Lucius POV
Rosa—my little beloved—kept me waiting. Or perhaps I was simply early. There is a rhythm to these things I have long since learned to listen for: the soft stirrings of fate, the tug at a thread that begins as a whisper and then insists until I follow. Tonight that tug had been impossible to ignore. My demons paced the edges of me like hounds at a closed gate, claws scraping the inside of my skull. They wanted out. They wanted her.
They do not share my old grudges. They are cruder creatures than I, greedy and immediate; they do not catalog betrayal or nuance their contempt. Where I have reasons to loathe witches—politics, betrayal, the hex that robbed me of years—my demons are far less discriminating. They smelled her and decided, with stupid, animal certainty, that they wanted her. They didn't found it unacceptable that the thing they hungered for was a witch, of all impossible ironies. The demons do not know propriety. They raise a clamor. I shut them down.
