The frown on his wizened little face told her what he thought of the “elves” joke. “It’s confidence,” he said. “I know you don’t feel entirely comfortable with us. With what we do. But you have to remember, it is how we stay alive.”

“I’m not trying to kill anyone. I think it’s fair to ask you to exercise a little restraint, don’t you?”

“There’s another family.”

“What?”

“Another family. I mean, some of us have always had loyalties to other families. Not all of us in this city or even this country belonged to the Accuser.”

She nodded. He’d touched on this subject before, but she hadn’t paid much attention. It was enough to know several thousand demons in the city belonged to her. What the others did didn’t matter much, at least that’s what she’d thought.

Apparently she was wrong. “Another family is forming in the city. Some of yours…they’re uncomfortable. They don’t like your new way of doing things.”

“They’d rather be tortured and beaten?”

Rocturnus nodded. “And be able to live the way they always have.”

“But they aren’t giving it a chance!” She stood up—so much for sitting down—and started pacing, then realized she was still wearing her coat and scarf. No wonder she felt so warm.

“They don’t think you can protect them,” Rocturnus said. “They think you didn’t want us to begin with, and now you’re trying to starve us and you don’t care about the explosions.”

“That’s not true, you know it isn’t true. I do care. I went to jail last night for you guys; if I didn’t care I wouldn’t have bothered to go in that house and—”

“I know that.”

“Have you told them?”

He nodded.

“But they don’t believe you.”

“It isn’t all of them,” he said. “It’s not even a lot of them…yet. But enough to make me worry. They just—they don’t think you’re strong enough.”

She brushed aside the little voice in her head warning they they might be right. “I want to help them!”

“They want to be ruled, not helped. It’s the way demons are.” She raised an eyebrow and he amended, “It’s the way Yezer Ha-Ra are. The big ones, they have their own needs. They still want a strong leader though.”

She never thought she’d live to see the day when she was rejected by a bunch of little demons who fed on human anger and misery. By rights they should be drawn to her like flies to…well, like flies to just about anything. She’d never heard of a discerning fly.

They should be drawn to her like she was drawn to the bottle of vodka in her liquor cabinet. It sloshed into her glass, cracking the ice sticking to the bottom, turning a lovely jewel pink when she poured cranberry juice over it and added a splash of Rose’s lime. A tropical drink for a very cold and frosty night. Hey, something should be warm and tropical. Her insides certainly weren’t.

Half the drink was gone before she felt ready to talk again. “So who started this other family?”

“What do you mean?”

“Who started it? Who’s in charge? Is it one of you guys or is everyone joining a different Meegra or what?”

From the way his mouth twisted she almost expected him to say the others were joining Greyson’s Meegra. But that wasn’t possible, she knew it. Greyson wouldn’t betray her like that.

At least she thought he wouldn’t.

Shoving that disturbing little doubt out of her mind, she repeated the question. “Who’s in charge, Roc? Come on, if I’m going to be in direct competition with someone I’d like to know who it is.”

“I don’t know,” he said finally. “They wouldn’t tell me.”

“Can’t you—wait, what do you mean they wouldn’t tell you? Who wouldn’t tell you, the ones who left or the ones who’re still with me?”

He looked at his hands.

“Okay, so my demons—the ones staying with me—are now refusing to tell you where the demons who are no longer with me are going?”

“That’s the gist of it, yes.”

“Fuck.” She stood up and held out her hand. “Okay, then. Let’s go see them.”

“Now? They won’t be there.”

“Then I’ll call them there.” Why this was suddenly so important she didn’t know. Hadn’t she spent half the day wanting to be rid of the little demons, to be herself again? To come down to it, hadn’t she spent most of the last three months wishing this whole leader-of-the-personal-demon-pack thing hadn’t happened? As much as she liked Roc, being pulled in two directions like this wasn’t exactly comfortable.

But now she was hopping mad, fighting mad. It wasn’t that they were leaving, it was that they weren’t even telling her where they were going. That anger burned in her chest, burned through her entire body. If they wanted to leave, that was fine. But to not tell her where they were going, to treat her so disrespectfully…

It wasn’t until she’d closed her eyes and reached with her mind for the high-ceilinged room in the sky where they lived that she realized she was thinking exactly the way Greyson kept telling her she should think.

Chapter 5

She had no idea what to say.

Faced with a sea of little bald heads in a confusing Impressionistic variety of colors and squinty lash-less eyes, she started to regret her impulse. It would have been better to let it go. It would have been better to let the ones who didn’t want to stay with her just leave. If they weren’t even interested in trying things her way, in giving being a little less vicious a chance, they should go.

But the people…

And that was why. She couldn’t let them all just leave her and move on. Not when she’d spent so much time formulating a plan. Not when she was able to sleep easier at night knowing the humans her demons affected slept a little easier as well, because her first rule had been no more suicides, no more abuse. They could make their people miserable, but they were not to harm others.

Even that made her uncomfortable. But she couldn’t let the Yezer starve either.

“I called you here because I know some of you are leaving,” she said finally. “And going to a different house.”

The crowd shifted uneasily. She glanced at Roc, but his expression was unreadable. She hated not being able to use her gifts with demons. Having spent her early life getting hunches about people and then her entire life beyond her teen years being able to simply open up and know all sorts of things about what a person was feeling or thinking or doing, she felt disarmed these days. Naked, and not in a good hot-demon-in-bed kind of way, but in a showing-up-to-work-undressed-and-being-laughed-at way.

“I want to reassure all of you that I’m doing everything I can to stop the…ah…the attacks on you. I will find out who’s doing it, and I will make sure they’re punished.”

A ripple of interest moved through the crowd, and her spirits rose a little. “It’s happening in other Meegras too. Not just to you.”

“So if the others can’t protect their rubendas, how are you going to protect us? You’re not even a demon.”

“Yes, when are you going to do the ritual?”

The words echoed in the cavernous space for a moment, bouncing off the wooden cabinetlike doors of their bedrooms and the incredibly high ceiling. Normally this house felt oddly peaceful, a happy place despite the human despair its inhabitants fed on. But now…the demons were angry. With her. With the Accuser for having bound them to her. At the unseen, unknown killer stalking them.

“We’re not here to discuss that,” she said, then, remembering what Roc had said, “I didn’t come here to be questioned. I give my orders and you follow them.”

A few of them seemed to settle down, either at her strong tone or the words themselves. But unrest still hovered in the air.

“Do you doubt I have the power to protect you? Is that why you’re going somewhere else?”

Murmurs. Mutterings. But none spoke up.

“I’m connected to you. You’re connected to me.” Her face reddened. She felt like a bad actor in a melodrama. But Rocturnus nodded slightly beside her and the numerous eyes glinting in the white light from the ceiling were trained on her. Bad melodrama was just the sort of thing they liked, along with sugary snacks and twee home decor. They were like vicious little old ladies in that way. “Any more of you leave and you’ll all be—punished. Punished severely.”