“I suppose. Ahad wants me to keep him informed of what the Arameri are doing.” Then I remembered. “Of course, you’re Ahad’s boss, so…”
“You may stay.” His gaze was intent, lacking none of its old power despite his mortal condition. “And you should stay, to be near the mortals you love.”
I frowned at him. His eyes flicked away from mine. “Their lives are too brief,” he added. “One should not take that time for granted.”
He meant Glee’s mother. And perhaps the first Shahar Arameri, too. He had loved her despite her obsessive, destructive madness.
“How do you feel about the Arameri dumping you?” I asked, a bit nastily. I didn’t have the energy for real nastiness. I was just trying to change the subject.
I heard the creak of leather and the rasp of hair as he shrugged. “They are mortal.”
“No tears shed, hmm?” I sighed, lying back on the stone and stretching my arms above my head. “The whole world will follow them, you know, and turn away from you. It’s already happening. Maybe they’ll keep calling it the Bright, but it’ll really be the Twilight.”
“Or the Dawn.”
I blinked. Something I hadn’t considered. That made me sit up on one elbow and narrow my eyes at him. He stood the way he always had: legs apart, arms folded, motionless. Same old Dayfather, even in mortal flesh. He did not change.
Except.
“Why did you allow Glee Shoth to live?” I asked.
“For the same reason I allowed her mother to live.”
I shook my head in confusion. “Oree Shoth? Why would you have killed her?” I scowled. “She wouldn’t put up with your shit, is that it?”
If I hadn’t been watching him in the glass, I would never have believed what I saw. He smiled. “She wouldn’t, no. But that wasn’t what I meant. She was also a demon.”
This rendered me speechless. In the silence that fell, Itempas finally turned to me. I flinched in shock, even though he looked the same as the last time I’d seen him, apart from the hair and the clothes. And yet something about him—something I could not define—was different.
“Do you plan to kill Remath Arameri and her children?” he asked.
I stiffened. He knew. I said nothing, and he nodded, point made.
Suddenly I was full of nervous tension. I got to my feet, shoving En into a pocket. The Altar was too small for real pacing, but I tried anyway, walking over to him—and then I stopped, seeing my own reflection beside his in the glass. He turned, too, following my gaze, and we looked at ourselves. Me, short and wiry and defensive and confused. I had developed a slouch in my manifest maturity, mostly because I did not like being so tall. Him: big and powerful and elegant, as he had always been. Yet his eyes were so full of knowing and yearning that almost, almost, I wanted him to be my father again.
Almost, almost, I forgave him.
But that could not be, either. I hunched and looked away. Itempas lowered his eyes, and a long, solid silence formed in the enclosed space.
“Tell Glee to come back and get you,” I said at last, annoyed. “I’ve said all I’m going to say.”
“Glee is mortal, and I have no magic. We cannot speak as gods do; we must use words. And actions.”
I frowned. “What, then, you’re staying here?”
“And traveling with you to the new palace, yes.”
“Yeine will be here, too.” At this I clenched my fists and resumed pacing, in tight angry arcs. “Oh, but you must know that. You came here for her.” The two of them, entwined, his lips on the nape of her neck. I forced this image from my mind.
“No. I came for you.”
Words. Actions.
Both meaningless. They should not have made my throat clench the way they did. I fought them with anger, glaring at his back. “I could call Naha. I could ask him to kill you over and over, until you beg to truly die.” And because I was a brat, I added, “He’ll do it, too, for me.”
“Is that truly what you wish?”
“Yes! I’d do it myself if I could!”
To my surprise, Itempas pivoted and came toward me, opening his coat. When he reached into one of the inner-breast pockets, I tensed, ready to fight. He pulled out a sheathed dagger, and I grabbed for En. But then he handed the dagger to me, hilt-first. It was a small, light thing, I found when I took it; a child’s weapon, in those parts of the world where mortals gave their children sharp toys. Not altogether different from the dagger I’d used to damage Shahar’s innocence, ten years before—except this dagger was strapped securely into the leather sheath, held in place by a loop about the guardpiece. No one would be able to draw this blade by accident.
As I turned the thing in my fingers, wondering why in his own name Itempas had given it to me, my nose caught the faint whiff of old, dried blood.
“A gift from Glee,” he said. “To me. If death ever becomes preferable to living.”
I knew what it was, then. The gift of mortality, Enefa had called it. Glee’s blood was on the knife—her terrifying, poisonous demon blood. She had given Itempas a way out of his imprisonment, if he ever found the courage to take it.
My hand clenched convulsively around the knife’s hilt. “If you ever use this, the mortal realm will die.”
“Yes.”
“Glee will die.”
“If she hasn’t already died by then, yes.”
“Why would she give this to you?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at him. He wasn’t being deliberately obtuse. He must have asked her. Either he hadn’t believed her answer, or—more likely, given how much she’d taken after him—she hadn’t bothered to answer. And he had accepted her silence.
Then he knelt before me, flicking his coat behind himself in the process, so that it spread out gracefully along the white stone floor. He lifted his head, too, partly because he was an arrogant son of a demon and partly to give me easy access to his chest and throat. Such a handsome, proud offering.
“Bastard,” I said, clenching my fist around the knife hilt. Death. I held the death of the universe in my fist. “Arrogant, selfish, evil bastard.”
Itempas merely waited. The knife was small, but I could angle it just so, get it between the ribs easily to prick his heart. Hells, if Oree Shoth had been a demon, too, then her daughter was more than half god. Even a scratch tainted with her blood might do the trick.
I unfastened the loop, but my fingers were shaking. When I took the hilt in my hand to draw it, I couldn’t. My hands just wouldn’t move. Eventually I let them—and the dagger—drop to my sides.
“If you want me to die—” he began.
“Shut up,” I whispered. “Shut up, gods damn you. I hate you.”
“If you hate me—”
“Shut up!” He fell silent, and I cursed and threw the dagger to the floor between us. The sound of leather on daystone made an echoing crack from the chamber’s walls. I had begun to cry. I raked my hands through my hair. “Just shut up, all right? Gods, you’re so insufferable! You can’t make me choose something like that! I’ll hate you if I damn well please!”
“All right.” His voice was soft, soothing. Against my will, I remembered times—rare but precious—when we had sat together in his placid realm, watching time dance. I had always been conscious of the fact that he and I would never be friends. Lovers was out of the question. But father and son? That much we could do.
“All right, Sieh,” he said now, so gently. He did not change. “Hate me if you like.”
The urge to love him was so powerful that I shook with it.
I turned and stormed over to the stair entrance, trotting down the steps. When I looked up, just before my head passed beyond the floor’s threshold, I saw Itempas watching me. He had not picked up the knife. He had, however, changed: his face was wet with tears.