And what the hell had Talia just done? An ocean of Shadow? That bone-shattering voice? Those fae were some serious mothers.
“I don’t know. Might be a complication of your reincarnation. We’ll have to ask Custo, or maybe my father. I’m more concerned about how.” Talia inclined her head toward the elevator. “Let’s get out of here, have lunch. Puzzle it out together.”
Layla’s drying perspiration sent a chill down her back, but she boarded the elevator. Talia had to know about the mother-daughter thing. The word reincarnation hung in the air between them, but Layla had no idea what to say, so she decided to remain quiet.
“I freaked you out, didn’t I?” Talia bit at her bottom lip but kept her gaze on the doors.
“No, no,” Layla lied. “We’re good. I’m surprised, but good.”
“Come on now. I freak everyone out.”
“Well, everyone doesn’t know Khan. And he spoke to me from a painting today.”
Talia laughed, but it seemed forced. “I told him to go easy on you, and here I . . .”
“Don’t worry.”
“But . . .”
“Really. I’ve seen crazy stuff all my life and no one ever believed me.”
The tension didn’t leave Talia’s eyes. “Lunch, then, and you can tell me about it.”
“Sure.” Chances were, Talia would believe every crazy thing Layla had seen.
“Oh, and for the immediate future,” Talia said, “it’s probably best for you to stick to the east side of Segue.”
Layla choked a laugh. “Ya think?”
Khan laid a peace offering at the foot of Layla’s bed: her bag from her apartment, so she could be more comfortable, and a pile of fragrant red roses, forced into extravagant bloom. Mortal women were supposed to like those, and he was under his daughter’s instruction to court when he wanted very much to take.
For the moment, he left Layla to Talia, who knew better how to settle her into this new life, and lifted out of Segue and into the weak winter sunshine. With Death hanging over the land, the temperature dropped, a hush silenced the afternoon skitter of leaves, and movement slowed. The Reaper was on the hunt again.
The devil was being careful, growing wise to the ways of the mortal world. No smears of wrongful death marked its path, yet it lurked somewhere within the streets. Khan loomed over the village of Middleton. Only an occasional soul was about. They hurried inside, drawing their coats more tightly about them, and glanced over their shoulders as if Death stalked the streets. And so he did.
He checked each house, set children wailing with his passage. He made the dogs howl and the cats arch their backs. The leaves fell more swiftly from the wintery trees as he blackened the streets with his icy search, and he paused only when he chanced upon an angel, leaning on a lamppost in the now failing light.
“She’s here somewhere,” the angel said, with a wry expression. “Had a little trouble this morning with her. She’s been messing with people’s heads. We almost had her, but she got away.”
“No deaths,” Khan answered, or he would have felt the mark. He did not like the angels, but he was glad they were searching, too, and probably limiting the harm the woman could cause on the unsuspecting populace.
“No?” The angels had no gift for death. “Well, that’s good news.”
“She’ll be turning foul, a monster to behold.”
“Takes one to know one,” the angel returned. He shoved his hands into his pockets and walked down the sidewalk, his back to Death.
The devil, a she, was biding her time. It made no sense for her to strike in Middleton now, when Layla was so near. Khan could feel a sense of waiting in the stillness of the air for the moment the devil deemed it right to strike. The angels were here to keep the peace in the interim.
The day, like the eons of days before it, had been swallowed by the night, so Khan returned to the beat of life within Segue.
The roses were in a vase at Layla’s bedside.
She paced in the room beyond, wringing her hands. The air was rife with the charge of her nerves, so he drew out a chair that she might sit down and calm herself.
“Khan?”
If her apartment had had any of Kathleen’s paintings, he could have given her a familiar face to speak to. But these rooms were like all the others in Segue, similar in their comfortable furnishings, unimaginative in decoration.
He needed another medium and found it in the glass of a window.
He rapped with Shadow for her attention.
She screamed when she saw him there, and he considered her perspective. For her, he was a face in the night, looking in from the dark air some distance from the ground. It took a moment for her heartbeat to slow again. He was rapt with the subtle expressions that played across her face, matching them to the emotion that touched his Shadow: an excited kind of fear, which he liked; a pleasurecoil of interest, which he liked better; and best of all, humor, though it was born of exhaustion. If she could laugh at him, they might have a chance.