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Chapter 7
Choices, choices, choices. Life always comes down to choices. What to wear. What to drink. What to eat. What to think. When someone tells you that within the next five minutes, you have to choose whether or not you’re going to cooperate with them, be silent, and possibly live to see another day, or not cooperate, scream your little ass off, and most certainly be fed to the wolf outside, which little piggy’s house do you think would be the best choice?
Let me put it to you like this: I am afraid of the big bad wolf.
“Nothing like a shining piece of metal to sweet talk your way into earning my full attention,” I said.
Penni smiled, but not as if she was amused. Actually, I didn’t know what she was. Happy; sad; tired; pissed—damned if I knew, but her knife seemed to have an eye for my throat regardless.
“You don’t need to keep holding that,” I said, glancing at the tip of the blade. “I already said you have my attention.”
This time, her smile was amused. “Having your attention by waiving a piece of steel in your face and making my point by driving this steel into your throat are two very different things, Sairyneleet. For obvious reasons,” she tilted her head, “I can’t do the last without raising suspicion.”
“Being back here so long already raises suspicion, doesn’t it?” I asked.
She shrugged. “We still have four minutes. As long as you keep the questions to a minimum, we can leave without any trouble.”
“If you didn’t want trouble, you shouldn’t have come here.”
Penni laughed, and it was high pitched and squeaky. Either she was nervous, or she was forcing it way too hard. “Is that a threat or a promise?” she said, and smiled wide like a cheshire. She had an awful lot of teeth for such a little thing.
“It’s a fact,” I said as nonchalantly as possible, but it didn’t come out as well as I was trying for. Her smiled had spooked me more than I thought it would, and my voice had that telltale wiggle of fear in. Shit.
“Oh, is something the matter little pussycat?” Penni pouted her lip. “Have the dogs scared you up a tree?”
When she said it, she smiled again, and my single step back turned into two pretty quickly. My nerve was shot to hell, and now, the whole world knew it. What the hell was it about her smile that sent me for the hills?
“You know Sairyn,” she began to say as she tapped the flat side of the blade against her cheek, her other arm wrapped around her tiny waist, “I really must congratulate you. It has taken me quite a while to find you after all these years. You hide unusually well for only a partial demon.”
I raised my eyebrow, but only slightly. She had been looking for me? Penni wouldn’t have been the first person, but the people who usually look for me are people I already know; had faces I could easily recall. Penni’s face was new to me.
The easiest and most obvious guess was that she came from my first master’s clan. She was Russian, had been looking for me, and had at least one werewolf at her back. The only problem with thinking that way was that I had never once seen her in all the time I had served that man. She could have been in another clan, but for her to know me, she would have had to have seen me at some point.
People don’t just know me. I’m not one of those popular demons with credentials out the ass. I have no real reputation, no particular attributes, no fortune and glories to be had. I exist—survive—as quietly and efficiently as possible. Unless I recently pissed someone off and forgot about it, I didn’t have a clue who she was, or where she came from.
“Now then,” Penni said, running the blades tip down the bow of her upper lip, “it’s time for you to listen.”
As Penni took a step towards me, I took a bigger one back. She took one more step forward, and I took another large one back. I knew I couldn’t keep it up. A wall was back there somewhere, and there was no way in hell I was jumping out the window—the teeth on the other side of the wall were bigger. I had no choice but to stand still until she was within kissing distance of me. That was when it had occurred to me that in all the time we had been back here, not a single soul had come in to use the restroom. What kinds of women were these people? Even a witch can’t help but have a bladder the size of half a cashew.
Penni snapped her finger right in my ear, making me flinch. “No one is coming through that door, Sairyneleet, so stop looking! Magic—” she dragged her nails down my cheek, and they felt prickly like needles, “—is a powerful thing. In the right amount, it can keep anyone away.”
Well, that explained that.
I stared at her for a few seconds, trying to figure out who and what she was. All I really knew for certain was what she was not. She wasn’t a werewolf—werewolves can’t do magic, and she said was using magic to keep people away from the door. A vampire would have been the next obvious choice, but those teeth…she just had too many of them. Unless cheshires had become a reality while I wasn’t looking, I was stumped.
“What do you want?” I whispered.
That seemed to be the right question, because Penni’s smile went from crazed to devious in a matter of seconds.
“That’s more like it.” She tilted her head. “I want you to do—” she leaned in and whispered into my ear, “—exactly what you are doing now.”
I blinked. “What do you mean?”
Penni poked the knife into my belly as she pushed back. The skin hadn’t broken, but I knew I would have a small hole in my shirt.
“I mean exactly as I say. You will go back, finish eating with us, and go home. Then you will tell your master nothing of my presence, and nothing of what has happened between the two of us.” She paused. “Let him keep thinking Savino has an eye for his turf. That will do just fine for now.”
I furrowed my brow. “He’s going to know something is wrong as soon as I get back, and he’ll know I’m lying before I even open my mouth. He is a vampire after all, so why do you even want me to bother trying to lie to him?”
She spoke as she waived the blade back and forth in front of her face like a metronome. I think she was actually pacing her words by it, too. “It really isn’t your business to know my reasons, Sairyn. All you need to know is that if you tell your master otherwise, I will find out, slit his throat, and fill your tub with his blood.” She stopped waiving the knife and flipped it shut. “Is that clear enough for you, or do you have more questions to waste my time with?”
A woman and her friend finally came into the restroom, then, chatting like most women do all the way until they sat down on the toilets, and started talking a little bit louder. I didn’t need to see the back of Penni’s head to know that apparently, our time was up.
