Cambion's Blood by Erin Fulmer

Author:Erin Fulmer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781648981975
Publisher: City Owl Press

15

SHAME THE DEVIL

I spent the afternoon walking the shoreline, scanning the weekend crowds for slender young women with golden hair and sullen expressions. Eve had told me she wanted to go to the beach, after all. But she didn’t show.

I didn’t harbor much more than a faint hope of finding her. Even if Rae’s claim that she didn’t have Eve in a safe house somewhere proved true, a teenager could disappear into anonymity in San Francisco all too easily. She could have gone a thousand places. She could have hopped on a plane back to New York City by now.

Or she could be lying in a ditch, slowly crumbling to dust.

No. I wouldn’t believe it. Ariel’s daughter had more resilience than that. She had street smarts, more than I had ever learned. She made it out here on her own. She’d survived for six months or more on nothing but her wits, her Presence, and whatever her father had set aside for her in human money.

Why didn’t I ask her where she’d stayed before? Why didn’t I find out if she had friends here?

I took the Muni back uptown, growing more morose with every stop. The incongruence of my encounter with Rae nagged at me. How had she resisted my Presence? That made two humans in my orbit lately who seemed immune to my powers, and the novelty was wearing off fast.

Only three possibilities occurred to me, none of which I liked much. But none of them struck me as exceptionally likely, either. I liked that even less.

The first possibility was that Rae herself was a demon. This seemed unlikely because she had a desiderata, and a strong one at that. Demons didn’t have desideratas. To have one of those, you had to have a human soul, whatever that meant. Or at least, that’s how I understood it.

Then again, Ariel had taught me most things I believed about our kind. Half a year later, with his body crumbled to dust and his Claim on me reversed, I was still discovering new lies he’d told. I put my demon Rae theory in the category of improbable but not out of the question.

The second possibility was that Rae, like me and like Tobias, was a cambion. Tobias had a desiderata, a nasty one that required more proximity to detect than your average human, but no more execrable than your average asshole. And Ariel had claimed I had one too. He certainly seemed able to read it.

I could only tell whether Rae had half-demon powers by touching her, and after today, I put low odds on that ever happening. And cambions were vanishingly rare. Or at least, that’s what Ariel had led me to believe.

I slumped in the grubby Muni seat. Once again, I couldn’t rule it out.

The third possibility was that Rae, like Sebastian, was fully human, but claimed by one of us, making her immune to the charms of other demons or cambions. I should have liked this option the best, but I didn’t, not one bit.

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