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“You’re not getting off that easily,” I said. I’d always assumed she’d stayed with us by choice. But to be cursed to stay? That changed our history completely.
I felt sick just thinking about it.
“It doesn’t matter. Wendy is long dead, and aside from her, your family always treated me well.”
“It does matter. What broke it?” I asked.
She cut a glance at Leo as she poured herself a cup of coffee in the biggest mug I owned. The thing was basically a soup bowl with a handle. “Family.”
Hook nodded thoughtfully. “That could be. Magic has a balance to it, and nothing lasts forever. For every curse or hex, there’s always a way to break it. The trick is figuring it out.”
Lily took a sip of her coffee, hissed at how hot it was, and went right back in for another taste. “There you have it. Mystery solved. Now, can we get back to our current problem?”
Sometimes it was easy to forget how she cared about Matty, too. Her face might still feel a little new when I looked at it, but she’d been there all along.
“We need to lure the demon to us,” Leo said. “Chasing it through the city isn’t working.”
Hook shook his head. “Not without a plan for getting that thing out of him first.”
“Could we use the pendant for that?” I asked. “Also, if anyone knows where the owner’s manual for it is, that would be super helpful.”
I meant it as a joke, but Leo looked at Hook with his eyes narrowed. “You didn’t tell her?”
“She knows some of it,” he said, clearly not in the mood for that discussion.
“That’s right.” I settled all my attention on Hook. “You were going to tell me something about it.”
“Until you fled the room in a huff.”
I glared at him because whatever smartass remark I had sitting on the tip on my tongue vanished with the memory of his words. Everything got boring eventually. Translation: he would get bored with me too, assuming I lived long enough to grow uninteresting based on his immortal standards.
And that was a whole other thing.
My eighty-some-odd mortal years, if I was lucky, would be a blip compared to the time he’d already spent living, and he had eternity in front of him.
Which meant what was going on between us was basically a fling for him. Summer lovin’, demigod style.
“Just spit it out. It can’t be any worse than finding out there’s a demon’s shadow walking around in my brother’s skin, or that Lily is shifter, or that you’re a demigod. Hit me with it and let’s move the hell on.”
There. That sounded bitchy enough.
Hook’s eyes took on that dangerous glow again. “I don’t think you really want to know.” He rose from the couch, and the tension in the room rose with him. He crossed over to me, closing the distance in a few long strides, and reached for the pendant.
On instinct, I grabbed it first. “Hands off, pirate. This is mine. You can look, but no touchy-touchy.”
A grunt of bitter laughter rolled out of him. “You are absolutely correct. It is yours, completely.” He grabbed my free hand and brought it to his chest, laying my reluctant palm directly over the scar marring his heavenly skin. “Do you remember how I told you how Anya stole a piece of me all those years ago?”
My nerves went on high alert as something inside me pulled tight. If this was going where I thought it was going...
“That piece belongs to you now,” he whispered.
I stumbled back a step, but he didn’t let go.
“No.” It couldn’t be the truth, could it? Was my necklace—the thing that had hauled me to Hook’s world and back, the thing I hadn’t been able to let out of my sight since I’d returned—was it literally a piece of the man standing in front of me?
“Yes.” The single syllable rumbled low, stealing the air from my lungs even as it lit a fire inside of me.
All I could do was stare at him, at least until the pendant grew warm in my trembling grip. When I opened my hand, light spilled out of it, reflecting off Hook’s amber eyes. Or maybe it wasn’t a reflection. I honestly couldn’t tell.
