“You need his permission? Interesting. I thought you were powerful.” Hunting for psychological weaknesses—not a lesson the Brotherhood taught, but one she’d learned from the mean girls who made fun of her clothes in middle school.

“I am powerful. I command Ambrose’s entire army against the legion of light demons.” His voice betrayed only the faintest hint of irritation.

“You’ve commanded an entire army, but you have to ask permission to make a door.”

“A portal. It’s not a door. And, more than that, the shadow demons have a hierarchy.” Caine’s attitude suggested he didn’t bend easily to authority. He must struggle with his own rebellious impulses.

“I have more questions.”

Caine pressed his fingers to his eyes as if trying to manage a migraine. “I deeply regret pulling the vampires off you.”

As she followed him up the winding cobblestone road, she gazed up at him. “I need to know why everyone thinks I’m a mage.”

“Fine.” His pale gaze met hers for a brief instant. “But you’re so ignorant, I don’t even know where to start.”

“Start from the beginning.”

“For one thing, the Brotherhood are notoriously inept.”

“No, we’re not,” she protested. Though obviously, they’d screwed up in her case.

“The Salem Witch Trials. The Scottish Witch Hunt… all the European witch crazes. The Brotherhood’s rampant slaughter led to panic. That’s why the magical lands were created in the first place.”

That wasn’t how she’d learned it, but she got the idea. He was talking about magical lands like Maremount—New England’s own hidden land of mages.

“The real demons needn’t have bothered, because your Hunter predecessors spent most of their time murdering the innocent. The Brotherhood—or the Purgators, as they used to be known—have been screwing up for thousands of years.”

Of course, he saw things from the demon point of view. “When I said start at the beginning, I didn’t really mean thousands of years ago.”

“Almost none of the Brotherhood’s victims were actual mages,” he continued on. “The Hunters went after the poor, the weak, the desperate. The cranky and ill-tempered. Those who worshipped the wrong gods. Anyone they didn’t like. Anyone who didn’t fit in. If any real mages were among their victims, it was pure accident.”

An extremely biased account. “So, assuming you’re telling me the truth—” which, by the way, she really wasn’t assuming “—what you’re saying is that they’ve screwed up again with my case.”

They passed a candlelit tavern, and she caught a glimpse of vampires packed inside, drinking from silver goblets.

“That’s actually not what I’m saying. For once, they got it right.”

A cold sense of dread snaked up her spine. Everything he said was pretty much the opposite of what she knew to be the truth.

Or what she’d thought was the truth.

And yet, somehow something about the way he spoke suggested honesty.

“I don’t understand. How can I be a mage if I’ve never learned a single spell? No one is born a mage.”

He led them up a narrow, winding lane. Steep-peaked stone houses towered over them at crooked angles. “That’s true. Neither you or I came into this world as a mage. Neither did we learn magic in the conventional way. We both have your parents to thank for that.”