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“Forgive me, Cassie, but Jonas Marsden is hardly an example of well-adjusted behavior!”
Point.
“And we are discussing the warlock Pritkin.”
Actually, we weren’t. Because Pritkin wasn’t a warlock. His ability with demons came not through some arcane magic, but because he was half demon himself. His father was Rosier, Lord of the Incubi, which made Pritkin sort of a demon prince. Or something. I really didn’t know what it made him, since he hated that part of his lineage and almost never talked about it. But I didn’t think mentioning that I was being guarded by the son of a prince of hell was likely to go well.
Of course, neither was this.
“He’s a friend.”
“Those creatures are not friends, Cassie! They are selfserving, power-hungry—”
“They say the same thing about vamps.”
“—and unpredictable. Not to mention that this one may well be part demon himself.”
“What?”
“That is the rumor Kit has been hearing. And it would explain why he heals so quickly, how he has lived—”
“A lot of people are part one thing, part another—”
“But most of them don’t bother to cover up large areas of their past. Yet despite all of Kit’s efforts, he has been unable to discover anything about the man before the last century—”
“Because he wasn’t born then!”
“We both know that isn’t the case.”
I didn’t say anything. Mircea had recently seen Pritkin on a trip we’d taken back in time. And while mages tended to live a century or more longer than most humans, it was kind of hard to explain why he’d aged maybe five years in a couple hundred.
Of course, I didn’t intend to try. I didn’t think that explaining that Pritkin had been in hell for much of his life was likely to make him seem more trustworthy.
“I would like you to consider dismissing the man,” Mircea said suddenly. It caught me off guard, which I suspected was the point.
“I can’t do that.”
“Cassie—”
“I need him,” I said flatly. “If he hadn’t been training me, I might have died—”
“Or you might not have been in danger at all. Have you noticed that your problems with demonkind always seem to come when the warlock is around?”
“What are you suggesting?”
“That perhaps he is the source of the threat, rather than its solution.”
“That’s ridiculous!”
“Is it? I know only that every time you have trouble with demons, he is there.”
“He’s my bodyguard! He’s supposed to be—”
“You have bodyguards.”
“Yeah, only I think most of them would like a new assignment. And this wasn’t a demon.”
“According to him.”
