The Devil's Playground Page 6

  He nodded. “Dougal is not a big fan of subtlety. If he wants more demons on the Mortal Plain, then he wants lots more demons on the Mortal Plain, not just a handful.”

  “Do we even want to speculate about why?” Dominic asked.

  I shuddered to think of the possibilities.

  We’re getting ahead of ourselves again, Lugh told me. First, we have to confirm that our guesses are correct. Then we worry about what it means.

  I conveyed his message to the council, and no one argued the point.

  “So, how do we confirm our guesses?” I asked of no one in particular, though I had a feeling I already knew the answer.

  Raphael grinned at me. “Sounds like another visit to The Seven Deadlies is in order.”

  This was yet another one of those times when I really hated being right.

  Considering how much I loathed The Seven Deadlies, it was amazing how many times I’d set foot in the place. Enough that the bouncer at the door recognized me and let me in, even though I wasn’t a member. Adam was a member, and he claimed Barbie as his guest. Raphael wasn’t technically a member himself, but Tommy Brewster, his host, had a membership card from back when he’d been possessed by a different demon.

  I always thought of The Seven Deadlies as a sex club, and it is, in part. But when you first go in, it looks and sounds just like any other nightclub, complete with ear-splitting music, dim lighting, and a floor that vibrates with every bass note. There’s also the standard bar and dance floor.

  But once your eyes adjust to the light, you start to notice the differences. The first thing you notice is that bunches of people in the crowd are wearing cheesy halos or cheesy devil horns, which they picked up from a table near the entrance. Adam had explained to me that one wore a halo if one was shopping for a partner for some vanilla sex, and one wore the horns if shopping for something more … exotic.

  There was a sign above the dance floor that labeled it “Purgatory,” and I’d always thought that an apt description. There were rooms to rent on the second floor for the halo crowd. The balcony of the second floor looked down onto the dance floor, and was labeled “Heaven.” And then there was The Door, as I’d come to think of it. The Door led into a section of the club called “Hell,” and it was where the S&M crowd hung out … and played. I’d only been down there once before, but the things I’d seen remained burned on my retinas, and you couldn’t pay me enough to go down there again.

  I’d have been repulsed enough if what happened down there were human S&M, which Dominic assured me was about mutual pleasure, even if that pleasure was obtained in unconventional ways. But unlike humans, the demons loved the pain itself. They are incorporeal in the Demon Realm, and many of them find physical sensation—all physical sensation—fascinating. Add that to the fact that they can heal wounds that would kill a human being, and you have a scene from your worst nightmare and scariest horror movie all wrapped up into one.

  “I’ll go get a room,” Adam shouted into my ear.

  I didn’t feel like screaming myself hoarse, so I merely nodded. Raphael, Barbie, and I hovered in an especially dark alcove near the entrance, trying not to attract attention. It wasn’t that hard. People were mostly occupied with their prospective partners, or so drunk they didn’t care what was going on around them.

  Adam returned shortly with a magnetized key card. He and Raphael went upstairs to unlock the room, then Adam came back down and handed the key card to Barbie, who tucked it in the back pocket of her jeans.

  “Happy hunting!” Adam yelled with a lascivious lift of his brows. Barbie laughed, but I just scowled at him.

  Barbie snagged one of the halos and put it on, looking positively ridiculous, in my opinion, then headed toward the bar with me in her wake. Raphael, the author of our nasty little plan, had been very specific on the criteria for our mark. It had to be a demon who wasn’t into pain, for one thing. Even the demons who liked pain had their limits, but interrogating one of them would be … especially unpleasant. Which was why Barbie had donned the halo. It also had to be a demon who fit Shae’s description of these new illegals, with the look of someone who wasn’t far removed from a street person.

  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 china-doll 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 dagger-sharp 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 t
he 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, their 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.”