Three more days before Xan had to report to Spaeth. Stress should be gnawing at her. Spaeth would demand answers. She needed information to free her sister and niece, though if she were honest, she doubted Spaeth’s word. He’d find a way to exploit her some more, but all Xan needed was to know where he was holding her family.

Three days. She didn’t know if she’d survive the boredom.

With nothing to do the last two days, she’d recited the alphabet, spelled out her thoughts for the practice, sung songs, whatever it took to pass the time. Quution’s back was to her, and energy wards halved the dusty library. She’d slept on the floor—right next to the line of energy preventing her from crossing to him. The buzz of Quution’s energy over her skin had nothing to do with her reasoning.

Each time she crept closer to his wards, his shoulders tightened. He was aware of her. Painfully.

If the line of demarcation weren’t also imbued with Stryke’s energy, she could’ve strolled across it and sat in Quution’s lap.

She’d been here long enough to study the barrier in detail. She could get through it, but Quution hadn’t left the library. Once a day, the demon brothers would take her to a cave with a pool of water that amazingly didn’t smell like a brackish lagoon. Taking a pleasant dip with Quution wasn’t an option, but she lingered as long as their patience allowed, then pushed it even further. She liked the way Quution started pacing and clearing his throat and Stryke’s furtive glances toward him. He was worried about Quution’s feelings for her.

Currently, she perched on the little desk she used to read on. He’d taken away many of the other pieces of furniture on her side of the barrier and cleared off the shelves. When she’d asked for a book to read, he’d asked, “Who are you reporting to?”

The last two days had provided her with copious amounts of time to think about Xera. Had Xera been exposed to Spaeth enough to detect his weakness and capitalize on it yet? Perhaps her niece’s powers were developing and she could see a missing layer Xera hadn’t yet.

Either way, they’d been Spaeth’s prisoners for months and Xan was beginning to think she’d failed Xera. A good two hundred and twenty years older than Xera, Xan had ignored Mama’s taunts that Xera was the powerful daughter she’d always wanted. Instead, she had taken her role as older sister seriously and passed on all the secrets of their purple kind.

The first rule: the longer she was exposed to a target, the higher the chance of success. Spaeth could stick Xera in a hole in the wall and chant every spell in the book, but after all this time, Xera should’ve been able to divine a way out.

Xan was caught between debilitating anxiety that Spaeth was hurting the females every chance he got and ignorant hopefulness that Xera had escaped with Xoda and Spaeth was bluffing.

She believed in Xera’s power. Their mama had done what she could to mold Xera’s thinking to her own bloody doctrine, citing Xan as the failure that shouldn’t have been allowed to survive. But Xan had refused to let Xera think she was nothing but a pawn for Mama to use. And when Mama had been ready to farm Xera out to the highest bidder, Xan had put a stop to it. Permanently. Then she’d taken over Xera’s training.

Mama had assumed Xan wasn’t strong enough to best her. It was why Xan had been shoved out of the nest. You ask too many questions. Your powers are stunted. You’re useless. Useless. Deep down, she’d known it was because she’d resisted Mama’s efforts to manipulate her. Mama had probably found a second demon to procreate with just to birth another child she could use.

Xan’s mind churned through scenarios until she could combust from insanity.

“Brimstone and ashes, Quution, can I just get one fucking book?” A little more tact might be required, but he should know by now that she wasn’t spilling her guts to him. So why make her suffer?

“Who are you reporting to?”

So that was how he was going to play it. She made a request—albeit a bitchy one—and he returned with the same old question.

“I guess I’ll just chat then.” After two days stuck in her own mind with a sexy, frustrating demon only feet away, she could converse with the wind. “Stryke, huh? Did he know about you? You know, I had a sister I didn’t know about.”

Xan pressed her lips together. She hadn’t meant to go there. But she could talk about Xera. Quution wouldn’t make the connection. He’d just assume her sister was like her and off doing spy stuff.

Besides, it got Quution to turn his head. He might even be able to see her out of the corner of his eye.

“Mama was a… She was ambitious. Like demon-y ambitious. When it was clear I was incompatible with her outlook on life”—like refusing to allow Mama to sell her by the hour—“she kicked me out and had another kid. Thankfully, it took a while for her to conceive again.”

Quution had gone back to staring at the scroll in front of him, but his shoulders weren’t as tense as before. He was thinking about what she’d said.

“I should’ve seen it coming.” Xan lost herself to those days. Of turning around and spotting eyes the color of an aged merlot. “Mama sent my little sister to spy on me. Jealousy, I suspect. It gets a lot of my kind. We only have female babies, you know.”

He turned his head again. The rich orange of his horns peeked out above his hairline. No, he hadn’t known.

“There’s like this rivalry built into my breed of demon,” she explained. “It’s why you don’t see many of us.” That, and other demons killed them on sight before they could become victims. “Only female births, and then the constant fear of being used by our kin. It makes them trigger-happy.”

“Them?”

She would’ve grinned, but he’d taken her by surprise. A question that wasn’t Who do you report to? But as for clarifying what he’d asked, her words caught in her throat.

She’d just wanted a family. A home. Someone to watch her back while she did the same for them.

“I… I’m not as bloodthirsty, I guess. I don’t know who my sire was, but I assume I get it from him. Mama killed her mama. Mama had no sisters—she’d killed any that survived. I saw the idiocy of the trend.” Her laugh lacked all humor. “I didn’t miss the irony when I had to kill Mama.”

His chair squeaked as he swiveled around. “You killed your own mother?”

If his tone had been full of censure, she might have shut down the conversation and gone back to mind-numbing boredom. “It was necessary.”

“The sister you didn’t know about.”

“Mm.” She didn’t dare delve into the circumstances behind the fatal fight with Mama. Quution was smart enough to put together that if she’d kill to protect her sister, she was probably protecting her sister now. “I have a niece, too.”

“There are three of you?”

“Oh, they’re not like me.” The statement rolled out so fast, Xan blinked. Sure, Xera could be a cold-hearted bitch, but that was part of Underworld Survival 101. “Xera’s half-breed sire—did I say Xera? I meant Xoda. Her sire had more brawn than brains, I guess, from what Xera said. We joke that Xoda will only be able to give people the dream about going to work with no pants on.” She smiled at the beat of relief that went through her. She always enjoyed talking about her niece, and she’d missed it. Without Xera around, there was no Xoda.

A smile touched Quution’s lips, but his gaze was introspective. “Xoda—sister or niece?”

“Niece. Xera is my sister.”

“Does Xera manipulate fear?”

Xan crossed her legs where she sat on top of her desk. This was a distinction she had to make. “We can manipulate all emotions. Some of my kind”—all the rest—“can sense them all and bend them to their will. Not telepathy, exactly. We can’t read minds. Or speak into them. But we can influence emotions. My specialty is fear.”

There. She’d answered without confirming that Xera could warp happiness, worry, anger…anything.

His expression hardened. “And that thing with me?”

“That thing with you came from your imagination. I created something like a dream state from the fantasy in your mind. We all dream of what life would be like if ‘insert fear here’ weren’t an issue.”

“But you were in it.”

She cocked a brow. “I tried looking like that host you used and you claimed I was pale and must be ill, remember?”

His scowl was laughable. “How did I cook for you?”

“Weaknesses are malleable. You feared I wouldn’t eat, so I fed your imagination that you were cooking for me.”

“But we ate. It was a steak.”

“That hunk of steak was candy beetles.” She shook her head. He wasn’t getting it. “The more tangible a hallucination, the better. When a fear demon starts manipulating a dream, the target thinks the fear is being resolved, and their mind gets euphoric and feeds the manipulator the information she needs. It’s pure relief for you, thus giving me more power and making the outcome more believable.”

His jaw dropped, but in his eyes he was horrified. “That’s an astonishing power.”

Her back went ramrod straight. “And wielding energy so it can imprison me with nothing more than a thought isn’t?”

“It wasn’t a criticism. There are so many layers to what you’re capable of, it’s mind-boggling.”

She did a little wiggle that was a lot like preening. No one had complimented her powers. Ever. She was too much of a halfling to her own kind, and too threatening to the rest of demonkind—and avoided at all costs. “Not all of us can induce a hallucination.” She wasn’t a boaster—usually. Today, apparently she was. “Nor can we all hold them for long periods of time.” Like I did with you.

Maybe his own energy had added fuel to her flame? Could that even happen? It wasn’t like they were mates or anything.

“So you’re powerful.” He said it so simply, like it confirmed what he’d been thinking.

“I’ve worked hard to hone my abilities.” Her sister was powerful. That Spaeth had bested her…

He leaned forward in his chair, his elbows on his legs. “You could’ve kept me imprisoned in my chamber with nothing but a thought.”

She swept her hand from one end of the room to the other, indicating the energy shield. “Isn’t that what you’re doing?”

He straightened abruptly like she’d affronted him. Then his brows dropped. “Most of our powers have a significant mental component, I guess.”

“Why do you want to make it so we can’t ever visit the human realm?”

His lilac eyes shuttered. “What do demons usually do when they’re up there?”

“They don’t wreak as much havoc as you think.”

“Why are you in Marcus?” Arrogance stained his speech. “It’s to work for your full-blooded master.”

Her indignant gasp echoed through the library chamber. Marcus had nothing to do with Spaeth. “I guess you don’t know as much as you think you do.”

While his brow dropped as he contemplated what she meant, she slid off the desktop and stomped to the corner she’d been sleeping in.

He thought she was nothing more than an unthinking minion. Fine. He could do all the thinking without her. And when he fell asleep, she’d traipse through his wards and leave.

Why’d she quit talking? She’d never quit bugging him before. Must be sensitive about the master comment. The half-breeds on the Circle were overwhelmingly smug about their status and had formed a posse of their own, minus Xan.

She had to be working with someone. She didn’t have servants of her own, unless it was the mysterious sister and niece she’d suddenly mentioned. Had Xan and her sister come up with the idea of spying on him? But if so, what was their ultimate aim?

He was more confused about Xan than before and he hated having her back to him. It was too early to bed down for the night and he dreaded another round on the hard dirt floor.

She could conjure the illusion of another plush mattress with satin sheets for them.

He spun his chair around, the squeak bouncing through the chamber. After who knew how many minutes had passed with him staring blankly at the scroll, he spun back around.

Her shapely ass faced him. The slope of her hips down to her waist was a sight worth painting and hanging on his wall. Torchlight gleamed along her smooth scalp. The image of her sucking on him rose so swiftly he slammed back in the rickety chair.

He wanted to touch her again. Feel her come against his mouth, his hand, and—

He shoved both hands through his hair and growled when two of his fake claws stabbed him, one in the cheek and one above his right eye.

Fuck, he hated this costume. It hurt.

Throughout his duress, she didn’t twitch.

He’d really upset her. Why did he care?

It was time for lunch. No, she’d eaten scavenger bugs and he’d had a submarine sandwich Stryke had brought down. His brother was becoming most proficient at bringing items into the underworld. It was beneficial since Quution couldn’t leave, and he couldn’t stomach bugs or beetles.

Though he must’ve done fine a few days ago when she’d tricked him into eating candy beetles.

No wonder she’d tasted so sweet.

“It’s time for dinner,” he said gruffly. “Want to split the remains of my sandwich?”

A scratching noise emanated from the wall by her. A line of beetles swarmed toward her head. She must be using her ability to make them flee an imaginary enemy. One fat bug skittered straight for her. She snatched it and the audible crunch gave him his answer.

She needed time. He hadn’t anticipated that she’d want to chitchat, since he’d locked her in this room and wouldn’t even give her a book. But he had liked her attempts to talk with him.

In reality, no one conversed with him in this realm. Demons spoke with him out of necessity, or when they were trying to kill him, not for conversation.

Pulling his sandwich out of the blue and white cooler, he savored the sounds of her crunching. It’d been less than ten minutes since she’d quit talking to him and he was as empty as a water bottle in the Sahara.

Chewing through his sandwich, he tasted nothing beyond a generic chalk flavor. Earlier, the food had been good. Xan had rejected sharing it then, too, but it hadn’t hit him as hard then.

His gaze landed on the stack of books he’d cleared from her half of the library. The entire stack wasn’t entirely demonic ramblings; there were a few good reads in the pile. One nightmare demon had been especially eloquent and had penned all the dreams of his human hosts. Quution had found it quite entertaining, and given Xan’s level of proficiency, she could probably read the whole thing with little trouble.

He finished his sandwich and crinkled the wrapping in his hand. As he crossed his half of the library, he wedged the bundle onto the torch. The blast of burning paper dwindled to the normal brimstone scent of the realm.

No more scavenger beetles propelled out of the walls. Xan must be done eating. He went to the seam his energy wards made in the middle of the room and set the book on the floor. Without a word, he pushed it through.

She glanced over her shoulder, but not at him. Her gaze touched on the book before she turned back to the wall. Disappointment rang through him.

Given what he’d done to her, why had he expected anything more?