“You can do magic, too. That’s unusual for a human. What sort of magic can you do?”

Nest hesitated. “I’m not sure I can do any magic. I haven’t used it for a while. I have some problems with it. It hurts me to use it sometimes.”

Ariel came forward, a delicate white presence in the night, dark eyes shifting from one to the other. “Tell her about the demon, Boot,” she whispered anxiously.

The sylvan nodded. “Don’t rush me. There’s plenty of time to do that. All night, if we need it, and we don’t. Where demons are concerned, you don’t want to rush things. You want to step carefully. You want to watch where you go.”

“Tell her!”

The sylvan harrumphed irritably. Nest thought of Pick. Apparently sylvans became curmudgeons at a young age.

Audrey ruffled her feathers against a rush of wind and damp, and resettled herself on the bench back, luminous round eyes fixing on Nest. Boot folded his skinny arms and muttered inaudibly into his beard and gave every appearance of refusing to say another word.

“I have a friend who is in danger from this demon,” Nest announced impulsively, not wanting to lose him to a mood swing. “Whatever you can tell me might help save his life.”

Boot stared at her. “All right. No reason not to, I guess. You’ve come a long way, haven’t you? Well, then.”

The arms unlocked and dropped to his sides. “The demon came to this park about three months ago. I’d never seen it before. I’d seen others from time to time, but they were always passing through on their way to somewhere else, and they were cloaked in their human guise and had been for a long time. But this one came deliberately. This one came with a purpose. It was night, midsummer, and it walked into the park just after sunset and came up to the cliffs and waited in the trees where the paths don’t go. It was hiding, waiting for something. I was patrolling the park on Audrey and saw it from the air. I knew what it was right away. So Audrey and I circled back behind it, keeping to the high limbs, and found a place to watch.”

“What did it look like?” Nest asked quickly.

“I’m getting to that, if you please,” the sylvan informed in a no-nonsense tone of voice. “Don’t rush me.” He cleared his throat. “It was a man. He was tall and thin, rather different looking—dark hair and small features. He wore a long coat, no hat. I got a good look at him through the scope.” He held up the tube tied to his waist. “Spyglass. Lets me see everything. Anyway, he stood there in the shadows for a long time. Maybe an hour or more. The park emptied out. It was a bright, moonlit night, so I could see what happened next very clearly.”

He paused meaningfully. “Another demon appeared. It crawled up the cliff face from somewhere below, from the shoreline. I don’t know where it came from before that. This one was huge, barely recognizable as human, its disguise sort of thrown together. It was thick-limbed and hunched over and all hairy and twisted. It looked more like an animal than a human, but a human is what it was trying to play at being, sure enough.