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"Mina," Kai called out, and the joy in his voice was undeniable. The woman gave him a smile, but there was caution in it. He leaped up the steps. She moved towards him, allowed herself to be embraced. She kissed him on the mouth and then stepped away.

  "Mina," Kai said, "may I present Jessamy Shepard. Jessamy, this is Mina Rakalas, a very"—he looked at Mina and grinned, and her dark eyes flashed in response—"a very old friend of mine."

  Mina said, "I was hoping you'd be older."

  "Maybe I'm like you," Jess said. "Older than I look."

  She seemed to consider that a moment, then laughed. "I doubt that very much. Come in."

  The interior was bigger than Jess had expected. Dark wood floors layered with threadbare Persian rugs. A high, raftered ceiling. A fire snapped and sizzled inside the stone fireplace. The walls were draped with medieval tapestries, yet the furniture was an eclectic mix of styles. Sleek contemporary couches mixed with leather armchairs from the 1930s, pulled around a marble-topped coffee table inlaid with onyx. There were wall-to-ceiling bookcases where antique leather-bound volumes pressed against current best sellers. It was a room designed for comfort and visual interest. Nothing about it suggested prison.

  Or demons.

  A short young man in jeans and a sweater entered from the opposite door. He carried a tray—coffee mugs and plates of cheese and bread—which he placed on the table. "Anything else?"

  "That's fine, Jack. Thanks."

  He left the room.

  "He's new," Kai observed.

  "He arrived eight months ago. Siobhan recommended him."

  "I remember Siobhan."

  "She's in Amsterdam now." Mina folded herself into one of the leather armchairs, Kai into the one opposite her. Jess sat on the couch, feeling awkward and out of place, and much too light-headed. It seemed entirely possible that she was asleep on the plane—or back in the loft—dreaming this.

  Kai was already helping himself to the bread and cheese. She reached instead for one of the mugs. Hot chocolate, rich and creamy with a cinnamon tang.

  "You look like him." Mina's voice was thoughtful. "You look like Shemayan."

  Jess's eyes shifted to Kai. "Who?"

  Kai said, "Jess is still learning her own history."

  "Kai. Look at her true. She's a child—"

  "I'm twenty-eight," Jess could not help retorting. "That's hardly—"

  "—And you want to put her down there with Del?"

  "She can handle Del."

  "Listen." Mina tilted her head to the side. Her expression grew dreamy. "He senses you. He knows you're here. He's been waiting."

  Jess felt her own senses heighten, and she heard it: a faint, droning sound that rose and fell in atonal chords. The air seemed to vibrate with it.

  "It's a song," Mina informed her, and Jess detected a note of pride in the other woman's voice. "Demon song."

  Jess's numbness broke a little, and a shaft of fear slanted through, but she blocked it off. Better to be numb. Better to get at least some degree of orientation, before the fear smashed in and sent her spinning.

  "So this is one of the seven places," Jess said. "A demon is imprisoned here."

  "Below." Mina gestured to the floor. Her smile was tight. "Far below."

  Kai said, "Del isn't quite like the others."

  "This is true," Mina acknowledged. "Del never was, and he's become less so. Five hundred years of boredom and solitude can play with your mind a little." Her voice turned wry. "It can't be easy for a demon."

  "Del's full name is—or was—Delkor Lokk," Kai told her. "He was an artisan in the southern part of the Labyrinth. He seemed harmless enough. He did not own slaves; he did not seem to care about the excesses of court or the corruption of the Academy.

  "But he fell into Ashika's circle of influence. We think it was because"—he exchanged a look with Mina—"he was not just amoral, he was bored. The dark magic excited him. War and annihilation amused him. And when he grew distasteful of the slaughter, he all but surrendered. He was the only one who went easily."

  "He lives in the moment," Mina said, "and for the moment. Kai thinks you would amuse him. He thinks this is why Del would help you." Her eyes shifted to Kai. "And also because—"

  Kai raised a hand. "Mina," he said tiredly. "Is it necessary to—"

  "—Del has a crush."

  "A crush?" Jess said.

  "Mina."

  Mina laughed. "Relax, Kai. I think it's rather cute."

  Jess glanced from one to the other. "Why do I need his help? What is this?"

  "Even imprisoned," Kai said, "a demon's abilities are strong. Del can quicken you with a speed that I can't. We don't have time for other options."

  "Quicken me?"

  "There's a great talent sleeping inside you. We need to wake it up."

  Her gaze drifted beyond Mina's shoulder to the tapestry on the wall behind. Jess rose from the couch and went over to study it. A battle scene was woven into the cloth. Trees and crude houses suggested a peasant village. Dead bodies lay scattered in the road, while surviving villagers crouched and watched with awestruck faces.

  In the foreground were two figures.

  They were not human.

  They had stepped from the realm of myth and nightmare. The first was female, silver-skinned and silver-haired, her eyes like gashes of green flame in her face. Her mouth was open, showing rows of jagged teeth. Blood spilled down her chin. In one hand, she had what seemed to be an apple until Jess took a closer look. A heart, she thought. Human.

  Squared off against the demon was someone, something else.

  It was a thin, almost insubstantial figure that cast off a vivid white light, its arms flung out and its head thrown back. The silver-skinned demon was retreating before it, fire-pitted eyes blazing hatred.

  "We never knew his true name," Kai said. "We called him Innat. After my teacher Shemayan's firstborn son."

  He was directly behind her. She had not heard him approach. She felt his breath against her cheek, heard him say, "We beat back Bakal Ashika and the demons because of him."

  Jess touched the cloth.

  "This is an idealized depiction," Kai continued. "In reality the two were much more closely matched. We suspect they had their own private battle, the two of them, in the Dreamlines. Bakal Ashika nearly tore him apart."

  Jess said, "But what is he? What… ?"

  "A war-angel from a very distant realm."

  He put a hand on her arm to steady her. He spoke in an absent tone, as if concluding a dialog he'd been conducting in his head. He nodded towards the tapestry. "Innat was summoned—pulled—from his own world and into ours. The man who did it was my teacher, Shemayan. No one else could have done it. No one had the capability."

  "Shemayan." Jess clicked into the name. "The one I resemble."

  "Shem bound him to his bloodline. Innat fought for us, but he did not serve us; he served only Shem. And when Shem died, the blood-link, or Binding, passed down to his children. And his children's children. And so on through the generations.

  "And finally to you, Jess.

  "It has come down to you."

  She took a step back, as if she could put some distance between herself and the things he was telling her. When she spoke, her voice sounded strange to her, faint and tinny: "How does a person accomplish a thing like this? Capturing a—an entity like this?"

  "It's complicated. It takes great skill and power. And sacrifice."

  "Sacrifice," she said. She felt too warm, too close to the fire. "What got sacrificed?"

  He held his breath for a moment, and she thought he would refuse to answer. But then he said, "His son. He bound the creature to his bloodline through the body of his firstborn son."

  Another log collapsed inside the fireplace. She was conscious of Mina watching them, curled inside the leather armchair.

  "Shemayan is your ancestor," Kai said. "On your mother's side."

  "That's impossible," Jess said. "That would mean I'm part—Like you. And h
er." She jerked her head towards Mina.

  "You haven't figured that out yet?"

  "I'm—"

  Her voice, her words, just stopped.

  "You paint brilliantly," he murmured, "especially for one with so little formal training. You never required any."

  "That's hardly proof of—"

  "Shem's line is particularly gifted in such ways."

  "I'm not like you," Jess said. She didn't say it in protest; simply as blunt, self-evident fact. "Look at me. I don't look like you. I can't do anything paranormal, for God's sake… I know what I am. I paint. I'm a painter."

  Kai sighed. Said tonelessly, as if reading off a prompter, "You have a psychic link to Innat and the ability to command him the way Shemayan did. And that's why you're so important. Bakal Ashika does not know you exist. She thinks she slaughtered all Shem's children, thinks the bloodline ended with Shemayan himself. You, and the ones who came before you, are the secret I've spent centuries protecting. In case I was ever to need you. Like now."

  The bones in her legs were turning to dust. She put a hand against the wall to steady herself. "It's the boy," she said. "Not this—this thing—" Her eyes fell again on the shimmering, elongated figure in the tapestry. "I'm linked to the boy." It was an important distinction to make. The boy in her paintings (his ancient grieving eyes) was the person who needed her, haunted her. It was the boy who compelled her. Not this shimmering, otherworldly warrior.

  "Jessamy. The boy is the warrior. Or partly. After Shem's death, Innat lived within the Dreamlines—"

  "The Dreamlines," she said. That word again.

  "—Caught in a kind of limbo, unable to return home. At some point he came back down into this world. We're not sure why. It's possible Innat knew of Ashika's impending escape; it's possible they were in some kind of psychic communication. Innat knew he was not strong enough to survive another encounter with her. So he went into hiding the only way he could."

  Struggling to follow this. "He's hiding inside the boy!"

  "Yes. In this realm Innat is like a ghost, Jess, he can't exist in the same physical way that you or I do. But inside human flesh, human soul, Innat is concealed from us all. From us, from Ashika, from everyone but you. You alone can recognize his true nature, can see the face and name of the one who carries him." He paused, then said, "Your paintings."

  "And the boy himself doesn't realize?"

  "He would know he's not exactly normal. He wouldn't know why."

  She was aware of Kai and Mina exchanging long glances. She was aware of the wood snapping in the fireplace, and the faint droning song—demon song—thrumming up from unseen depths, through floor and faded carpets, into her own body.

  Kai was still speaking to her, but she must have missed a step in the conversation because she didn't, couldn't know what he was talking about. This was a game, a dream, a storybook. She was ballooning out of herself, gazing down. None of this was real. Couldn't be. "You can heal him. Make him strong again. If you can only get to him. Del can help you awaken your own power, Jessamy. That's why I brought you here."

  "Why can't you do it?"

  His eyes flicked aside, as if he were ashamed.

  "I think you should rest, now," Kai said.

  "You realize you have this habit of not answering my questions?"

  His eyes darkened. She was fascinated all over again by their rich amber color. "I think you're very tired, now. You need to sleep."

  "No," she snapped, but the sleepiness was already working through her. Wait, she wanted to say. This fatigue was not her own, not natural, as it spread through her body like heavy syrup. Jess felt Kai's hand in the small of her back, steering her from the room.

  Down a short hallway, up stairs to a lofty landing that overlooked the living area. She saw Mina curled in the chair, staring into the fire. But then Kai was opening another door, guiding her through it.

  Her eyes were so heavy.

  Vague impression of a bedroom: shades of blue and yellow, a big four-poster bed. "Sleep deeply," Kai was murmuring to her. "I'll come for you tomorrow. I'll even serve you breakfast in bed."

  And then she was nestled beneath soft covers, as sleep steamrollered over her. She fought against it, struggled to speak through it: "Kai."

  In the doorway, he paused.

  "Don't ever use magic on me again."

  If he made any reply, she didn't hear it. Sleep took her deep and far, and she did not dream that night.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Mina said, "You haven't told her, have you?"

  It was a strange kind of fatigue, grinding in his bones. He had sleepspelled Jessamy not so much because she needed the rest—although she needed all the rest she could get while she could get it—but because he no longer had the energy to deal with her questions, the stream of explanations.

  Mina said, "You haven't told her what we need from her. What it will cost her."

  "Mina."

  He didn't want to deal with Mina either. He sank onto the couch. Good to be here in this warm, familiar room, fire blazing orange and yellow behind the iron grate; good to be sipping fine port from this cut-crystal glass. Mina had the young man—Jack—go down into the cellar and fetch another bottle. As Jack placed the bottle and glasses on the coffee table, Kai glimpsed the edge of a tattoo above his neckline. He cast a startled look at Mina, for a moment thinking she'd lapsed back into the old tradition of branding, ownership. But this was a personal tattoo, he realized; even clean-cut types were into them nowadays.

  Jack, like his long chain of predecessors, earned a lucrative salary as Mina's assistant, but that wasn't the most interesting reward of the job.

  Time moved differently in the demon-prisons. The places themselves were chosen not just for their remoteness but because they were innately, naturally powerful: they were sorenikan, sacred places, crossroads of energies that could be channeled and learned from and manipulated and exploited. Sorenikan formed their own secret pockets of space and time. Even people completely lacking any trace of Sajae blood were affected. They did not physically age for as long as they remained in this chateau. Mina chose for her assistants people who were lost in some way, who needed a different perspective on their lives before plunging back into the fray of the world. Some stayed for a few months or a few years, while others—like Siobhan, the woman now in Amsterdam—stayed much longer. Siobhan had been twenty-six when she came to this mountain. Three decades later, when she left, she was from all outward appearances still twenty-six.

  "Kai," Mina said again. Her tone was patient. She was used to him, his silences, knew how to coax his attention as if it were a wayward dog.

  He looked at her, and said, "I have to take it in stages, Mina. She has to be…"

  "Broken in? Like a wild little pony?"

  "… properly prepared."

  Mina looked into the fire. "Is it possible you're wrong about her?"

  "No."

  "You're so certain."

  "You should have seen her paintings."

  She didn't answer this. She said instead: "We are not what we were."

  "You think I don't realize this? I realize this every hour of every day—"

  "We can do tricks." Her voice was edged with scorn and something else: loss, Kai thought. A knowledge that ran deep and vast, that continued to bind them.

  What they had lost. What they were losing.

  "Sleepspells," Mina continued. "Memory tricks. A little bit of levitation, a little bit of dream- and mindplay, and some of us can no longer do that. And one pretty descendent is supposed to make up for all this? Forgive me, my prince, but I am dubious."

  "Mina," he said, but he didn't want to argue. Mina could be difficult for the sake of being difficult: her nature for as long as he'd known her.

  He changed the subject. "I saw Salik in New York. He killed a woman for no reason. Because she annoyed him."

  Amid the shifting firelight, Mina's expression was implacable.

  "He asked me if I thou
ght this world was worth saving."

  "What did you answer?"

  "What do you think?"

  She looked away from him, sipping at the port that gleamed so richly in the glass, then murmured, "What if it's time?"

  "Time?"

  "What if it's time for this world to enter a new era? And for the Sajae to just quietly, finally… desist? What makes you think we're so special, so right, Kai? Why should the world belong to us and not to them?"

  "You're not serious," he said flatly. "A new era of what? Disease and destruction?"

  "And then a rebuilding," Mina said. "A re-creation."

  "Oh, yes," he said. "A brave new world authored by fucking demons—what is it, exactly, you think they would create? A more effective political system?" He waited a beat, as she shifted in the chair, her hair a deep auburn in the firelight. "They don't create, Mina. They can't. They need humans to do that work for them."

  "Kai—"

  His hand was shaking. He set down his glass. The glitter in Mina's eyes had unnerved him. "Is it Del, is he getting to you? You're been here with him for such a long time—You've grown inbred, my lady, you're losing all reason—"

  "That's absurd." She vaulted from the chair, moved in front of the fireplace. He remembered—with a clarity that took him by surprise—how that rich, tumbled hair had once felt in his fists. Remembered her naked body against silk pillows.

  But that had been many, many lives ago.

  She said, "People come through here, for one reason or another, bringing me news. Bringing rumors. And you. You. You went too far, too long. You disappeared."

  "I was traveling the Pacific. It's not like I was on Mars."

  "You took yourself out of contact."

  "That was the bloody point. Some people might call it a vacation."

  She laughed. "A vacation from what? Yourself?"

  He didn't answer.

  He had felt his own sanity slip, from time to time. There were occasions when he had to go save it.

  Mina was smiling. "So tell me, dear prince, how did that work out for you?"

  He thought of Celine, the Parisian expat he had lived with in St. Martin. She was thirty-seven, ripe and soft and tanned and freckled. He stopped his memory there, before it moved any deeper, before it presented Celine and her son the way he had left them—