“I can’t read your thoughts,” Halcyon said, which of course made me believe quite the opposite. “Your face, the way you stiffened. It’s easy enough for me to read from your expression that you just thought of something you did not wish me to know…and that you feared that I might.”

Okay, I could buy that explanation. Horace the steward and Bernard Fruge, Dontaine’s father, had read me like that once.

Halcyon paused. A human might have sighed, but he was demon dead, he did not need to breathe. And they rarely did so unless it was to speak or to scent our fear or arousal. “When you felt my sadness,” he said, “I was calming your demon. I can help you that way if I choose, because it is my blood residing in you.”

“You linked us together.”

Halcyon nodded.

“Are we linked now?”

“No. I have withdrawn my aid. You stand by just your control alone, and it is not bad.”

But is it good enough to let me live? was the million-dollar question. Apparently so. He hadn’t sliced off my head yet. It seemed for the moment that I was good. But I wanted to know beyond the moment. “How do you…” I gestured to my fangs. “How do you make them go away?”

“In time, you will be able to make them appear at will or suppress their emergence if you wish. For now, they will subside when I leave you. It is my demon presence that pulls forth your own.”

“And my nails. Will they become like yours? Or my eyes…will they glow red?” Like Halcyon’s did with rage—flickering fiery red as if the very flames of Hell were ignited in him.

“I do not know. What you are now, what you will become, no one can predict. What you did…no one has done that before.”

His words left a leaden feeling in my stomach. As if I had swallowed down a bar of steel, and it weighed me down like a dropped anchor.