My fault, I was certain.

“I would offer you tea,” I said, as if it was possible to divert subjects with him. “If you were actually here to drink it.”

“Just now,” he said, ignoring me, “you were in pain?”

Once confident I could do so without wavering, I pivoted to face him, and for the briefest of instants, terror caused his face to pinch, his fear springing from the memory of that night in the cellar. With Wrath.

For good reason, Rastin had not stepped physically onto this property since that initial meeting of ours. The fact that he was here in spirit form, his body elsewhere in the world, afforded him the luxury to depart in the same manner in which he’d entered—within the blink of an eye. Even in his current astral state, though, he was still quite vulnerable. I could do him a great deal of harm if I chose to. Lucky for him, Valor harbored no temptation to do so.

“I was in pain, yes,” I admitted after several beats.

“You have implanted another false heart,” he guessed.

“My dear Rastin,” I said through a short and humorless laugh. “You might fancy another trip to the brink of hell, but I personally have quite had my fill. Tell me, though, so long as we’re on the subject of one another’s health, how fares your own heart? No doubt it still troubles you.”

Whenever the opportunity presented itself, I never shied from offering him a reminder of what his attempt to dislodge me from this estate had cost him. I did this because I didn’t like feeling responsible for him. But Rastin’s little stopovers. Did they not suggest that he felt responsibility for me, too?

“I’m here to talk and, for now, that is all,” Rastin snapped, taking my reminder as a threat. How characteristically melodramatic of him.

“Well,” I said. “You are a funny sort of diplomat to request peace but, in the same breath, hint at war.”

“The people, Erik,” Rastin replied, his initial fear of me waning, his bravery coaxed forward perhaps by the observation that I was not currently under the influence of a mask dispossessed of reason. “I’m here because of the people.”

“Oh, I have no doubt they are why you are here,” I spat with a bitterness I could not fully bring myself to feel. Because the sudden appearance of the only person who had ever attempted to break my curse so shortly after Stephanie’s proclamation that she would be the next to attempt the task . . . Well, it suggested the influence of the miraculous.

“Erik, there is a child here,” he pressed. “A little girl.”

“There are two girls,” I corrected. “One six. One seventeen. And Mr. Armand, their father, is in his forties. Do you think these are details I might have missed? How quick you are to assume I have not already taken pains to see to their eviction. I’ll have you know that I have tried and have thus far failed. Armed with that knowledge, tell me, medium, what is your plan?”