‘‘Anything is bearable with proper precautions,’’ I said lightly, waggling a bottle of sun block at the demon. I hurried out before it could ask me any more penetrating questions, muttering under my breath as I left the house. Unless a demon lord was very powerful, he or she could not step foot in the mortal world, although most of them maintained domiciles that had an intrusion into our world, serving as more or less a conduit for their minions. As I skipped down the steps of Magoth’s Parisian house, I breathed another sigh of relief, and hunted down a taxi.

Magoth didn’t mind his servants going to the trouble to summon me via a portal or rip in the fabric of being, but he frowned on them expending any such energy when I wanted to leave. It was up to me to make my own way out of Paris, and although there was a sticky moment when the passport official balked at my lack of proper entrance documentation, eventually I was on a plane headed back to Greece.

‘‘. . . so I’m back, still alive, and haven’t had anything stripped from me, like my soul or brain or any of the other things Magoth will remove if I cross him,’’ I told Cyrene a couple of hours later.

She turned from where she had been looking out the window of my hotel room while I told her of my trip, her face twisted with anguish. ‘‘Oh, May, I’m so sorry you had to go through that! I’m just sick to death that I ever agreed to bind you to him! It’s just that he was so incredibly handsome, so overwhelmingly sexy, and I had no idea—’’

I pulled myself up from where I had collapsed exhaustedly on the bed and held up a hand to interrupt the apology. ‘‘I didn’t tell you that to make you feel bad. Your sexual thrills aside, I know full well you had no real grasp of what you were agreeing to when Magoth seduced you into creating me, so stop beating yourself up for it. I’m coping well enough, and managing to stay a step ahead of him, so there’s no need for you to continue on this martyr kick.’’

That was true so far, but as my near seduction earlier had proven, the future didn’t hold much hope for me. That thought nibbled away at me as Cyrene paced past.

‘‘I will never forget the look on your face when you were created, and Magoth told you that I’d given you to him. I thought my heart would break.’’

Her distress was very real, as real as the tears rolling down her face.