“Yes, he is. Isn’t he doing it wonderfully?” Cyrene asked, blowing him a kiss.

Gabriel laughed and moved over to stand next to me, his arm loosely around my waist. “It is quite amazing, is it not?”

Kostya smiled at Cyrene, and for a second, I was aware on a primal level of the charm that had attracted her to him. But although my acquaintance with Kostya had not been of a lengthy nature, it had been violent enough to leave me wary of such a benign appearance, even despite the dragon shard’s interest.

“Incredibly so,” I said, knowing my twin would completely miss the sarcasm in my voice.

Jim didn’t. The demon choked. I eyed it, about to forbid it to speak if it looked like it was going to say anything inappropriate. Catalina leaned toward her el dest son, whispering furiously as she gestured an elegant hand toward me. He looked at her for a minute before turning an astonished gaze on me.

“I am not mentally deficient,” I announced, just in case he believed his mother.

Jim snorted again and opened its mouth to speak.

I pulled out my dagger and spun it around my fingers before flinging it to the floor about half an inch in front of Jim’s toes. It leaped backwards. “All right, all right, I get the point! Man! I’m telling Ash you’re pulling weapons on me!”

“Do not say anything about it,” Catalina finished speaking to Kostya in what she no doubt imagined was a whisper. “It is best if you do not dwell on the sad situation. Her kind gets so upset.”

I smiled and slipped just a smidgen the normally tight rein I held on the dragon shard. It purred with satisfaction, sending silver scales shimmering up my arms, my fingers lengthening and turning crimson at the claws. I waggled them at Kostya. “Your mother has sage advice. And speaking of people who were resurrected, why do you think Baltic isn’t really Baltic?”

“He could not be,” Kostya said with a familiar stubborn set to his jaw. “Dragons are not easily resurrected.”

“Gabriel said that, as well, but his mom seems to think otherwise.”

“She’s never tried to resurrect a dragon,” Kostya replied with a glance at his mother.

“It is true, what my darling Kostya says,” Catalina said with a dramatic sigh. “I tried to have Toldi resurrected, but alas, he came back . . . less.”

“Less than what?” I asked, curious about the odd tone in her voice.

She cast me a sympathetic glance, nodding slightly toward me. “Just . . . less. It was a kindness to put him out of the way. Again. Which I did, naturally, because I was nothing if not a good mate.”

An odd sort of choking noise emerged from Jim. I picked up my dagger, noting that the demon’s eyes widened as I twirled it around my fingers. “ ‘Again’ as in you killed him before?”

“Oh yes. He was not a nice man, Toldi. He murdered most of my family, you know, in order to get me to accept him as mate. Which I did, but only because I knew I would be able to destroy him easily when I chose.” Catalina picked an invisible bit of fluff off Kostya’s arm, speaking with a nonchalance that would have been more at home in a psychopath.

I slid a quick look at Gabriel. One of his dimples appeared.

Drake sighed and gestured toward the sitting room, having cast a quick glance up the stairs. “If you insist on having this discussion, brother, perhaps you will do so out of Aisling’s hearing. If she thinks we are having a counsel regarding Baltic, she will want to be present, and it is her rest time.”

Jim made a whipcrack noise as it passed Drake on the way into the sitting room. I said nothing as Drake glanced at the dog, setting its tail on fire for a good ten seconds before the demon noticed. By that time, we’d all trooped back into the sitting room.

“So you killed him twice?” I asked Catalina, ignoring Jim’s hysterics as it ran around the room yelling at the top of its lungs until Drake put out the fire.

“Fires of Abaddon, Drake! I mean, literally fires of Abaddon!” it bellowed, pungent smoke trailing behind it as it marched over to where we sat.

“Sit down and be quiet unless you have something helpful to say,” I ordered it.

“Such a very odd demon,” Catalina remarked, watching as Jim obeyed my orders albeit with ill grace and no little amount of glaring. “And yes, my dear, I had to kill Toldi a second time. I couldn’t leave him . . .” She paused and gave me yet another pitying look that had me grinding my teeth. “But we have agreed not to speak of such unfortunate things. I just hope that Gabriel has the strength to do what is necessary when the time comes.”

She brushed off my look of utter disbelief with a smile at Gabriel before taking Kostya’s arm. “Come, my darling Kostya. Tell Mama what you have been doing these last one hundred and thirty years.”

“I have no time for talk, Mother,” Kostya said with a glance at his watch. “I have a sept meeting in less than an hour. I simply wished to tell Drake . . .” He hesitated a second, very pointedly not looking at either Gabriel or me. “. . . tell Drake that our trip was fruitful.”

Catalina demanded to see him at the first opportunity, and went off to oversee the unpacking of her luggage.

“You found the lair, then?” Gabriel asked after she left.

Kostya stared at him for a second, then sharpened his gaze into a glare and pointed it at his brother. “You told them where I was going?”

Drake shrugged one shoulder. “It concerns them.”

“They are not black dragons! The location of Baltic’s lair does not concern them!”

Kostya shook off Cyrene’s hand on his arm, and stormed over to his brother, clearly about to launch into yet another diatribe, but he remembered in time that he was watching his p’s and q’s. With an effort, he bit back what he was about to say, forcing a smile to his lips as he looked at Gabriel and me.

“It’s killing you to be nice to us, isn’t it?” I asked, leaning into Gabriel.

“Yes.”

Cyrene punched him in the arm.

His strained smile grew larger until I could see each and every one of his teeth. “No, of course it isn’t. I have realized the error of my intention to re-form the sept to its original glory, and have resigned myself to the fact that the si-silv—that you are happy on your own.”

“He can’t say it,” Jim said to me in a volume that was not at all sotto voce. “He was practicing last week, and he couldn’t actually get the words out.”