He’d promised because what she’d said had made his nerves twang like tether lines in a storm, because that was her price for training him to be a Black Widow, because, even then, the Darkness sang to him in a way it didn’t sing to other Blood males.

He had kept his promise. But the daughter never came.

The insistent knocking on the door of his private study finally pulled him from his thoughts.

“Come,” he said, his deep voice a tired whisper, a ghost of what it once had been.

Mephis SaDiablo entered and stood beside the chair, silent.

“What do you want, Mephis?” Saetan asked his eldest son, demon-dead since that long-ago war between Terreille and Kaeleer.

Mephis hesitated. “Something strange is going on.”

Saetan’s gaze drifted back to the fire. “Someone else can look into it, if anyone so desires. Your mother can look into it. Hekatah always wanted power without my interference.”

“No,” Mephis said uneasily.

Saetan studied his son’s face and found that he had a hard time swallowing. “Your…brothers?” he finally asked, unable to hide the pain that the question caused him. He’d been a flattered fool to cast the spell that temporarily gave him back the seed of life. He couldn’t regret Daemon’s and Lucivar’s existence, but he’d tortured himself for centuries with reports of what had been done to them.

Mephis shook his head and stared at the dark-red marble mantel. “On the cildru dyathe’s island.”

Saetan shuddered. He’d never feared anything in Hell, but he’d always felt an aching despair for the cildru dyathe, the demon-dead children. In Hell, the dead retained the form of their last living hour. This cold, blasted Realm had never been a kind place, but to look upon those children, to see what had been done to them by another’s hand, for there to be no escape from those blatant wounds…. It was too much to bear. They kept totheir island, unwilling to have any contact with adults. He never intruded on them, having Char, their chosen leader, come to him once in a while to bring back the books, games, and whatever else he could find that might engage their young minds and help while away the unrelenting years.

“The cildru dyathe take care of themselves,” Saetan said, fussing with the hearth rug. “You know that.”

“But…every so often, for the past few weeks, there’s another presence there. Never for very long, but I’ve felt it. So has Prothvar when he’s flown over the island.”

“Leave them alone,” Saetan snapped, his temper returning some strength to his voice. “Perhaps they’ve found an orphaned Hound pup.”

Mephis took a deep breath. “Hekatah has already had an altercation with Char over this. The children are hiding from everyone who approaches because of it. If she had any authority to—”

Before Saetan could respond to the sharp rap on the study door, it swung open. Andulvar Yaslana, once the Eyrien Warlord Prince of Askavi, strode into the room. His grandson, Prothvar, followed him, carrying a large globe covered with a black cloth.