"Maybe you don't have any choice in the matter," I teased, still mentally picturing myself saving his soul, then spending the rest of our lives together bound in peace and harmony.

"I do," he answered, his lips a grim line. "I refuse to bind you to me."

I pulled my hand from him, pushing down the pain of his rejection. So much for peace and harmony.

"It is not because I do not want you," he said stiffly, grabbing my hand and tightening his fingers around mine. I risked a glance at his eyes, and almost recoiled at the anger visible there until I realized it was an anger directed inward. "You have seen into my mind—you know that I desire you, that my body cries out for you. But I will not bind you to one with whom you can have no future."

Distraught as he was, I knew that this wasn't the time to press him for more information, or to argue my point. Besides, I wasn't absolutely sure I wanted to commit myself to him, especially since I couldn't give him what he so desperately wanted.

"I feel horribly guilty about running out on Melissande," I said, blithely changing the subject. I gently rubbed my thumb over the back of his hand in order to get him to loosen his grip. He dropped my hand like it was made of spiders, turning away to watch the people nearest us.

"You didn't run out on her. I abducted you."

"At first. But you can't really imagine I would be here now with you if I didn't want to be."

His outraged expression gave me the answer to that statement. Before he could go into his "me Betrayer, you Jane" routine, I added, "Yeah, I know, you're the big, bad wolf and all that, but the fact remains that I'm not a pushover, Adrian. I'm here because I want to be here. I want to help you—within the limits of what I can do. But that doesn't mean I feel any less guilty about the fact that I was hired to help Melissande find her nephew. And since you have information that she needs, I figured it'd be a fair trade if you gave me the info in exchange for my help."

He thought about that for a moment. "Melissande cannot help Damian."

"Why don't we let her be the judge of that?"

He grunted a disagreement, but didn't outright refuse to talk. "What do you want to know?"

I settled back on the bench, tucking my hands into my coat sleeves to warm them. Funny how they never felt cold when Adrian was holding them. "Let's start at the beginning—what were you doing at Christian's castle?"

His jaw tightened, and for a minute I didn't think he was going to answer. With an annoyed grimace, he admitted, "Looking for the ring."

"Ah! The ring." I nibbled on my lower lip for a moment or two. "Um. What ring?"

"What ring? Melissande persuaded you to help her without mentioning the ring of Asmodeus?" He shook his head, a disgusted look on his face. "Foolish woman."

"She's not foolish, she's concerned. There's a difference. And yes, she mentioned a ring, but only briefly. I'm sure she would have gone into more detail if we'd had time. This ring—I assume, since you're looking for it, that it has some sort of power against Asmodeus?"

His hands clenched. "Yes. It channels his power. Without it, he is crippled, bound to his prison, unable to free himself."

"That tells me why he should be looking for it, but not who you… oh." Just as the words left my mouth I remembered what Melissande had told me: Adrian the Betrayer was bound to the demon lord Asmodeus. Which meant if his master wanted the ring but was too weak to go hunting for it himself, his tame vampire would be the likeliest person to send on a retrieval mission. "Asmodeus asked you to look for it?"

"Yes."

The word positively dripped ice cubes.

I mused for a moment over the fact that his eyes had gone a flat, dulled ice blue. "OK, got that, but what does this ring have to do with anyone else? Why did you say Melissande was foolish not to have discussed it with me? Wait—does this ring have power that can be used against Asmodeus as well as by him?"

"Yes."

The atmosphere surrounding Adrian was so cold, I wouldn't have been surprised to see a polar bear strolling by.

"Ah, gotcha. So if Melissande gets ahold of this ring, she can either trot up to the A-man and offer him a trade—the ring for her nephew—or use it against him and force him to free the kid?"

"To do either would be to sign both her and Damian's death warrants." His eyelids dropped to half-mast as he gave me a long look. "The ring is a conduit to great power. Whoever wields it has within his hands the ability to destroy the lord Asmodeus. It would be fatal for one unlearned in the ways of the dark powers to try to use the power against him. Melissande has neither the strength nor the ability to battle Asmodeus."

I pursed my lips, warmth flooding my belly with the way Adrian's gaze pounced on the movement. "I take it you didn't find this ring at the castle?"

"No. You did not happen to see it during your search of Dante's desk?"

"A ring?" I thought back to my scant few minutes in the wonderful library, dwelling for a moment on the warded book that yielded the notes and shell earring. Did Adrian know I had searched other places in the room than just the desk? He had recognized that the vase was warded, but perhaps he hadn't had time to look over the entire library and realize that a less obvious object had been warded as well. "No, I didn't see a ring in his desk. How did you know that vase was warded?"

One auburn eyebrow rose in question.

"The vase in the library, the one you tested me with to see if I could recognize the ward. How did you know it was warded? Can you draw them, too?"

He shrugged. "Anyone can draw a ward, but it takes a skilled Charmer or one learned in ward lore to unmake them."

"So you can see the ward as well?" I pressed, a growing suspicion making it important to know whether he had searched Christian's books. I slowly slid my right hand from my sleeve, along my hip to the back pocket on my pants, watching Adrian from the corner of my eye. He didn't seem to notice the movement.

"Not see them, but feel them. When I was near the vase, I felt that it was warded."

My fingers closed around the thin circle of the earring. "What… uh… what does this Asmodeus ring look like? Something big and garish? Gold Tolkien-ish band? Red-hot to the touch and leaving scorch marks on whoever touches it?"

He gave me a curious glance. I smiled and looked as innocent as I could.

"Your smile is lopsided," he said, apropos of nothing.

"I know." I kept my lips curved despite the almost overwhelming desire to grind my teeth at his comment. "Does the ring have spiders carved on it or something ghoulish like that? Does it leech blood? Is it connected in any way with a giant eye floating above a black tower?"

Adrian looked as if he wanted to roll his eyes, but managed to give me a weary look instead. "Nothing so dramatic. And you thought I'd been watching too much Buffy."

"Hey!" I said, about to protest the fact that he'd been in my mind again without my permission.

"The ring is about two centimeters in width, and consists of a thin circle of horn bound in gold."

"Horn?" I asked, my stomach doing a lurch as I ran my finger around the approximately two centimeter-wide circular earring in my pocket, the one I had assumed was made of shell. "What sort of horn?"

He looked away, once again scanning our surroundings. "Unicorn."

I laughed, the sound dying a cruel death on my lips as I realized he wasn't cracking a smile at his joke. "You're serious, aren't you? Unicorn?"

"Yes, I'm serious. Have you seen such a ring?"

I shook my head, the fingers of my right hand running around the object in my pocket, searching for a break that would indicate that it was an earring as I originally thought, and not a ring so powerful it could destroy a demon lord.