So, it took a while, which left me sitting on the floor by the tub, monitoring the damned thing, because it could go from tepid to lava pretty darned fast. I’d often thought that the Victorians, who had made the tub—and the lights downstairs, which would electrocute you if you handled them wrong, and the pretty, bright green wallpaper, which got its color from arsenic and could poison you—had had some kind of death wish. Or maybe that was why they’d ended up conquering half the world.

After hanging out in their houses for a while, nothing scared them anymore.

Plenty of things scared me, however, like Pritkin’s incubus.

But not because he was a demon.

Demons were actually easier for me to understand than for most people, who just assumed they were evil. I thought a little differently, maybe because I’d grown up with vamps. From what I’d seen, demons were basically vamps on steroids: self-interested to the core, but potentially helpful if assisting you netted them a significant gain.

In fact, vamps were harder to predict, because they’d started out as humans and still sometimes acted like it. They could surprise you, doing things occasionally even if they didn’t directly help them. It wasn’t a good idea to bet on it, but it did happen. My governess, Eugenie, for instance, had literally died for me, refusing to tell my old vampire guardian where I’d run away to, even as he ripped her apart.

Demons, on the other hand, had never been human, and they didn’t act like it. Every demon I knew was completely egocentric, and not because centuries of life—and all the backstabbing, betrayal, and general bullshit that came with it—had made them that way. They were like that because they were like that; it was their nature.

But that didn’t mean that they were evil; in fact, they didn’t even seem to understand the term. Something was “good” if it helped them, and “bad” if it didn’t. The action itself was almost irrelevant.

To figure out if you could trust a demon, then, you first had to know what it wanted.

Take Adra, the head of the demon high council. He skeeved most people out just by walking into a room, maybe because of the less-than-convincing glamourie he wore, which was designed to make him look like a slightly chubby boy scout. It didn’t.

Sometimes, the pleasant, round face blanked entirely, when he forgot that humans required expressions in order not to look like something out of a horror movie. Sometimes, he got confused about the—to him—rapidly changing human culture, which resulted in him doing things to fit in, like taking snuff, that had been out of fashion for hundreds of years. And sometimes, he just got the expressions wrong altogether, like when he’d grinned at the mention of the massacre at Aeslinn’s court.