by Jessa Slade
Maybe there were some parts of needy she could get used to. She slipped into the seat, and he closed the door gently behind her. She propped her feet up on the dashboard to keep her wire-scratched thighs off the scorching vinyl seats while he walked around the front of the car.
He was upset; she could tell by the hard edge of his jaw. And still he moved with a strict, almost painstaking efficiency. No screaming. No wild gesticulating. In a way, he was even scarier than some raging drunk. Because when the explosion came, she knew, it’d be bigger for having been held in so long.
When he got into the car, she asked, “Why did Ecco call me thrall?”
“It’s a classification of teshuva. Like my bane demon.” He sat for a moment, the hook on the gear shaft. Then he finally looked over at her. “For once, I think he’s right.”
His assessing stare, with one dubious wrinkle between his brows, as if she hadn’t even lost her soul correctly, raised her hackles. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“The class of teshuva determines its . . . proclivities. ‘Thrall’ is an old word for ‘slave.’ And you were assuredly that.”
Now her blood pressure rose too. Except the angry pulse at the corners of her eyes didn’t have her seeing red, but violet. “Maybe he meant enthrall, as in ‘enslaving others.’ ”
“Perhaps. All demons specialize in temptation, but thrall demons are especially . . . tempting.”
The insulting pauses hadn’t changed, nor had the doubtful set of his expression, and yet something in his gaze sharpened, focused on her. This time, the shiver was goose bumps that swept inward across her skin and tightened her breasts and belly.
“Could’ve been worse.” She pitched her voice toward husky. “I could’ve used my shirt to get over the barbed wire.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
She cocked one knee toward him to reveal the inside of her thigh. The bright red scratches over the black lines of the reven were already fading. “Getting better. Good demon.”
His gaze fixed on her leg, and the shivers spiraled deeper to her core. Definitely enthralled.
She let her knee fall a little farther open to bump his thigh. Certain advantages to the bench seats on old crap cars.
Instead of tracking inward toward her thong as she intended, his eyes narrowed. “Don’t put too much faith in it,” he warned. He started the car and clacked the hook against the wheel for emphasis.
“You’d know,” she said. When he slanted her a glance, she clarified—only fishing a very little bit—“I mean, you’d know because you were a missionary man, not because the demon let you down and lost your arm.”
But if he heard the question in her voice about the missionary part, he saw no need to enlighten her, unlike most missionaries. “I lost my arm.” He shook his head. “No, I didn’t lose it. I knew exactly where it was. Trapped under a sheet of broken glass. I could have let Liam’s woman die, burned up in a brimstone fire, but I left my arm in the inferno instead.”
Nim crossed her arms. “Yet another woman in your life.”
“Liam’s woman, I said.”
She snorted. “I suppose he has both his hands.”
“Last I checked. Although he’s juggling league business so fast, sometimes it’s hard to tell.”
“His immortal managerial life must be so very hard.”
Jonah gave her another indecipherable look, then U-turned out of the parking space. “Interesting thought you had about the malice. If they’d gathered in such numbers so quickly after the appearance of a demonic artifact, they must have been already primed on you. An unbound demon acts as an attractive nuisance to the tenebrae, which we tried to mitigate with the energy sinks we placed around your apartment and the club.” He drove out of the warehouse district and toward her neighborhood. “In retrospect, perhaps I was unfair.”
“Which time?” Nim examined her nails.
“There was far too much demon sign at the club. I assumed with as much negative energy as the place had, demonic emanations were inevitable.”
“So strippers are automatically evil? Gee, thanks.”
“Actually, the arts usually confer a certain protective effect against the tenebrae. The art specifically, not the artist. I don’t know that there has been any research into whether . . . burlesque counts as art, so far as demons are concerned.”
Nim snorted. “I’m a stripper, not a dancer anyway. But naughty isn’t necessarily evil.”
“Says the Naughty Nymphette?” He lifted his eyebrows in pointed disbelief.
“It’s just a stage name.”
“You mean your parents didn’t choose it for you? Your talent wasn’t obvious from birth?”
She gave him a long stare. “I like you better when you are silent and morose.”
“As do I. Being with you brings out new facets of my personality.”
“Lucky me.” But she wondered at the second spurt of warmth that went through her. Not embarrassment this time, but satisfaction. Corrupting a missionary man must earn extra points for a demon. “My parents named me Elaine, after the Lady of the Lake in the Merlin stories. I thought Elaine was boring; I liked the other versions better: Viviane, Niniane, Nivian, Nyneve, Nimue. I tried them all.”
“Already with the stage names,” he murmured. “Why did you settle on Nimue?”
She shrugged. “That’s who I was when my parents split up. I was fifteen. After the divorce, I saw my dad at the end-of-the-school-year talent show and then never again.”
“You were the best ballerina,” Jonah guessed. “His abandonment ruined your chance at Juilliard.”
“I writhed around and lip-synched to Alanis Morissette. Sort of like ballet.”
His lips curled in amusement. “So you were destined for this career path?”
“Demonic possession, you mean?”
The wry twist of his mouth flatlined at the reminder. “Of course. Your penance trigger made any other path irrelevant.”
She wished she hadn’t been so flip. Without that teasing lightness, the handsome lines of his face went stone-cold. “He left because his best friend, the guy in the lakeside cottage next to ours, had sex with me every summer from the time I was twelve.”
Jonah’s hand tightened on the wheel until the plastic squeaked. “You were raped.”
“Shit. Who hasn’t been?”
“Nim . . .”
She kept talking. Better to talk than to hear what he might say. “He didn’t hurt me. I was a very mature twelve and did an exceedingly sultry performance of the lady emerging from the lake, wet T-shirt, pirouette, and everything.”
“I’m sorry,” Jonah said softly.
Damn it, those were the words she hadn’t wanted to hear ever again. As if she cared about sorry. “A hundred years ago, when you were saving South America or Mongolia or wherever, what age did those girls lose their virginity?”
“It was Congo,” he said. “And that’s really not the point.”
She fingered one dread that had fallen over her shoulder. “Maybe there, if we weren’t so proper and civilized, my father could have stayed afterward, or at least looked me in the eye. Maybe when Mr. God-I-can’t-stop-myself-I-need-you-so-much saw me getting ice cream at the bait shop, he wouldn’t have pretended I was invisible, which made me all the more determined to attract him the next time. Maybe my mom wouldn’t have acted like it never happened and told me to keep quiet.”
“No one could accuse you of being invisible or quiet when you dance.” His bland tone told her exactly how little he thought of her half-assed attempt—actually full, bare-assed—at sublimation.
She bristled. Easy for him to be self-righteous. Any idiot could tell, when he was at his most quiet and still, that was when he was most dangerous. “I dance so no one can doubt that it’s mine. This body is mine. No one else’s. No matter how much they pay, I choose.”
“Except this time,” he murmured. “With the demon.”
A chill crackled up her already stiff spin
e. But he was wrong. She hadn’t handed her admittedly cockeyed principles to the demon. She’d given in to the man.
With a nonchalant shrug, she reminded him, “You said I said yes. Maybe I didn’t quite understand, but I said yes.”
“Does that give you comfort?”
“Does it make you nervous that, yes, it does?”
“I wouldn’t presume to judge.”
Funny, she heard all sorts of judgment in his tone. “Who wants to go through life feeling guilty, especially if you’re immortal?”
He looked ahead. “Who indeed?”
“Oh, right. A missionary man. I guess I’d rather be a slut, then.”
“A tease,” he corrected. “Since you don’t actually give anything away for free, appearances very much to the contrary.”
“Wow, you’ve found a way to make me worse than a whore. I thought you said we should try to look at the bright side of our situation.”
He tapped the hook on the steering wheel. “I find solace in knowing God has abandoned me,” he said. “Since I’ve fallen as far as I may, now I can fight, no holds barred.”
“How very inspirational.”
“At least things can’t get any worse.”
He pulled up outside the Shimmy Shack.
Under the harsh morning sun, the red-painted concrete blocks looked particularly worn and pitted. A half dozen cars dotted the parking lot, their hoods gleaming like cockroaches caught by the sudden kitchen light.
“Must’ve been a rough night,” Nim said. “Usually only one or two drunks get their keys confiscated. The cleaning crew will be pissed. Taking the keys always means somebody puked.”
“The janitor shows up right before the cook comes to prep for the lunch crowd, right?” Jonah asked. “That’ll give us some time.”
He got out of the car, and she did the same, not waiting for him to come to her door. No sense playing the lady when they were parked at the sleazy club where she took off her clothes for money. She followed Jonah to the door. “What are we looking for?”
“A trail, from where you were to wherever the anklet has gone.”
“Then wouldn’t the pawnshop have been a better place to start?”
“We were there already and nothing jumped out at us.”
“I like it when things don’t jump out at me. Especially not things with teeth.”
The lock yielded under his fingers. “I’m hoping whatever—whoever—took the anklet was lurking here first. If they’d be so kind as to leave some sign for us to follow . . .”
He opened the door and a sewer stench rolled out.
She recoiled. “Ugh. Damn, the janitor is gonna quit this time.”
“Nim,” Jonah said softly. “Stay here.”
“What? Why?” She curled her finger through the rear belt loop of his jeans and stumbled behind him. Where the frayed ends of his reven peeked above his T-shirt collar, the black lines sparked faintly violet, visible even in daylight. “What’s wrong?”
“Don’t you smell it?”
She hesitated. “Vomit. Shit. The toilet probably backed up again.”
“Unless they all got sick on rotten eggs, there’s demon in that mix.”
As soon as he said it, a whiff of sulfur curdled in her nostrils. “Oh, that’s not good,” she whispered. But when he moved forward, she followed.
He raised an eyebrow, but didn’t comment.
Swiftly, he led the way down the hall toward the bar. The doors to both bathrooms stood ajar and he nudged them wider. Paper towels littered the floor, but nothing worse.
They continued forward. The strobe lights of the stage reached down the hall and flickered on the walls. Nim’s ears ached with the dull press of silence. She’d never heard the place silent.
Jonah stepped over the VIP red curtain lying on the ground.
The stench thickened. The rank stink made her hold her breath, then gasp, then cough. She tried to hold her breath again when Jonah glared at her.
But she couldn’t repress her small cry as they stepped past the bar into the main room.
Slaughter.
That was the smell. The people from the cars outside hadn’t left. They just hadn’t been found yet.
Jonah left her gripping the bar as he crouched beside one huddled mass, avoiding the shining slick on the floor that gleamed purple and blue and yellow in the rotating lights. He kept his head up, scanning the room, and never touched the body. She knew it must be a corpse. Could anything else lie that still?
Nim locked her gaze on Jonah, tried to concentrate only on the reven that glimmered calm and cool just above his collar. But when he moved away from her, to the next body, the streaky black-light glow of her demon’s vision leapt into focus. Her rising pulse hammered through her veins, and she gulped down a panicky breath.
A dozen—no, more—crumpled shapes littered the room. How many cars were still parked outside? She couldn’t even remember, but considering that last-call Shimmy Shack customers weren’t the carpooling type, there hadn’t been enough vehicles to account for all the bodies.
Then she realized. These weren’t bodies. Just pieces. A sleeve. A pant leg. A man’s leather shoe. Torn and discarded like old costumes.
She hurried after Jonah when he circled the room toward the deejay booth and clicked off the stage lights. Under the remaining incandescent white room lights, the Technicolor spill across the floor was simply red.
And in the center of the room was a bare leg, a woman’s leg, curved and strong and pale. With a ragged end of muscle, sinew, and bone.
The burn in Nim’s throat wasn’t breath this time.
She whirled away, stomach heaving, but the red crimson scarlet bloody fucking lake of blood was all around her, and there was nowhere to go. She wrapped her arms around herself to banish the freeze that turned her insides to a snow cone, though the AC wasn’t working any better now than it usually did.
At least her insides were still inside her. Although if she looked at that leg again, she might not be able to claim that dubious distinction.
They finished their circuit at the front door. “They locked up when they left,” Jonah said.
She jumped when he spoke at normal volume. “What . . .” She cleared her throat when the word came out in a croak. “What happened here?”
“Ferales happened.”
“Like the thing you introduced me to.”
“That was nothing. A lone feralis won’t go after a crowd. But for the last year, they’ve started hunting in packs, more recently with malice and salambes mixed in. And there’s only one master demon we know who commands the lesser tenebrae like this.”
He was talking to himself now, because she wasn’t listening at all. She could only think. . . . “This is because of me.”
“Yes. They wanted you.”
“But why?” The word rose in a choked wail from her churning stomach.
“For the same reason I do. Because you are a powerful weapon in this war.”
“But they already have the anklet.”
“A weapon without a trigger.”
She was about to explode from the sickness in her stomach and the scream tightening her throat. She definitely didn’t need another trigger besides his dispassion. “How can you be so cold?”
“Because I’ve seen worse.”
She flinched.
“No, that’s not quite true,” he mused. “This is the first time the tenebrae have been so blatant. These were frustrated, unhappy men, but they weren’t solvo addicts or otherwise unusually vulnerable to the darkness. This shouldn’t have happened.”
“Of course it shouldn’t have,” Nim hissed. “They only wanted a dance.”
His gaze flickered violet toward her. “Don’t delude yourself. They wanted more.” He turned a slow circle, pausing at each quadrant of his rotation, as if memorizing the scene. “I meant, under the terms of engagement we’ve been following, this shouldn’t have happened. Our enemy keeps to the darkness, always has.” He po
inted his hook at the front door. “No tenebrae locks up after itself. And no brain-dead solvo addict would think to do it either. A human, in full possession of his faculties, was leading this attack.”
“The one on the security video, who stole the anklet.”
Jonah shrugged. “Let’s hope so. Otherwise, there are more forces arrayed against us than ever before.”
Jonah kept a close eye on Nim as they left the club. She’d paused at the naked, blood-streaked leg. She hadn’t broken down; the demon was working to guard her body from all threats, even if the threat was coming from inside.
Because she must be thinking, it could as easily have been her.
She didn’t yet understand; her fate would have been—could still be—much worse.
As he locked the door, Nim stared out into the sun.
“Shouldn’t we call someone?” Her voice was dull.
“The cleaning crew will be here soon. They’ll call the police.” He didn’t think this was the time to tell her that to protect the human realm, the league had been known to make incriminating evidence disappear. But they wouldn’t have the chance, not this time. He’d have to call Liam and prepare the league leader for possible blowback.
He’d noted that the cameras inside the club had been ripped from the walls, more evidence of a human associate overseeing the tech-ignorant tenebrae. But much worse had been left behind. . . . Although people would unwittingly go through all sorts of mental contortions to deny the existence of demonic forces in their midst, such cruel devastation as what they’d seen in the club would be hard to believe. Or disbelieve.
He gave her arm a nudge to get her moving across the parking lot.
“It’s not survivor’s guilt,” she said, apropos of nothing except what he knew was circling in her head. He knew because he’d felt it himself. “I didn’t even like Amber very much. She was a terrible dancer. And she never returned my mascara.”
“But she didn’t deserve that.”
“Right.” Nim took a gasping breath. Almost a sob. “Nobody deserves that.”
He opened the car door for her and, with the bulk of his body, pressed her forward. “Just like you don’t deserve this,” he prompted gently.