Demon Bound
before. And there are dents and chips all over—this isn’t the first time she’s hit it.
Alice’s gaze skimmed the other statues. And only that one.
Jake began to reply, then realized that although Khavi was still facing the hellhound, she’d switched to English.
“The dragons are of Chaos,” she said in that low tone. “They create, they destroy—there is no difference between each act. All Chaos knows is destruction and creation.”
He frowned, glanced at Alice, and saw the same incomprehension on her face. The words made sense, but he had no clue what Khavi was getting at.
Before he could frame the question, she returned to the table. “It is not a lie.”
But it wasn’t all of the truth, either, Jake guessed—and his gut didn’t untwist.
“Then Michael was human,” Alice said.
“In every way that matters. He called himself a man, and he lived as one. He did not water his mother’s fields with the sweat from his brow, but he did work them.”
Alice breathed in and out. Wanting, Jake thought, to dance around the question.
He asked it. “Was Belial his father?”
“Yes. And no.” The faint smile on Khavi’s lips might have been mocking or sad—Jake couldn’t tell. “Belial was not as he is now. He drank at the table of the dragon, was created and destroyed. When he was full, he became himself again.”
Jake bared his teeth in a grin. “I don’t suppose you could say that one more time, but without the woo-woo seer-speak?”
That Alice didn’t hold out her hand for his money told him that she was just as frustrated.
Khavi’s smile widened, sharpened. “Your novice friends will refer to me as Déjà Vu when I cannot hear. I will not appreciate it.”
Was that why she was deliberately obscure, or was this just a crazy tangent? “I’ll tell them not to, then.”
“It is already done.”
Great. Just . . . flippin’ . . . great.
Alice’s frown became thoughtful. “How is it you didn’t know that you would have to tell us about Michael? Or that we don’t know everything you do about the Second Battle?”
“I can only see what I know. I cannot see what you do.”
For an instant, Jake considered shape-shifting and growing out his hair, just so he could rip it out. “So,” he said, measuring each word, “Michael had a farm. He considered himself a man. Belial wasn’t always such an asshole, and he was the father. Who was the mommy?”
“A human.”
“ How was she a mommy?”
Khavi tilted her head. “Surely you know how it is accomplished.”
“With a demon? Not exactly.”
“But I have already told you.”
“Dragons,” Alice murmured. “The hounds, the bats, the spiders.” Her gaze lifted from her sketchbook. “Have they all drunk at the table of the dragon?”
“Yes.” Ebony eyes gleamed. “And they ate through their mothers’ wombs when they were born.”
Khavi was going to have to work harder than that to freak them out. “Yum,” Jake said, thinking it through. So, Belial had either eaten dragon meat or drunk its blood—as had the bats and spiders. Their offspring would have changed, generation by generation. The original destroyed, and something new created—except Belial, a demon, had returned to his original form when he’d stopped consuming it.
And considering the blinding brightness, maybe it truly was his original form—his angelic form.
“You said Michael worked his mother’s fields,” Alice said. “So he was not born so violently.”
“No. He slid from his mother with wings of black, and his white-feathered sister not far behind.” She sneered at the head Jake still held, and he remembered the name she’d coupled with Michael’s: Anaria. “And so we came, two by two, the dark and the light.”
“And Zakril?” Alice asked quietly.
Khavi’s expression softened. “Our mother was the demon, and Zakril was the white. There were many demons who dined on the dragon, but not all performed the mating of the human’s free will. And of those who did, only five pairs were born.”
It made a sick kind of sense. A human couldn’t be transformed into a Guardian or a vampire without their consent. Apparently a demon couldn’t conceive without it being willing, either.
“We were ten: the grigori, who watched the humans. Who saw their fear when they looked back at us. Their greed when they attempted to use us. Their anger and their hate and their envy.”
“But?”
Her hand rested on the shoulder of the unnamed male
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