The Hearts We Sold(59)

“How will you even find him now?” asked Dee, startled out of her silence. “If you’re here, and he’s out there…?”

Cora’s smile was a crooked, triumphant thing. “Demons still think we’re helpless. They treat us like livestock, like things to be herded and harvested for their own needs. But humans evolved in the last few hundred years—and we’ve got technology.”

A moment.

Then it hit Dee. Exactly how one might track the Daemon.

“You’re following his cell phone?” she said, aghast.

James gazed at Cora in unflattering amazement. “Wow. I mean, I knew you were ballsy, but this is… a whole new level.”

Her mouth twisted. “Shut up, Lancer.” There was no affection in her words, no blunted insult this time. Her voice was low, utterly serious, and for the first time, Dee did not see a benevolent leader. Cora looked… coldly calculating. She looked like a demon hunter.

This, Dee decided, would not end well.

“So,” said Cora, turning flashing eyes upon Dee and James. “Are you both in?”

The ringing silence was answer enough. Cora looked between James and Dee, her own face tight with anger. “You’re just going to let this continue?” she snapped.

“I don’t see we have a lot of choice,” said Dee quietly.

Cora did not say another word. She turned on her high heel and strode out of the apartment.

“I feel like an asshole,” said Dee.

“I’m impressed,” said James.

She frowned at him. “Because I said no to someone?”

“Actually, it was because you just swore in front of me.”

She used her big toe to poke at his leg. He made a squeaking sound and caught her bare ankle in one hand. “Seriously, are we horrible for not wanting to help her?” said Dee, after a moment of thought.

James shook his head. “You’re asking me if we’re horrible people for not wanting to break a contract with an immortal being, to deliberately set ourselves against him, to risk everything we have and everything we are—all so we might hypothetically keep another teenager from losing his or her heart?” He paused.

“We’re horrible people,” said Dee.

“Yes, we are,” agreed James. “But somehow I think I can live with it.”





TWENTY-EIGHT


D ays passed and the weather went from fair to foul. Sunlight was chased away by clouds, and the light took on a grayish quality. Torrents of rain lashed at the windows, making it look as though the entire building was being put through a car wash. But no one paid the rain any real attention; the teacher went on talking about irregular polygons—half of the students were taking notes and the other half were passing them.

Dee was averaging out the two heights of her polygon when her phone buzzed in her pocket. She jumped; she usually kept the thing turned off—but Gremma had overslept and Dee had ended up rushing her morning routine. As subtly as she could, Dee reached into her pocket and withdrew her phone. She tucked it behind her geometry book and eyed the screen.

James: have you heard from cora at all?

Dee’s lips pressed together in a frown. She glanced up at the teacher; his back was to the room, his attention on the whiteboard as he sketched out a new polygon. Hastily, she typed a response.

No. Why?

His reply came a moment later: she’s gone quiet for a week. making me nervous, tbh.

A cool tendril of dread seemed to settle in her stomach. This wasn’t anything out of the norm, she reasoned. Cora might have given up or become busy with other responsibilities. She had sisters, if Dee remembered right. There were plenty of reasons that Cora might have relinquished her vendetta against the Daemon.

But then Dee remembered the look on Cora’s face: bedrock certainty, accompanied by an unhealthy amount of righteous fury.

No. Cora would not have given up.

Perhaps—

No.

Dee refused to even let herself think the words.

But they rolled around in her brain until she typed them out.

You don’t think, she texted, that Cora did something. Interfered somehow. And the Daemon got angry.

James’s response took a good minute to come and that was enough to make Dee jittery with nerves.

maybe.

Her lips formed a silent curse and she picked up her pencil and shoved her phone beneath a stack of graph paper. She couldn’t think about this right now. Cora was strong-willed; she was independent; if she was going to do something stupid, it would take more than the likes of Dee or James to stop her.

Another thought occurred to her—one so horrible that Dee immediately reached for her phone again.

How angry do you think the Daemon would be if we interfered?

Another long pause; another frightful minute of her teacher droning on about x-coordinates. The sound of the rain on the windows almost drowned him out and he was having to speak more loudly.

U saw him after Cal died, came James’s reply.

And abruptly, an old memory came back to her. A party in the Grover dorm, a handful of pretzels, and a very drunk girl with a prosthetic arm saying, They won’t kill people. Not can’t, but won’t. My demon, she said that it’s too much trouble for what they get out of it.

Not can’t—won’t.

Dee texted James one last time before jamming her phone back into her bag.