Dark Around the Edges

by Cari Z

  Contents

  Hiding From

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Hiding From

  The Light

  Cari Z

  Publisher's Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors' imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The publisher has no control over and does not assume responsibility for any third-party websites or their content. The uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law.

  Copyright © 2020 by Cari Z—Second Edition. Originally published in 2013 by Storm Moon Press as Cambion: Dark Around the Edges.

  All rights reserved.

  Cover art by Natasha Snow.

  Chapter One

  The first thing Devon noticed about the underground lair that he was entering—though “lair” might have been coming on a bit too strong, given that the place was well lit and decorated like a cross between a cathedral and a seraglio—was the smell. It was too delicate to be called a smell, really; a scent, wafting up the stairs and past the two burly men who were waiting to escort Devon into the belly of the beast. The delicate curls of incense were flavored with spikenard, a derivative of the valerian family and supposedly the stuff that drove Judas to rebel after Mary Magdalene used the costly ointment to anoint Jesus’s feet, and...

  Devon could feel his overactive memory trying to dive down irrelevant avenues of information in his head, and he firmly refocused himself on the men walking toward him.

  “Arms up,” one of the men said, his English barely scratched by an Italian edge. He wore a cheap, shapeless polyester suit and a bolo tie, with some sort of rough-cut brown stone for a pendant. Not exactly contemporary fashion choices, but it looked like the standard uniform for henchmen, if the other guy was anything to judge by.

  Devon just smiled and raised his arms, letting the man frisk him and taking note of the Taser at his hip as well as the piece he was trying to hide, a small-caliber pistol in the small of his back. The way he walked suggested there was something strapped down at ankle height, too, but Devon didn’t plan on getting up close and personal enough to make sure.

  The man’s hands ran briskly down his legs, and Devon gave a tiny, experimental shimmy of his hips. The man finished his check and stepped a foot back, as square-jawed and implacable as ever. No reaction. Interesting. “This way,” he grunted. The other man never spoke, but he followed behind them, sandwiching Devon between them as they headed deeper underground into the place called the Pearly Gates.

  This place, hidden under ten feet of rock and sand in the middle of the Mojave Desert a hundred miles from Las Vegas, seemed like an odd place to set up a lofty den of iniquity. It was hard to get to this ghost town in the center of nowhere. The only visible things that marked the entryway were a crumbling adobe motel and a shuttered gas station. Few people knew about the Pearly Gates, and even fewer were allowed entrance.

  No matter how exclusive the entertainment on offer, the inconvenience should have been enough to put people off when the glitz and glamour of Vegas was so readily available. In this case, though, it looked like the first rule of fight club was working in the Pearly Gates’s favor, because this serpent’s belly was filled to the brim with people.

  Devon was led into a large central room that looked like it had been plated with marble: floors, ceiling, walls, all of them were white shot through with a soft, pale gold that soothed the eye as much as it captivated. There were silk carpets here and there on the floor, recessed enclosures behind carved wooden dividers for the fortunate few who’d found a place to sit, and beautiful, silent women and men weaving between the guests bearing trays of everything from drinks to drugs. Most of the clientele seemed to be male, men of many different nationalities, if the cut of their suits was anything to judge by, all drinking and smoking and trying to restrain their glances towards the center of the room, where a tall crimson candle in a gold candelabrum was slowly burning down. No one touched it, no one even bumped into it, despite the crowd.

  Ah-ha. A timepiece, then. Symbolizing that something everyone was waiting for was going to happen when it burned down to a nub.

  “Mr. Klein.” A young woman in a form-fitting silver and blue dress approached with a welcoming smile on her face. “Welcome to the Pearly Gates.”

  “Thank you, miss.” Devon smiled charmingly; he couldn’t smile any other way. “Its reputation has preceded it.”

  “I trust you’ll be well pleased with what our establishment has on offer. May I bring you anything as you wait for tonight’s entertainment? A bottle of our finest champagne, perhaps, or something stronger, to calm the nerves?” She fluttered her eyelashes enticingly, and it was all Devon could do not to laugh. “Or perhaps even the company of myself, to help occupy your time until the show begins?”

  He shouldn’t do it. He knew he shouldn’t, but Devon couldn’t help himself. Being on the receiving end of a seduction was pure challenge for him. He had to prove he could outdo her, even though he was supposed to be keeping a low profile. But then, no one had ever said Devon was good at denying himself.

  Devon captured her gaze with his and extended his hand. She gave hers over, almost unconsciously, and he bent over it slowly, in a gesture that appeared courtly from a distance but was smoldering up close. As he bowed, Devon pressed lightly against her body with his power.

  Her scent changed instantly, growing stronger as her temperature rose, sweat and musk sliding more freely from her pores and between her legs. She gasped, then clutched her free hand to her neck. Too late, Devon realized that she was wearing the same brown stone as the guards, this time as a choker. It must have acted as some sort of warning, because an instant later she drew back, and the guards immediately reached for their Tasers.

  Shit. This was not how the op was supposed to go. “Maria,” Devon muttered around his clenched teeth, “they can tell what I am.”

  “Can you get out of there?” Maria asked through the com, her voice so faint that if his hearing hadn’t been naturally augmented, Devon wouldn’t have been able to hear her.

  “Not sure yet.” He straightened up and smiled again. “Actually, I just remembered that I left something rather important in my car. I’ll be back in a minute.”

  “You’re not going anywhere,” Nameless Guard Number One grunted, reaching for Devon’s arm.

  Devon reacted instantly, grabbing the man’s wrist and jerking it aside as he spun toward him and neatly kicked him just above his ear. Guard Number One staggered back, giving Devon time to deal with Number Two, who had gotten his Taser free and aimed all of its fifty thousand volts at Devon.

  Devon ducked the first deployment and smirked as he heard one of the guests fall and begin to convulse, his glass
of expensive scotch shattering against the marble floor. He closed the distance and threw a front kick into Number Two’s gut, bending him just enough for Devon’s knee to connect solidly with his face. That freed up a path back down the hall, toward the door that Devon knew he needed a keycard to get out of. He grabbed Number’s Two’s off of his slumped body and got a running start back down the hallway before he felt the strike of a Taser’s barbs low in his back. The electric shock arched his body so hard he could hear his vertebrae creak, and Devon collapsed rigidly to the floor.

  “Harper? Do you copy, Harper?” Yeah, he copied, but his tongue felt swollen in his mouth, too thick to speak. Devon just stared up at white-winged angel painted on the ceiling, its wide grey eyes seeming to glare down at him. After a moment that glare was replaced by a view of the young woman, who still held onto the Taser she must have grabbed from Number One. She snapped something in Italian, and Devon swore to himself that when he got out of here he was learning that goddamn language, because nothing was more obnoxious that being talked about when you couldn’t understand.

  Numbers One and Two, rather the worse for wear, came and hoisted him to his feet none too gently. “Saint Peter,” the young woman said firmly, and spun around, her skirt swirling out like a peacock’s tail. The men followed behind her, and Devon came along by default.

  “Harper? Harper? Shit.”

  Devon didn’t often agree with his handler, but in this instance, Maria was totally right. Shit.

  Chapter Two

  Devon naturally had the kind of constitution that recovered rapidly from damage. By the time he was dragged into a private room beyond the madding crowd, carried right through the horde of muttering old men, all of whom stank of rich cologne and sour, secretive lust, the numbness was gone and he was back to feeling pretty much himself again. He let Numbers One and Two keep dragging him though, because it always paid to be underestimated, and besides, why should he make things easy on them?

  The room he was pulled into was…strange. It was very well-ventilated, for one, with none of the cloying incense in the air. There was only one chair in it, an immense throne carved from what looked like a solid piece of marble. There was a large silver circle inlaid with the Seal of Solomon on the floor in front of the throne, and that was where Devon was tossed.

  He rolled to his hands and knees and looked the circle over as he tried to catch his breath. It was very professional work, and infused with enough power that if he were a true demon he’d have been trapped already, even without the incantation to raise the ward. So, demon summoning, he could check that off the list of perversions that the Pearly Gates had to offer. It explained how they had known what Devon was. The situation had just deteriorated from “shit” to “serious fucking shit, I’m not kidding you, I think my balls just tried to jump into my throat.”

  Still, it was a little too early to be panicking. Devon loudly cleared his throat twice, and Maria’s sigh of relief came through loud and clear. That signal meant he wasn’t in eminent danger, and she didn’t have to worry about sending the posse in quite yet.

  In Devon’s opinion, there was nothing like a good posse, but that was a big and often explosive step. If there was an alternative to letting things get that far, he knew he had to pursue it.

  A small man in a pure white robe sat on a thick silk cushion covering the seat of the throne. He wore a tall pontiff-style hat that looked oddly officious and had a neat, greying beard that fell down to his lap. His eyes were dark and calculating, and he smelled musty, like old wine and rotting wood. He had a brown stone hanging from his neck as well, and now Devon kind of wanted to kick himself for not figuring those trinkets out earlier. “You must be Saint Peter.”

  “The lord of the Pearly Gates,” the man said in perfect English, nodding his head slightly. “And you are not Jacob Klein, despite all evidence to the contrary. It’s a most impressive cover identity, though. My girls couldn’t find anything wrong with it when they looked into permitting your supplication.”

  “I thought it was an application,” Devon interjected.

  “You must know better than that,” Saint Peter tutted. “No one can apply to get into heaven. They can only entreat me, their lord, to grant them access to delights beyond the mundane world, and if I look favorably upon them, then...” He smiled slightly. “Then their lives become enriched beyond measure. And creatures like you are the means of that enrichment. Did you truly think to hide your nature in a place like this?” He chuckled. “When we are already so knowledgeable about you? It was folly. I know what you are, demon child. Cammmbion.” Saint Peter drew out the word like it was something to be savored.

  “How did you know?” Devon had a pretty good idea, but he wanted it confirmed.

  “My little charms.” The old man tapped the stone around his neck. “Peach pits, with a symbol carved on the back that renders the bearers nearly immune to your influence. All of my floor staff wear them. They grow warm when in the presence of an unshielded cambion or demon. They are expensive to manufacture, but well worth the price. After all, my people aren’t here to play. They are busy little angels, obedient and constant in their devotion to none but me.”

  Damn, but this guy had an ego. Devon straightened the cuffs of his suit, then splayed his hands out at his sides, putting himself on display. “Well, now that you have me, what do you plan to do with me?”

  “That’s a very fine question,” Saint Peter said bemusedly. “Were my time solely my own, I would stretch your beautiful body out on an iron rack and devote myself to studying every last inch of it, inside and out.” His fingers twitched, as though they were already crawling over Devon’s skin. “There are differences, you know, in the anatomy of a human and a cambion. I’ve made quite a study of it over the years. I could tell the two species apart solely from the differences in the taste of their livers.”

  Wow, vivisection and cannibalism. Some people just had to be overachievers. Devon tamped down on his nerves and gave his captor a breezy grin. “But you’ve got all these guests, huh?”

  “Very true,” Saint Peter agreed. “So I’m afraid I’ll have to restrict myself to squeezing your identity from you before we use you as tonight’s entertainment. You are,” he mused, looking at Devon appreciatively, “very beautiful, even for your kind. Almost as beautiful as one of your forebears. Usually I summon a succubus for the crowd to gawk at, but I think that you will prove an interesting break from tradition.”

  “It won’t work the same,” Devon pointed out quickly, barely keeping himself from sending the signal to Maria for the posse to come roaring in, stat. He could handle himself a little longer. “You can’t command a cambion the way you can a pure demon.”

  “Ah, but a pure demon doesn’t bleed,” Saint Peter said, drawing his hands together in a professorial clasp. “And there are a number of sadists in my audience chamber who are perennially disappointed by that. While I can’t turn all your joints backwards or force your spine out through your stomach without killing you—” Devon unexpectedly felt a surprising surge of sympathy for whatever demons had ended up here “—you’ll stay alive through much more torment than a regular human being, and the colors will be spectacular.

  “So now,” he continued briskly, “let us proceed as friends. The more easily you tell me your true identity, the easier I shall go with you when it comes time for you to perform, in approximately half an hour.”

  Fuck. Devon’s lips thinned into a flat line, and he was just a few seconds away from giving the signal for rescue despite the fact that he hadn’t accomplished any of the mission’s objectives yet. Getting tortured wasn’t part of the deal, and while he could take it, at least for a while, his bosses had been very clear on their opinion of futile heroics.

  A faint click sounded as a door opened nearby, and suddenly Devon felt quite a bit brighter about the situation, because here, in the flesh, was the very man he’d been sent into the Pearly Gates to find. Porter Grey was an unusually gifted demon summo
ner, also the former leader of a cult in California that had created over a dozen cambion before the police got involved. He was wanted by mundane authorities for human trafficking, rape, assault, kidnapping, fraud, and murder. Devon’s employers wanted him for a whole lot more.

  Porter Grey was classically handsome, with dark, slicked back hair and a dove grey suit tailored to show his broad shoulders and long legs to the best result. His chin was cleft and his eyelids were heavy, almost lazy. He looked languorous and dangerous, like a lion lounging just beyond reach, tempting you to pet it and promising pain if you did. He smelled like an alpha male to Devon, but he still bowed to Saint Peter.

  “I didn’t call for you, magician,” Saint Peter said dismissively.

  “I was in the security booth when I caught sight of you and the cambion, my lord.” Porter’s voice was urbane, compelling—the sort of voice that implied trustworthiness.

  “And why is this adequate reason for interrupting me?”

  “Only because I’ve already summoned a demon for tonight’s entertainment, my lord. It wouldn’t do for the effort to go to waste. She’s in the holding cell, waiting to be brought out for your guests.”

  Saint Peter looked a little put out. “You already have her manacled and collared?” Silver manacles with the right inscriptions would let a summoner move their demon from place to place without worrying that they would escape, but manacles like that were devilishly hard to make and maintain. Devon raised Porter Grey’s threat level in his mind.

  “Yes, my lord. I was merely keeping to the schedule that you yourself have set.”

  Saint Peter waved a hand. “I know, I know. Hmm…how long can you hold her?”

  “No more than two hours, my lord.” Porter sounded apologetic, but his eyes were cold. Very few people had the innate power needed to summon a demon, and for someone like Porter Grey, so long the master of his own domain, it must have been galling to be at the beck and call of someone else now.