“And she was terrified of you, which you knew perfectly well! You were frightening her on purpose!”

“You are wasting time.” His crimson eyes glinted with impatience. “All you have done is waste time. You promised to send me home. You promised to find the grimoire and remove my House’s name. You have done none of that.”

“I warned you it would take a long time.”

“I thought it would be slow because it is difficult, not because you are hardly trying.”

“I am trying!” I flung the bloody tissues into the garbage and wet a cloth to clean my face, my hands shaking. “You haven’t been helping! Bullying Amalia, interrupting me all the time, and now you’re torturing the kitten too.”

“The kitten is worthless. It’s a distraction.”

“Saving a life isn’t worthless!” I swallowed hard, tasting blood in the back of my throat. “Do you have no heart at all, Zylas? Are you that incapable of empathy?”

“I do not know that word.”

“Of course you don’t.” As I wiped the blood off my face, I decided I would deliver the kitten to the animal shelter tomorrow. She’d be better off there than exposed to Zylas’s whims. “Leave the kitten alone. I’ll take her away in the morning so she won’t be a ‘distraction.’”

He watched me from the doorway. “What is empathy?”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“I can understand anything you can.”

I shot him an icy look. “You’re a demon, so no, you can’t.”

“Explain,” he growled.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because when it doesn’t make any sense, you’ll say ‘zh’ūltis!’ and decide I’m the dumb one, even though the problem is you.” I rinsed out the cloth and turned to the door. “I’m leaving the bathroom now.”

He didn’t move, gazing at me with an unreadable expression. “Tell me what empathy is.”

Stubborn demon. Jaw tight, I folded my arms over my bloody shirt. “Empathy is the ability to understand and share what others feel.”

His eyebrows drew down in confusion. “Share what others feel?”

“Yes.” I pushed on the armor plate over his heart and he stepped back, allowing me across the threshold, but he followed right on my heels as I returned to my bedroom.

The kitten, exhausted and huddled in her bed, watched us with wary green eyes.

I opened my closet and grabbed a shirt at random. “I’m changing. Turn around.”

He turned his back on me and I slid my bloody shirt off. This, at least, was a civilized compromise we’d reached early on. Sharing my room with a demon was unpleasant enough without the complete lack of privacy. He might be able to hear my thoughts half the time, but he did not get to see me undress. I’d extracted that promise from him in exchange for teaching him how to use the shower.

He loved the shower. I was pretty sure he’d save the shower before he’d save me, contract or no contract.

I tugged on the new shirt and straightened the hem. “Okay.”

“Explain more,” he commanded, facing me again.

I wasn’t sure whether his refusal to drop it annoyed me or gave me hope that he wasn’t a total lost cause. “When you scared the kitten, I could imagine how the kitten felt—how terrifying it would be, being small and weak and trapped with a huge predator so close.”

As I sat on the foot of my bed, I almost missed his darting glance toward the kitten’s crate.

“And,” I continued, “because I can empathize with the kitten, her fear was almost as upsetting to me as if you’d been scaring me instead.”

He looked from me to the kitten and back, his forehead crinkled under a tangled lock of black hair. “That’s zh’ul—”

“I knew it!” I burst out, my anger surging back. “I knew you’d call me stupid because you don’t understand!”

“It is stupid!” he barked. “It’s dilēran.”

Yep, he was a lost cause. A total and absolute lost cause.

“It’s ‘stupid’ that I can care about another living thing besides myself?” My voice rose in volume and pitch. “If I was as selfish and heartless as you, you would’ve died in that summoning circle, because I would never have bothered to help you.”

“You had reasons.”

“What reasons?” I shook my head. “Helping you has only ever caused me trouble, and it almost got me killed. Now we’re stuck together until I can send you home.”

“I protect you.”

“Yeah, but if it wasn’t for you, I wouldn’t need protection. No one would be trying to hurt me.” I pulled a book off my nightstand. “Along with your protection, I get your bad temper, your constant insults, and your disrespect. Not a great deal.”

His eyes narrowed.

“Just forget about the empathy thing,” I told him tiredly. “You’ll never understand. Why would you want to, anyway? Caring about others is a waste of time, right?”

I could feel his attention on me, but I ignored him as I opened my book to the bookmarked page. The intro to that demon psychology text was right on the mark. Zylas didn’t care about anyone but himself, and he assumed everyone else was either selfish like him or a worthless animal like the kitten.

Unexpected tears welled in my eyes and I hastily wiped them away, afraid he’d notice—but when I looked up, he was already gone.

Chapter Seven

“Is this the place?” I asked.

Amalia shot me a cold look and I privately admitted my tone hadn’t been particularly polite. I was still furious. Right before leaving our apartment this morning, I’d caught Zylas terrifying the kitten again. This time, he’d been crouched in front of her cage, and poor little Socks had been huddled in the back corner, shaking with fear.

I shouldn’t have named her. It would just make it harder to take her to the shelter this afternoon.

“Claude’s unit is the third one,” Amalia said, tucking her phone in her pocket now that we were done navigating. “Do you want to find a spot to call out Zylas?”

Last night, we’d decided to tackle our infiltration of the summoner’s home in two phases. First, during the day when the street was busy and loiterers would be less conspicuous, we’d scope out the area and Zylas would check for signs of Claude and his demon. Then we’d go home, plan our attack, and return at night to sneak in.

I glanced around at the rows of neat townhouses facing each other across a narrow street, each identical front door framed by a white railing and three steps. The only differences between the houses were the drapes in the windows and the occasional blow-up Santa Claus or snowman decorating a front lawn. It wasn’t as busy as I’d hoped.

“Let’s walk down the street first,” I decided. “We’ll find a back alley and I’ll call Zylas out there.”

My suggestion had nothing to do with delaying the moment I had to see my demon. Nope, not at all.

Amalia fell into step beside me as we strolled along the sidewalk. I wasn’t surprised to see that Claude’s townhouse was devoid of Christmas decorations. His blinds were closed and no car was parked out front; he didn’t seem to be home. Now that his business partner was in hiding, what was Claude doing with his time? Was he spending every minute searching for Uncle Jack?