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He sure did make it hard to distrust him. The best con men always seem trustworthy, I reminded myself. I leaned my head against his chest and closed my eyes. His hand stroked over me, a warm tingle following its path.
“You like to win, don’t you?” I murmured.
“I do not care for the consequences of losing,” he said.
“Winning has consequences as well.”
“But one tends to have more control over consequences when one is the victor.”
I opened my eyes to look into his. “Do you ever lose?”
“Yes. It is how I know that I prefer to win.” An expression of regret skimmed across his face and was gone. “You have yet to ask your questions, dear one.”
I pulled away from him, moved to the table, and hitched myself up to sit on it. Rhyzkahl’s eyes were intent upon me as if he knew what I was going to ask. For that matter, it was possible that he did know. I desperately wanted to know about the summoning of Szerain. But there was another question that haunted me more.
“I know Ryan Kristoff is a demonic lord,” I said, watching him. To his credit he didn’t twitch, but the hopeful part of me thought it detected just the faintest flicker of interest. I also noted that he neither confirmed nor denied it.
“Why is he on earth, posing as a human, and with no apparent knowledge or memory of being a demonic lord?”
The air seemed to grow heavy as he regarded me. I could hear my heart thumping as I waited for his answer, any answer.
When he finally spoke his voice was low and rich, tinged with an emotion that I couldn’t process. “I am bound by oath, Kara,” he said, shocking me by the use of my name. I couldn’t remember the last time he had spoken it. It was usually “dear one” or something of that ilk. He stepped to me, let out a low sigh, and touched my cheek lightly with the tips of his fingers. “I know this frustrates you beyond measure. But I cannot answer this question. Ask another.”
Frustrated was putting it mildly. “You can’t tell me anything?” I asked, struggling to hold back my disappointment. I’d finally pinned him down and asked the damn question right, and all I got was “I am bound by oath”?
“I cannot answer this question,” he repeated.
A flare of annoyance rose. I opened my mouth to make a retort, but then I closed it and processed what he’d said. Part of my agreement with him was that, in return for summoning him no less than once a month, I could ask two questions, and he would answer them to the best of his ability. However, I’d also discovered that I had to be extremely careful about how I asked a question. If I didn’t phrase it properly, and he didn’t feel like answering it, he’d find a way to wiggle out of it. In other words, asking a yes/no question would get me a yes/no answer, and not a word more.
But he’d said that he could not answer this question, not that he couldn’t answer questions about Ryan.
I thought for a second. The demonic lord waited quietly, almost patiently as I worked out what I could ask that might give me a useful answer.
Sitting up, I took a deep breath and tried again. “What sort of offense could a demonic lord commit that might cause the other lords to strip him of his memories and exile him?”
“There is none,” Rhyzkahl stated, eyes never leaving mine. “The lords do not censure their own.”
Well, crapping hells. That didn’t make any sense. “So why…â???” I stopped, shook my head. No, he wasn’t going to answer a direct question. I made myself think about the answer. Okay, the lords wouldn’t censure. So who would? Was there another level beyond even the lords?
I needed to think about that one some more. No sense wasting a question. Maybe time to go back to my other big question.
“Why was Szerain willing to be summoned by Peter Cerise and the five other summoners on the night that you were summoned by accident instead?” I was trying to be as specific as possible without knowing the exact date—not that the exact date would probably mean anything to the demonic lord.
Rhyzkahl turned away from me to face the fireplace. He stood with his hands clasped lightly behind his back, silent, but I had the impression he was gathering his thoughts. I waited, struggling to control my impatience. I had a strong feeling I’d just asked a doozy of a question.
He finally spoke.
“Because two of the summoners present were bound to him in much the same way that you are bound to me.”
Wow. I fought back the urge to pepper him with further questions. Which ones? Then why were there six summoners? How did it go so wrong? Was my grandmother sworn to Szerain? What was Szerain’s goal? What was your goal?
“Why did you kill them?” I blurted. “My grandmother…and the others?” I’d never known my grandmother—she was simply a name. I’d never felt any sort of connection to her, and I’d somehow managed to compartmentalize her cause of death into a category similar to poking bears with sticks. She’d been involved in something insanely dangerous, and when it had gone bad I’d somehow decided that it was tragic but not really Rhyzkahl’s fault. He’d reacted as expected, that’s all. Maybe it made me a terribly callous person, that I could have become intimate with the one who took her life, but I was a summoner. I knew the risks. Surely, so did she, and she’d accepted them. If a summoning goes badly wrong, you die. It’s worth it, though, because…
Becauseâ??.…I frowned, forgetting Rhyzkahl’s presence and my unanswered question. Summoning was so incredible and satisfying. I felt clear-headed and alive and powerful after every ritual. Once I’d started summoning, I’d never once been tempted to go back to drugs. I hadn’t thought about that until now. How had I done that? Who the hell shook an addiction that easily? Right now I couldn’t imagine not being a summoner.
Was summoning an addiction? Now that I had the storage diagram I never went more than two weeks without conducting a ritual, even if it was simply a lower-level demon summoned for “practice.”
But I couldn’t ask him. The question about killing my grandmother and the others still hung in the air, and I didn’t expect him to answer it. He’d already answered two questions for me.
