Chapter 16
The medium was almost as completely concealed as Ligat when she finally faced him, swathed in a dark green waterproof with a hood that shadowed most of her face. If her clothing had been lighter and her coat a little longer, they might have resembled a very odd pair of chess pieces.
He knew what she looked like below the coat, of course, and she had no idea about him.
That advantage would have shamed an honorable man, but he’d lost his honor long since.
Even the brief memory of it startled him.
Ligat brushed it away, prepared to fully benefit from the most pleasant advantage he’d had in a while.
He could have drawn most of Hazel Lewis’s alluring form from memory alone, had he been any sort of artist. He could even picture it in his sleep, if the scraps of his dream were any guide.
Now he was the one who couldn’t move. The reversal was…intriguing.
The medium didn’t seem to share his mix of emotions, at least not if the flat tone of her voice was any clue. “You’ve been spying on me.”
“Yes,” Ligat said. It wasn’t as though she’d believe he was the postman.
“For the demon I fought?”
“Yes,” he said again. No reasonable person could have drawn another conclusion, and therefore neither he nor Perthrux lost anything by his admission. “Do you have some sort of punishment in mind?”
He thought he heard the woman inhale sharply, though the damned rain meant he couldn’t be sure. She did raise her knife. “I could kill you now.”
The idea drew laughter from places in Ligat so deep he’d almost believed them gone, and he let his head fall back, watching the knife the whole time. It wasn’t the blade she’d stabbed him with originally, but he suspected this one was silver too. “Try it,” he said. “Please.”
Miss Lewis stopped. The half grown, translucent puppy at her side whined. Her minion’s vines tightened around Ligat, and the faint pain as the thorns pierced his flesh washed over him like a lover’s touch.
“I’ve hurt you before,” she mused, keeping the knife raised. Water rolled down the blade and along her tense wrist, the raindrops making her skin shine in the gray light.
“You have. Though you’ll have a long way to go before you can match my master in torture, especially with only the one weapon to hand.” That was a thought to quench some of his desire.
“Ah—” She hadn’t been going down that road, though she covered her surprise decently. “We’re very inventive. Mortals. I hear it’s one of our better qualities.”
Ligat’s mouth twisted. “You can’t be that inventive.
” He would have liked to see her face, to know whether and how he was getting through, even to find out how well she could mask her reactions.
He would have liked a number of things. “So, then. You can try and kill me with that blade. We can wait out here until your…ally tires.”
“And you can’t free yourself?”
“Let’s say I don’t want to take the trouble.
” The dryad was strong, hardy in the way of weeds and wasteland plants.
Freeing himself would have involved calling on Perthrux.
“Did you trap me to accuse me?” he asked.
“If so, you have your answer. If you want an apology, you’ll be a long time getting one. ”
“No,” said the medium slowly. “I want answers.”
* * *
“And you think you’ll get them from me,” said the cloaked figure.
They were obviously mocking her, Hazel thought. Rising to the bait would be a bad idea, regardless of the heat making its way up her neck.
“Can you lie?” she asked.
“Yes,” said her captive, with a blend of surprise and amusement.
Their answer, in turn, startled Hazel slightly. Creatures from the ethereal and beyond generally couldn’t lie outright, and she wouldn’t have expected one to admit it if they did.
She studied the figure more closely. They hadn’t struggled against the vines at all since she’d come out—they almost seemed to be relaxing into them, languid in the middle of rain and thorns. Were they having fun?
It was more possible than her ego would have preferred.
You smug son of a bitch, she thought, but didn’t say it aloud. The professional in her roused before she could, pointing out that smug often went before a fall and that lies could reveal their own kind of truth.
“Let’s make a deal,” Hazel said.
The figure’s eyes glinted through the rain like taillights on the highway. “Oh, yes. Let’s,” they said, each syllable slow and silky.
Hazel swallowed.
Head in the game. She needed exact phrasing to come out ahead in this exchange. She also had to stay focused, attentive to any sign that the intruder might be lying, which meant observing them closely and wouldn’t help at all in keeping her cool.
Slowly she counted to ten, then assembled each word of her offer. “I’ll let you go if you answer nine questions. Before each one, I’ll say what number question it is, or it doesn’t count.”
“Ah.” The figure chuckled. “Clever girl.”
“Save it,” Hazel snapped. Self-control was vital, anger was an obstacle, but she was no saint, and it had been a long day already. “I’m not a fucking velociraptor.”
No hood or cloak could really conceal how utterly baffled the figure looked for a moment. “A what?”
“Never mind. Do you agree? That isn’t a question.”
The figure shook their head. Hazel’s heart sank until they spoke again. “I’ll give you one answer. And I can’t tell you how to defeat my master or how to heal yourself. Don’t hope too high.”
“I never do.” But she was hoping a little more now. The figure—
“What’s your name?” Hazel asked. “I’m not using a question.”
She could just barely make out their smirk. “You can’t possibly expect me to give away that.”
Hazel couldn’t be mad that time, just embarrassed; she should have kept her phrasing in mind when dealing with the ethereal, where true names were major bargaining chips.
“Then what would you like me to call you? I can come up with a few suggestions, but in the interest of doing business, I thought I’d let you pick. ”
“I suppose it would make matters easier. ‘Legate,’” they said, or that was what Hazel heard.
“Like a Roman soldier?”
They hesitated before correcting her. “Ligat. As in ligature.” Ligat tugged gently at the vines to illustrate.
“And your—are you a he or a they or what?”
“He.” He didn’t act confused or mock the request for pronouns, which earned him some of the few points Hazel was willing to give a demonic stalker.
“All right. Ligat.” She lowered her knife, though she didn’t trust him nearly far enough to sheath it again, and rested her hands on her hips. He’d said he couldn’t tell her how to fix the wound or kill the demon. I’ll give was a different story. “Seven answers.”
“Three. The worst you can do is keep me here, remember? The rain and the cold won’t bother me, I don’t need food, and I’ve slept in worse positions.” It was surprising how fluidly he could shrug while bound in vines.
Hazel grinned suddenly, surprising herself. “And I don’t have much of a life since your boss decided to make me its business. Five.”
Ligat took another minute. The ghost dog curled up on the ground, his chin on Hazel’s foot, and the bramble-creature rustled slowly. Hazel didn’t get a sense of urgency from either of them. Her stomach took that moment to rumble, but she ignored it.
“Five,” he said slowly. “Yes. We have a bargain.”
* * *
“My first question,” said the medium after another long pause. Ligat could almost see her putting together the words, mortaring them in place so that there were no holes he could exploit, or at least none that she was aware of. “What part do I play in your master’s plans?”
It was well worded; she hadn’t simply asked what the demon wanted, to which the answer would have been equally simple, or even what it wanted with her.
“It wants to make you a doorway. Failing that, it’ll give you to Chapman and let him wear your body to continue his work.
It would vastly prefer the former—it dislikes delegation. ”
She had to have been expecting an answer of the sort, since she didn’t hesitate before nodding.
Her voice returned to its earlier flatness, though, disappointing Ligat.
“My second question: How would it make me a doorway? Why not just have you kill me? Your boss can’t be that dedicated to the personal touch. ”
“You’d be surprised,” said Ligat. He only winced internally, having made considerable progress in that regard over his time in service.
“But no. You’re still too much a creature of the physical world for your death to serve, I can’t take you back to the ethereal directly, and my master’s ability to manifest and capture you itself is… limited.”
“So it’s waiting. For the damage to spread.”
Ligat wasn’t surprised that Hazel caught on so quickly, but watching her reach conclusions was even better up close.
He would have given her another compliment if he hadn’t thought she might actually stab him in response.
Given the circumstances, he couldn’t blame her, and that small dart of sympathy unnerved him.
“He won’t have to wait long,” he said, not bothering to soften the brutality of his answers. “Mortal bodies don’t make good pipelines for the ethereal, even without the touch of Hell.”
Only a slight inclination of her head showed that she’d heard him. “My third question, then,” she said. “What happens if I die by unrelated means?”
“Chapman walks around in your body. I’d imagine he’d enjoy the experience.”
“Ah,” she said, and the ghost dog opened his eyes at her tone.
The rain fell between them, making its own indentations in the muddy ground and pooling there, a curtain that Ligat both blessed and cursed as he waited for the medium to go on.
* * *
The situation had just gotten simpler, anyhow.
Learning that the demon was going to use her as the beachhead of an invasion had suggested one very unpleasant but decisive solution—but from what Ligat said, that wouldn’t actually help.
Hazel was selfish enough to be relieved about that and cynical enough to know it wasn’t great news.
She’d thought she had an emergency exit, awful as it would have been, if matters got too dire. No such luck.
Ligat was watching her, so she straightened her back and lifted her chin.
The motion made her hood fall back, but to hell with it.
Despite what some people had called her in her youth, water wouldn’t melt her.
“Fourth question,” she said, sorting through her experiences in the cottage and before.
“How many times has your master tried to directly attack me, not counting the séance?”
“A few. The telephone, the hospital, and the incidents in your old home were…” Ligat sighed. “…largely aimed at your morale, shall we say? The hand was a genuine attempt at retrieval.”
“Then what happened just now—”
“What did happen just now?” he asked, leaning forward. The vines drew him back in a second, but Hazel saw the motion. Her prisoner wasn’t quite as careless as he seemed.
She also noticed that a lock of dark hair had plastered itself to his forehead.
The rain had made his robes clingy, too, showing that he didn’t have wings, spines, or tentacles unless he hid them really well.
His body was essentially human: long and lean in a way that suggested strength in addition to grace.
As Hazel watched, raindrops ran down his silver-and-red face, tracing the elegant line of his throat above the open collar of his robe.
Hazel felt her nipples harden and blessed the concealing properties of her raincoat.
Dark, secret excitement crept through her despite her best efforts.
She tried to remember that she was talking to a minion of the red demon, one who would benefit from her death, and a creature that might not even be human, clinging robes aside.
Those were the facts that mattered, but her memory kept returning to the dream.
“A manifestation,” she said quickly. “And an unpleasant one. I’m not under the impression that the house or the land has a particularly traumatic history, so I wouldn’t have expected it.
And all my own spells have behaved normally. ”
“Of course. You’re guiding them. It’s the difference between, oh, throwing a ball for a dog”—he inclined his head toward the ghost puppy, who was still lying with his head on her foot and watching the whole exchange skeptically—“and bleeding when sharks are around.”
“That’s a myth, unless I’m a fish,” said Hazel, mouth on autopilot while her brain tried to simultaneously sort new information and figure out what to ask next.
Ligat gave her a leisurely, mocking grin. “In this metaphor, Miss Lewis, you’re a particularly tender little seal.”
“Ugh.” She mostly meant it. Really. Even if the curve of his mouth made her shiver and the way he said tender resonated treacherously within her.
It was time to wrap up and get out. “Fifth question. What’s your master’s name?”
Ligat opened his mouth, then promptly closed it again.
It was the first time Hazel had seen him really startled, if startled was the right word.
She didn’t have long to read his expression before it vanished.
Then he pulled on cynicism again, chuckling low in his throat.
“A decent try. But I already told you my limits.”
Sometimes the dice came up snake eyes. Hazel took her eyes off Ligat’s throat and the symbols there, then stepped back and raised the knife again before addressing the bramble. “Please release him. He’s no danger.”
That wasn’t true, and she could almost feel Ligat smirk again even as she said it, but it was accurate for her purposes.
It was better to have a spy whose presence she knew about than one she didn’t, and she didn’t want the bramble getting her attention every time he showed up if that meant she missed another threat.
“You keep our bargain,” she said, as the vines slowly unwound themselves from Ligat, “and I will too.”
The ghost dog had gotten to his feet again and stood by her side, staring at Ligat while the bramble withdrew. He didn’t growl or put his ears back—he just watched, tail moving slowly.
“You’ve found yourself a friend,” said Ligat.
“They’re good to have. I suppose you’re going to keep peering in my windows?”
“I do what I must.” His voice was lower and colder than it had been a few seconds before. “Believe me, it gives me no pleasure.”
“No?”
“I don’t exactly yearn to become familiar with the doomed,” Ligat said. Before Hazel could speak again, he’d turned away, and the rainy forest took him back.