“I didn’t expect them to do that much damage.” He furrowed his brow, the dark slashes of eyebrows pulled into a V. “I expected more from you. I definitely didn’t expect you to get hurt. You’re better than that. At least you always have been. You’re not losing your touch, surely?”

“Would you lose interest in me then? If I killed a few fewer demons?” I asked.

“If you were a little less lethal, a little less demoni cally destructive in your habits? Perhaps my interest would fade. It’s an interesting question. I’ll have to think on it. Now . . . honey in your tea or not?” he asked pleasantly.

Sighing, I leaned back very carefully and answered, “Four teaspoons of sugar and four of honey. And what about the other demons? Some of them were higher level. Why would they work for you?”

“Living life on the diabetic edge, are we?” he said with humor as he started on the tea. “There is high-level and then there’s me. You should keep that in mind. Now enjoy your diabetes.”

“I will. Life is short. I doubt I need to tell you that, Solomon.” I was amused too; it seemed to confuse him, but he wouldn’t have admitted it. I’d confused Solomon for years now. It could be one of the reasons he hadn’t tried to kill me . . . at least personally. Solomon had been around a long time. Things that confused him, interested him, confounded his devil ass, were bound to be few and far between.

Which was what had kept him focused on me. At least until now, although he could be telling the truth. He could’ve thought we were up to the fight last night, and if we hadn’t been so overly confident, maybe we would have been. I’d not been so sloppy since I could remember. I disgusted myself, but there was a time and a place for self-recrimination, and while facing a demon was not it.

“No, you do not have to tell me about the shortness of life.” Stirring the honey into my cup, he added casually, “I doubt you have to tell your friends Griffin and Zeke so either.”

“Not the way to get on my good side,” I said flatly.

The relationship between Solomon and me was complex . . . if complex grew up and developed a multiple personality.

He’d been in Vegas thirteen years to my ten, from what information I could gather, and had shown up at my place three years ago. I’d known he was a demon the second I saw him. Too handsome, too smooth, too rock star, movie star, too everything. And he couldn’t have been more perfectly designed to appeal to me physically. Dark hair, the shadowed eyes, the warmly wicked smile. Leo from a different time . . . a wilder time. I did have a type and demons were nothing if not good at sizing up someone’s type. But there was a difference between Leo and Solomon. Leo had been a chaos of blackness, rapids over the rocks, with serious, serious father issues. Solomon’s darkness was the opposite—the glass-smooth surface of a river with an undertow that would pull you in and drown you in seconds.

I had known that Leo had a spark of light in him. Maybe I exaggerated when I thought goodness . . . maybe it was more a spark of reason. As for demons, did they have glimmers of good? They were once angels. Did they have the occasional doubt about what they did? And just what was it they did do? Kill, okay. Any sociopath alive could explain why they did that—simply because they wanted to. But bargaining for souls? I was sure plenty of souls ended up “downtown” anyway. Why would they need more?

“What do you do with the souls you bargain for?” I asked, changing the subject to something other than Zeke and Griffin. If I hadn’t, I’d have to shoot Solomon, although half the blame was mine, and that wasn’t the most delicate way of getting information out of someone. It tended to cut down on their cooperation fairly quickly.

“We eat them.” He sat opposite me and set the mug before me. He leaned back in his chair and linked fingers across the dark gray shirt covering his stomach. “Don’t look so surprised. We have to get energy from somewhere. Lucifer is but a fallen angel himself. He can’t feed us the way the angels are fed by the Glory and the Grace.” He almost had a touch of respect as he said the last, still remembering how it had felt. “And some of us require much more energy than those lower demons you kill so easily”—he paused, obviously considering the night before—“usually with ease, at any rate.”

“So all demons aren’t created equal?” That was interesting—with more power came more need.

“Hardly. The hierarchies that existed above exist below. Those mud- and slime-colored demons that are so prevalent were the lowest of angels. Former messengers. If you’d ripped off their wings, they may as well have been human. Pigeons,” he snorted in disdain. “Before the Rebellion came, they might as well have been flying Heaven’s Hallmark cards here and there. They have none of our glory.”

I guessed in some higher angels’ eyes that hanging around with humans was their version of slumming it. But if you were a fallen angel, it became automatic. Ironic. Nope. More like karmic. I drank the tea. If Solomon were going to try to kill me, poisoned honey would not be his weapon of choice.

So Solomon had been a high-and-mighty angel in his day. It figured. He was simply too arrogant to have been anything else. “A soul is just a snack, then.” After all that’s said and done, it was sad to have that luminous quality ending up as something akin to a Happy Meal. It was a great pity for those who didn’t know the value of what lived in them. “At least there’s plenty to go around. Billions of humans, but not so many demons. Exactly how many of you guys are there anyway?”

“Not enough, and we can’t grow. God can create, but Lucifer cannot.” The gray eyes were grim—the ashes of a crusader ’s loss. “There’s a war on. A cold war at the moment, but still a war. Surely you knew that. I know a good little girl like you went to Sunday School.”

“Actually I had a problem with shellfish being an abomination.” The tea was good, hot and sweet. I smiled and tapped a nail on the table. “I do love my oyster shooters. Hard to respect a god who won’t let me have that.”

“You’re Jewish?” he asked, momentarily distracted.

“No, Solomon, just a smart-ass.” I drank more of the tea. It was soothing. I’d had a hard night. I could use a little soothing.

“As if that’s news to me,” he said with an almost-indulgent smile. “So, what do you know about the Light of Life?”

Ah. Not a routine seduction visit. Hun the pervert had sold me out or else Solomon had followed another rumor. Solomon was here for a reason far from sex and a very good reason it was too. The Light of Life. And why not? Solomon had to be one of Below’s top players. Who better to send looking? And as he said, there was a war on. Not an out-and-out war. More of a cold war. No angels storming Hell, no demons assaulting Heaven. Not yet. The demons simply didn’t have the numbers, and if you didn’t have that, then you needed some other edge. Such as the Light.

“I know you’re nowhere near that to me yet.” I tilted my gaze over the mug’s edge. “Not the light of my life. Not my reason for being. Not my pookie-bear. But you keep trying, Solomon. Maybe one day you’ll get there.”

He stood in a motion so smooth and fast he put a cheetah to shame. Slamming both hands down on the table, he demanded darkly, “You’ve been sniffing around. Don’t think I don’t see that. Don’t for an instant think I don’t know. Now, tell me about the Light.”

I nodded at his right hand, where my second combat knife had just been embedded through the flesh and bone into the table beneath it. This time it was the other way around—a demon underestimated me. “I know a Snoopy Band-Aid should take care of that.” I also knew the hand was quicker than the human eye. And demons were quicker than that, but not in this case. He appeared sincerely surprised. Why, I wasn’t sure. If I had one knife in my one boot for his chest, what did he think I had in the other one? Tickets to Spamalot?