Steal the Light (Thieves #1)(40)

He strode to the center of the room and stood before me. I was acutely aware of the state of my person. I was still wearing the dress I wore the night before, stained and ripped and wrinkled. I’d washed off my makeup, but had failed to apply more. And then there was the arrowroot concoction I could still feel clinging to me. I looked ridiculous, and he was a god. I wanted to hide, but there was nowhere to go.

“I need you to tell me the truth, Zoey.” His voice was raw. He looked through me like the answer I gave him would determine our relationship. “Let me warn you, I will know if you’re lying. Are you planning to steal a faery object?”

My heart started to beat quickly. I wanted to lie. I didn’t want him to look at me with contempt and anger. I wanted him to like me, maybe love me. I felt tears pooling, but they had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with regret as I answered. “Yes.”

“Good,” he said, his voice hard and bitter. “I want in.”





Chapter Eleven





Two hours later, Dev entered the kitchen with a hesitancy that told me he wasn’t certain of his welcome.

He stopped a few feet away, his hand on the counter. “You won’t regret letting me in, Zoey.”

He was right to be concerned. I wasn’t particularly happy to see him. I also wasn’t particularly surprised. He’d let me know that he wasn’t going anywhere until I acquiesced to his demands. I have to admit I had a couple of little fantasies the night before where he tied me up until I gave him what he wanted, but not once had what he wanted been a career in crime. I tried to explain the problem to him, but he wouldn’t listen. No amount of tough talk would get through to him. It appeared this situation rubbed some raw wound in Dev, and he wouldn’t listen to reason.

And he wouldn’t give me that name without my agreement.

“Oh, I already regret it.” I turned my attention back to the herbs I was cutting. Sarah had left with an exuberant Christine to pick up some things we were going to need, and she’d stuck me with busy work. Now that we knew the name, we could call the demon. Apparently herbs were involved. “It’s not like you left me much of a choice.”

He hadn’t left me any choice at all. With the money gone, my one and only option was to push through and do the job.

In order to do the job, I needed to talk to Halfer. I could have tried calling the number he’d left again, but if he picked up this time, he would have a decisive upper hand. I needed his true name, and I needed to call him to me. It wouldn’t make him any less dangerous, and it was likely to make him royally pissed, but it was the only way I would have any real idea of what I was dealing with.

To know a demon’s true name is a powerful and dangerous thing. It’s powerful because the person who knows the demon’s name has a certain, though limited, amount of power over the demon. With a demon’s true name, a person can call the demon and the demon is forced to take that meeting. The demon can’t claim prior engagements or call in sick. He or she simply gets pulled into the spell if it’s cast properly. Upon finding himself suddenly in a protective circle not of his choosing, the demon promptly discovers he’s become some human’s bitch. That’s the powerful part. The dangerous part is when the demon breaks the circle, and the demon always, always, always breaks the circle. It might take a while, but the longer it takes, the more the demon wants to punish whoever called him.

The key to calling a demon is to not get carried away with the powerful part. My quest was to get information out of him, not to make him my attack dog. He was a businessman, and as long as I treated him with a proper amount of respect, I believed I was going to come out of this with my body parts still attached. I was thinking of it as an impromptu business meeting.

But I couldn’t get this meeting on the schedule without the proper name. Albert had come through, but he had chosen to give his boss a powerful bargaining chip, and I caved. It didn’t make me happy, though. Dev could force his way on to my crew, but he couldn’t make me like it.

He smiled a slow, sexy smile that spread across his face like a blanket of charm. I tried to not let my insides go all warm and gushy at the sight of that smile. “I know you have your doubts, but I promise to follow orders. You’ll find me a good soldier.”

I set the knife down and turned to him. “Which just points out what you don’t know. There is nothing at all military about my crew. I picked them because they can think for themselves. In the field, you have to be able to think and change the plan. There’s a great deal of creativity that goes into an enterprise of this nature. This isn’t war, Dev. It’s an art form that takes years to perfect.”

“See, I’m already learning.” He leaned against the counter and looked at me seriously. “I’m not without my talents, you know. I’ve been on my own for a long time. I know how to survive. I think you’ll find me a quick learner. I can be valuable to you, Zoey.”

There was something in the way he said “I can be valuable” that made me think I wasn’t the one he was trying to convince. I thought about what I’d learned about Dev. It must have been hard to be an outsider in such an insular world. In the human world, if a kid didn’t fit in with his family, he usually found some group of kids he did fit with. There was always some outcast who understood his pain. It hadn’t been like that for Dev. He was a mortal in a world of the eternal. His mortality was anathema to his peers. He would have no value to his family. He would have no way to prove that he was worthy.