The awful feeling of loss I had felt in the FIB conference room rose from nowhere, pulled into existence by the reminder of Kisten’s death. I’d thought Ivy and Jenks were dead. I’d thought everyone I cared about had been severed from me. And that I had given up and accepted the damage of a demon curse when I thought I’d nothing left to lose had opened my eyes really fast. Either I was an emotional wimp and had to learn to handle the potential loss of everyone I loved without caving or—and this was the one that scared me the most—I had to come to grips and accept that my black-and-white outlook on demon curses wasn’t so black and white anymore.

I had a sick feeling that it was the latter. I was going bad. The lure of demon magic and power was too much to best. But damn it, when she’s fighting demons and nasty elves with the strength of the world’s economics on their side, a girl has to get a little dirty.

I looked at my chocolate cake and forced my jaw to unclench. I wasn’t going to agonize over the smut on my soul. I couldn’t and still live with myself. Ceri was coated with it, and she was a good person. Hell, the woman had almost cried over forgetting my birthday cake. I was going to have to handle demon magic the same way I did earth and ley line magic. If the stuff that went into the spell or curse didn’t hurt anyone, and the working of the spell/curse didn’t hurt anyone, and the result of the spell/curse didn’t harm anyone but me, then I was going to twist the stupid curse and call myself a good person. I didn’t give a damn what anyone else thought. Jenks would tell me if I was straying, wouldn’t he?

Fork in hand, I cut a bite, then put it back on the plate untasted. I met Ivy’s miserable expression, seeing the tears in her eyes. Kisten was dead. To sit here and eat my cake seemed so hypocritical. And trite. But I wanted something normal. I needed something to tell myself that I was going to live past this, that I had good friends—and since I didn’t drown my sorrows in beer, I’d do it in chocolate.

“You going to eat that, or cry over it?” Jenks said, flitting in from the piano.

“Shut up, Jenks,” I said tiredly, and he smirked, sending a glitter of sparkles to puddle on the table before the breeze from the upper transom window blew them into infinity.

“You shut up,” he said, spooning up a wad of my frosting with a pair of chopsticks. “Eat your cake. We made it for your damned birthday.”