The Devil's Playground mk-5 Read online

  And that’s where I came in. Because these demons wouldn’t look like the stereotypical drop-dead gorgeous specimens, it would be hard for Barbie to tell the difference between a nouveau demon and a skanky human. I would have to discreetly slip into my exorcist’s trance and check the aura of anyone she was considering taking upstairs for the glow of demon red.

  I wasn’t entirely sure I could get myself into the trance state under these circumstances. I don’t need the whole dog-and-pony show many exorcists require to induce the trances, but I feared the music and crowd might be a tad distracting, even for me. Still, I’d managed to induce the trance in less-than-ideal circumstances before, so I hoped I could manage it here.

  The reason I still insist on calling Barbara “Barbie,” despite her repeated attempts to get me to stop, is that she looks so much like a Barbie doll. She’s petite and blond, with a curvaceous figure and a chinadoll face. Yes, I hate her, even though I actually like her against all my expectations.

  Her delicate good looks made her the perfect bait, and we hadn’t even swallowed the first sips of our drinks before we had a candidate sniffing at her skirts. I shouldn’t have been surprised that said candidate was female. This was a demon club after all, and I’ve already mentioned their lack of gender preferences.

  Barbie’s admirer fit our profile perfectly. She was way too skinny to be wearing a spaghetti-strap camisole, which showed off her bony shoulders and jutting collarbone. Her cheekbones were daggersharp slashes across her face, and there were hollows under her eyes. Her hair was a brittle, frizzy bottle-blond, with a stripe of brown roots showing at the part. She might have looked pretty enough at a healthy weight and with a decent dye job, but as she was, she was an eyesore. Definitely not the kind of person the Spirit Society would approve as a legal demon host.

  I didn’t hear what Ms. Skin-and-Bones said to Barbie, but her smile was lascivious enough to get the meaning across. It also showed a chipped front tooth. I knew without even checking her aura that she was one of the nouveau demons. With Shae’s sense of aesthetics, she’d never have granted membership to a human who was so patently unattractive.

  I expected Barbie to start up a flirtation, but instead she slipped an arm around my waist possessively and shook her head, smiling gently. Ms. Skin-and-Bones pouted, and I stood stark still, trying like hell not to show my surprise. I’m a shitty actress, so it’s a good thing our would-be mark only had eyes for Barbie.

  Ms. Skin-and-Bones reached out and gave Barbie’s shoulder a squeeze. “If you change your mind, I’ll be at the bar,” she said, then sauntered off, probably thinking the way she shook her ass was sexy, rather than pathetic.

  Barbie dropped the arm she’d put around my waist and gave me back my personal space. I frowned down at her.

  “She was a perfect candidate,” I protested. “Why did you turn her down?” I doubted it was due to any homophobia, considering Barbie had pretended to be with me, but I couldn’t understand it.

  “I thought we’d be better off with a male,” she answered, leaning close to me again so she wasn’t broadcasting her words to the whole room. Not that anyone could hear her over the blasting music. “I didn’t want Adam and Raphael to get squeamish.”

  I was glad I wasn’t in the middle of sipping my drink, because I’d have spit it halfway across the room as I laughed my ass off. Barbie had been a member of our council for a couple of months now, but since nothing much had happened, she hadn’t gotten to see Adam and Raphael in action. If there were ever two people less likely to get squeamish—about anything—I sure didn’t want to meet them.

  “Believe me,” I said between bouts of laughter, “they won’t let chivalry—” The laughter threatened to take over again, and I sucked in a couple of deep breaths to quell it. “They won’t let chivalry get in the way,” I finished when I could get the whole sentence out.

  “All right,” Barbie said, the flush in her cheeks the only sign that my laughter pissed her off. “Maybe I’m squeamish. I’d rather pick someone who doesn’t look so pathetic.”

  “That might be tough, since ‘pathetic’ is kinda one of the traits we’re looking for.”

  We both looked toward the bar, where Ms. Pathetic sat sipping some kind of fruity drink. No one was talking to her. Hell, no one even looked at her. She might be one of the only demons in this club who’d have trouble getting laid.

  Barbie bit her lip. “Are you sure she’s a demon?”

  Yes, I was. But not sure in the way Barbie was asking, so I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.

  “I’ll let you know in a minute,” I said, adding a mental “I hope,” because I still didn’t know if this was going to work. The music pounded through my body, distracting me even as I tried to tune it out. No pun intended. When I breathed deep, I smelled booze and sweating bodies and a miasma of conflicting colognes.

  Without opening my eyes, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tissue I had stashed there. Before coming to the club, I’d dotted the tissue with some vanilla-scented oil. I made a pretense of wiping my nose as I drew the scent of vanilla into my lungs.

  By the third breath, the club began to fade around me, the music suddenly seeming to come from far away. I let the trance take me, then opened my otherworldly eyes.

  The sight I saw was almost enough to shock me back out of the trance, though I should have been braced for it. This was a demon nightclub. I knew most of its patrons were demons. But that didn’t stop the moment of existential terror when my otherworldly eyes took in the sea of red auras that surrounded me. There were humans here, too, of course, their blue auras dotting that red sea like buoys. But the ratio of demons to humans was higher even than I’d expected.

  I forced myself to calm, then focused on the bar. This was harder than it sounds, because in my otherworldly sight, I can’t see objects, only living beings. The bar, being an inanimate object, was invisible to me. My depth perception was also kind of screwy, and I couldn’t figure out how far out I needed to look to find the bar.

  For a moment, I thought I couldn’t do it. Then I noticed a set of auras that formed an almost straight line, behind which only a single human aura appeared, and I realized that had to be the bar. Aside from the bartender, there was only one human present, and he or she was at the far end.

  I shook off the trance and opened my real-world eyes. Ms. Pathetic still sat alone and ignored at the bar, and since she wasn’t at the far end, that meant she wasn’t the human I’d seen in my trance.

  “She’s a demon,” I told Barbie.

  Barbie sighed. “All right, then. I’ll go tell her I changed my mind.” She still didn’t look happy about it, but I knew that was because of her limited exposure to demons. It was hard for her to look past the external package and see the powerful, nearly immortal being within.

  I watched as Barbie pushed her way past the milling crowd and approached the bar. Ms. Pathetic’s face lit up when Barbie sidled up to her, and even I felt a tug of guilt for getting her hopes up like this only to dash them. And worse.

  I was sure Barbie felt the same guilt, only stronger, and I halfway expected her to walk away. But she had committed herself to this path, and she wasn’t deviating from it. Her mark didn’t stand a chance. Barbie could coax a preacher into robbing a bank with the crook of a finger.

  After only a couple of minutes of conversation, Barbie slipped her hand into Ms. Pathetic’s and started leading her toward the stairway to the second floor.

  I pulled out my cell phone and texted Adam a one-word message: “Incoming.” Then I followed in Barbie’s wake, giving her a big enough head start that Ms. Pathetic wouldn’t notice me coming toward them. Not that she was likely to notice anything other than Barbie right now.

  The club was air-conditioned, but no air conditioner in the world could combat a night this hot and humid, not with a couple hundred people packed together, radiating body heat. Half the dancers looked like they’d just come out of the shower, their hair wet, the
ir clothes plastered to their skin by sweat.

  By the time I got across the room, I was sweating, too, and about ready to deck the next person who grabbed me and tried to pull me onto the dance floor. The alcohol was flowing freely tonight, the crowd more boisterous than I’d seen in my past forays here.

  Barbie and our mark were just disappearing into a room at the end of the hall when I made it to the head of the stairs. I glanced down at the dance floor as I was shoving my way through the loiterers, and caught sight of Shae. She was strolling gracefully through the crowd, surveying her domain. I moved away from the balcony, hugging the wall and hurrying. I doubted Shae would object to what we had planned, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.

  Struggling through a sweating, inebriated crowd of mostly demons was hard work. I felt like I’d run a marathon by the time I finally made it to the door behind which Barbie and Ms. Pathetic had disappeared.

  I knocked on the door—two series of three knocks, which was our agreed-upon signal—and moments later, the door cracked open just wide enough for me to slip inside.

  It was Barbie who’d opened the door. Her already fair skin was even paler than usual, and there was a sheen of tears in her eyes. Her halo was crumpled in a corner, where presumably she had thrown it. She wasn’t a wuss by any stretch of the imagination, but I doubted she’d been exposed to as much violence as the rest of us.

  Ms. Pathetic lay on the floor, curled into a fetal position and whimpering. Raphael stood between her and the door, and Adam circled her like a shark.

  “I was hoping you’d be more talkative, Mary,” Adam said, in a purring voice that held more menace than the fiercest growl. Even with the door closed, the music from downstairs was uncomfortably loud, but Adam’s voice carried over the ambient noise.

  “Let me try asking you this again,” he said pleasantly. “How long have you been on the Mortal Plain?”

  “All they’ve been able to get her to say so far is her name,” Barbie said to me in a deliberately low voice. I think she was trying to hide a quaver, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t a good thing that this scene wasn’t bothering me like it was her. A few months ago, it would have.

  There was no crumpled furniture, no dents in the wall, no broken glass, so I had to presume Mary hadn’t put up a fight when Adam and Raphael had jumped her. She wouldn’t have been able to take them, but I was surprised she hadn’t even tried. Demons weren’t usually wimps, even the ones who didn’t like pain.

  “How long?” Adam roared, and Mary curled more tightly around herself.

  “T-two d-days,” she stuttered, her voice hard to understand because she had her chin ducked to her chest and her arms over her head. The fact that she was blubbering didn’t help, either.

  “Very good,” Adam said in his most condescending manner. “Now, it seems clear to me that you are in an unwilling host. I’d like to know how you got to the Mortal Plain, and why you’re in this particular body. Just keep talking, and I won’t hit you anymore.”

  She didn’t uncurl, but she relaxed just a little. Giving in to the inevitable, I suppose. “My host performed a summoning,” she said, sounding defensive.

  “There’s a difference between being willing to do something and actually wanting to do it. Tell me, Mary dear, did your host perform that summoning ceremony of her own free will?”

  Mary didn’t answer, and Adam punished her with a brutal kick that made me wince and Barbie gasp. I had to remind myself once more that this was a demon, not the fragile mortal she appeared to be. And that she had taken this host when the host was unwilling—stealing her life, violating her every boundary. Mary did not deserve my pity. No matter how pitiful she seemed.

  “Do I need to repeat the question?” Adam asked. “Or would you prefer to answer me?”

  “No, my host isn’t really willing,” Mary sobbed desperately. “They hurt her, then threatened to kill her if she didn’t perform the summoning.”

  “They?” Adam prodded. “Who are ‘they’?”

  “She doesn’t know. They were strangers, and they wore masks.”

  “I didn’t ask whether your host knew them. I asked who they were.”

  “Please,” Mary said with another sob. “I don’t know. I didn’t care enough to ask. I just wanted to get out.”

  “Get out of where?” Adam asked, his brow furrowed.

  “Prison,” she hiccuped.

  “Shit,” Adam said. Raphael’s response was even more colorful.

  I didn’t know exactly what this meant to them, but I wasn’t about to ask in front of Mary.

  “How many prisoners have been sent through?” Raphael asked, and it was just as well Mary still had her chin tucked protectively down and couldn’t see the look on his face or she might have died of fright.

  “I don’t know.”

  Adam growled, and Mary raised her head for the first time since I’d entered the room. I thought she’d looked pathetic before. She looked positively hideous right now—mascara-stained tears leaving tracks across her battered face, a line of blood snaking down her chin from a split lip, and a look of terror and hopelessness in her eyes.

  “Please,” she begged. “Please! I don’t know. I’m nobody. I’d been imprisoned for centuries. They pardoned me and let me out early, but as soon as I was out, I was ordered to come to the Mortal Plain.”

  Adam was still circling her, and Mary followed him with her eyes until he was out of her line of sight. She didn’t turn her head to watch him, instead closing her eyes and tensing, every muscle in her body quivering.

  Was this what happened to demons who were imprisoned? Or had she been this pathetic beforehand? I had a nasty suspicion it was the former. I couldn’t imagine this terrified bundle of nerves having the gumption to break a law.

  “Again I ask you, who are they?” Adam said. “Name some names for me.”

  But Mary shook her head. “I don’t know who they were. I only know they were elite, and they told me if I was still in the Demon Realm when they came looking for me next, they would destroy me.”

  Barbie frowned, interested in spite of herself. “I thought there was a decades-long waiting list to come to the Mortal Plain. How did you get here so fast?”

  Mary cringed. “I jumped,” she said in a whisper, tensing even more, like she expected to be hit.

  I cocked my head to one side. “What does that mean?”

  Adam’s jaw tightened. “It means she cut into the line. We can all feel the call of a general summoning, but it’s against the law to answer when it’s not your turn.” He glanced down at Mary, a knowing look on his face. “What were you imprisoned for?”

  She hesitated, but answered before Adam had to bully her. “Jumping.”

  He nodded. “Right. So no one would be particularly shocked that you’d jump again as soon as you were out.”

  “I wouldn’t have done it if they hadn’t made me!” she protested. “I don’t want to go back to prison.”

  Adam ignored the protest. “And what were you told to do once you reached the Mortal Plain? Because I don’t believe for a moment that ‘they’ sent you here with no strings attached.”

  “No,” she said with a wet snuffle. “There are strings.”

  “Go on,” he prodded when she didn’t continue.

  “There’s a demon. I don’t know his name. I’m to check in with him once a week, and he may have orders for me.”

  “This just gets better and better,” Raphael muttered under his breath, shaking his head.

  Adam ignored him. “So when are you supposed to check in with him next?”

  She flinched. “Please. I’ll go back to prison if I betray him!”

  Adam reached out and grabbed her by the throat. The poor creature was too mousy even to fight against that.

  Great. Now I was thinking of a demon who’d taken an unwilling host as a “poor creature.” Talk about your bleeding hearts!

  “There are worse things than going back to prison, Mary,�
�� Adam said, his voice once more that menacing croon. “When do you meet with him next?”

  “Thursday.”

  Adam kept his hold on her throat, but he didn’t seem to be squeezing. The threat was enough to keep her compliant. “And where will you meet?”

  She swallowed hard. “I don’t know. He’s supposed to call me at two and tell me where to meet him.”

  Her eyes widened with renewed terror, like she was sure Adam wouldn’t believe her and was going to hurt her again.

  Adam processed that a moment. “All right. Here’s the plan: I’m going to give you my card,” he said, letting go of her throat and reaching into his back pocket for his wallet. “As soon as you hear from the mystery man, you’re going to call me and tell me where you’re meeting him.”

  “Please—”

  “Don’t even think about running, or not calling, or lying to me. I can get to you wherever you go, and believe me, you wouldn’t like that.”

  Her shoulders slumped and her head bowed. She didn’t say anything, just nodded, her body language a picture of defeat and misery. I felt another pang of pity.

  I think even Adam was starting to feel sorry for her, because his voice, when next he spoke, was surprisingly gentle.

  “The bathroom’s right there,” he said, pointing. “Why don’t you go wash your face? Then you can get going.”

  I think if Mary’d had a choice, she’d have bolted from the room immediately, bloody, mascarasmeared face or no. But she interpreted Adam’s offer as a command and slunk into the bathroom. If she’d been a dog, her tail would have been tucked firmly between her legs.

  The four of us waited in silence as Mary washed her face in the bathroom sink. No one was making eye contact. Was it possible that even Raphael felt pity for our soon-to-be informant?

  Mary looked a lot better when she emerged from the bathroom. Not only had she washed off the mascara and the blood from her cut lip, but she’d washed her face clean of makeup entirely. The lack of eyeshadow made her eyes look less sunken. And the cut had already sealed itself, though there was still an angry red line where it had been.