Me and My Shadow - Katie MacAlister [79]
I waited for a minute. “Are you finished?”
“Not quite.” She took a deep breath. “I would never do anything to harm anyone. Ever!”
I let the silence say it all.
“I am good,” she said with much dignity. “I am not in the least bit bad.”
“Yeah, ’cause holding someone down while a demon lord beats the snot out of him isn’t bad at all,” Jim said, snickering.
“Holding someone’s arms is not the same as holding them down,” Cyrene said with a glare at the demon.
“Yuh-huh. I see now why you and Magoth hooked up.”
“Oh!” Cyrene said, outraged.
“Enough bickering, you two.”
“I didn’t hold Fiat down,” Cyrene reassured me. “I just helped Magoth get a tiny little edge.”
“Whatever. Can we move on?” I asked.
“That’s why you were dancing around yelling, ‘Smash the tar out of him, Mags!’ the whole time?” Jim asked.
Cyrene gasped. “Lies! Scandalous lies! You take that back!”
Jim made a motion that on a human would be a shrug. “OK, OK, don’t get your panties in a wad. I take it back. Magoth didn’t beat the snot out of Fiat. There was enough left in him to brain Magoth a few times on the rack over there before Cyrene bopped him upside the head with a cat.”
Cyrene, to my extreme surprise, was holding a rust-stained cat-o’-nine-tails, swinging it gently from side to side. “That was purely self-defense, and thus doesn’t fall under the heading of bad,” she said, giving the cat a little twirl. “I knew if Fiat had me alone, he’d try to claim me.”
I let the claiming comment go and eyed my twin for a few seconds. “Why the sudden emphasis on being good? Oh, Cy. You’re not in trouble again, are you?”
“No,” she said quickly, but her gaze dropped. “Not really. It’s just that Neptune is still a bit annoyed about that whole thing with letting my spring get tainted while I was taking care of Kostya, and when he gave it back to me last month, he made me swear that I wouldn’t do anything that could be considered detrimental to either the Otherworld or the mortal world for a year, or he’ll take away the spring permanently. And you know I couldn’t let him do that.”
“No, of course not,” I said, mentally giving kudos to Neptune. Perhaps he could control my wild twin where I could not.
“He really is the most unreasonable of persons, you know. He’s all blond and surfer boy, and has those lovely white teeth, and really impressive biceps, but he’s not at all as scatterbrained as he looks. And I swear he has it in for me. He’s always picking on me.”
I let that comment go, too, and focused on what was important. “We need to get out of here. Door?”
“Bolted from the other side,” Jim said, getting up off Fiat and shambling over to me, nuzzling my hand for a moment before cocking a canine eyebrow. “Any other bright ideas?”
I glanced around the room. “Not really. Cy, is there anything you can do?”
“Flood the room?” she asked, also looking around.
“That would do nothing but drown us.”
She stilled for a moment, her eyes closed as she opened herself up to the earth. “The pond is too shallow, and the stream is at its lowest peak. Neither source would be effective against the foundation of the house. Other than those two, there are no sources of water nearby that I could use.”
“Damn.” I eyed Jim. “I know demon lords can move through space the way demons can, but I don’t know how to do it. Do you have any pointers?”
“Yeah. Don’t do it.”
“Why not?” I asked the demon.
It shook its head. “Aisling tried it and got proscribed. I don’t think you want to end up that way, because it would give Bael some sort of control over you, what with you being bound to Magoth and all.”
“Good point,” I said, reluctantly releasing the idea of using the dark power. “What we need is for a demon to rip open the fabric of space for us so we could leave.”
“We have a demon,” Cyrene said, pointing to Jim.
“No can do,” it answered, shaking its head. “I’d like to, but I can’t. Gotta have a direct order from my demon lord. My real demon lord, not someone with the temporary ability to command me.”
“Damn,” I said again, thinking