I noticed that his hands were shaking, and I had to fight off a ridiculous urge to throw my arms around him and assure him that everything would be all right. I glanced nervously at the ceiling, then back at Adam.
“Do you think Dom will be all right alone while you drive us back to the apartment?”
Andy interrupted before Adam could answer. “I’ll call a cab. And I’m going back to my apartment. Der Jäger’s out of the way, at least for now, and I want to take advantage of the reprieve.”
I frowned. “Yeah, but you were staying with me because of Raphael, not Der Jäger.”
Andy’s face took on a grim set. “I’m not going to spend the rest of my life in hiding. I’m a lot stronger now and I can take care of myself.”
“Andy—”
“Are you forgetting our conversation earlier today?”
The words hit me like a slap in the face. I guess I sort of had allowed myself to forget. If our positions had been reversed, I don’t think I’d have much wanted to go home with me, either.
“I understand why you did it,” Andy said, “but that doesn’t mean I forgive you.”
And then he, too, left in anger. Once again, my eyes started burning. I hate crying, and I do it as little as possible. But right now, I wanted nothing so much as to bury my head against someone’s shoulder and bawl my eyes out.
I jumped when Adam gave me a pat on the back. “Come on,” he said. “Have a seat and I’ll get you that drink.”
“I should get home,” I said hoarsely, but when he gave me a little push toward the couch, I went.
Adam disappeared into the kitchen. Moments later, I heard the distinctive whine of an espresso machine. Not the kind of drink I’d been expecting, but probably better in the long run. I like some of the fruity, froo-froo drinks where you can’t taste the alcohol, and I can choke down a rum and Coke in an emergency, but I’d expected him to give me some kind of manly-man drink like Scotch on the rocks. I felt miserable enough that I’d have forced it down, but I wouldn’t have liked it.
He returned shortly with two steaming mugs. The aromatic, slightly bitter scent of espresso blended with the sweet scent of hazelnut. He put the two mugs down, and I saw that mine was heavily creamed while his was black. I wrapped both hands around the mug and inhaled deeply.
“Hazelnut espresso, eh?” I said. “I didn’t know there was such a thing.”
He smiled as he picked up his own mug. “There isn’t. Your cup’s heavily spiked with Frangelico. I know you’re not really fond of hard liquor, but that stuff ought to be sweet enough to be drinkable.”
I blinked at him. “You know my taste in drinks?”
He took a sip of his coffee. “I know just about everything Adam…er, my demon knows about you. He almost never shuts me out.”
I sipped my own coffee. He was right—the liqueur was so sweet, and the espresso so strong, that I barely tasted the alcohol. “This is really good.”
“Thanks. But drink it slow. It’ll sneak up on you if you let it.”
For maybe five minutes, we sat together on the couch in companionable silence, sipping our coffees. I might not taste the alcohol much, but I definitely felt its mellowing effects. I wondered just how much Frangelico he’d put in my cup, then decided I didn’t want to know.
“Don’t you have some questions you’d like to ask me while my demon’s not around?” Adam asked.
Usually, I managed to squelch my curiosity about Adam and anything demon. But either I was desperately in need of the illusion of friendship, or the liqueur had mellowed me more than I realized, because just this once, I gave in to temptation.
“Yeah. I guess I do, if you don’t mind talking.”
He settled more comfortably into the couch. “Not at all. I’ve got about a twenty-four-hour sabbatical. I’d like to take advantage of it.”
“Do you want him back?” I blurted before I could think better of it.
Adam smiled. “Yeah, I want him back. We make a pretty good team.”
“So you actually like him?” I sounded incredulous, even to my own ears.
Adam stared into his cup, swirling the remains around absently. “I’ve known him a lot longer, and I know him a lot better, than you. I don’t always agree with his methods, and I know his people skills could use work at times, but he’s a really good guy. So yeah, I like him.”
“Even though he almost never shuts you out? Which, by the way, is not the same thing as never.”
He shrugged. “He can be a horse’s ass sometimes. But then, so can I. The only time he’s shut me out for any significant length of time was when you told Dominic that Saul wasn’t dead.”
I winced. That had not been one of my most diplomatic moments. As far as most humans knew, demons died when they were exorcized. So when I performed the exorcism on Dominic—whose demon, Saul, had gotten a really bum rap—Dominic had mourned him as dead. Because it was against demon law to tell him the truth, neither Adam nor Saul had told him that exorcism would merely send Saul back to the Demon Realm, not kill him. I’d blurted it out at an inopportune moment, and had caused terrible strife in their relationship.
Adam had made Dom take the whip to him that night in penance, and it hadn’t been for anything like pleasure. Worse, Adam had refused to heal the wounds.
“I told him he was being a dickhead,” Adam continued, “and that he should just heal.” I must have looked horrified, because he hastened to reassure me. “I didn’t feel a thing. He was punishing himself, not me. Anyway, he wanted to wallow and he didn’t want to hear my opinion, so he shut me out until you brought him to his senses.”
There wasn’t much left in my cup, and what was there was lukewarm at best, but I took a sip anyway.
“Did you know Saul wasn’t dead?”
The corner of Adam’s mouth tightened just a fraction. “No. Adam’s let slip a few details here and there that I’m not supposed to know, but that wasn’t one of them. I probably would have been angry at him myself if he weren’t feeling so bad about Dom already.” He ran his thumb around the rim of his cup and sighed. “Maybe I was mad at him, and that’s why he shut me out. But he’s too loyal to Lugh to break demon law, and I understand that about him and accept it.”
“What was it like? Being shut out?”
He leaned forward to put his cup on the coffee table, but I think it was more to avoid meeting my gaze than anything. “It wasn’t fun.” He rubbed his hands together. “It was kind of like sitting at the bottom of a very dark, very deep oubliette. If he hadn’t popped in every once in a while to reassure me he hadn’t forgotten I was there…” He shivered. “I can see how your brother might have had trouble returning to himself if Raphael did that to him for long stretches of time.”
I shook my head. “And yet you still want him back?”
He banished the troubled look on his face. “He shut me out for maybe twelve hours, tops. And even when I was shut out, he made sure I knew it was temporary. In the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t really a big deal.”
Not to him, maybe. To me, it sounded like hell on earth. I sighed. “I don’t suppose I’ll ever understand.” To be so completely under someone else’s control…I had a hard time dealing with Lugh’s control over my dreams. I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to be so helpless twenty-four hours a day, knowing it was for the rest of my life. I couldn’t imagine being willing to submit to that.
Adam shrugged. “Maybe not. But then, I knew for almost my entire life that I was going to host a demon one day, and Adam and I are extremely compatible. It all feels very…comfortable to me.”
I suppressed a shudder. “So you don’t mind when he uses your body to torture people? Or to kill them? Or, hell, to hurt Dominic?”
“He doesn’t do anything to Dom that Dom doesn’t want him to do. Dom was into that stuff even before he became a host.”
He was evading the important part of my question, but I thought that was answer enough in itself. He might put up a protest about his demon’s methods occasionally, but the protest was only skin deep. “What about you?” I asked him.