For the last week that’s all he, Claire, Isabelle, and Jack had demanded of her. Theo worked with her self-defense skills, Jack was helping her fine-tune her raw ability with fire, and Claire was teaching her how to use it effectively against demons. Lastly, Isabelle was helping her learn how to use a sword—something she never thought she’d have to do in her life.

God. Not ever.

Every night she collapsed exhausted into her bed and slept like the dead until morning. Every single one of all the muscles she’d never known she’d had ached. She understood the gravity of her situation and she’d been giving her all to each of them. That added up to three hundred percent. She had no more more to give.

She tried not to let the look in his eyes cow her. “I’ll try.”

He grunted and rolled off her. “Don’t try, just do it.”

She pushed to her feet, wincing at a pain in her back. Being slammed down onto a pad by a muscular man twice her weight wasn’t fun. “Who are you, Yoda?” Annoyance made the words snap out.

“Just because Bai hasn’t been back doesn’t mean he won’t be.”

She let her head droop. “I know, I know. Believe me, if he or Stefan ever come back I want to be ready.” She shivered. “I think Stefan scares me even more than Bai.”

“Why?”

Sarafina walked over and took a towel from where she’d draped it over a Nautilus machine. They were training in the Coven’s exercise room. “Because he’s a witch. I mean, I would expect a demon to do hideous and terrible things. I can understand that. But Stefan is aeamon, one of us.”

Theo uncapped his bottle of water and took a drink. When he’d finished, he put it down and said, “We’re all one, Sarafina. As hard as that may be to understand, the aeamon are a part of the daaeman. We’re born of them. The daaeman are a complicated race, like humans. Some of them are good and some of them are bad. There many shades of gray. You can count on an Atrika being violent and sociopathic. They’re made to be that way. You should count on it to save your skin. But there are accounts of even Atrika falling in love with humans in ancient times. Even they are capable of compassion, apparently.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying you shouldn’t generalize and you shouldn’t think in terms of us versus them. Basically, there is good in all demons, witches, and warlocks, but there’s bad, too. You can’t live by absolutes and you can’t trust anyone, not even those closest to you.”

Sarafina studied him for a long moment. “Do you really believe that? You can’t trust anyone?”

He shifted. “Yeah, mostly.”