“I can’t see my feet.”
“They’re still there,” Joy assured me. She finished braiding my dark brown hair into two French braids that ended at my shoulder blades. They both eyed a collection of pictures of video game characters from which they’d designed the costume, then me. The idea was for me to look like I worked at one of the convention booths, without anyone mistaking me for their employee. I slumped. Mission accomplished.
“Stand up straight,” Will admonished. He handed me a pair of fingerless black leather gloves and shoved some fake guns in the thigh holsters. They were surprisingly heavy. I pulled on the gloves, then pulled out a gun.
“Please tell me this isn’t real.”
“It isn’t loaded,” Joy said.
I groaned. “I can’t carry a real weapon into this convention.”
“You’ll be fine. No one will think they’re real.”
Crap. What had I gotten myself into?
Joy and Will argued playfully over my makeup. More than once I considered storming out—after grabbing a coat—but my curiosity to find out why all the imps were at the convention held me in place. Even if my outfit was degrading, cold, and highly inappropriate, it was going to get me into places that had been off limits yesterday.
“I could have gone as a businesswoman working for one of the game companies,” I said.
“This is the gaming industry we’re talking about. If you were a businesswoman, you’d stand out like a prostitute at an inaugural ball.”
“So instead I’m going in as a prostitute?”
“Besides, Brad insisted.”
I met Joy’s eyes in the mirror. She grimaced and shrugged. “He said you needed a little humility.”
What I needed was a gigantic rule book to explain everything Mr. Pitt already expected me to know, along with a CliffsNotes cheat sheet for his rules of operation.
I gritted my teeth and examined the final effect in the mirror. Extra-large breasts made my waist look smaller. The guns made me feel a tad badass. Joy had done something to my eyelids so that my eyes looked slanted and a little catlike, and she’d made my naturally full mouth look downright pouty. Damn it. I wanted to be able to look at myself in the mirror and be as disgusted by the idea that I was going as a showpiece for men’s sexual fantasies as I had been before I was in the costume.
“You like it,” Will said.
“No, I—”
“You can’t pretend with us. You’re hot and you know it,” Joy said.
I sighed. “I’m a hypocrite.”
Joy laughed.
“At least I get a backpack.” The siblings had supplied a small black backpack that fit my wallet, Medusa, and the pet wood. I slipped it on and tightened the leather straps.
I pulled the guns and struck the dramatic pose of a woman in one of the pictures. When I looked up at the mirror, I was taken aback by how authentic I looked, given what Will and Joy had had to start with.
“I’m so getting you guys to do my next Halloween costume.”
We met Rose back at her cubicle. She took one look at me and grinned. “I’m glad you’re the enforcer and I’m the babysitter.”
“You don’t have to wear a costume?”
“Nope.”
I eyed the employee pass dangling from a lanyard at her neck, which was a matched set with mine, and then I looked to Will and Joy for confirmation. They shrugged.
“That’s so not fair.”
“Get over it,” Mr. Pitt said from behind me. I turned, and with the added height of the boots, my fake boobs were slightly above his eye level. He took a step back. I smiled sweetly at him and stood a little straighter, rolling my shoulders back to emphasize the breasts, and enjoyed watching him squirm.
“You’re going behind the scenes today, but your orders are the same: Look but don’t touch. Think you can handle that?”
“Aye-aye, captain.”
Rose drove. I struggled with finding a comfortable position for the seat belt and tried to ignore the butts of the guns poking into my legs. My only consolation was that in Rose’s Hummer I was less visible to the people driving around us.
“You should have gotten a knife yesterday. It would have gone perfectly in those boot sheathes.”
“Hum.”
“Where are you keeping the pet wood? I mean, there’s not a lot of options, and I don’t see it in the boots.” Rose eyed the shelf of fake boobs. “It’d be rather inconvenient . . .”
“Don’t even start. I’ve got it in the backpack.”
“Um-hum.”
Once again, the droves of nerds caught me off guard. Their numbers had swelled. Gone were the businessmen, too, or so it seemed at first glance. The hotel was swarming with testosterone, and all of it was too nerdy for my taste.
I hadn’t appreciated how invisible I’d been the day before in my conservative business clothes. Apparently businesswomen are not the stuff of video games. My ridiculously large chest, however, was. We barely made it through the hotel doors before gamer geeks began daring each other to get close to me. Several snapped pictures on phones that would have made Medusa jealous.
“You need to get that look off your face,” Rose said. “All of this”—she waggled her finger at my body—“looks right, but unless you get control of your expression, no one is going to believe you work here.”
I gave her my best grimace. Two men headed in our direction stopped and went the other way. I smiled smugly.
“That’s a bit better. Remember, they may think you’re here for them, but we know why you’re really here.” I looked at Rose to see if she was trying to push the right buttons to get me to work. “Besides, girl, you look hot.”
“I agree,” a man with a scraggly goatee next to me said. “Can I have your autograph?”
I started to say “Shouldn’t you be at work?” but Rose’s sharp elbow to my ribs turned it into, “Sho—Sure.”
The man handed me a small black book and pen. I almost signed Madison Fox, but I caught myself and scribbled Elizabeth Firth, which I thought at least sounded British. He snapped a shot of me, then held the camera in one hand to get a shot of the two of us together.
We’d drawn a small crowd in the lobby and a few more men pushed forward.
“Sorry, boys. I’ve got to get to work,” I told them, indicating the elevator. Then, feeling supremely foolish, I rolled my shoulders back and stalked across the room. Rose scurried to catch up.
“Did they buy it?” I asked out of the side of my mouth.
“Hell, I bought it. Keep it up and don’t forget the mission.”
By some small miracle, we had the elevator to ourselves. I adjusted the gun straps and straightened the bra. With all the mirrors on the walls, it was impossible not to pull several poses. Rose laughed at me.
“That’s exactly what you need to do out there,” she said.
“The more ridiculous the better?” I grumped.
“If that works for you.”
No, that didn’t work for me. As we stepped into the thickening mass of men on the conference floor, I was more aware than yesterday of the women who had been reduced to the title of “booth babe.” By their standards, I was conservatively dressed. At least, everything from the tops of my thighs to my collarbone was covered. I watched the women, looking for behavior clues that would help me pull off this absurd charade. It’s all about the attitude, I decided. Own it. I straightened my spine, grasped the butts of the guns, and glared around me.
What kind of person tells herself to “own it”? I giggled. Shit. I was nervous.
We passed through the entrance doorways after having our badges and bags inspected. The bored staff member didn’t glance twice at the forged IDs, though his eyes did linger on the British flag stretched across my butt. His eyes weren’t the only ones drawn by the bright red, white, and blue, either. Just like that, I was back to scowling.
“What does it look like today?” Rose asked
. She was chaffing her arms, and I knew it wasn’t because she was cold.
I blinked. My hands convulsed on the guns. Imps were everywhere. They moved through the crowds like visible currents of air. For a moment, they seethed around our ankles before the tide of darkness carried them away. But it wasn’t the imps that made my blood cool. Clinging to the banners and swinging from booth top to booth top were monkeylike creatures of pure evil. They had the same general shape as monkeys and moved like monkeys, but I’d never seen a monkey with only three fingers on each paw, especially not fingers that ended in black claws as long as my palm. Those black claws glistened in Primordium the way the hound’s fur had—like dark, wet blood. Their small round bodies were spiked and scaled, not furred, with no two creatures looking exactly alike. Long tails twirled behind them, ending in scorpionlike striking tips. When one looked my direction, it smiled, and row after row of teeth glistened under brilliant, glowing eyes.
I turned away only because movement near the ceiling caught my eye. Atop two closely hung banners, a small cluster of the creatures fought, using their claws, teeth, and tails to tear apart one of the smaller, weaker ones. I shuddered.
“What? What is it? Stop staring!”
I looked down at Rose and took physical comfort in the pure white of her energy.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Is it a demon?”
“How would I know?”
“You’d know. Take a picture!”
I fumbled into my backpack, vaguely aware of Rose shooing away eager men. I finally fit my hand around Medusa, letting go of the pet wood by sheer force of will. When I turned, one of the monkey creatures was standing at the corner of the booth watching me. I stiffened. My instincts told me to gather lux lucis and prepare to do battle. Instead, I turned enough to keep it in my peripheral vision.
“Oh, look at that booth,” I said inanely to Rose, pointing, then taking a picture of a group of creatures an aisle away. I silently handed my phone to Rose.
“Crap. Vervet.”
“What-vet?”
“Vervet. Monkey things.” She tapped the phone. “This isn’t a good sign at all.”
“I figured that.”
“How many are there?”
“You want me to take time to count?”
“So what’s the plan?”
I stared blankly at Rose. Plan? What plan? Mr. Pitt had made it clear that he didn’t want me taking out any evil creatures, and if I was honest with myself, I wasn’t enthusiastic about getting close to the vervet. Cute and cuddly mindless imps were one thing. Monkeys with razor-sharp appendages and some obvious intelligence were another. My only consolation was that vervet appeared as insubstantial as imps.
“Same plan as yesterday,” I told Rose. Only with better results. Hopefully.
“Winging it. I like it. Kyle would have wasted half the day gridding this place out, planning something methodical.”
I grimaced. Kyle’s method sounded far more professional.
“All right. Let’s get busy,” Rose said, eyeing the room. “There has got to be a demon around here somewhere. Let’s see if we can find it.”
Anyone with a shred of common sense would have left after a statement like that. I followed her. I wasn’t sure I liked what that said about me.
We roamed the floor. Or I should say Rose roamed the floor. I stuttered along after her, pulled aside nearly every other step by a geek who wanted a picture or a conversation with me. Fortunately, the more attitude and arrogance I used on the men, the more they liked it, which suited me fine.
I lost track of time, and I would have gotten physically lost just as fast were it not for Rose. The crowds engulfed me like sweaty quicksand. I fantasized of better days, better times, like this morning’s phone conversation with the hottest vet in the county. I tried to picture Dr. Love’s face superimposed over those of the prepubescent boys who stopped to get pictures of me. It was a challenge my imagination wasn’t up to. I didn’t even attempt to picture Niko. I shook myself free of my downward plunge into insanity when I mistook a man an aisle over for Tim from the bar. No man that Bridget had a crush on would be caught dead at this convention. She had better radar than that.
The whole time, I obsessively alternated between Primordium and regular sight. I couldn’t stay in Primordium for long, because it was too hard not to look at the vervet and imps, and I couldn’t use my regular sight for too long because I felt a compulsive need to track the evil creatures. Whether it was the repeated blinking or the sheer volume of evil making me nauseous, I couldn’t tell.
There were so many imps and vervet frolicking through the convention floor, it had been difficult to determine their point of origin. However, after ruling out the booths, I noticed an ooze of atrum leaking under this particular door and reforming on this side as imps and vervet. After watching them bound into the feeding frenzy also known as the gaming fans, Rose and I decided I should investigate the other side of the door.
Lucky me.
“I’m going to check out that booth,” Rose shouted over the blaring music. “Be quick. It’s past my lunch time and I’m horny.”
“You mean hungry.”
She shook her head. I shot her a worried look.
Rose slipped through a crowd of Japanese boys with spiked hair and colorful, skintight pants and disappeared into a neon-lined booth. I blinked to Primordium.
The door opened before I reached it and two men came out. Their souls were normal. The number of imps clinging to them was not. They were clustered around the men’s stomachs, so many stacked on top of each other that it looked like a writhing mass of black maggots. My stomach flipped and I lurched into a table to steady myself and close my eyes for a moment.
Keep it together, Dice. Swallow. Think of Mr. Bond.
“Are you all right?” the man behind the table asked. He was short with curly blond hair. I must have unintentionally blinked back to normal vision, because I was seeing in color. I eyed the man’s stocky torso, which strained against a too-small T-shirt, and straightened.
“Yes, thank you. I just need some water.”
“Here, let me get you some.” He started to race off, but I stopped him.
“I’m going to take a break.” I waved in the direction of the evil-spawning door. “But thank you.”
“Oh. Okay. Come back by if you still need a boost later. We’ve got a stash of energy drinks back here.” His smile revealed two dimples.
I smiled back and blinked. He didn’t look so bad in Primordium, either. A little short for my taste—and voluntarily working at this damned event, which was a huge mark against him—but he didn’t have a single imp on him and he had a nice smile.
“Okay,” I agreed.
Reluctantly, I turned back to the door. The two horrifying imp-covered men had moved away. I plastered on my best smile, gave my gun belt a tug, and sauntered over to the door.
“Badge,” said the bored-looking muscle man at the door.
I pulled the thin lanyard and employee pass from my bag. I’d taken it off after the first man had noticed my real name on the card. The last thing I wanted was for someone here to know my real identity. The security guard scanned the badge’s bar code with something that looked like a large cell phone. I crossed my fingers behind my back. The scanner turned green. He pressed a button on the door to let me through.
I brushed past the guard into the hallway beyond, knocking my breasts against the doorway and staggering to the side. That earned me a snort.
“Hey, they’re bigger than they look,” I said.
The corridor had several rooms feeding off it, all of them clearly marked with taped-up pieces of paper: break room, restrooms, supply closet, exit. It may have looked innocent enough in my regular vision. In Primordium? I swallowed. As Mom said, there were many professions out there. I didn’t need to stick with this one, right?
12
Honk if You’re Hot and Horny
> Imps bounced along the edge of the corridor, bubbling out of walls thick with atrum. Half-formed vervet swung from the slick black moulding over the open doors and spilled from the tops of sign placards, tumbling in balls of claws and teeth to the floor, ripping each other to pieces that disintegrated back into raw atrum to coat the floor.
Facing that evil-encrusted hallway, I tried to remain unbiased toward the video gaming industry. I’d always dismissed the reactionary statements that video games led to real-life violence, but maybe there was something to those paranoid news stories. This convention appeared to be a prime example.
Rose would have pointed out that most of the people at this event were good, normal people—well, maybe not normal—who were victims not evil predators.
Yet, something had attracted the sludge of darkness that seethed in the employees’ hallway, and it wasn’t the hotel staff.
A group of bikini-clad warrior women sauntered out of the lounge. They weren’t bad. One had dark soot on her soul, but the others were basically good. A rolling wave of imps chased their heels, taking tiny bites from their souls but not attaching.
The women kicked through a pile of twitching, detached vervet body parts that were slowly melting into the linoleum. My knee twinged. I tore my eyes from their atrum-smeared calves. My bare legs looked like snow against a starless night sky, marred jarringly by the soccer ball–size imp attached to my knee. I swallowed a shriek and stomped my foot to dislodge it.
The women’s laughter died, leaving the hallway eerily quiet. I glanced up in time to watch a vervet dropped from the doorway to the last girl’s shoulders. It shimmied down her back and sank its teeth into her ass. The women were all staring back at me, faces frozen. Maybe it was because I was in such a cool costume and they were all envious. After all, I was nearly fully clothed while they had only tiny scraps of fabric covering their X-rated bits.
More likely, they watched me in wary silence because I was hopping around, stomping my feet like I was in a ho-down while staring at the one woman’s butt.
They gave me wide berth, scuttling against the far wall like crabs in stilettos, sliding against all that raw atrum. My hand twitched toward the last woman’s ass, and she raced through the door with a shriek, tossing me a wild-eyed look. The vervet waved at me, never losing its mouthful, before the door clicked shut.
A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1) Page 15