Demon Bound

by the realization that his battery lasted longer than hers.
    Well, she would rather feed her entrails to pigs than change it in front of him. She snapped the lid closed, began arranging her notes. If she did not pay attention to what she put in her cache, she would never find it again.
    “You’re taking off?”
    “I must attend to a few chores,” she lied. But perhaps she would go to her quarters, set the shielding spell, and scream and scream. “And it is time for you to leave for your session with Alejandro, isn’t it?”
    “Tonight, yeah, in a little while. Tomorrow? Nope.”
    Alice frowned and looked up from her notes. “Surely you are not stopping your sessions now that you’ve been given full status.”
    “Nuh-uh.” Jake had tipped back in his chair, his hands laced behind his head. His T-shirt was mocking her again; when she finally deciphered the stylized letters, she realized that they spelled “kiss.” “I’ll still be getting an intensive session a couple of times a month from Alejandro. But everyday practice, I’ll get with you.”
    “Alejandro will teach you more about fencing than I can.”
    “Yeah, but if we’re going to be working together, shaking down Belial’s demons, it makes more sense for us to get a good feel for each other first. Find out where you’re strong, where I am. And where we need to compensate.”
    She could not argue that. “Very well, then.”
    He let his chair rock forward. A second computer appeared beside his first, and he began tapping again. Alice drew in a long, calming breath, and vanished everything from her end of the table.
    She did not get up, however, but let her gaze run over the cases of books and Scrolls. When she was amid the long rows of marble shelves, the scent of bindings and paper and parchment, her bargain usually felt very far from her.
    It didn’t now. Not when the prophecy and her work had become so unexpectedly entwined. And yet, after twenty years and seventeen sites, she still knew so very little.
    Too little . It was the same lament and frustration that everyone she’d ever known who had studied an ancient site felt, and she’d always laughed at them for asking too much. Awe and discovery should have been enough. She could have laughed at herself for succumbing to the same.
    Would have laughed, if her life and soul hadn’t depended on finding the answers.
    Maybe a cackle would do, however. She narrowed her eyes at Jake. My, wasn’t he so very comfortable down there, with his music and his computers. Here she sat, prickly and despondent, contemplating the terrible fate that awaited her, and he was . . . no longer tapping, but using a controller of some kind.
    “Are you playing a game ?”
    “Yep. DemonSlayer. I’m almost—” He made a dismayed grunting noise. “Dead.”
    Alice stared at him, and he flashed a grin at her over the top of his computer screen.
    “Hey, it’s personal time. It’s either this or porn. And this takes my mind off . . . other things.”
    “I see,” she said. She didn’t, though—and now she was trying to fit this into what she knew of him. “So you are a geek.”
    His controller clattered to the table, then disappeared. So did his computers, giving her a clear view of his dumbfounded expression. “A what?”
    “A geek. It means—”
    “I know what it means. How do you know?”
    She lifted her chin. “I’m not completely ignorant of contemporary culture.”
    The most convenient locations to charge her computer batteries were human libraries—and even she found herself tempted by magazines and the Internet.
    “Just mostly ignorant,” he countered, and she decided it wasn’t worth arguing. She’d lose. And it gave her some pleasure that he was looking disgruntled now. “Anyway, I’m not one. I’m not dedicated enough.”
    She hadn’t known there was an element of commitment to it. “What are you dedicated to, then?”
    He looked at her longer than the question warranted, but it wasn’t until his voice lowered that she realized he’d taken it more seriously than she’d intended. “Being a Guardian. A good one. This.” He tapped his fingers against the photographs on the table. “And helping you.”
    It was as if he rolled her wretchedness over, like a pitted dark stone—and revealed something sparkling beneath. His eyes were the most striking blue, her heart was pounding, but still she managed to ask, “And what if being a good Guardian means that you cannot help