Page 38 of Sinless Demons
“Aries, are you fuckin’ okay? Aries?” Strong hands grip my shoulders, and the anxiety rushing through his words shake through me as his hold on me wavers with a little jolt.
I look up at intense blue eyes. Those dark eyebrows of his are shaded over his eyes, just as they always are, but not from anger this time.
Zaviar’s worried. About me.
“I’m fine.” I blink slowly, my hand loose against the stone as I try to understand what just happened. “The remembrance stones capture moments. She’s capturing moments for herself. She knows she’s forgetting, and she’s trying to help herself,” I tell them, looking around the room and finding more and more of the black stones shining in hiding spots all around the house. One rests atop the door frame. Another is dropped in the corner. Several line the floors along the wall, and I spot even more glinting in her bedroom. They’re everywhere. Thousands of them.
And one of them has what Isabella sent me here for.
“One of these stones has captured something important. We need to go through the stones one by one and find what Isabella knows is hidden here.”
“Are you fucking kidding? That’ll take months, Crow,” Zaviar’s calloused hands slide down my arms, and he winces, turning his head from me and pushing his fingers over the bridge of his nose.
I tilt my head at him, but he ignores me.
“Why can’t you just ask the little shadow cunt what she knows?” Zaviar demands, shaking off whatever he felt earlier as he glares at me with that lovely little aggravation that I’d almost missed.
“Because the guard doesn’t trust Aries,” Krave says for me.
My attention cuts to the overly watchful incubus.
But he’s right.
And though it takes many more grumbles and a lot more cursing from Zaviar, we get to work. Hours pass in a haze of someone else’s mind. I watch Hyval from the beginning. I watch her as she starts to realize in the political meetings in the offices of the castle that she’s forgetting things here and there. She starts the stones early in her life to remind her of agendas and important key figures in her life. At one point, she cries.
She’s young and beautiful. Alone after the death of her husband. But entirely alone to the life she leads. And she’s forgetting it, bit by bit.
They whisper around her. Her ladies in waiting and her advisors. They whisper when she exits rooms.
“Headless Hyval called out for her husband again in the middle of the night. The poor King died five years ago. Let him rest.”
“I heard old Headless Hyval shook hands with her son this morning and asked if he was the new war commander.”
“Did you hear Headless Hyval blew a trade deal with the Kingdom of Crowns in the north? Couldn’t remember the bloody King’s name even though she’s met him a hundred times. She was at his son’s wedding, for fae fuck’s sake.”
“Do you think...do you think we should consider carefully suggesting resignation for Headless Hyval?”
It’s late in the night when my eyes flash open. The pounding of my heart is so overwhelming, it’s all I hear.
It’s all I hear until bickering cuts in.
“Stop watching it! It’s rude!” Damien yells across the room as he tosses another black stone in his messy pile in front of him.
Krave shakes his head at the man. He’s seated cross-legged on the floor and has just one stone in front of him.
One.
“It’s not rude,” Krave argues with a half-smile and a wave of his hand. “It’s research.”
“What are you talking about?” I finally ask, like I haven’t solved our problem only to be tossed right back in the Broadway shit show of The Demonic Housewives TV special.
Gods, no wonder people fear going to hell.
These two would be there to bicker their brains out.
“I’ve gone through a hundred and two stones, and Krave keeps coming back to the one where your dear old grams fucks an incubus named Dravle.” Ryke pushes his big hands down his face and releases a long slow breath.
“She didn’t just fuck him. Don’t be crude. They were in love,” Krave says with a slightly dreamy, slightly lustful sigh.
