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I had to admit, I did like the witch’s old-fashioned commitment to marriage and childrearing. From what I’d seen, this didn’t seem like an easy conversation for most women in their teens or early twenties.
“Just because they can mate with this female does not mean that they want to,” Samael explained to her with exasperation. He had a serious sort of tone, only slightly less off-putting than it had been over the phone.
“I jus’ don’t get it,” the witch said, shaking her head. She had very bright eyes the color of liquid gold, and she looked at Murtagh, then me, then Zazie, and then back again. “She doin’ college or something? What’s the hold up on gettin’ together?”
“She’s a djinn halfling, baby. They’re dragons. Can you pretend to not be yourself for a moment?” Samael demanded of her, looking quite put out. “Possibly you can show a little respect for the millennia that dragons have been at war with djinns?”
“No, I can’t show respect for that! That’s there! This is here! Don’t be ridiculous!” she refused stubbornly, her hands seeming to physically push away the thought with a flourish. “They cain’t be so damn picky, Sam. Makes no sense!”
I didn’t know if I should laugh or be annoyed with her reaction. Obviously, she didn’t know her ass from her elbow concerning djinns, but she had an adorable sort of thought process, at least. Samael seemed to look towards me, and we exchanged an exasperated, almost compassionate look. He took pity on us and ignored her and stepped in front of Zazie.
“Come here, sweetheart,” he told Zazie, reaching out his hand. His hand was pale, but had fingernails painted with black polish. “I’m going to need some of your blood to check something.”
Zazie looked at him straight on. “To check what?”
“Oh, well. I’m going to check a few things,” he assured her as if he was a doctor talking to a child. It wasn’t as if his words were pedantic, but he seemed to be going far out of his way to not be intimidating, and it seemed to be working well, despite the fact that there was definitely something off about him, and I could tell that Zazie could see that he wasn’t quite right. “Like who your Daddy is. Do you know who your Daddy is? Because djinns aren’t born by mistake. It is an undertakin’.”
“I… I thought so,” she replied.
“So you met both your parents?” he asked, looking surprised. “They still around, darlin’?”
She shook her head, looking confused. “No… They died. Um… I was eight.”
“How’d they die, then?” he asked, taking her hand into his own.
“Um…” Her eyes rounded as she looked at her hand, then back into his sunglasses. She was looking at her own reflection in them, it seemed. “Um. A fire.”
He leaned forward. “Did they die in that fire?”
She shook her head. “I don’t really want to…”
“Talk about it?” He straightened and seemed to smile.
Honestly, the smile seemed more predatory than anything. But he seemed to be trying?
“Of course you don’t, darlin’,” he said. “I’m sorry to ask. Just let me give you a poke here.” His thumb nail turned into a black, sharp talon and stabbed into the center of her hand. Blood gently pooled around that claw and Zazie gasped and grabbed her hand away from him.
Murtagh and I both stepped forward aggressively, though the demon stepped back and put up his hand as if to tell us to calm down. It was hard to calm down—he’d just stabbed my possession. If nothing else, it was rude. He should have asked for permission.
And then he licked the blood on the tip of his claw against his tongue, and tasted it. I didn’t like that either. I didn’t like anything of my female being inside him.
The demon couldn’t have missed the rising tension in the room, but he sat down on the edge of the bed. Then he stood up and walked to the nightstand and sat on the edge of the mattress as he rifled through a drawer. Inside of it, he found a small pad of paper and a pen and wrote something down.
“So, good news and bad news,” he began. He looked straight at me. “What do you want first?”
“Good news,” Murtagh said immediately.
“Good news is that she is from your realm. Well, her blood is, in any case. I’d say she is a shit ton more than a half-blood. Feels like 90 percent, which is not an easy percentage to acquire. Although that’s what I figured she was when I came in. Do you know how hard it is to breed one this close to the real thing? Probably took centuries and a lot of tries.”
He ripped off a piece of paper. “That is not part of the good news, by the way. Got sidetracked. I was never born, but I imagine that having the same creature take up so many branches of my family tree would make me shudder at night, to be sure. So let me get back to the good news. She’s from your realm, there ain’t no reason why you can’t stick your dick in her. Djinns and dragons are close enough to breed.”
“What?” Zazie asked, horrified as she was still cradling her hand. “That’s not what they wanted to know!”
She had no idea what we wanted to know.
“With djinns on the line? Sure was,” Samael told her firmly. “Djinns are dangerous, sweetheart. Their lines are descended from dragons, but they went their own way, and their way tends to be quite violent and wily.”
“Aren’t djinns like… genies?” she asked, blinking at him, still aghast.
