Twilight's Dawn

come to me when the first child in that village went missing. They had other choices, Sylvia, and the choice they made resulted in Beron being injured and you being killed.” He shoved out of his chair. “Save your pity for someone who deserves it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a butcher to hunt.”
    He walked out of the room, walked out of the Keep, and caught the Black Winds that would take him home.

    Sylvia watched Lucivar fill up a plate with breakfast foods before wandering out of the room. He made it look casual, but it wasn’t. She didn’t think Saetan had caught up with Daemon before Sadi left the Keep, but Yaslana was getting off the battlefield before the High Lord returned.
    Moments after Lucivar left, Saetan came back into the room. He walked over to the table beside her wheeled chair, picked up her glass of yarbarah, and warmed it over a tongue of witchfire before handing it to her.
    “Finish that,” he said.
    She bristled at the disapproving chill in his voice. “I’m entitled to an opinion.”
    “And we’re entitled to think you’re being a softhearted ass for having that opinion,” he snapped.
    “You’re not a mother!”
    “No, but I am a father, and I am the High Lord of Hell . I’ve seen that bastard’s victims, Sylvia, and I gave mercy to some of them because they were so damaged that was the only thing I could do.”
    “Haeze’s mother was just trying to save her son!”
    “He’s dead!” Saetan roared. “No Face was never going to give her back a living boy. He was dead before you arrived for that visit.”
    Sylvia shrank back in her chair, trembling. “You can’t be sure of that.”
    “Oh, but I am sure of that. And before you say Daemon and I don’t have a personal stake in your sons, I suggest you consider how our families are connected.” He walked out of the room, slamming the door behind him.
    She didn’t need to consider or think. She knew all about the connections.
    When Jaenelle was fifteen and had tried attending school with other children, Beron had been her friend. Even now, when he was still an adolescent and she was a grown woman married for more than a decade, they were still friends, and he told Jaenelle things he wouldn’t think to tell anyone else. Mikal spent as much time with Tersa as he did at home, and because of that, Daemon was the adult male he had the most contact with outside of Sylvia’s own First Circle.
    Many years ago, her father had come to Halaway to find work and a wife. He’d found both, and he’d been enormously proud of his daughter, the Queen. He was a good man, and he loved her as much as she loved him. But their love had been strained by her love of another good man—because that man was the High Lord of Hell and the patriarch of the SaDiablo family. Her father saw things one way; Saetan saw things another. Neither was wrong, and both cared deeply for family, but it had scraped against her father’s pride that her sons had found the SaDiablo way of thinking more appealing, even though its rules and code of honor were more demanding.
    Having a man so old and powerful and lethal as her lover and her sons’ surrogate father had not sat well with the man who had raised her. Of course, he had thought the two Consorts who had sired her sons were great fellows because they fit into the social circles that minor aristos like her father found comfortable, and she suspected he’d been behind the interest Mikal’s sire had been showing in his offspring recently.
    Daemon and Jaenelle would make room for her father and brother because they were her family, but whether her blood relatives liked it or not, her sons had become absorbed into the SaDiablo family, and the SaDiablos took care of their own.
    She drained the glass of yarbarah and set it aside. Then she pulled up the long skirt and looked at what remained of her legs.
    The SaDiablos took care of their own. Would Saetan have given anyone else a vial of Jaenelle’s blood so that a Healer could shape shattered bone and ripped flesh into clean stumps? Or heal her fingertips so that she could have full use of her hands? She knew enough about the restrictions he placed on the demon-dead to understand that he’d bent many of his own rules to give her this much.
    If another woman had come to the Keep asking for his help, most likely he would have summoned his sons or trusted demon-dead Warlords to save the children, and he would have provided the blood that would have given