air rather than actually saw him move. She blinked
and he was standing between them, at right angles to
both her and Gahiji.
Rivaling the soul reapers in speed, Calliope darted
forward, a blur of action. She had her knife in hand and
she settled in a defensive crouch.
Roxy wasn’t far behind. She had her own blades out
and at the ready. They weren’t her favorites—those
had been destroyed the night Xaphan’s concubine’s
attacked—but they would do.
“I seek the child,” Gahiji repeated. “I offer you your
pathetic lives in exchange for that information. She is
nothing to you. A mere mortal.”
Mortal.The way he said that made Roxy certain he
knew.
Dana might be mortal, but she’d been fathered by a
soul reaper.
Roxy hadn’t been sure until she’d fed from Dagan
after her injury. There was a signature there. It had
confused her at first. But something had nagged at her,
a similarity between Dana’s and Dagan’s blood.
370
SINS OF THE HEART
They shared a genetic match, not as father and
daughter, but as uncle and niece.
Roxy would bet her church that Dagan’s dead
brother, Lokan, was the child’s father. And her gut was
telling her that he’d died to protect the child.
She had no doubt that Dagan didn’t know about
Dana.