“It’s only you and me now,” he said quietly, a serene look on his face, his hands folded comfortably before him. “I suspected that Mr. Ross might try to intervene in this, so I arranged a minor distraction. It looks to me as if it did the job. Care to check for yourself?”
She straightened, forcing herself to stand fast, closing away her emotions so that he would not see them. “What do you want from me?” she asked, keeping her tone of voice flat and expressionless.
“I want you, child. My daughter. I want you with me, where you belong.”
She choked back the urge to scream in rage. “I told you not to call me that. I am not your daughter. I am nothing like you. I have no intention of going with you anywhere. Not now, not ever. If you make me go, I will run away from you the first chance I get.”
He shook his head admonishingly. “You are in deep denial, Nest. Do you know what that means? You can pretend all you want, but when all is said and done, I am still your father. You can’t change that. Nothing can. I made you. I gave you life. You can’t just dismiss the fact of my existence.”
Nest laughed. A surge of adrenaline rushed through her. “You gave me life out of hate for my mother and my grandmother. You gave me life for all the wrong reasons. My mother is dead because of you. I don’t know if you killed her or if she killed herself, but you are responsible in either case.”
“She killed herself,” the demon interjected with a shrug. “She was weak and foolish.”
Nest felt her face turn hot. “But my grandmother didn’t kill herself, did she?”
“She was dangerous. If I had let her live, she might have killed me.”
“And so now I belong with you?” Nest was openly incredulous. “Why would you think I would even consider such a thing?”
The demon’s bland features tightened. “There is no one else to look after you.”
“What are you talking about? What about Grandpa?” She pointed at him threateningly, aggressively. “Get out of here! Leave me alone!”
“You have no one. Your grandfather is dead. Or if not, he will be soon.”
“You’re lying!”
The demon shrugged again. “Am I? In any case, none of them matter. Only me.”
Nest was shaking with fury. “Why you would think, after all you’ve done, that I would do anything you wanted, is beyond me. I hate you. I hate what you are. I hate it that I am any part of you. You don’t matter to me. You matter less than nothing!”
“Nest.” He spoke her name calmly and evenly. “You can say or do anything you like, but it won’t change what’s going to happen.”
She took a deep breath to steady herself. “Nothing’s going to happen.”
“You are my flesh and blood, Nest. We are the same.”
“We are not the same. We will never be the same.”
“No?” The demon smiled. “You want to believe that, I expect. But you’re not certain, are you? How can you be? Don’t you wonder how much of me is inside you?” He paused. “Don’t you owe it to yourself to find out?”
He started forward. “Don’t touch me!” Nest snapped, clenching her fists at her sides.
The demon stopped, laughing. “But I must. I must touch you if I am to help you see who you can become, who you really are. 1 must, if I am to help you free the part of me you keep buried.”
She shook her head rapidly from side to side. “Keep away from me.”
He looked skyward, as if discovering the rain for the first time. It was falling more rapidly now, a slow, steady patter against the leaves of the trees, its dampness spreading darkly across the bare ground. Nest glanced down at John Ross, but he still wasn’t moving. She looked over at Pick, slumped on the floor of his iron cage.
You have to help them.
Then, for the first time that night, she saw the feeders. They had ringed the clearing, hundreds-perhaps thousands-of them, bodies scrunched together within the shadows cast by the trees, eyes bright with expectation as they gleamed catlike in the darkness. She had never seen so many gathered in one place, never in numbers like this. It seemed, on looking about, as if all the feeders in the world had come together in these woods.