“Exactly.” Daemon sighed. “There’s a party in three days. One of those mind-numbing affairs. So Jaenelle and I will play out a little game at the party. Maybe we’ll even find out something. Either way, I think I can convince her that she played out her part and should go back to the Hall.”

“A mind-numbing party,” Lucivar muttered. “Sounds like fun.”

Daemon’s eyes and smile finally warmed. “I’m delighted you think so, since you’ll be there, too.”

Lucivar swore. “Why do I have to be there?”

“Because if someone there goes after Jaenelle and somehow manages to get past me, I want to know they’ll have to go through you in order to hurt her.”

“Done.” He set the snifter on the table. “You’d better include Surreal in this party. If you piss her off, she’ll threaten to pin your balls to the wall.”

Daemon grinned. “She does have a way of expressing her opinions, doesn’t she?”

“That she does. So what happens after the party?”

The grin changed into a viciously gentle smile. Daemon set the snifter down and turned his right hand palm up so Lucivar could see the snake tooth slide out of its channel beneath the ring-finger nail.

“After that,” Daemon said, “I’m going hunting.”

TWELVE

1

Daemon shrugged into his black jacket and adjusted the cuffs of his white silk shirt. He didn’t want to go to this party, didn’t want Jaenelle anywhere near the aristo Blood who would be crowding the rooms. But her plan to try to draw out whoever was behind the rumors sounded safe enough, especially with Lucivar and Surreal in attendance.

That didn’t mean he liked it. And he wasn’t sure he could do it.

To distract himself, he silently rehearsed the phrase in the Old Tongue that he’d painstakingly pieced together over the past few weeks. He’d learned a few phrases of the Blood’s ancient language over the centuries from scholars who still had some knowledge of those fluid words, but nothing he’d known had come close to what he wanted to say. Something private. Something erotic. Something he could whisper to Jaenelle to tell her what she meant to him.

Unfortunately, there were only two people in all of Kaeleer who were fluent in the Old Tongue. He couldn’t ask Jaenelle to help him translate the phrase since he wanted to surprise her, and Saetan ... Well, no matter how sophisticated the relationship, no matter how adult the people involved, there were some things a son just couldn’t ask his father.

So he’d struggled with the books he’d found in Saetan’s private study deep beneath the Hall, books that were filled with the grammar and vocabulary of that old language. What they didn’t tell him was how to pronounce those words.