My voice came out low and more threatening than I’d ever heard it. “You’re threatening to kill my sister’s baby if I don’t cooperate?”

“I’m promising to let it live if you do.”

“Not good enough. I don’t want him raised as a ward of the Church. I don’t want him ordained or consecrated. Ever.”

Bennett’s eyes narrowed and her jaw tightened. “Fine. The baby will be sent to a children’s home somewhere outside of New Temperance.”

I studied her face for one long moment. Then I listened to my gut. “You’re lying. If Melanie’s an exorcist, her child might be too, and you won’t lose him. Which means I have no reason to answer your question.”

Bennett leaned back in her chair. Then she smiled slowly, an expression absent of warmth. “It was worth a shot.” She shrugged, and the gesture looked foreign and careless on a body I’d never once seen cast off the restraints of authority and formality. “We are a patient species. We’ll lock her in a cell for two years and see for ourselves.”

“But you have to make a deal with Umbra now, don’t you?” Long before she would know whether or not Melanie was an exorcist.

The demon’s scowl was as good as an answer. “If you’re not going to cooperate, I have only one more question: Why did you turn yourself in, Nina Kane?”

“I came for my sister.” I gave her a shrug to hide the fact that I was twisting my hands behind my back, tugging on the restraints Finn had already weakened with his borrowed knife. “But before I go, I think I’ll make time to kill you.”

“Foolish child.” The deacon shook her head slowly, like an instructor disappointed by ignorance. “I cannot die. With or without this body, and this world, and your arrogant ambition, I can never die, just as I was never born.” She stood, her eyes glinting with demonic light, and I twisted my hands faster, harder, as her speech became more formal, her posture more dignified. “My native language has no word for youth, because in our native realm we have not your cycle of birth and death, nor the waxing and waning of seasons, nor even the concepts of growth and decline. There are no more and no fewer of us now than there have ever been or will ever be, and that unchanging number is sufficient to swallow your world whole, ten times over.” The deacon glared down at me, and I made my hands go still so she could not notice my efforts. “We are both eternal and unchanging, and your simplistic human languages—all of them—lack the vocabulary necessary to express the tedium of millennia spent in stasis.”