“But you know, what really made it all work was that I couldn’t imagine it wasn’t real. Why would it be anything else? Why wouldn’t you be exactly who you said you were? When Nest first suggested you might be the demon, I dismissed the idea out of hand. It made no sense. If you were the demon, why wouldn’t you just kill me and be done with it? Of what possible use was I alive? A former Knight of the Word, an exile, a wanderer—I was just further proof you had made the right choice a long time ago when you embraced the Void.”

She wasn’t saying anything. She was just sitting there, listening attentively, waiting to see if he had really worked it out. He could tell it just by looking at her, by the way she was studying him. It infuriated him; it made him feel ashamed for the way he had allowed himself to be used.

“Nest figured it out, though,” he continued. “She explained it to me. She said you saw me in the same way her father had seen her grandmother, when her grandmother was a young girl. Her father was drawn to her grandmother’s magic, and you were drawn to mine. But demons need to possess humans, to take control of them in order to make the magic their own, and sometimes they mistake this need to possess for love. Their desire for the magic confuses them. I think maybe that’s what happened to you.”

“John—”

“No. Don’t say a word to me. Just listen.” His fingers knotted about his staff more tightly. “The fact remains, I was no good to you dead. Because if I were dead you couldn’t make use of the magic trapped inside the staff. And you wanted that magic badly, didn’t you? But to get it, you had to do two things. You had to find a way to persuade me to recover it from the dark place to which I had consigned it and then to use it in a way that would make me dependent on you. If I could be tricked into killing Simon Lawrence, if I could be made to use the magic in such a terribly wrong way, then I would share something in common with you, wouldn’t I? I would have taken the first step down the path you had chosen for me. I was halfway there, wasn’t I? I was already very nearly what you wanted me to be. You’d worked long and hard to break me down, to give me the identity you wanted. Only this one last thing remained.”

He shook his head in amazement. “You killed that demon in Lincoln Park to protect your investment. Because it wanted me dead, so it could claim victory over a Knight of the Word. But you wanted me alive for something much grander. You wanted me for the magic I might place at your command.”

She stared at him, her perfect features composed, still not moving. “I love you, John. Nothing you’ve said changes that.”