“I have to drain the life force from over a dozen humans to absorb one-tenth of what you just doused me with. I want to feel that again, which is one of the reasons why you’re still alive.”

“Think you can kill me?” A dangerous little smile curled Bones’s mouth. “You’re welcome to try.”

Below us, the affluent and the powerful continued to mingle, unaware of how close to death they were. If Trove shed his human act and went for Bones, no one would be safe in the ensuing fight. We didn’t have any demon bone, and Bones’s powers only made the creature stronger, but I wasn’t about to let him harm my husband. From his words and the coiled rage leaking out from Bones’s shields, neither was he about to wave the white flag.

“Why did you back Madigan in his attempts to create tri-species supersoldiers? Normally, our kinds don’t mess in each other’s business.”

My voice was brisk. Either the demon would answer or he wouldn’t, but it cost me nothing to ask.

Trove took his amber gaze off Bones long enough to flick it over me in a way that made me expect a trail of slime where it landed.

“You know how much I hate vampires?” he asked in a conversational tone. “The only things more disgusting are flesh eaters, and though your races came close once or twice, you just won’t go the distance and destroy each other.”

I tried not to show my shock as understanding dawned. Madigan had had no idea what he was risking by blending vampire and ghoul DNA into a human to create a new subspecies. Trove, however, knew exactly what would happen. The resulting war had been his intention all along.

Bones let out a low, mocking laugh. “And you thought you’d found a way to solve our peace problem? Sorry to disappoint.”

“My people were here first.”

Trove’s voice lost its smooth Texan twang, revealing a guttural intonation and an accent I’d never heard before.

“Then your races came,” he spat. “Humans were easy to dominate, but not your kinds. And how you protected your precious food from us! You drove us nearly to extinction, forcing us to hide for millennia, until neither side could remember how close it had come for my people. The only reason I know what happened is because I was there.”

I wondered why he was telling us this. Demons didn’t care if we understood their motivations. What was he up to?

“Finally, in the fourteen hundreds, ghouls and vampires began rising against each other,” Trove went on. “Such a surprise to realize all it took was a half-breed French girl and the threat of change she posed. Pity Joan was sacrificed so quickly. She nearly caused your races to annihilate each other.”