Read Novel Full Chapter 1086: "You Called the Demoness of Death and Lust?"
Chapter 1086: "You Called the Demoness of Death and Lust?"
"What you do best, Shepherd," Senithe said, voice smooth as a blade fresh from the whetstone. "The instant we touch down in Paris, do what you do best."
The Shepherd's flicker stabilized for one long, luxurious heartbeat into something that almost wore an expression—a master craftsman handed the keys to the workshop, told the hours were hers, and informed there would be no curfew, no oversight, and no survivors.
Then the vision scattered again, face dissolving back into its usual teasing haze, leaving the room poorer for the loss.
Senithe turned.
She turned to Cazzie.
Cazzie had already raised one hand from the couch in lazy preemption, lollipop still jutting from her mouth like a declaration of war.
"Yes, yes, yes, I know—back to Maya's side. Movie nights and watching her mother grade biology homework like some tragically normal human child. I get it. Got it. Already packed, already bored."
"You return to her side," Senithe said evenly, "and you create—"
"An element of surprise that we're both coincidentally in Paris!" Cazzie sat up so fast her glacier-blue ponytails cracked like whips.
She pointed the lollipop at Senithe like a tiny, sticky accusation. "I'm not a kid, Senithe! Stop talking to me like I'm a kid! I know what I'm doing!"
Senithe regarded her the way one regards a particularly opinionated housecat who has just knocked over a priceless vase and now demands applause.
"Are you not?"
"AM I—"
"A kid. I asked. Are you not. Because I appear to have been laboring under the delusion that you were one, judging solely by your body, your hair, your shoes, your candy, and the entire register in which you have been operating for several centuries.
"So if I have been mistaken, please, by all means, correct me at your leisure. I have eternity."
Cazzie inhaled. She did not exhale for several dangerous seconds. Her cheeks flushed the exact violent shade of her lollipop. Several words in three dead languages clawed their way up her throat and died there, none of them quite vicious enough to be worth the oxygen.
Senithe waited with the polite patience of a gun.
The other figures in the room suddenly discovered fascinating distractions elsewhere: Oath became deeply interested in the fire, the Soul Shepherd became deeply interested in her own flickering, and Dark Regent became deeply interested in a decanter the color of bruised gold whose bouquet he was pretending to analyze with the intensity of a man defusing a bomb.
Cazzie flopped backward onto the couch like a puppet whose strings had been cut by divine contempt.
"I hate you."
"I know."
"You're the worst big sister."
"I know."
"I'm putting glitter in all your boots."
"I'm sure you will. Extra-fine, I trust."
Senithe waited a single beat, then continued in a tone that passed for gentle with her—
"You return to Maya's side. You are not, this time, simply her friend. You have already established that. You have her trust. You have her mother's trust. The two are open to you in a way no one else is his FAMILY is opne to us. Now you step up. Now you deliver on what you have been building."
Cazzie's eyes sharpened. The lollipop, against its will, left her mouth.
"And while you're working, you recruit. Aggressively. Every woman the Prince encounters in Paris is a candidate. You bring her into as your Maidens. I want as many sisters in his orbit as you can manage. The Rodriguez women remain your priority. The rest of his Paris coterie is the field. Work it."
Cazzie's mouth twitched, half sulk, half wicked grin.
"…Fine. Fine. But for the record, I'd already started thinking about it."
"I know you had."
"I'm just—I want it on the record."
"It's on the record."
"Good."
The lollipop returned to her mouth with renewed, slightly petulant dignity.
Senithe turned to Oath.
He was already nodding, slowly, before she had even spoken, blue hair sliding like liquid midnight.
"Wronged men," he said in his clear, small voice that still somehow filled the chamber like distant thunder. "Paris will produce them in industrial quantities. The Prince will arrive and within a handful of nights he will have unmade the lives of half a dozen men of standing—fathers replaced, husbands cuckolded, fiancés discarded, sons found tragically wanting.
"They'll be ripe. I will be at each of their elbows in the hour of their unmaking, offering a path to themselves they do not yet know they are looking for."
"Recruit them all," Senithe said. "Every man he wrongs. The Prince is going to wreak havoc in Paris and many men are going to lose what was theirs. We need vessels. More of them. Faster."
"It will be done."
"Sign them clean. Every man fully informed. The ABSOLUTE does not tolerate shortcuts on this front and neither do I."
"Of course."
He bowed.
Senithe turned to the Seven Emissaries leader.
She had been on the third couch the entire evening, silent as a blade in its sheath, mask off, dark hair pulled tight, sharp features lit at one cheek by the firelight like a warning.
She rose in one smooth, lethal motion, blade still at her back, and inclined her head.
"Seven. It's time you resumed the search. Our lost target has been allowed to drift too long. I do not want the Prince to find them first. I do not want anyone to find them first. They are a priority—possibly the highest priority on the board, given what we are about to learn about his ASI—and they cannot, under any circumstances, fall into his hands."
"Understood."
"Burn whatever leads you have to burn. The ABSOLUTE will reimburse you with attention. Get me the target."
"It will be done."
Seven sheathed her words—and turned for the door without a farewell, because goodbyes were for people who might not come back.
Senithe let her go. Generous of her.
She turned next to Dark Regent.
He straightened like a man who had just been handed both a promotion and a live grenade. In mixed council he rarely got addressed at all. When he did, it usually meant Senithe had decided to use him as the blunt instrument for something exquisitely unpleasant.
"The vessels," she began. "I had intended to leave their training in your hands while I moved on Paris. Your demons supervising the rites, the schedule, the discipline."
He inclined his head, already tasting the honor.
"I've changed my mind."
The lounge went still as a morgue realizing it was about to get busy.
"Velkora will train them."
The fire flickered, embarrassed. The Soul Shepherd's flicker slowed to a crawl. Cazzie's lollipop paused mid-gnaw. Oath's small body turned a fraction toward Senithe, ancient eyes narrowing inside their child-sized sockets.
Dark Regent blinked. Once. Slowly.
"…the Grim Reaper."
"The Grim Reaper. Velkora. She's been bored for two centuries and she's been asking rather pointedly. The vessels will sharpen under her hand faster than they ever would under yours. I want them sharp. Lethal. Unbreakable."
"Senithe—"
"You're coming with me."
The room achieved a new and impressive level of stillness. Even the decanters seemed to hold their breath.
"With you."
"To Paris."
"To Paris."
"At my side."
Dark Regent stared at her like she had just rewritten physics and then insulted his mother. He was rarely summoned. In the council's sacred order of operations Senithe took the field herself or dispatched specialized assets—Seven for quiet murder, Oath for quiet recruitment, Cazzie for quiet infiltration and other things he'd rather not say, the Shepherd for the kind of work that made gods file noise complaints.
Dark Regent ran the demons. Dark Regent did not get invited to Paris like it was a weekend getaway.
The honor of it hit his chest at the exact same instant the danger did. Whatever storm was coming was big enough that she wanted the punishment incarnate standing physically beside her in the city.
He bowed. Deep. Reverent. The kind of bow that acknowledged both the gift and the noose.
"At your side."
"At my side."
"My demons?"
"Bring two. The rest stay with Velkora."
"Understood."
A pause.
He cleared his throat with the delicacy of a man defusing his own execution.
"Anyone else?"
Senithe looked down at her own hand, studying the line of her fingers as though deciding whether the room had earned what was about to leave her mouth.
The seconds stretched like piano wire.
The Soul Shepherd's flicker went absolutely, unnaturally still. Cazzie sat up ramrod straight on the couch, lollipop forgotten, ponytails sliding down over her shoulders like blue silk nooses. Even Oath allowed his small, ancient face to shift into open, predatory attention.
Senithe lifted her eyes.
"Lilithara comes with us."
The room moved in a collective inhalation so sharp the fire in the hearth actually bent backward, away from her, as if the air itself had decided to suck in its gut.
The Soul Shepherd's flicker gathered into the most solid configuration of the entire evening; for one full second she was almost a woman with a face, and that face looked mildly horrified.
Cazzie made a small involuntary noise around her teeth that might have been a squeak in a lesser creature.
Oath took half a step backward—on a being his actual size that should have cracked the foundations—and the rugs beneath where he had stood flexed faintly upward in protest.
Dark Regent's hand twitched toward his collar, stopped halfway, and lowered with deliberate, self-preserving care.
His face had gone several fashionable shades paler.
It was Cazzie, of course, who said it out loud. Younger-sister privilege.
She said it like someone blurting the thing the rest of the room had been desperately pretending wasn't happening.
"Senithe—"
"Yes."
"—you called the Demoness of Death and Lust?"