“He’s the bartender here.”
Oh yeah
, I thought. I remembered him. He was working the bar at Demonica the night I had my first audience with Abrine, Alcott’s newly deceased brother and the previous demon king.
Dialle replaced teeth with lips and sucked my chin until I thought I might start panting.
“He’s a royal spy.”
His hands clasped my butt under the worthless scrap of red leather, pulling me more tightly into his happy place.
“And he’s my brother.”
I gasped in surprise.
Then suddenly we were locked in time and space again. And, I had to limit my reaction to forming rapid fire questions in my mind.
When we landed in my office Dialle’s lips were on mine before I could question him about the bombshell he’d dropped on me at Demonica.
I pushed at his chest until his lips left mine with an audible smack and opened my mouth to question him but he shimmered away before I could get the first question out.
I stamped my foot in frustration and screamed. “Damnable devil, come the hell back here!”
I spun around, fully intending to stomp into my office and have a proper snit and found myself face to face with Emo.
I jumped and blinked. “Oh!”
His face did not look happy. “Astra.”
I was in no mood for his…mood. “Stop sneaking up on me, dammit! Everybody is always sneaking up on me and grabbing me and shifting me to He knows where in my slippers…”
Emo followed me into my office and leaned against the door frame as I plopped myself behind my desk.
He was watching me very intently and it took me a minute to figure out why. Suddenly I realized what I looked like. “Damn, why hadn’t Dialle taken me back home?” I scowled up at Emo, daring him to make a snide remark about my street strumpet outfit.
“Why are you dressed like a corner stander, Astra?”
Well that was just peachy! I got no respect…from anyone. I stood back up and started to stalk past Emo. “I’m going home. I’ll be back later.”
I tried to push past him at the door and he grabbed my arm, pulling me around to face him and dragging my stiff, unyielding body up against his. He lowered his face until I could taste his breath on my lips. He tasted of Chinese takeout from down the street.
“Why do you let him yank you around and involve you in his messes, Astra?” He lowered his face even closer to mine. I felt a warm pool of anticipation gathering itself in my lower regions and pressed my thighs together in self-defense.
“Let me go, Emo.”
His lips were only a whisper away from mine and he just stayed there, breathing heavily as if he were trying to gain control of some deep emotion. I stared up at him, feeling like my inordinate fear of what he would do next was glaringly evident in my over wide eyes.
I waited.
He breathed and trembled.
Finally he let me go and stepped out of my way. But as I pushed past him he said, “You have no business being involved in this, Astra. You
will
get hurt.”
I stopped in my tracks and closed my eyes, breathing deeply in an attempt to regain control of an overpowering urge to kill and maim. So far my day had been a particularly nasty contender for entry into the shitty day book.
When I felt as if I could speak to him without pulling out his nails I turned around and said, “Tell me why everyone wants me off this case, Emo. Right now.”
He stared at me for a couple of beats and then shrugged. His eyes told me he wasn’t as nonchalant as he was pretending to be. Emo and I had been close friends for nearly our whole lives. If anyone knew me and my moods, he did. So I was betting that he knew the razor fine line I was currently walking with my temper. Yet he refused to answer my question.
Instead he stood there, his beautiful black eyes focused on me as if I were a particularly volatile explosive device.
“Tell me right now Emo or you’re fired.” I almost gasped aloud as soon as I said the words but I couldn’t take them back.
I thought I saw him wince but he recovered too quickly for me to be sure.
In a contest of wills Emo and I were strongly matched. I knew what I’d just done was a fatal mistake. But it was one that would have to play itself out.
Emo would never back down.
I would never back down.
Stubborn R Us.
We stared at each other for several moments and then, finally, my best friend and partner nodded once and started toward the door.
I reached out to him as he passed me and grabbed his hand. He swung me around by the hand and into his arms and, before I even knew what he intended, his lips were on mine. We were like people who’d gone days without food at a smorgasbord. For a few seconds all we could do was clutch one another closer and grind hungrily against each other.
On some level I felt my daemon hickey sparking but Emo reached up and placed his hand over the mark and it stopped.
The shock of that brought me to my senses. I pulled away from him and covered my tingling lips with my hand.
He looked at me for a long moment, then reached out to tug the slut bodice higher up on my breasts. “You have no business being with him, Astra. He’ll kill you eventually but he’ll cause you so much pain before he does.”
My eyes filled with tears as I watched him walk out of the office.
Chapter Eleven
Super Size It
His chin was square, his pecs were buff,
But his manners were not up to snuff.
The client sitting across from me seemed less concerned about his missing wife than he was interested in the demons that he claimed took her. More worrying even than that was the extent of his knowledge, which, for your everyday, normal human type creature, was impressive.
Most humans had little to no knowledge of any of the dark worlders, choosing instead to pretend that evil didn’t exist in the world. But nowhere is their ignorance more profound than as directed toward the demon race, since the demons were so adept at hiding their true form and nature from the magically susceptible human race.
I waited patiently while my new client explained to me that his wife had started to frequent the demon nightclubs in downtown Angel City a little over a month previous. I listened while he told me how she had become increasingly withdrawn and uncommunicative as her apparent obsession with the demons had grown.
As I listened it occurred to me that he was describing a textbook case of demon fixation. It was almost word for word, in fact, the same description I’d read in my own reference text on the subject.
Unfortunately it was just too perfect to ring true to me, given my highly cynical nature.
I tried to keep a poker face until he was done and then I stared at him for a couple of beats before responding.
He stared back at me, unblinking. Meaning either he was being honest and had nothing to hide or he was
very
good at lying.
I wanted to believe the former but was cynically inclined toward the latter.
“And exactly when did your wife disappear, Mx. Coltran?”
“The night before last. At around two a.m.”
“How do you know she disappeared at that time of morning if you weren’t with her?”
He had the good grace to look sheepish at this, dropping his dark blond head to stare at the fine-boned hands that were clasped in his lap. “I put a tracking device on her.”
I raised two finely tweezed dark red eyebrows into matching peaks. “You were tracking your wife, Mx. Coltran?”
He coughed a bit nervously. “Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I had reason to believe she was meeting a demon at the club every night, a superdemon, which meant he wasn’t repulsive and I…”
I inclined my head. “Yes?”
“I think she was falling for him.”
I thought about this for a moment, letting everything I knew about demons flow through my brain, snagging here and there on a jagged corner of my fertile imagination.
I knew it was possible. The superdemons were the equivalent of the royal devils in that their evil was hidden behind a fairly pleasant façade. Some of them were actually quite good looking in fact. I could see a human woman with an obsession toward the dark side finding one of them attractive.
Under the right circumstances.
I cocked my head at my new client. “How do you know about this demon?”
This time he actually flushed. “I…ah… I… You see I’d suspected for a while…” He looked up at me and his green eyes flashed with anger momentarily before they settled back into sadness. “The truth is she had been bragging to me about him. I didn’t want to know anything about it. I just wanted to make our marriage work.”
Also straight out of the book. The human mate of the obsessed person never really considered the obsession and any subsequent sexual activity to be actual straying from the marriage or relationship. It is always assumed that humans have no free will around dark world types.
On some level I could see their point. Thoughts of my recent behavior with one—okay two—royal devils made me flush and look away from my client. I suddenly became very interested in the dull, unimaginative print of a Martian sunset that hung on the wall next to my office door.
“So you tracked your wife and what? The tracking device stopped working at around two in the morning the night before last?”
He nodded, looking miserable.
“Do you think she might be dead?”
His head jerked up and his eyes seemed to swim with pain. “No!”
I stared hard at him and waited.
Finally he took a deep breath and shook his head. “She’s not dead, Mx. Phelps but I’m afraid she’s been taken against her will.”
“What if she hasn’t?”
“Huh?”
“Been taken against her will. What if she went voluntarily?”
He shook his dark blond head, dislodging a large curl onto his forehead and making him look like a very large, slightly disheveled child. “You and I both know, Mx. Phelps that humans have no free will around these creatures. I just want to get her back so I can get her some help.”
I watched him struggle with his emotions and thought about whether I wanted to take the case on with everything else I had going on. But when he looked back up at me and said, “I love her, Mx. Phelps.” I knew I was gonna take the case.
But I had to know one thing first. “Mx. Coltran, how do you know so much about demons? How did your wife get interested in them in the first place? You know it’s highly unusual for humans to even recognize a demon let alone seek them out once they have.”
He glanced up at me and the pain that had been in his green eyes just seconds earlier had been replaced by something else entirely. Something almost…calculating passed through his gaze in a heartbeat of time and was gone. Leaving me wondering what I was getting myself into.
“She…we found out one of our neighbors was frequenting these nightclubs and he told us about them. Instead of warning her against them, like I think the neighbor had intended to do, she seemed intrigued somehow by what he told us. She started going out at night soon after that and returning home very late with little or no explanation.” He sighed, staring at his hands, which were clasped tightly in his lap. “It nearly destroyed our neighbor. At least that’s what he told us at the time. But she ignored his warnings and went to that first nightclub anyway.”
Coltran coughed into a fist and looked away, his eyes unfocused and weary.
I saw too many holes in his story. I thought about demon chattel and how they can be used to draw other humans into the demons’ sphere. I couldn’t help wondering if Mx. Coltran’s neighbor wasn’t a member of that group. I thought it was highly likely and asked for his name. I decided I’d check the neighbor out and turn him into the paranormal cops if he looked suspicious.
“Mx. Coltran, why do you think the neighbor told you about the demons. What prompted him? I mean, it’s not exactly a normal conversation to have. Most people would have thought he was delusional talking about demons.”
Coltran nodded, still staring off in that unfocused way. “Margaret and I had recently joined a…group.”
Oh-oh.
“What kind of group, Mx. Coltran?”
He cleared his throat, looking slightly embarrassed. “It’s called HEAC, Humans Against Evil Creatures. We wanted to do something to stop the spread of evil through our community.”
I felt dread, cold and slimy, sliding down my spine. “What exactly does this group do, Mx. Coltran?”
His green eyes jerked to my face, locked there and filled with the passion of the righteous.
I gulped.
“We eradicate evil where it stands, Mx. Phelps. We destroy its purveyors and scour its places of business. We kill evil creatures to protect the innocent.”
Major oh-oh.
I swallowed hard and looked for a way to say what I needed to say next. I finally settled on blunt honesty.
“Mx. Coltran, you have no right taking the law into your own hands. If I believed that you were killing and destroying anything I would be forced to turn you into the paranormal cops. It’s the PC’s job to protect the human population against the dark world, Mx. Coltran. Not yours or this group’s.”
The fanatical glint bled away from his green gaze and the light in his eyes turned calculating. “Of course I was just using a figure of speech, Mx. Phelps. My group would never harm another creature. We work very closely with the PC on these matters.”
I stared at him for a long moment and then nodded. I didn’t believe him for a moment but hopefully I’d given him something to think about. I made a mental note to check the group out with the paranormal cops. If they hadn’t yet heard of it they needed to.
“Mx. Coltran, if you don’t mind my asking, whatever possessed you and your wife to join this group?”
He gave me a sad smile. “Murder, Mx. Phelps. My wife’s nephew was murdered a few months ago. He’d been out club-hopping with friends and just disappeared. His body was located several days later and it was horribly mutilated. The PC tried to tell us he’d been killed by Satanists but we didn’t believe them.”