Blaire visited again. I was there to see her reunite with her sisters. Her demon guards followed closely behind. They still frightened her, but Blaire wasn’t letting that show.

They frighten me, too. Rall, he’s the taller brother, wanted me to sit with him on the balcony behind the Boltiers’ suite. 

Just to talk, he said. To talk, he promised.

I’m not sure what his definition of talk is, though. 

I almost fell for it, almost went with him. 

I probably would have been his lunch—if Aida hadn’t pulled me aside and told me I had been speaking to him in a demon language known only to the royal family, for a good five minutes. 

I certainly hadn’t realized. 

I’d tried to learn human Spanish my first go-round in college. It hadn’t gone well. Neither had my high school attempts at French and Latin. Apparently, according to the poor instructor who had taught me both at the high school and at Dardanos University and had gotten stuck with me each—I have no ability for foreign languages at all. 

Had my parents not spoken English to us as children, that instructor had said almost spitefully, I would most likely not have learned that language either.

He wasn’t a very nice professor. At least not to me. Especially to me—he’d wince every time my stutter emerged. Which made it come out all the more frequently.

He certainly liked those females of the Jareth and Dardaptos and Lycurgus Houses, though. Probably because they had vestis in the latest, lower-cut fashions. Something we Woalds most definitely do not.

I don’t know why I can speak demon. 

I don’t even realize I am doing it until someone points it out. 

Perhaps it has something to do with the demon blood they used on me in the Healers’ Hall? 

That makes the most sense. Next time I see Iahanna, the sister of my Equa, I will ask her. She’s a wonderful healer—one of the few we Woalds have—and she’ll tell me straight. 

Demon blood has to have left some kind of mark on me, right?