Authors: Eliza Crewe
“Newbs, eh?” the demon in the sequin dress asks with the practiced condescension of a lifelong bully. Her pale skin is in stark contrast to her dark dress, short black hair, and Goth-colored mouth. The black and white-ness of her, her heart-shaped face, cupid-bow lips and thin, overly-arched eyebrows make her look like she stepped out of a silent movie.
She quirks one of those 1920s eyebrows now. “It can’t hurt you, you know.” She slides a smirk at her audience, then twiddles long fingers made longer by her excessive fingernails. She mutters something and the snap-happy monster behind us howls in agony. Gusts of wind billow through the door as it flaps its wings in a mad attempt to escape whatever excruciating punishment was dealt by the demon’s lazy finger-flick.
Jo steps forward, post-fight adrenaline evident in her elevated breathing and flushed cheeks. “I find it best to assume the unknown is dangerous,” Jo says, her uber-sweet tone in no way belying the bellicose nature of her response. “Safer that way.” She takes a smooth, predatory step forward. She eyes the assembled demons with the rapacious gleam of a post-weigh-in wrestler standing before a buffet.
I snap out a hand and grab her by the forearm. “Jo,” I say warningly. “Down girl.” My eyes flick to the other dozen or so demons watching the impending fight with varying levels of interest. I feel like the proverbial cat in a room full of rocking chairs.
“Uh, guys,” Chi says, looking out the door at a scene that could be Tokyo during a Godzilla movie. “I think we might want to hang out here for a little bit.”
Crap.
“Oh, come on, Meda.” Jo waves a hand toward her antagonizer, not keeping her voice down at all. “Look at her—we could totally take her.” The other woman hisses, and Jo baits her with an obnoxious grin and takes a stutter-step forward to get in the demon’s face. I grab her arm.
“No. Bad Jo. Bad. Sit.” I point at an out-of-the-way barstool.
She snarls, but at least it’s at me. I shove her toward the short side of the L-shaped bar. I push her into the seat closest to the wall, taking the stool beside her. Armand and Chi work their way towards us, but they’re bigger—particularly Chi—and don’t have Jo’s apparent rabidity to clear them a path.
“Oh, come on, Meda,” Jo whispers seductively, her eyes on her nemesis. “Since when are you such a stickler?”
“Trust me, Jo, no one misses the days when I was the irresponsibly violent one more than I do.”
She laughs, a huskier sound than I remember, malevolent delight replacing her old bitter sarcasm.
I scout the room. The main part of the bar is long and narrow and done in warm, burled woods and brass, or maybe gold, as it’s not like cost is an issue. The large panels of art built into the walls are geometric renderings of pouty-mouthed women and skyscrapers. It has all the obvious traits of an art-deco speakeasy, but like everything in hell, it’s just a little off, a little twisted. The room is cockeyed, wider at the back than the front. The walls undulate, with shadowed nooks, or maybe even entire rooms branching off the main portion, that I can’t see from where I stand. The ceiling is at uneven heights. The brass embellishments that run down the bar splay and sink organically into the grid-patterned floor, like roots, or hands sunk into soft clay.
Plus, there are the less subtle clues, like the soul strapped to the wall being used as a living dartboard.
Chi and Armand are on the long side of the bar, only about five feet away, but having a hard time making it around the corner of the bar without touching anyone. The 1920s horror star slides sinuously in Chi’s way, leaning against the bar. She juts out her hip, emphasizing her outrageous curves, and blocking his path.
We’re close enough to hear their conversation, but the demon considerately speaks up to make sure. “Pretty, pretty skin you’ve picked out.” She reaches out as if to run her long, claw-like nails down the side of Chi’s face.
Chi pulls back slightly, putting himself just out of reach, and shoots a glance at where I have Jo forcibly pinned to her stool. “Er, thank you.”
The demon leaves her fingers suspended between them, and says, without bothering to look at us. “You’re not with
her
, are you?”
“Uhhhh,” Chi says, vaguely panicked.
“He’s mine actually.” Armand squeezes between the bar and a demon, and smacks Chi on the butt. He then slings his arm around Chi’s neck.
Chi gives Armand an affronted look and it occurs to me that Chi’s upbringing in a fanatical religious cult in a small, rural town may not have prepared him to handle a man-on-man ass-grab. I brace myself as I wait to see if Chi can pull off the deception.
“You know how I feel about PDA,” Chi says, completely, effing, deadpan. Only the realization that it would mean certain death keeps me from laughing out loud.
Armand gives the demon a look like
what can you do?
and drops his arm from Chi’s shoulders.
The demon looks disappointed, probably more over losing a toy to rile Jo with than the loss of Chi. With everyone able to change their appearance at will, it’s not like there’s a shortage of hot guys. “Pity,” she says with a pretty pout. “Unless you like to share?” she asks Armand.
“Hey, I’m not some piece of meat,” Chi protests, holding up his hands. “I’m a living breathing human.” They both look at him. “Er, figuratively speaking,” he adds quickly.
I dart a look at the door. The screaming outside has died down, or at least moved off a bit. Between Jo’s newly-embraced violent streak and Chi’s long-standing Chi-ness, I think I’d rather face the dragons. I grab Jo’s upper arm and propel her from the stool. I catch Armand’s eye and jerk my head towards the door. A short nod lets me know he’s on the same page, and he says something to Chi, who looks at us and takes a couple of careful steps back the way he came.
Of course there’s no way for us to get out of the bar without passing by the demon chick. She does not disappoint, and leans in as we try to pass. “You look like you think you’re leaving.” The words contain a silky threat.
Jo rises to the bait. “And you look like an asshole.” I squeeze her arm in warning. “What?” she says to me, “I thought we were stating the obvious.”
“I’m trying to avoid a fight,” I say primly.
“Why?” Jo asks at the same time the demon says, “I’m not,” and slides her foot into our path. I’m off balance from pulling Jo, and frankly, I’m not expecting something quite so juvenile from someone who’s had a hundred years to perfect her torture techniques, and I stumble trying to avoid contact. The demon throws back her head and laughs uproariously. Smelling blood in the water, her lackeys follow suit.
Screw it.
“Have it your way, then.” My hand whips out, I wrap it around the demon’s arched throat and rip out her larynx. Her eyes are still widened in complete shock when she drops to the ground.
As I said, my dignity is a delicate flower. It can only take so much abuse.
“Yesssssss,” Jo says, at the same time Armand groans and the room erupts into shouts and curses, demons leaping to their feet.
“But . . .” sputters a tall blonde woman to the left.
“What? Friend of yours?” I toss down the missing piece of the still-twitching corpse. The Hunger erupts from its cage, unfurling through my blood, and I bring my hand to my mouth, licking off the blood with the deliberate spite of a naughty cat.
“You can’t—’
“Can’t what?” I ask with a dangerous little smile.
“Kill your own,” another demon, an overly-jacked body builder type, fills in for her. Though he looks clownish in proportion, his face and tone are hard.
“Oh, sweetie.” My voice is a caress. Behind me I hear Armand say my name warningly, but I ignore him. “I can do anything I want. Want to see?” Beside me Jo cackles. The demons, however, are not weak little humans to be cowed by a little bit of throat ripping. They were surprised by my audacity, but not the violence. The blonde shifts into a crouch and the vibe in the room clicks into anticipatory maliciousness.
“When zi-Ben finds out, it’s going to make what I’m about to do seem like a gentle massage,” she threatens with a pointed finger, bravely close to my face.
“I guess that means we can’t leave any witnesses.”
Armand tosses his jacket on to the bar with a dramatic sigh and steps next to me. “I was afraid you were going to say that.”
I grin at him. He tries not to grin back and fails. Chi pulls a knife from his pack, his other one somewhere on the pavement outside and shrugs. He’s always ready to roll with the punches—especially the literal ones.
Demons can’t use weapons, so the sight of his weapon elicits some confusion, but the realization that we may be more than we seem comes far too late.
Without turning my head from Armand, I fling my magic like a whip. It digs into a half-dozen of the closest demons, ripping the false life from their flesh like razor wire. I jerk, pulling their false life towards me. It weaves, black and snakelike, from their shrieking bodies. Above ground with the dragons, with who knows how many witnesses, I was leery of using Crusader magic.
Down here, that’s not going to be a problem.
The blonde demon dives for Jo, and Armand and Chi don’t hesitate to jump into the fray. I hold my six in immobile agony while Armand ends them efficiently. As he takes out the last one, I swing my arm, sucking another three demons into my spell. I arch my back, pulling the beautiful dark magic into me, sucking it into my core. When Armand slices the false life to a brutal stop, I don’t cast another spell. The Hunger lapped from the river of death as it poured through me; now it wants to bathe in it.
Chi grapples with a dark-haired demon, her back to me, and I leap at her. I grab her around the neck and jerk her from his grip with a loud crack. We have just enough time to share a bloodthirsty grin before we part, by unspoken agreement going opposite directions, to find more foe.
Blood splashes, bones snap. A searing gash opens on my forearm in a moment of carelessness, but the injury only makes it better; it adds the sharp sting of pain to the pleasure, turns mere violence into hot vengeance.
I see Jo, moving, dancing, fluid. The hate that always bubbled beneath the surface erupting to the surface, pouring into the bar in red-hot rivers of blood.
It’s over too soon.
“Well,” says Armand, standing amidst the wreckage. “That was an . . . interesting decision.” He sounds critical but I can see the electric hum under his skin, a combination of adrenaline and something darker. Something that sings. I grin at him, the drying blood pulling my skin. The Hunger roars in my ears, making me feel powerful. Invincible.
Jo swipes a hand down her forearm, swiping off a fistful of goo. It hits the floor with a wet plop. “Ew.”
That ruins the mood.
Armand turns towards her. “You can hardly complain when this is your fault.” I roll my eyes and ignore their bickering in favor of prowling among the bodies and making sure they are, in fact, all bodies.
Aha! Got one . . .
Armand’s raised voice interrupts my pleasant diversions. “. . . I’m not saying you’re at the
very
top of the list of people whose opinion I don’t give a shit about, I’m just saying don’t look down if you’re afraid of heights.”
“I wish we were somewhere high right now—I’d shove you off!”
“You know, I think being a demon really suits you. It lets us see who you
really
are.”
“That’s a great idea.” Something about Jo’s tone, its cat-with-cream quality, catches my attention. I turn just as she grabs his arm. “Let’s see who
you
really are.” Her eyes glaze, and I realize she’s pulling his memories from him, just as we did from the eel-like souls. Armand’s eyes widen, and he jerks from her grasp but it’s too late. Jo’s face holds all the delight of a child’s on Christmas morning. Before Armand can even protest, not that it would make any difference if he did, Jo jerks her arm across her body with a dramatic swish. Using his memories as a guide, she changes his halfling’s body into what it would have been had he never been able to alter his looks at will, or had he never been reborn as a Crusader.
I’ve known almost since the night we met that Armand’s appearance was false, that it is nothing more than a beautiful demonic construct, a pretty lie. I can’t help but admit I’m curious as to his true appearance. I anticipate a softer jaw, shorter lashes, a gut. Maybe he really is blonde.
The reality I could not have anticipated at all.
His hair disappears, revealing skin the mottled red-and-white of an old burn. A fissure of scar tissue as thick as my wrist erupts on his cheek bone and dives down his neck into his shirt. The top of one ear disappears, also his eyebrows, his left eyelid. He gives a short gasp as one leg shrivels and he fights to catch his balance. His body hunches, one shoulder higher than the other, twisted in some old injury.
For a moment, a blessed moment, I don’t understand what I’m seeing; I don’t recognize my once-friend, my almost-lover in this twisted creature. For that long minute of confused silence the horror of understanding is held at bay.
Then his eyes meet mine. They meet mine and I can’t. I can’t breathe, I can’t believe, I can’t hide from the truth of his horrific past, written in ridges of scar tissue, present in the absence of his limbs.
Jo’s the first to recover. “Better than even I expected,” she says, her voice pitiless. Armand looks up, his eyes burning with hate, but he makes no move to come at her. I’m not sure he can. As he stands there, I notice more, missing fingers, the white crisscross of whip marks, the divot of what looks like a bite taken out of his forearm, the wizened hand at the end speaking of destroyed tendons. He sees me looking and tucks his hand against his chest, looking sharply away. And I’m glad, I’m so glad he looked away, because in his eyes, in his hate, I still see
him
.
And I’m glad because Jo’s simple spell did more than strip him of his disguise; for the briefest second it stripped me of mine.
“Not so charming now, is he?” Jo asks, her voice fat with satisfaction.
I use her cruel words like a rope to pull me from emotions I’d rather not feel into those that are much more comfortable. “Neither are you.”
In the face of my frigid rage, her smile falters, and she looks to me then to Chi. He, too, is watching her, not Armand. Chi’s expression is at once shock, confusion and disappointment. Like he’s not quite sure who he’s looking at.
“Jo,” he says, full of reproach. He gives his head a little shake.
Her chin jerks up a bit. “That’s right,” she says, her tone mocking “You’ve always ‘kinda liked Armand,’ haven’t you?” Her voice lacks apology, but neither can she hold his gaze. She turns back to Armand. “But I suppose you can’t stay this way. No demon would ever look so grotesque.” She says it with deliberate cruelty. “Pretty faces make prettier lies, don’t they? That’s why the demons use them. Sugar surrounding the bitter pill.” When she jerks her hand again, Armand is transformed yet again. He straightens; she makes him taller, more muscular than before, with fairer skin. Dark hair covers his head, but short this time. His dark lashes return, but his facial structure is different, more square as opposed to his previous urbane-prettiness. He looks like the rugged hero on the cover of a romance novel, except he wears a thin red T-shirt decorated with a snarling bear and jeans rather than a chest-revealing ruffled pirate shirt and pantaloons.
He doesn’t meet my eyes, instead fastening his furious gaze on Jo. His hands clench into fists, his newly formed mouth shaped into a snarl. I open my mouth, but don’t have a clue what to say, so instead I take Jo’s arm. I have to clear my throat before I speak. “Come on, Jo, we need fresh disguises, too.” I tug her away from Armand, into one of the shadowed nooks, but his eyes follow us. Chi puts a big hand on Armand’s shoulder and says something I can’t hear. Armand nods and, after one more pat, Chi disappears out of sight into the main room, no doubt to strip the demon corpses of their false life.
Searing pain all over my body calls my attention away from the guys, and I look back at Jo to see that she has remade herself as a fine-boned woman with mahogany skin and a shaved head (a decision I suspect was influenced by the bloody, bare patch of scalp she earned moments earlier during the fight). My blond locks turn red and I feel the metal curve of a lip ring, but there’s no mirror for further inspection, and I’m more interested in escaping our crime scene than admiring my superficial beauty.
Once done, I strip the false life from the demon corpses in our alcove. Armand still won’t look at me, or Jo for that matter, but he walks with us into the other room to find Chi. Chi’s not in the main room when we enter, but more worrisome—neither is the soul that was pinned to the dartboard. Jo notices at the same time I do.
“Chi!” she calls, jumping over bodies.
Chi sticks his head in the doorway. “What?”
“Where’s the soul?”
He looks sheepish for about a half-second, then hardens his jaw. “I set him . . . er, it . . . free.”
“Why would you do that?”
“We couldn’t just leave him there.”
“Of course we couldn’t.” I suspect Chi meant it in a humanitarian sense: “We couldn’t leave him there” as in, not strapped-to-wall-shot-through-with-darts. Jo’s agreement is more in a no-live-witnesses kind of way. “But . . .”
“And we couldn’t kill it if we wanted to,” Chi says, stalwart in the face of her rising fury.
“No, but we could have made sure it didn’t talk.”
“It didn’t have a mouth. It can’t talk.”
“You know what I mean!”
“I do, Jo,” Chi agrees sharply, taking us all by surprise. “But it was the right thing to do. It doesn’t need to be caged, or turned into a roach, or terrified into not betraying us, or any of the other creative ways you could think of to keep it quiet.”
That Chi’s freeing of the soul was a deliberate attempt to protect it from Jo’s cruelty and not just his happy-go-lucky naivety is again the wind fluttering the curious curtain over Chi’s depths. He has seen something in Jo and now we all see something in him. Jo blinks, as if someone unexpectedly turned on a light, then shakes her head. “You can’t do the right thing here, Chi. It’s not . . . it doesn’t belong.”
His voice gentles, the previous bite all but forgotten. “You can do the right thing everywhere, Jo. That’s why it’s the right thing.”
“Well, it was stupid,” she responds, but her tone is weak, like someone who lost their train of thought and finishes their sentence by rote.
“Probably,” he agrees, holding her gaze. “But that doesn’t change anything.” He releases her from his gaze and nods at us. “We ready to go?”
We duck out into the ill daylight. We can hear the roar of the beasts in the distance, and the responding mouthless screams of the tormented souls, but, mercifully, our destination is in the opposite direction. The street is scattered with destroyed cars and broken bodies of the hapless, but the surviving souls are picking themselves up and creeping from their hiding places to resume their tasks. Their faces reveal only resignation as they step indifferently over the bodies of their less fortunate comrades.
Without a word, Armand leads us back up the hill then takes a left. Jo and Chi fall behind, either so Jo can yell at Chi some more or Chi can yell at Jo, I’m not sure, not that I really care. I wouldn’t mind screaming at both of them until their heads pop off. If nothing else, it might relieve my uncomfortable emotions.
As Armand said, you can’t un-know things, and knowing things can change you, whether you want them to or not.
“Armand . . .” I’m not quite sure what to say. An apology feels right, but I’m not sure why. I’m not in the practice of apologizing for things that aren’t my fault—or for things that are, for that matter. So instead, I ask, “What happened?”
He squints as he looks down the street. The yellow light gives his skin a sickly pallor. His voice is emotionless. “What do you think happened?”
When we met, we compared our upbringings, how controlling my mother was, how limited my freedom, and how his childhood was the opposite. How he could do as like, how he had no rules, how he grew up learning the art of pain. “But you said . . .”