by Chloe Garner
It wasn’t just lonely, it was frightening.
She knew that was silly, that she was one of the most powerful people alive, she slept with an angel-forged short sword next to her bed, one that no one else would be able to see, much less pick up, and she was capable of dealing with almost anything she could think of.
But the empty room, walking out of the bathroom into the dim, quiet, strange-smelling main room, her mind jumped at shadows, believed she wasn’t alone. She kept looking over her shoulder.
She didn’t shower.
The shower was the worst. Unarmed and on slick footing, with no line-of-sight between herself and anyone or anything that might show up. Sam would sit on the floor of bathrooms while she showered, because it made such a difference to her.
She didn’t like to be alone.
Sam wasn’t far, just on the other side of the bond, and Jason and Kara were next door, but she was alone.
She sat on the end of the bed and fidgeted with the remote, not watching the television that it summoned.
She should have been plotting. Planning. Evaluating. Doing her terrifying shaman thing that kept people and demons from being able to hide anything very important from her.
Instead, she sat, numb, silent, listening to the room.
She shouldn’t have agreed to it.
Carter would know that it would have this effect on her, and he was doing it to spite her, to hurt her for taking Abby’s side.
Finally, unable to think of anything else to do, she knocked on Kelly’s door. He appeared in the hallway next to her.
“That’s not how it’s supposed to go,” Samantha said, looking up and down the hallway.
“Sorry,” he said. “I forget sometimes.”
“If they need me, tell Jason and Kara that I went to Nuri’s. I need you to keep an eye on Isobel. Kara will have her hands full with Jason, and I can’t count on him to remember that he’s supposed to be taking care of Isobel.”
“Why are you leaving?” Kelly asked. “That isn’t a good idea.”
“I have to go,” Samantha said. “I can’t stay here.”
He looked around.
“It’s not very clean, and it doesn’t smell right, but…”
“That’s not it,” Samantha said. “Wait. It’s perfectly clean, and it just smells like a hotel.”
“Oh,” Kelly said. “Okay.”
She frowned, wondering what he was seeing that she wasn’t. Regretted walking around barefoot.
“I just…” She didn’t want to admit she was afraid of the empty room to him, so she shook her head. “I can’t stay here right now.”
“We’ll find the demon,” Kelly said. “And I’ll kill her. There’s no demon who is invulnerable to me.”
Samantha laughed.
“I’m sorry I didn’t bring you the first time,” she said.
“I should have been there,” Kelly said. “I chose to stay with you, to help you in your commission, and instead I left.”
“I don’t have a commission,” Samantha said. “You know that. And I think that you and Jason had the right instinct. I can’t explain it, but you need to stay together, as weird as that must be for both of you.”
Kelly processed, then nodded.
“Yes. But you still shouldn’t go.”
“I have to,” Samantha said. “It’s just Nuri’s.”
“I can’t go there,” Kelly said. “If they need you, there’s no way to tell you.”
“You can get to the door,” Samantha said. “And they can tell me.”
“You don’t carry a phone, you go to a demon club…” Kelly said. “I don’t understand.”
“Don’t feel bad,” Samantha answered. “No one else does, either.”
He frowned harder, then sighed.
“Very well. Do you want me to watch Isobel from her room, or am I supposed to stay here in mine? It’s kind of pointless, you know.”
“I know,” Samantha said. “We need to talk, you and me, sometime soon. There’s stuff you know that I need to hear.” She held up a hand. “But not tonight. Just stay close. Isobel won’t be happy if you show up in her room, but I put a splat on her door that should trigger anyone with any power at all in the building. I can’t protect her directly, but if you feel something cross that, you get to her immediately. Get her out, and then find a way to get to me.”
“You shouldn’t go,” Kelly said. “You wouldn’t have left Ash.”
He had spent time around Jason. He was making much better-reasoned arguments, and here he was right. She wouldn’t have ever left Ash like this. It really wasn’t even a good idea. But she had to get out; she couldn’t face that room.
“She’s a grown woman. He’s sixteen,” Samantha said. “It’s different.”
Kelly frowned, trying to make the statement fit with what he already knew, and Samantha knew she didn’t want to stick around while he exposed her decision to further skepticism.
“I’m going,” Samantha said. “I won’t be far, and I don’t think I’ll be long. Hold it all down, here, okay?”
She watched him mouth hold it down, then he sighed.
“I’ll do my best, Anadidd’na Anu’dd. Be well.”
He disappeared, and she frowned at his door. What had he discerned? What did he outright know? The kid confused her, and she knew more about angels than almost anyone she knew.
Dismissing it with the urge to escape, she left, going down to the pricey parking garage and retrieving the Mustang to drive herself to the club Nuri owned with Kjarr.
She knew Kelly didn’t approve of them - how could he? - and that Jason had intervened to keep the kid from saying anything to her about it, out of respect to how important the two demons had been for a long time, now. She felt bad, leaving so little space for Kelly when he’d stayed voluntarily to help her, but that was what her life was.
And tonight, she needed to be somewhere familiar, where only familiar bad things tended to happen.
She might get in a fight. She might infringe on what some demons considered a neutral zone, simply by her presence, but she was allowed to be here, and she was comfortable here.
The bouncer at the door was one she’d bullied quite badly while she’d thought Jason was dead - sort of the low point in most of her behaviors - and he stepped out of the way as she approached, rather than challenging her the way most of the bouncers would.
She went in, walking past the curtained rooms without paying any more attention to them than she had to.
This was where her education had come from. Carter had brought her here routinely for work stuff, and she’d learned everything fundamental to demons and demon society here, watching it happen in those red-lit rooms.
Light in hell was red, so the rooms were red. They were tiled, to make them easier to clean. They were dim, violent, and popular.
Demons couldn’t ash here - Nuri was that powerful - unless special provision was made, so the games got particularly violent, in this land of no permanent consequences.
Demons didn’t ash in hell, either. They just healed at the rate they could with the power they’d accumulated and stored within their own bodies.
The music always sounded like it was coming from the next room over, the bass vibrating the floors and the walls, no melody making its way through. Like a heartbeat you felt with your feet and your skin, rather than your own chest. The air always felt pressurized with noise that you weren’t sure you were really hearing.
Funny that this was where she felt safe, on her own.
Sam and Jason had saved her from this, in a very real way. Sure she’d run away from it, but there was no way she would have stayed away, long term. She had nowhere else to go, nowhere that they both knew her and knew about the world she knew. And she couldn’t exist without both. It was partially about wasting her potential, sure, but it was also that she didn’t connect well with humans who didn’t know this world. There were so many things that she had to carefully avoid saying that it became ha
rd to say anything at all.
The twins had been an option she’d never seen coming.
She ordered at the bar, watching with keen eyes as the demon fixed her drink and delivered it. No shenanigans at Nuri’s club. The Ethiopian woman wouldn’t have tolerated it. But the first time it happened, the demon who betrayed Nuri would be counting on the payday of all paydays to keep him alive. Vigilance was always worthwhile.
“Nuri says you should come say hello when you finish your drink,” the demon bartender said when he brought it to her.
“Thank you,” Samantha answered.
She drank free, here. And most demon establishments. They’d buy points any way they knew how.
She took her time with her drink, feeling Lahn at her back and the demons around the room as she put a mild disturbance into their evening. It was calming. The blacklights here picked up the lint on her shirt, but she’d changed - even before she’d admitted to herself that she was going out - into a black silk shirt that left her a shadow, an impression here. Maybe thirty minutes later, she left her glass on the bar and went down the narrow hallway back to Nuri’s office.
The demon guarding the door didn’t know her.
“Nuri asked me to come see her,” Samantha said, a charity, rather than going straight to forcing her way in, the way she often did. She wasn’t on an agenda, tonight, and she wasn’t going to leave as big a wake as she normally did. Not unless she had to.
“Human,” the olive-skinned woman said. “I don’t know why Nuri would ever have business with a human.”
Samantha let her face drop to a flat expressionlessness, the ultimate in bored.
“I’m not here to play power games,” Samantha said. “You know she’s expecting me or you don’t, but you aren’t just going to stonewall me. That’s a bad play.”
The woman yawned, covering her mouth pointedly with black fingernails.
“Run away home, little mortal. Come back when you’re important.”
“She does go through you, doesn’t she?” Samantha asked. “You’d think the kids she sticks in the corner back here would learn to watch for Anadidd’na Anu’dd.”
The demon hissed, pressing herself against the wall at the use of angeltongue. Samantha pushed the door open and walked past her.
“You need better bodyguards, if that’s the best you’ve got,” she said before closing the door behind her. Nuri was reclined on her chaise, long lean body curling along the red fabric like a cat’s.
“Your abuse to my staff is legendary,” Nuri said. “And yet, they can’t refrain from picking fights with you, anyway. Perhaps you help, I never know.”
Samantha smiled.
“It’s good to see you.”
“And you,” Nuri said. “Kjarr told me you were here and that you would not come to see me.”
“Is he ever right?” Samantha asked with a wider smile.
“Rarely,” Nuri answered, the corner of her mouth curling. “Come and sit with me. We have much to discuss, I sense.”
“I’m not really here to talk,” Samantha said. “I just needed to get out.”
“Where is your young man?” Nuri asked.
“With Carter.”
Nuri’s head rotated elegantly, looking at her with a demure curiosity.
“Why would he choose that?”
“A condition of a deal with Carter,” Samantha said.
“Ah,” Nuri said, clearly understanding much more than Samantha had said. She rarely found herself surprised. “You have more people with you than just your beau, though.”
“They’re normal people who sleep,” Samantha said.
“And you can’t,” Nuri said. Samantha felt her guard dropping, as it always did with the woman.
“No. Not by myself. Not anymore.”
“Even when you were with Carter, there was someone outside the door, wasn’t there?” Nuri asked. Samantha hadn’t considered that.
“Yes.”
Nuri nodded.
“I haven’t been alone in a thousand years. More.” The corner of her mouth twitched again. “I would be the last to judge. Who are your companions?”
“You know most of them,” Samantha said. “The last one… I need to keep her under wraps until everything settles.”
“The angel’s pet rock,” Nuri said, only the faintest hint of disgust betrayed in the tone of her words. “Yes, I know about her.”
“How do you know that?” Samantha asked.
“How is Trigger?” Nuri asked. “Is he living up to your expectations?”
“To do whatever I tell him to do, regardless of how demeaning?” Samantha asked. “Yeah, he’s pretty good about that.”
Nuri smiled, blinking slowly.
“He says you want our contract with him,” she said. Samantha frowned.
“You have a common contract with Kjarr?”
“Of course,” Nuri said. “Isn’t that how your marriage works?”
Samantha hadn’t considered that Nuri might actually view her relationship with Kjarr as a marriage to the point that they shared assets. That was even more out of character for demons than she had come to expect.
“I’m sorry,” Samantha said. “I sold you short.”
There was the faintest twitch of a shoulder and Nuri’s hand waved gently, dismissively.
“How would you know?” the woman asked. “Unless I told you. You know I can’t give you his contract.”
“Why is that?” Samantha asked.
“Because it’s more than twenty years of clauses, most of which have nothing to do with you. If I review carefully, I may find that his contract is older than you are, my dear. No good demon creates such a contract without rules of what to do with the secrets that are in it.”
“I need to know,” Samantha said. “I need to know exactly what it is you’ve made him tell you, when it comes to my affairs.”
Nuri blinked again, unflustered.
“Do you believe he is telling me anything that you would not tell me, yourself?” the woman asked.
Samantha considered, simply because that was the kind of question that deserved due consideration.
“No,” she said. “Probably not. But I need to know, all the same, from you and from everyone else.”
“Yes,” Nuri said. “I expect you’ll get the same answer from everyone.”
“I need to know why, two days after I took her in, Spasm showed up on my doorstep, asking to trade for her,” Samantha said. There was a slight twitch in Nuri’s brow. Humor.
“Yes. He thought that perhaps you’d underestimated the value of what you had gotten your hands on, and that he could get it for a steal.”
“He annoys me, sometimes,” Samantha said frankly, drawing a short but sincere laugh from Nuri.
“He hasn’t gotten used to you growing out of your awkward phase. Most of the rest of us have.”
“I need to know who is talking,” Samantha said.
“It only takes one,” Nuri answered. “And then we all know. It’s our nature.”
“Nuri,” Samantha said. The woman smiled, acknowledging the game.
“Any information Trigger brings to me that is not a part of the common pool of information, or disinformation as the case may be, will remain with myself and Kjarr. Trigger is contracted, quite explicitly, from speaking of anything about his time with you to anyone outside of the two of us.”
“That’s not good enough,” Samantha said. “There need to be boundaries on what he can tell you.”
“Things that you would tell me yourself?” Nuri asked. “This is about being fair, isn’t it?”
Samantha shrugged.
“It’s what I’m known for.”
Nuri smiled again.
“Even when everyone knows I am, in proof, your favorite.”
Samantha shrugged again.
“I will speak to Kjarr and send suggested contract terms to you as soon as we agree to them,” Nuri said.
“And I will return them with changes,�
�� Samantha answered.
“Of course,” Nuri said evenly. “Now, tell me, how many layers of logic were there to your decision to come here tonight?”
Samantha raised her eyebrows, and Nuri sat up slowly, watching Samantha’s face.
“Don’t tell me that you really are here on a lark, Sam. You left your charges alone in a perfectly un-warded hotel. You aren’t that foolish.”
Samantha looked away.
“Tell me it was a trap,” Nuri said. “You come here, to the middle of the demonic world; clearly you are bait.”
“Clearly,” Samantha echoed.
“The moment you walked in that door by yourself, demons started putting together attack parties, trying to plan around everything you could have possibly thought of to keep them away. Do not tell me that they are going to show up and the only fight they’re going to get is from each other. I could have won that fight and seized the prize myself.”
Samantha stood slowly, at a loss. How could she have missed it? Had she been influenced, or was she just that raw from the simple idea of Sam being gone? Had she taken her eye off the ball that badly?
A young demon glitched in.
“There’s an angel out there who says that he has a message for Renouch,” he said.
“What is it?” Nuri asked.
“They’re under attack.”
Samantha was in motion in an instant, all action, when a solid arm thumped her across the chest.
“Your cause is already beyond you,” Kjarr said. “I will go.”
She stopped, stunned, as the great Norse demon gave her a simple nod, every inch of him the Viking king he had once been, blood and violence and pure chiseled warrior, like a different person than the jovial man she had always known.
He glitched out, and the young demon shifted nervously, suddenly in the middle of something more important than he had anticipated.
“What should I tell the angel?” he asked.
“Tell him to return,” Nuri said softly. “That they will need him, if they are to win.”
The demon glitched away, and Samantha started for the door.
“You should remain,” Nuri said, slowly lowering herself back down onto her chaise. Samantha turned.
“I won’t leave my friends to fight a fight I set them up for,” Samantha said. “Even if I can’t get there in time, I’ll get there as fast as I can.”