17. Leah #3
Not at all. But I don’t want to tell him that. In fact, I don’t want to share another single minute of this evening with the brute who’s happy to puppet me in whatever humiliating way he pleases.
“You know I really wish you’d just shut up and leave,” I bite back, reaching out to the space where I can feel him lurking and giving his presence a hard, mental shove, just to take out some of my frustration.
Then, without another word, he’s gone, exiting my body so fast I freeze in place. Asterim turns around to give me a quizzical look, and I just blink at her, confused by the sudden emptiness created by his absence. My body is my own again, my mind blissfully quiet.
I didn’t actually expect him to listen to me and go away when I told him to. Now I don’t know whether to be pleased or suspicious.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, examining my face and then scanning the crowd. “Did that bastard put something in your drink? I’ll hunt him down and—”
“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I’m fine. It’s just…Syrus stuff.”
She looks outraged. “Is he there now?” She grabs hold of my shoulders, staring into my eyes. “Syrus Kaldare, if you don’t—”
“No, Asterim.”
Syrus’s last name is Kaldare? Why does that sound familiar?
I pull myself away from her grip. “He’s not there. I mean, he was, but he left.”
She still looks ready to fight someone. “I asked him for one night to have you to myself, and he can’t even give me that without tagging along.”
I ignore her talking about me like a toy to be fought over and shrug. “To be honest, I’m impressed you got him to let me come at all. It was pretty fucking great, watching you stand up to him.”
She waves a hand. “I told you before Sy and I are old friends. He can be crabby, but he knows he doesn’t get to dictate what I do.”
I pull a face, unconvinced. The Lord of Malice is many things, but nothing as simple as crabby. Not when he could turn tyrant against everyone the minute he felt like it.
“I mean, he’s still your lord, right?” I point out. “Technically, he does get to tell you what to do. I might be more his prisoner than you are, but he controls all of us. He’s the only person in Malice who really gets to do whatever he wants.”
“That’s not fair,” she says, shaking her head.
Fair. The word gnaws at me. “Do you really want to talk about fairness with the woman he kidnapped and forced into servitude? I don’t see that going well for you.
” My drink is half empty now, and I’m aware the alcohol is responsible for making the anger I usually shove down rise to the surface, but I can’t stop it.
Asterim’s easy expression turns unhappy. “He has more to carry than most of us. More responsibility than one person should ever bear, really.” She shrugs. “It means he has to make complicated choices sometimes.”
I snort.
“All right, and sometimes those choices are just plain bad ones for the people he’s dealing with, even if they’re necessary for him,” she admits. “I don’t expect you to like the situation you’ve been put in, my dear. No one would.”
“But you’re still going to defend him.” She opens her mouth, and I hold up my hand. “No, it’s all right. I shouldn’t expect one of his loyal subjects to do anything else. At least you’ve tried to make my time here not totally miserable,” I say, my anger ebbing a little. “I appreciate that.”
Something wars in her expression for a moment, then she grabs my wrist with a sigh.
“Come here,” she says, pulling me over to one of the empty booths. She leans in so I can hear her clearly over the music without raising her voice.
“There are some things you need to understand,” she says, then stops.
“Yes?” I prompt.
She chews her lip, hesitating again, then nods. “All right. Firstly, Syrus and I met the day we both arrived in Infernum. We rose from the lake together, at the same time.”
“You’re both mireborn?” I ask, stunned. “I just assumed…doesn’t the lord’s seat pass down through a family line or something?”
“Sometimes, but demon children are rarer than human ones,” she sits back. “When a lord doesn’t have offspring—or there’s a family bust-up and they’ve decided they don’t want to pass the seat on to their kids—they’ll choose an heir from the natural-born demons in their domain.”
“But I thought you said Syrus was—”
“Mireborn, yes. The first mireborn lord of Infernum, so far as anyone remembers. He was chosen by the previous ruler of Malice, Lord Ajax.”
I lean back against my seat, taking this in. “So that means…”
Syrus made a demon deal. I can’t suppress a bemused smile at the irony.
Though he’d pointed it out first, hadn’t he?
He made some comment down by the lake about it being ironic that he was the one in charge of looking after the souls.
All those desperate people he’s had the soul snares trick and take advantage of, and he was once one of them.
More than that, he complained about humans making deals without knowing all the details. Was that true for him too?
“I wonder what made him do it,” I say, mostly to myself. “Although I suppose he doesn’t know, does he? I forgot mireborn don’t remember their previous lives.”
“Oh, but Syrus has all his memories of being human,” Asterim says quietly.
My eyes widen. “What? How?”
“It’s to do with how he became mireborn.” She pauses, sips her drink, then shrugs. “I suppose I might as well cover all of it, now that I’m letting the hellcat out of the bag.”
“I thought we weren’t supposed to say ‘hell,’” I point out.
“It’s different when we’re talking about the likes of Triya, darling,” Asterim says, giving me a dismissive pat. “That’s the actual species name. Anyway, you have a small window when I’m just tipsy enough to tell you things I shouldn’t, so do you want the Syrus lore or not?”
I nod enthusiastically.
“All right,” Aster signals a passing server to ask for another drink, then turns to me. “How well do you know your Stratan history, my dear?”
That’s when I realize where I recognize Syrus’s name from.