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“Nope. I’m running late.”
I placed the mugs on the table and sat. Okay, I was awake, and I had coffee. What the hell was I supposed to do now?
Ryan pulled out the chair opposite mine and dropped into it. “Now what?” he asked in an eerie echo of my thoughts.
I started to say I didn’t have a clue, then shook my head. “We can’t keep on pretending everything’s normal,” I said. “We both know it’s not.” He gave a grim nod, and I continued. “I need training still. I need to find out if Paul is all right. And I need to talk to Mzatal.”
“Sounds like you have a plan.” Ryan picked up the mug nearest him, took a sip, then made a that-doesn’t-taste-right face.
I winced a little. “I guess I do.”
“That’s half the battle.” He stood and moved to the spice rack.
I dumped sugar and cream into my coffee. “And what’s the other half?”
“Perseverance and follow-through,” he told me. “A lot of people have plans. They’re useless unless you do something with them.”
I gave him a wry smile. “Time to get my ass in gear then.”
“Drink your coffee first,” he said, then returned to the table to put a scant spoon of sugar and a shake of cinnamon into his cup.
I quickly lifted my mug to my mouth to hide my mild shock. Ryan always drank his coffee black. Was this whole Ryan-appearance simply a pretense to make it easier on me, or did Szerain need to keep it like this? A pang of loss went through me. Was there any of my Ryan left? I sipped my coffee and, for a moment, wished that I could go back to that beach in the demon realm where I’d gone with Helori, and simply be away from everyone and everything for a while. And just as quickly pushed the whiny self-pity down. This wasn’t about me, and I wasn’t going to run away from my problems. Too many others depended on me.
“What about Zack?” I left the question wide open to see where he’d go with it. I’d assured Zack that Szerain wouldn’t abandon him as all the others had, but it was an assumption.
He set his cup on the table, swallowed. A weird ripple passed over his face as though he’d almost lost the Ryan features. “He’s broken,” he said in a strained voice. “I’ll take care of him. I know broken.”
I exhaled softly. “Yeah, I guess you do. Thanks.”
He nodded. “When are you planning to follow through with your plan?”
“After I get caffeinated I’ll go down and top off the storage diagram.” Luckily I maintained a habit of keeping it as full as possible at all times. I sighed, rubbed a hand over my face. “And then I’ll summon a little after noon, I guess.”
“You’re reluctant to do this,” he observed.
“No, I’m not reluctant.” I grimaced. “It’s sort of a weird nervous-dread-anxious-resigned hybrid emotion.”
“Well, that narrowed it down,” he said with a twitch of his lips. “Caused by?”
I set my mug down, leaned back in my chair. “Caused by the fact that my demonic lord lover brought down the fires of heaven and would have killed me and everyone else if you and Kadir hadn’t helped me stop him.”
Ryan winced. “That would do it. He lost control.”
“And then he closed me out,” I said, then sighed and rubbed at my temples. “Weirdly, that was the worst part.”
He looked at me sharply. “Closed you out?”
The ache tightened my chest again. “We have this connection, and he . . . went totally silent.” I couldn’t think of any other way to describe it. “Like he didn’t hang up the phone, but wasn’t talking on the other end of the line.”
He breathed a curse—in demon, I noted with another weird pang. “I understand the hybrid emotion now.”
“I guess I get to see if he’ll still train me.” I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “I don’t even know what to expect.” I dropped my hands and grimaced. “And he might be pretty pissed off I didn’t give him Vsuhl when he asked for it.”
“You’re a good student. He’ll teach you,” he assured me. “And if you’d given him Vsuhl, you would now be Rowan, anchoring the mini-nexus for Jesral and Rhyzkahl.”
A shiver ran over me as the memory of those bizarre few minutes as Rowan surfaced. Szerain had saved me, as had Bryce. I rubbed my arms, found myself smiling at Bryce’s fierce loyalty. He’d called to me, had never stopped. Kara . . . Kara . . . Kara . . .
Like Giovanni called to Elinor.
