“Step away from the kehza and sit down,” he ordered, voice harsh.
Pellini pivoted to face Idris, shoulders tensing at the overt hostility. Though Idris didn’t appear to be armed, Pellini no doubt sensed he had the potential to be dangerous. He lifted his hand from the kehza and took a slow step back. I signaled to the demon, and it moved away from Pellini to crouch by my side.
“Dahnk,” it said to me, settling its wings close on its back.
I murmured acknowledgment, weirdly relieved. “Dahnk” meant “not” in demon. In other words, Pellini was not a summoner, and Idris’s glower confirmed he’d heard the verdict. I pulled a hunk of sausage off the platter and offered it to the kehza with a murmur of thanks. It growled and bounded to the porch rail with its prize.
“Maybe I should go,” Pellini said, wary.
“I’m sorry about the sudden hostility,” I said and wished Idris would crank it down a few fucking notches. “But you come out of the blue and do—” I waggled my hands in an over-the-top copy of how he’d batted the potency away. “I’ve been training a decade and can’t do anything like that. You’ve raised a whole lot of questions that we need answers to.”
For all his faults, Pellini wasn’t stupid. He rubbed at his brow in apparent frustration but sat down. “I bet I have way more questions than y’all do,” he said. “But as to how the hell I know about demons, Mr. Sparkly came back when I was seventeen, and right after that a few demons began to visit regularly. Kuktok and Sehkeril mostly, but there were a couple of others, too.”
Sehkeril. One of Kadir’s reyza. That clinched it. “Whose side are you on?”
For the first time, Pellini looked truly flummoxed. “Side?”
“Your Mr. Sparkly is—” I was reluctant to say “enemy” because I didn’t think that was a correct definition of Kadir’s role in all of this crap, “—not an ally of ours. And there are other arcane practitioners who will do, and have done, horrific things to further their cause. The murder victim in the eighteen wheeler? That’s the level of stakes we’re dealing with.”
“I don’t know anything about ‘sides,’” he said. “There’s nothing going on with me and the demons and Mr. Sparkly now. He cut me off twenty years ago.” Anger flashed across his face combined with a shimmer of loss. “Nothing,” he repeated, voice strained.
“Why did he cut you off?” I asked. “What happened?”
Pellini spread his hands. “Dunno,” he said. “After he returned, every third full moon he’d take me to the between-space. This went on for seven years, but that last day he was late, and when he showed up I could hardly see him. He didn’t explain, just reached out and—” He swallowed and rubbed the center of his chest. “I don’t know what he did, but it felt as if he ripped my heart out.” His voice dropped, turned hollow. “He said, ‘hide,’ then vanished. After that, everything fell apart.”
Idris marched off the porch and back onto the nexus. I didn’t know what he was up to now, but at least he wasn’t glaring holes through Pellini anymore. I suspected Kadir had extracted an arcane implant from Pellini when he told him to hide. Whatever the purpose of the implant, I could only suppose that it would have drawn unwanted attention to Pellini.
“Who were you hiding from?” I asked.
“No idea,” he said. “He never told me about enemies.”
My brow furrowed. “And you haven’t seen him for twenty years?”
“That’s right. I kept to myself. He told me to hide, and who the hell would I talk to about that shit anyway?” He paused. “Then you came along with your little marks.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?”
He took a deep breath. “I didn’t know what I was hiding from. Or who.” He picked at a pulled thread on his trousers. “But then shit got intense and, well, here I am.”
I remained silent while I considered everything. Why hide? What happened with Kadir twenty years ago? “You never asked Mr. Sparkly for his real name?”
“Of course I did,” Pellini replied. “He told me names have power and it was dangerous for me to know it.” He shrugged. “I was a kid. Not knowing his real name made the whole thing even cooler.”
I sat back and regarded him. It was, of course, possible this was all an elaborate scheme to plant him as a mole. But, if that was the case, it made no sense to freak us out by mentioning Kadir. Besides, I’d known Pellini for years. If he was a mole, he’d been put in place long before I finished my training as a summoner. Kadir had been grooming Pellini for a reason, but what? Regardless, Katashi and company would be more than happy to scoop him up and use him against us.