19 #2
When his dark gaze lands on Slade, all the warmth drains from his face. Ceri falls quiet. Though I have no idea what’s coming, I tense.
“Emeric,” Slade says evenly.
“Markovich.” The other man’s tone is clipped, frigid.
Slade seems to wince—wince?—at the sound of his surname, though he recovers quickly, lifting his chin. “We need to talk.”
“I’ll say.”
A moment of charged silence stretches between them. I assume Emeric is the friend Slade spoke of, but it never occurred to me that they might not be on good terms. My blood burns hot with frustration. If we traveled this far only to be turned away, I’m going to—
A small hand encircles my damp forearm. “Come inside.”
I tear my attention away from Slade and Emeric, focusing instead on Ceri.
Her eyes retain a sort of hardness, but her lips form a smile as she indicates the door.
I hesitate as Emeric grunts a barely audible “Fine”—I’m acutely interested in whatever conversation is about to unfold—but I let Ceri lead me into the house.
The latch clicks, sealing us off from both the rain and Slade’s urgent tone.
The house is indeed old, but in a way that makes it look charmingly classic as opposed to outdated.
The entryway opens into a large sitting room in which a fire crackles, antique furniture arranged around it.
Rich mahogany paneling stretches from the floor to the high ceilings, and a handmade rug blankets the area beneath a long, glass-topped table.
It’s far cozier than it appears from outside.
Still, I do a mental scan for my weapons.
“You need to relax,” Ceri advises, extending a hand. It takes me a moment to realize she’s offering to take my jacket. I stare at her outstretched arm until she lets it drop. I’m not about to give her the coat that currently conceals the handle of my gun.
“Okay,” she says, stretching the word into two syllables. “Keep it on, if you prefer. I just thought you might want to be a little less…wet.”
I do want that. But I need to know what the hell is going on here before I get comfortable.
“Not to be rude,” I say, my abruptness undeniably rude, “but who are you?”
Ceri gives a dainty laugh, striding into the sitting room and collapsing into the sofa. I follow but pause to hover between the foyer and the living space. She swivels her head to peer at me. “You’re the one who showed up at my house in the dead of night. Who are you?”
She has a point. I screw up my face, not sure how to explain my relationship with Slade. We have a pact to kill the Prophet doesn’t seem like a good way to introduce myself. “Slade and I are…colleagues.”
Her brows ascend. “Colleagues?”
“In a sense.”
“What kind of sense?”
“We’re working on something together.”
Ceri appears to realize I’m not going to elaborate. “So you’re not his current…obsession.”
I blanch, recoiling. What does that mean? “Definitely not. I’ve only known him for a few days.”
“Oh.” She blinks. “And he brought you here because…?”
“Slade thought Emeric would be able to help us with something,” I hedge. Slade had mentioned Emeric—if not by name—but he didn’t say a thing about Ceri.
She scoffs. “Did he now? How typical of him to come crawling back when he thinks we might be useful.”
“What did he do to piss you off?”
She pats the sofa beside her with a pointed look.
I slink over to the chair by the fire, hoping it’s an acceptable compromise.
I don’t know how to do this. Rarely do I sit across from someone who isn’t Gabriel.
Even conversing with Slade invokes an undercurrent of tension that’s familiar to me.
Ceri, though, is something else altogether.
She sighs. “If you want me to answer your questions, could you at least lay down the weapons?”
“What makes you think I’m carrying weapons?”
“Oh, please. You move like a demonstration of someone trying to conceal a gun.”
I narrow my eyes, studying her too-innocent expression. Her pert nose has a light dusting of freckles. “Are you a diabolist too?”
Ceri crosses her long legs. “Yes.”
Despite the punch, she must trust Slade if she’s willing to reveal that information so easily. “Then I’m keeping my gun. I’m sure you can understand why.”
Confusion flickers in her face, and I curse myself. Revealing my wariness of diabolists likely isn’t the best way to get answers from one.
“I assume you know Slade used to live here,” Ceri says, though I can tell she isn’t prepared to be quite as forthcoming.
I nod stiffly.
“Well, he was the only other diabolist Emeric knew at the time, and vice versa. This was their territory.”
“What do you mean, territory?”
“The place where they fed, of course. Yes, I know—two diabolists sharing the same territory isn’t common,” she tacks on, completely misinterpreting my expression.
“Especially in the Outskirts. It isn’t a densely populated area, so you have to be careful.
That’s the price you pay for this kind of isolation.
But they made it work, just as Emeric and I make it work now. ”
“Why do you have to be careful? Isn’t the whole point of being a diabolist that people are drawn to you, but forget about you afterward?”
Ceri shrugs. “If you only take confession from a sinner once, then yes, they won’t remember it. But if you take from them multiple times, you start to risk them not forgetting you. The more you see someone, the more likely you are to remember their face, right?”
I nod without really processing her words.
“The point is,” she continues, “Emeric and Slade were here for a time before I arrived. Things got trickier once it was the three of us, because we had to be careful not to overlap. It was nice though. We had one another’s backs. And then one day, Slade just…left.”
“What do you mean?”
She flips her hands palms up in her lap, her tone sharpening.
“Just that. He left. Took some of his things and disappeared without a word to either of us. Emeric was crushed. Both of us were worried sick. At first I wondered if it had simply gotten too hard for him, seeing Emeric with someone else. After a while, though, I was just angry. No matter why he decided to leave, there was no reason for him to go like that.”
I think of the way Ceri hit Slade, and how he’d winced when Emeric called him by his surname. Then, belatedly, something else registers. “What do you mean, Slade didn’t like seeing Emeric with someone else?”
Ceri’s brows knit. “Did he tell you nothing about us?”
“Not really,” I admit.