Chapter One

“Off with her head!”

I looked over my laptop screen at the man who stood in the center of the sitting room, pointing with a fine dramatic flair at a woman in the doorway.

“I demand that you punish that . . . that . . . dragon for insubordination!”

“Oh, yeah, like that’s gonna happen,” a voice muttered from the floor.

Magoth narrowed his eyes on the dog lying in a patch of sunlight, reading through a stack of near-pornographic graphic novels. “I have not given you permission to speak in my presence, demon.”

“Here’s a news flash for you—you’re not a prince anymore, so I can say what I like. Right, May?”

I was about to nod, but thought better of giving the demon in doggy form carte blanche to do as it willed. My experience with Jim might not have been great, but it had been sufficient to give me pause. “No, you can say what Aisling told you was allowable to say when she sent you to stay with us. And if I recall, the words ‘Don’t lip off to anyone, for any reason, anytime, ever’ were included in her instructions.”

Jim, whose full demon name of Effrijim was deemed too girlie by its owner to be used in anything but formal ceremonies, grinned, not an easy task considering it bore the form of a large, shaggy black Newfoundland dog. “Actually, I think she said if I pissed you off, she’d banish me to the Akasha until the baby was old enough to vote, but everyone knows doppelgangers don’t get pissy easily, so it’s all copacetic.”

“Were we in Abaddon at this moment,” Magoth told the demon, the words coming out as a growl, “you would be on your belly begging for my mercy. It would be a useless gesture—nonetheless, I would allow you to continue begging, while writhing in torment so great you would plead for destruction, until such time as I grew tired of your screams of absolute, utter, endless agony.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Jim said, turning back to its graphic novel. “Been there, done that, have the ‘My demon lord torments me for fun’ T-shirt.”

Magoth puffed himself up until I thought he was going to explode. I considered whether the cleaning bill would be worth the entertainment value to be found therein, but decided against it. “What’s the problem, Maata?” I asked instead, shifting my gaze to the woman who stood at the door, watching us with noticeable amusement in her silver eyes.

She held on to a placid expression. “Magoth—”

“Prince of Abaddon Magoth, to you, dragon,” the man in question said. “Or Lord Magoth. Or even, His Unholy Highness Magoth.”

“Magoth,” Maata repeated, “tried to get into the basement. Again.”

I raised one eyebrow at the exiled demon lord, former silent-film star, and bearer of a (literally) cursed penis as he stormed around the room in impotent rage. Being born an incredibly handsome man in possession of sultry looks that had women throwing away their better judgments (and sometimes souls) over the centuries, Magoth had no reason to adopt a form other than his natural one. Not, I noted silently to myself, that he could now if he wanted.

“You see how I am treated? This is intolerable, wife! I insist that you lesson this minion! I will not be told by a mere slave what I may or may not do! She threatened me with violence! Me! She deserves a lengthy and inventive punishment for daring to treat me in such an insupportable manner!”

“It was my fault. He used my bathroom break to get past me to the entrance of the lair,” Maata said, apology rich in her voice. “He won’t do so again.”

“It was the merest of coincidences that I was in the basement at the exact moment the slave was out of the room,” Magoth sniffed, adopting a self-righteous expression that I didn’t for one moment buy.

“You sneaked past me when I was in the bathroom,” Maata accused.

“I am a demon lord! I do not sneak!” he said, outraged.

“One,” I said, ticking it off on a finger, “you’re no longer a demon lord. At least not technically. Two, Maata is one of Gabriel’s elite guards, not a slave, and you will treat her with the respect due her. And three, I’m not your wife, so stop calling me that.”

“You’re my consort,” he insisted, his eyes narrowing on me.

“You de-consorted me when you found out you’d been kicked out of Abaddon, remember?”

“I spoke in the heat of the moment. You know full well that I have not conducted divorce proceedings. Until it pleases me to remove you from that position”—he smiled, and I thanked my stars that we weren’t in Abaddon, or I might have lost a few bits of my soul to that smile—“or until you die, you will remain my consort.”

“Thank you for that reiteration of demon lord protocol.” Inside me, deep inside my chest, the shard of the dragon heart that I bore stirred, triggered as always by any threat or strong emotion. I clamped down hard on it, practicing the control I’d been working so hard to wield. I smiled at Gabriel’s bodyguard. “Thanks, Maata. I’ll take care of this.”

“Better you than me,” she answered with a wry smile as she left.

“You want me to rough him up a little?” Jim asked, rising and walking slowly toward Magoth.“I’d go straight for his noogies, but that curse gives me the willies. Ha! Willies! Get it?”

“Go ahead and try,” Magoth said, his eyes glittering with an unholy light.

Jim paused, shooting me a worried look. “You said he doesn’t have any powers here, right?”

“He’s without about ninety-five percent of his power, yes,” I answered.

Jim froze. “Oh, man! I thought you said all of his power was gone!”

“It is. Well, all but about five percent, as best as we can figure.”

“Five percent? Geez, May! We’ve got to have a little talk about the difference between a demon lord without any power, and one with enough to squash flat a sixth-class demon!”

Magoth smiled again. A little black tendril of power snapped at Jim.

The demon yelped and backed toward the door. “Fires of Abaddon, can’t you take a joke? I was just fun ning, Your Imperial Dark and Twisted Majesty. Er . . . I think Hart to Hart is on that retro-TV-show channel. You know how I love me some Stefanie Powers. Catch ya later, Your Eminence of Unholy Darkness.”

I gave Magoth my full consideration as the door shut behind Jim. It was true that over the last six weeks while Magoth had lived with us, Gabriel and I had determined that the demon lord had retained only a tiny fraction of his powers, but you don’t become a prince of Abaddon without picking up a few tricks.