Page 52 of Reap & Sow

“Baelion’s Gateway,” he corrected. “But yes. I made my escape, found myself in a little human cellar. Must have scared the shit out of the poor fellow standing there.” He glanced at her. “I’m just now understanding that was probably your father.”

Kit had been there. In their cellar, in their home, while she’d likely slumbered in her crib upstairs. Just for a moment their fates had brushed, only to untangle for the next twenty years. And here we are again, pulled together like thread through cloth.

“So, you found Robin to enchant that ring, and you’ve been hiding from Baelion ever since.”

“As you’ve been living alongside him.” His expression darkened. “I wondered at how collected you were, when you first came to me. Now I suppose it’s obvious. I’m hardly going to frighten you if you’ve been under my brother’s yoke all your life.”

“I’m not—it’s not like that. He was never cruel to us.” She thought of a pale finger on her cheek, a fond smile reserved just for her.

“How fortunate for you,” Kit said. “Not so much for that child smeared across the cobblestones, I fear.”

The callous way he said it made her stomach roil. She was reminded again of his alarming inurement to brutality, though he claimed no particular pleasure in it. “Florian killed her. The bishop is the one commanding the fiends.”

“With the power Baelion has granted him. You think my brother gives one solitary shit what happens to the people of this city, when their lives will prolong his own?”

No. He wouldn’t care. Selfishly, Eda had simply hoped that he cared about her. “It’s Florian Fane creating this spectacle. Mr. Night is just doing what demons do.”

“You know nothing about demons.” With a hazy shudder, his skin bled gray. Fangs flashed. “You know nothing about the world I come from. It’s a violent, pitiless one, I’ll grant you, but Baelion is something else entirely. You think you know him? You don’t.” He jabbed a claw at his broken horn. “I didn’t lose this by accident. I was a youngling. They pinned me down. Baelion laughed.”

Eda eyed the hairline fractures webbing down the stump. It was not sawed off, she realized, but forcibly broken. “All I mean to say is that people come asking for Pacts, use their newfound power and influence for ill. Humans are as bad as demons. Sometimes worse.”

“So little regard for your own kind.”

“Like you don’t think of us the same way.”

“Of humans? Why would I?”

It was her turn to stare. She thought of Mr. Night’s voice in the darkness of their sitting room, the firelight on his marble face. You see the greed and the selfishness of man as I do, Eda Shaw.

“But…we must seem like animals playing in the dirt to you. All your powers, your long life. What are we mortals compared to that?” Self-deprecation was easy when you mostly believed it, but Kit’s expression was stony. He didn’t respond. Understanding dawned. “You like it here.”

A muscle in his cheek twitched. Molten eyes slid away, drawn back to the dusky skyline. “I grew up sneaking into your world any chance I could. When Baelion dogged my every step, when the pressures of being raised to rule grew too much, I could escape here. I didn’t care about Pacts. I’d walk down dirty human streets and pretend I…” He trailed off.

The tapestry that was Kit’rath Ansellis weaved itself into something almost comprehensible. A demon who did not make Pacts. Who hid in a human apartment and collected human art, drank human wine, luxuriated in human clothes. Mimicked their inflections and copied their manner of speech. Not merely out of necessity but of a desire to belong.

It was jarring. Mr. Night would have sneered in disgust at mortal things. They were beneath him, which seemed perfectly logical, for what could a creature of such power and grace covet about humanity? Eda would never say it aloud to Ben or Lawrie, but she would rather be the creature that ruled than the one that served. Oh, to be powerful like that!

Yet here was a demon who rejected all of it.

Eda felt suddenly untethered from herself, as though an old shackle had come loose. She was free at last to twist this way and that, to view things from new angles—but wasn’t certain she liked what she saw. Kit spoke of humankind with more empathy than she ever had. Was that his failing or hers?

Something like shame had her clearing her throat. “Don’t you want your dukedom back?”

“It was never mine.”

“It could be.”

“You sound like Tripp.”

“I suppose you’d have to…” Kill your brother.

Eda allowed herself to imagine it: Mr. Night, dead. Autumn harvest would come and go without issue. The bishop would lose his ill-gotten powers over the fiends. The Shaws would finally be free. Pacts died with the demon who forged them, and they had given Mr. Night no years of their own—they needn’t be the ones to slay him. The attempt would be laughable, besides. But if Kit could do it…

A dangerously heady thought.

“Baelion is every bit entitled to the dukedom as I. He can keep it.”

“Even if your people want to follow you instead?”