“Let me give you a history lesson.” He chuckled, making the hair on her nape salute.
“Must you?” She winced into her wine. She’d never been much good at history, and a premonition whispered she wasn’t going to enjoy his lesson.
“Morgan Le Fey,” he said. “She summoned me.”
Hang on, here. Bianca wasn’t that shit at history. “Morgan Le Fey is a myth.”
“Is she?” He gave her that nasty grin of his.
Bianca was speaking to a being who might actually know. Or he was fucking with her, but curiosity propelled her. “She isn’t?”
“She wanted youth and beauty.” He shrugged. “And immortality.”
Trying to play it cool, Bianca snorted. “Legend has it that didn’t work out so well for her.”
“No, it didn’t.”
His chuckle freaked her out, and there might be a hole in the bottom of her glass.
“Mother Shipton,” he said.
“Beauty and immortality?” She was a reader. That seemed like a safe guess.
“Predictions.” He stared at her with those midnight dark, furious eyes. “She wanted me to lift the veil for her and show her the future.”
“Did you?”
He nodded at her glass. “You going to share that?”
“It isn’t very good.” But she poured him a glass and took it to him. “What happened to Mother Shipton?”
“She missed seeing her own death.”
He was freaking her out now, but she refused to show it. Now she knew she didn’t want to hear the rest of his historical meanderings.
“La Voisin.” He sipped his wine and grimaced. “How do you drink this crap?”
“Same way you are.” She lifted her glass in a toast. No way she was asking one more question and prolonging this.
Lucifer smirked. “She wanted the power to make people fall in love with her.”
That seemed like a bad idea all round. “Dead?” Dammit! She’d asked another question, but she was also sensing a theme here.
He nodded. “Aradia.”
Bianca took a seat.
“Was desperate to unlock the secrets to all magic.”
“And dead?”
“Agnes Sampson.”
Bianca drank because now she knew what was coming.
“Wanted to heal her children.”
That didn’t sound so bad and hardly deserving of a death sentence.
Lucifer took a leisurely sip. “Also not a big fan of her husband and offered his soul in exchange.” He leaned back on the sofa. “To be fair, the man was a total prick.”
Wind shushed through the maples outside.
“Merga Bien,” he said. “Wanted to be as powerful as the pharaohs.”
“I get it.” If this went on much longer, he’d talk her to death. “All those witches summoned you, and now they’re dead. Very subtle.”
“Precisely.” He held up his wine glass. “More wine.”
“Say please.” Lucifer was rude. So was Shade when he’d first met Eddie, and Wrath was no picnic, and Eddie had survived those two. Of course Shade was in love with Eddie and Wrath was her father, but she had Lucifer bound.
“Please,” he snapped.
See there. You just had to be firm with these hell princes. It took every ounce of her rapidly waning courage, but she held the death glare she was getting. “Why you?”
“What?” He blinked.
“Why do they summon you?”
“Ah.” He sipped his wine and shrugged. “Name recognition. Prince of hell. Blah, blah, blah.”
“Right.” That made sense, and at some point, she was going to have to broach her reason for summoning him. She was probably being way too optimistic, but if he heard her out, maybe she could get him to help them. The key lay in the approach. Start carefully, lay some subtle groundwork, build to the big finish—like she’d done with the play selection meeting. Lead someone carefully over to her point of view. Those unnerving abyss eyes drilled into her. “Our coven is being hunted.”
Shit! Fuck! Damn!
Oh, well, pivot and adapt. “I summoned you to help me stop it.”
“No.” He smirked.
Well, if he was going to take that strategy. “And if you don’t, I’ll never release your power from the amulet.”
Fury flashed across his handsome face. “I will rip you into little pieces and incinerate you. I will chain your soul to your rotting carcass for eternity.”
And above all else in negotiation, show no fear. “Not stuck on that sofa, you won’t.”
He absorbed her comeback with the preternatural quiet of a hurricane’s eye. “What makes you think this trinket around my neck will hold me for longer than tonight?”
“What makes you think it won’t?” She returned his smirk. “I created that trinket. I know exactly how it works and what it does.” Kind of and in the broader sense of knowing, but she didn’t have to tell him that. “That trinket, as you call it, is part of an ancient set of spells we have in our coven grimoire. It’s also the reason my coven members are disappearing.” She added a bit of dramatic flair with a heavy pause. “So you could say, I’m an expert on that trinket.”
