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I studied him for a moment, wondering if he was still teasing me or not. “Because it’s like love and sex—it’s just something a woman has to have.” I paused, but couldn’t resist asking, “What about you? Is there anything in your life that you’d consider essential?”
“Valdis,” he said immediately.
“Valdis is your sword.” A demon-forged sword with a whole lot of power and a voice and mind of her own, granted, but still a sword. I had a similar one sitting at my back, but Amaya was shadow-wreathed, and no one would ever see her—not until her black blade pierced their flesh, anyway. “Swords don’t count.”
“Then it would be duty,” he said.
I snorted. “It’s a sad statement about the reaper community that duty is considered a far higher priority than love and laughter.”
“It is natural our priorities are different considering our beings are completely different in design.”
I frowned. “Aren’t you even curious as to why we humans consider love, sex, and chocolate so vital to our existence?”
“No.” He paused. “Which does not preclude the possibility that I have experienced at least one of those options.”
“I wasn’t talking about the reaper version of love and sex.”
“Neither was I,” he said, amusement teasing his lips.
I stared at him for several seconds, completely dumbstruck. No, he surely couldn’t mean…
He’d shown no interest in eating in the time I’d known him, so I had to think chocolate was out. And it was hard to imagine him falling in love with a human, given his often harsh opinions of humanity as a whole. But that left only sex and I really couldn’t imagine…
“Why not?” he asked softly. “If I can find death in this form, why would you think me incapable of finding other emotions?”
“Death isn’t an emotion. Neither is sex.” I said this in total disbelief. I was still trying to get my head around the fact that Azriel had had sex. In human form.
“On the contrary, death is a time of great sadness. And does not sex bring joy and completeness?”
“Yeah, for us. You’re not us.”
“Why can you believe it possible for the Aedh to enjoy the benefits of flesh, but not a reaper?”
The Aedh he was referring to was Lucian. Despite all the help Lucian had given to us recently, Azriel both disliked and distrusted him, to the point where he refused to call him by name—even if he was in the same room with him.
“I believe it because I’ve seen the joy Lucian gets out of sex. Besides, reapers are soul guides and it seems to me that you all treat that role with great respect and utmost devotion. I would have thought fraternizing with us would be banned.” Hell, there seemed to be rules forbidding almost everything else in the reaper world.
“Ah, but it is,” he said, and there was an almost bitter twist in his brief smile.
I blinked. “Okay, now you’re just confusing me.”
He studied me for a few moments, his gaze more intense than usual, as if he were judging me. Which was odd, because he was connected to my chi and probably knew me better than I knew myself.>“You give me progress reports, and you let me see everything you have before you print said story.”
“Since this story looms so large on the Directorate’s radar, will I actually be allowed to print it?”
“They can’t stop it if they don’t know about it,” I said. “All you need to do is keep your head down.”
“Yeah, that’s going to be easy given what I’m investigating.” His gaze moved down again, narrowing slightly when it came to rest on my left arm. “Interesting tat.”
“Yeah,” I said dismissively, not even glancing down at the wingless lilac dragon that twined its way up my arm from my fingertips. I certainly wasn’t about to explain that it wasn’t actually a tattoo, but something far more deadly—a Dušan, a spirit guardian that came to life on the gray fields to protect me. “Have we got a deal?”
“Maybe. Let me dig around a little, just to see if there really is a worthwhile story in all this.”
“Just don’t take too long to decide, because we haven’t got a whole lot of time left.”
He nodded, finished his coffee in one long gulp, then rose. “I’ll let you know, one way or another, by tomorrow.”
He walked out. I tried to resist the urge to watch, but my gaze still flicked that way. The man sure could move nicely… Something fluttered at the outer reaches of my vision. It was almost ghostlike, a wisp of silver that was quickly shredded by the sunlight streaming in through the window. I frowned, scanning the front of the shop, intuition tingling. Whatever it was, it didn’t reappear.
