I brush past him, feeling the fury cascade through me. It’s like a domino effect, but instead of dominos it’s sticks of dynamite and they’re going off one by one.
I whirl around, fixing him with the meanest glare, directing all that fire at him.
He looks scared. Honest to god, scared.
Of me.
Well, hell hath no motherfucking fury like a woman scorned.
“Don’t you have anything to say for yourself!” I throw my hands up. “Maybe tell me the truth! Why you’ve been lying! I mean, god damn it Jay! You were talking to her today in the diner. One demon was distracted by me and my mother took the chance to talk to you and you just pretended it didn’t happen. You made me think I was nuts!”
But Jay doesn’t move. He doesn’t even blink.
I’m not sure he’s even breathing.
Uneasiness creeps up my spine.
I take a step toward him, feeling the hate and fire inside me dissolve momentarily.
Then Jay moves, stumbling forward a few feet, gasping for air.
I stop. “What happened?” I ask firmly, not liking how this is taking away from my fury. “What’s wrong with you?”
He blinks at me. “You weren’t doing that on purpose?”
“Doing what?” I ask with a sigh. “If you think you can change the subject . . .”
“I’m not, okay,” he says testily. He comes over to me and my body stiffens in response. “I’m not changing any subject. I just need to know if you knew what you were doing just then.”
“I wasn’t doing anything. I was yelling at you because you’re a big ginger-colored piece of shit!”
“Be that as it may,” he says, reaching out and grabbing my wrist before I wallop him in the chest again. “You froze me with your stare.”
My nose scrunches up. “I did what?”
“You did the same thing to me that I did to you at the diner.”
My mind goes back a few reels. In the diner I’d pissed Jay off, insinuating he didn’t know who he was. His glare caused a physical reaction in me. A bad one.
“I did that to you?” I ask. “Just now.” Then I glower at him. “Wait a minute, you are trying to switch the subject.”
“No, I’m not,” he says. He sounds sincere. Then again he sounded sincere when he was lying about my mom. “Remember when you asked me when you would be ready? This is the first step. I don’t quite know what you can do, Ada. But you can transfix me with your gaze in more ways than one. Which means you can do the same to a demon. A crucial skill to have, I would say.”
“And I can put up walls,” I tell him proudly, even though I have no idea how I do that either.
“About that,” he starts.
“No!” I yell at him, ripping my wrist from his hand. “Explain why you’ve been lying to me! I’m supposed to trust you Jay. And I did. It took my own grandmother to rip me into some secret location in the Veil to finally tell me the truth!”
“I had to lie,” he tells me, not seeming surprised about Pippa. “It’s the only way to keep you safe.”
“Safe!” I cry out, aware that I’m yelling at him full-blast and his face is a foot away. “Who gives a fuck about safe? What about my heart? My mother, Jay. You never had a fucking mother so you wouldn’t understand, but my mother was everything to me. And she’s being tortured for all eternity! How could you let that happen?”
He’d flinched at my comment but is back to being stone-faced and impassive. “It’s not up to me. There are rules to follow and I follow them.”
“Because you’re programmed to follow them, is that it? Like a mindless drone.”
He swallows. “You’re not being fair.”
“No, I’m being honest. You’re not being fair. You could have gone and rescued her at least if you didn’t want to tell me.”
“I can’t,” he says gravely, shaking his head. “I would if I could.”
“But you’re not allowed,” I say in a mocking voice. “You’ll get in trouble.”
“Ada, listen to me, please. You don’t know how this all works. I do, all right? My job is to protect you at all costs. To protect and teach. I am bound to it, bound to you.”
“For a limited time only,” I mutter.
“And I will do that at all costs. For you to go after your mother is too risky. I can’t afford to take that risk. I’m sorry, I would do it if I could, but I can’t. I can cross freely into the Veil, to all the layers, but Hell is another story all together. First of all, going in there would mean leaving you alone and vulnerable. Then there’s the fact that I don’t have a bond to your mother the way you do. She wouldn’t come with me. Then there’s the fact that there aren’t many portals from here going in.”