Page 137 of Cold Curses
She leaned toward me, voice low. “Don’t think of yourself as a fortunate vessel, but a locked box. If you live, it can’t get out without magical assistance. But if you die, if you shuffle off that mortal coil, it probably can.”
“Well, shit” was the only thing I could think to say. Monster was supremely self-satisfied. I felt like an idiot.
“The point is, it’s not your enemy. Maybe we should do what it’s suggesting.” She turned to look at me. “Maybe what you need to defeat Jonathan Black is a kick-ass, magically infused weapon.”
I had no doubt she could feel the exuberant burst of magic that followed that suggestion.
“Do you think you can do that? Get monster back into the sword?”
She folded her legs beneath her. “Well, I won’t say I haven’t given some thought to getting the plus-one out of you. But I didn’t know where I was going to stick it, because I wasn’t sure what it was. Now I know.”
“Monster would like you to know it does not approve of being ‘stuck’ somewhere.”
Lulu patted my leg. “No worries. We’ll get everyone into their appropriate vessels,” she said a little louder than necessary as if she was trying to permeate my belly to speak directly to monster.
“Can you do it by dusk?”
She looked ready to voice an immediate objection. Then she looked thoughtful. “Maybe. But you’re going to have to tell them—your parents and mine.”
TWENTY-ONE
Girl,” Petra said via screen.
“This had better be extremely important news,” I grumbled, looking down at the steaming breakfast Connor put in front of me. Part of me—the part that contemplated the possibility I’d be completely changing my consciousness later tonight—was nauseated by the thought of eating. The other part of me was vampire.
I put the screen on speaker. “We’re eating,” I said. “So the noises you hear will be chewing.”
“People? Are you eating people?”
“Eggs, bacon, pancakes,” Connor put in.
“Jealous.”
Alexei had already tucked into a stack of pancakes tall enough to hide behind. Lulu’s plate was seventy percent bacon. Connor went for volume. I went for a smorgasbord—a little of everything.
“I ate two bowls of steel-cut oats with chia,” Petra said, “so we’re all rocking breakfast tonight. Anyway, Jonathan Black.”
That had me pausing midbite. “Sighting?”
“No, he was mercifully quiet last night. But, after approximately a googol of calls, I found a sealed court record.”
“Murder?” Lulu and Connor asked simultaneously.
“Adoption.”
“Makes sense,” I said, “given he wasn’t raised by his biological parents.”
“Yep. He was adopted as an infant by humans and raised without incident, apparently. Good schools, soccer lessons, the whole deal. The adoption was sealed. And then, at thirteen, he wanted to find out about his biological parents. His adoptive parents weren’t thrilled about it, at least according to the counseling records in the file, but they agreed because it was important to him. Sorcha was, of course, gone by then. But he got her name.”
“Did he get the elf’s name?”
“Not that I can find. I don’t know if Sorcha identified him.”
“I wish the damned elves would come and pick him up,” I murmured.
“Wouldn’t want him,” Alexei said, flooding his pancakes with syrup. “He’s ‘other’ to them now.”
Unfortunately, Alexei was probably right. Elves were notoriously xenophobic, and they designated everyone who wasn’t an elf as “other.” I presumed that also applied to elves who had non-elf parentage.
