Black Spring

Beezle nodded. “It would be easier to impersonate a servant. You would have an excuse to come and go, then.”

“Or to get close to your target,” Nathaniel said as the main course was carried out on large trays. “I hope you are watching everyone who approaches Madeline closely, gargoyle.”

“Don’t tell me how to do my job, half-blood,” Beezle said. “I’ve been a home guardian longer than you’ve had wings.”

“Don’t bicker,” I said. “It’s bad enough that we’ve got enemies all around us. I don’t want us to fight among ourselves, too.”

“You must be feeling bad if you don’t want us to bicker,” Beezle said. “You’ve perfected arguing to an art form.”

“Says the gargoyle who taught me everything I know,” I said.

The salad plates were taken away and replaced with a filet of beef stacked on top of root vegetables and artfully drizzled with some kind of sauce. Pink juice oozed from the steak and my gorge rose. There was no way I could stomach eating meat right now, especially since the effects of the shifter’s spell were lingering. Beezle, naturally, dove into his plate like he had not eaten in a hundred years.

Nathaniel was making a show of eating, but I noticed he was picking at his food. When I looked over at Samiel and Jude, seated at the table just below ours, neither of them was eating, either. They weren’t even pretending to communicate with each other. Both of them shifted restlessly in their chairs, glancing up at the head table and then around the room. I knew for sure that Jude would have preferred to shift into wolf form and walk the perimeter. Unfortunately, Lucifer seemed to want to give a more upscale impression.

I found J.B.’s table among the throng of guests. He appeared to fare no better than the rest of us. He was pushing food around his plate, twirling his wineglass and generally doing a bad impression of a person enjoying himself. I’m certain that any courtiers trying to get his attention were getting curt answers.

It was a fact that none of us could really relax in Lucifer’s presence, and the additional bonus of Alerian and Puck wasn’t helping. I know that Beezle and Nathaniel would disagree with me, but I would feel a lot better if Daharan were with us.

Daharan was the eldest, he seemed to be the most powerful, and the other three were respectful of his presence. Plus, out of all the brothers, Daharan liked me best, no matter what lip service Lucifer paid to valuing all of the children of his line. And it would be really, really nice to have someone big and superstrong who liked me the best backing me up.

But where was he?

Beezle polished off the filet on his plate with a smack of his lips. “Are you going to eat that?”

I shook my head. Lucifer glanced over at me, frowning, although he didn’t make another remark about my need to feed the baby. Which meant that he was definitely listening to everything that went on at my side of the table no matter what impression he gave to Evangeline.

I had to get out of this place. Nothing good was going to come of my staying under Lucifer’s roof.

Beezle shoved his empty plate away and pulled my plate in front of him. If nothing else, we had to get out of here before Beezle gained twenty pounds gorging himself on food from Lucifer’s kitchen.

After the first course came a second course of gnocchi in pesto. I thought that the pasta course should have come before the meat course but, as Beezle pointed out, I knew nothing about etiquette and even less about formal dinners. Once upon a time I’d been a food writer, so I knew how to cook and could recognize good food when I saw it, but serving it was beyond me. I hadn’t had many opportunities in my life to play entertainer.

I had a few bites of gnocchi so that Lucifer wouldn’t pay any more attention to me than he already was. He nodded in satisfaction every time he looked over and saw me chewing.

Alerian sat at the opposite end of the table next to Puck, and he appeared to be steadily drinking his way through several bottles of wine. He did not speak to anyone and resisted Puck’s attempts to draw him out by glaring every time his brother spoke to him. Nathaniel was equally silent and stoic at my end, so the two looked like a pair of frozen bookends.

Was Alerian anxious in the presence of his brothers? Or was he irritated at being away from water, the source of his magic? I wasn’t an expert in geography and I had not seen the outside of Lucifer’s home, but I was under the impression that his mansion was in or near Los Angeles. And I thought Los Angeles was at least kind of close to the ocean. Alerian could draw more power from the Pacific Ocean than from Lake Michigan, I would think.

Of course, it was entirely possible that Alerian was drowning himself in wine for none of those reasons, but simply because Puck was annoying him.