. I had expected a quick, knee-jerk refusal. It’s what I would have done if Lord Fletcher had ever taken up a rag and joined me, but she didn’t make any moves to stop me picking up one of the spare clean rags. I had always found something soothing in mindless, repetitive work like this, or maybe I saw it in that light because it had been the only way I could cope with such drudgery.

My thoughts again strayed to Serich as I worked, but the moment his face popped into my head it spun away from me, as if Remy had punted it from my mind.

I’m worried about him, I protested. Anything could have—

The only thing you need to be worried about right now is yourself.

So the Flame demon and I cleaned in companionable silence for a few minutes until I became vaguely aware of the chill in the air, the way I could suddenly see my own breath, and I didn’t need her son’s grunt of dread to know who had next come to pay me a visit.

Remy’s mother didn’t even blink when I turned to look at her, just held me in her icy gaze for a moment before saying, in a cold, still voice, “Might we have a few minutes?” to the servant woman, though she didn’t take her moonlit eyes off mine.

“Jessa has been pestering me nonstop,” she finally said once we were alone. Her gown of ice caught the flames from the sconces. The effect was somewhat mesmerizing, the way red and orange bled down skirts that puddled at her feet. It was as if she wore a plain white dress beneath a sheet of tensile ice; it bent and swished improbably with her movements, and the stone floor grew frosty with her every step as she approached me. “She hasn’t given me a moment’s peace since last we met.”

“Mother, let me out,” I heard myself rasp, caught between my voice and a hypnotic, demonic intonation. “Do you want me to grovel? Let me out and I’ll fucking grovel. You’ve made your point.”

My nerves frayed at that cold look she leveled at me—through me? “I’m not sure I have, and I wasn’t speaking to you.”

“You don’t need to speak to her, speak to me. I’m the one you have a problem with, I’m the one who started all this—”

“As nice as it is to hear you take some accountability, I’d like you to stop talking.” And when he didn’t, she caught my chin in a delicate pinch between her frozen thumb and forefinger. She tipped my head back to tunnel her gaze into mine, and, so swiftly it took my brain a moment to catch up, I realized she’d silenced him somehow. I still felt him clattering about but his voice was gone, his last words fading into lingering echoes. It was as if she’d tied his tongue in a knot.

I wished she hadn’t done it. I didn’t love the idea of being alone with her.

“You must tire of him,” she said, in a wan, faraway voice. “He’s always been a talker. He gets it from his father’s side, I always thought. I did wonder from time to time if it was his human blood that made him difficult. They seem so tempestuous, at least from afar. Wars and melodrama and fanfare.”

After a frigid, unstable pause in which I felt her attention begin to drift away like an ice floe, I said, “I didn’t know he had any human blood.”

“Yes.” Pale eyes back on my face, cool and clear, drinking in my every feature as though she’d been bidden to memorize them. “His paternal grandfather was the result of a union between a succubus and a human.”

“He told me Frost doesn’t often mingle with the other circles.” Not that I particularly wanted to imagine it, but it was hard to picture her doing anything—with anyone—that could even remotely result in children.

“His father was very charming.” Something that looked like mild amusement gathered at the corner of her mouth, as if she knew very well what I was thinking. She tucked back a few silvery strands of hair. The frost on her lashes made her eyes heavy-lidded, almost sultry, from this close up. “What is it that you do with yourself, out in your world?”

“Do with myself?”