by Louisa Lo
“Better.” I slapped my hands together. “Boy, do I have a few bones to pick with you. Why don’t we start with what you’ve done to those cats you ‘adopted’? Did you eat them? Was the shelter just a food bank to you, or are you using the cats as currency in poker games?”
Bonaventure the Third looked genuinely horrified. “We did no such things. We would never do that.”
“Alright, next question. Why did you attack me in the Shadow World?”
Three voices replied, overlapping each other.
“We weren’t attacking you.”
“We were trying to attack her.”
“But you’re not her.”
You’re not her. They’d said those exact words to me before. What did it even mean? I closed my eyes and wished I could’ve prayed for the patience of Job, had I not been a demon. “Yeah, yeah, so who the heck is she?”
“The girl our competition wants.” It was as far as Sidekick Number Two got before earning an elbow in the stomach by Wistari.
“Your competition?” My eyebrow rose. “I assume you meant the other set of monks, right? You know, the ones with the real firepower to hurt me?”
Bonaventure the Third drew himself to his full height. It would’ve been intimidating if he wasn’t all tied up. “We have just as much firepower as the Greys.”
His sidekicks nodded grimly. But it was the kind of nod that carried more pride than true conviction.
“Try flinging me across the room and then we’ll talk.” At least I’d gotten a name for the other team now. The first break in a long while. Then his words sank in. “Wait a minute, you called yourself the Off-Blacks and they’re the Greys? What are we, in a laundry detergent commercial?”
“We don’t have to explain ourselves to you.” Bonaventure the Third stiffened.
“Well, too bad. I’m a vengeance demon and you’re in my jurisdiction.”
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds of whatever animal abuses you’ve committed.” And that was the reason I’d use if that was what it took to hold the Off-Blacks. Not to mention, I was indeed pissed about the missing-and-assumed-dead cats. An image of Pete helping his client transport her dogs home popped into my mind, and I kicked it back to where the sun didn’t shine.
“We already told you we did no such thing.”
“Oh yeah, let’s see if you’ll change your tune after a bath in boiling oil.” I made a gesture as if I was conjuring a large crockpot that was almost as tall as me.
“Wait!” all three of them screamed, covering their faces with their arms.
“So tell me about the girl you supposedly thought I was.”
“Look.” Bonaventure the Third was talking fast. “We just heard that the Greys were going after that Aequitas girl, and we didn’t want to be left out, that’s all. But since you looked nothing like her, it was just a misunderstanding. Can’t we just walk away and pretend it never happened?”
With a sinking heart, I pulled out my cell phone and showed them a picture of Esme from my album. “Is this the girl?”
“Yeah, that’s her.” For a moment there, Bonaventure the Third looked as if he thought I ought to be cheered by the case of mistaken identity, until he realized the implication of Esme’s picture being in my album.
He might not have targeted me. But he’d targeted one of mine.
The three guys swallowed as a whole, but before I could incite more terror in them, a tweet from Esme popped up:
Enjoying #perpetualsunset at #purgatory
She’d tweeted a picture of her and Guillermo smiling against the backdrop of the Land of the Undecided. Their bodies were outlined in the never-ending sunset, with a few lost souls serving as background extras. Guillermo had folded his hands in front of him, keeping a respectable distance away from Esme as was traditionally expected at this stage of the courtship. Despite the lack of physical contact, the couple looked as happy as two peas in a pod. Only a pair of vengeance demons would consider purgatory a romantic place for a first date. Esme looked positively radiant in the pink floral number she’d chosen from my trunk.
Somehow I got an odd feeling that everything I needed to know was already in that grainy picture. So I squinted at it and did a double take.
No way.
I magnified Guillermo’s right hand. Sitting on one of his fingers was a giant ruby ring, with the exact same knotting design as the one Dan Pillar had used on me.
Shit! Shit! Shit!
I typed a private direct message to Esme, my fingers flying over the keypad:
DANGER get away from your date NOW!!!
While I got busy typing, the badass wannabes started edging away from me. Being bound together, they couldn’t exactly go very far. But that didn’t stop them from trying. From the edge of my vision I could see them trying to hop away in unsynchronized motion, like some mutated three-headed bunny.
With no time to waste and even less patience to spare, I took out a secret weapon from a back pocket with my spare hand. I pointed it at the boys and pressed down on the button, my eyes never leaving the cell phone screen.
In less than a second, the three losers were howling and twitching on the ground, courtesy of my dad’s Hellhound-grade pepper spray.
***
Esme didn’t answer my direct message. In fact, she pretty much went off the reservation around the same time I sent out my warning, which made me very nervous.
I tried calling her cell, but it was shut off. I tried turning it back on remotely but couldn’t. So much for the supernatural GPS. Esme wasn’t missing long enough for me to call the demonic police, but I knew in my guts that she was in trouble.
The gatekeeper at purgatory swore up and down he never saw the couple go in, let alone leave. Crossing planes with a full-blooded vengeance demon against her will would be as inconceivable as keeping her in purgatory, as the prolonged presence of a living being could wreak havoc on that plane. So where was she then?
Dammit, I knew I jinxed it when I thought she could handle herself. While Esme might be powerful, on a certain level she was incredibly trusting. All that abrasiveness, her play-by-the-rulebook mentality and her murderous vengeance track record was just business, a product of her race. Underneath that was a sweet girl who could’ve turned her nose up at her hybrid half-sibling, but didn’t. She could be especially vulnerable if she let her guard down in the company of a fellow justice handler. I could just see him subduing her using sneaky means. Most likely some kind of magical roofie. Man, if he dared touch a single hair on her head… My blood boiled just thinking about that.
I needed to find her, pronto.
I checked all of Dan Pillar’s usual hangouts. The local seniors chess competition, the taping of the demonic version of Antiques Roadshow, the ribbon-cutting ceremony for the latest faery-powered stairlifts…he was gone. No one had seen him since around the same time Esme had dropped off the radar.
Well, at least I’d gotten myself a few suspects to torture some information out of.
***
“Please, I can’t stand it anymore. Oh, anything but that!” Bonaventure the Third begged.
We were in my parent’s basement. Mom and Dad were still away for that crap assignment the Council had ordered Dad to do. Clef, Boone, and Ty were all out, dutifully being up to no good. Fir, however, was home and more than happy to help me, though it was as much about making it up to me as it was about having a little fun for himself.
I didn’t care. My priority was finding Esme. Even if that meant milking Fir’s ability for all it was worth. On a normal day I’d be uncomfortable going all trickster-style, but today was anything but normal.
“Please…I…can’t…breathe. It’s…too…much,” Bonaventure the Third said, his face turning an alarming shade of crimson. His two friends weren’t doing so swell, either.
Fir looked to me and I nodded. He waved his hands, and countless mini-feathers the size of paperclips stopped tickling the three silly-asses’ bare feet.
<
br /> It was a new trickery spell invented by my half-brothers. They ran a little side business of designing unique spells. They were like the Weasley twins in Harry Potter that way. This death-by-a-million-feathers spell, called The Itch, turned out to be a rather wonderful interrogation tool.
“Now, tell me where Esme is or I swear, I’ll turn the spell right back on,” I told the boys.
“We don’t know,” Wistari said not for the first time in the last hour, rubbing his feet together ruefully.
Fir put his hand on my arm. “Megan, you’re going about this the wrong way.”
“What do you mean?” I frowned.
“Now, I hung out with elves a bit. You have to ask your questions in a way that makes sense to them.”
A light bulb went on in my head. “They are sneaky about the small stuff, but linear thinkers when it comes to the big picture.”
“In other words, Evil Lite.” Fir grinned.
“Hey.” Sidekick Number Two, whose name I now knew was Naracion, protested.
“Especially that one there with the giant blood.” Fir pointed a finger at Naracion and continued, “So start your questions from the beginning. The very beginning.”
I wanted to kick something. I didn’t have time for this. Esme’s life might be on the line here. Yet I couldn’t afford to not be patient. I tried to focus on the five W’s they’d taught us back in Target Recon 101—the who, what, when, where, and why. I took a deep breath and addressed Bonaventure the Third. “Who are you, as a group?”
“I told you, we’re the Off-Blacks.” He rolled his eyes.
“Yeah, but what is the Off-Blacks?”
“We’re the followers of the Blacks,” Wistari said with maddening reasoning. “But we’re not as black as our masters yet, so we call ourselves the Off-Blacks until we’re as black as they are.”
“Huh?”
“Megan,” Fir whispered in my ears, “I think by the Blacks, they mean Evil.”
“Evil, as in evil-Evil?”
We exchanged a look. Now we knew for sure the Off-Blacks were delusional. Absolute Evil hadn’t been heard from since almost the Beginning, just like Absolute Good. It was about as real to us as Big Foot was to humans, stories to scare little demon kids into listening to their mommies and daddies.
“Alright, what are the Greys then?” I turned back to Bonaventure the Third and crossed my arms.
“We’re sworn enemies.”
I laughed sarcastically. “That implies being equals.”
“We are equals.”
I snorted. “Yeah, right. The whole relationship looked to me more like rock stars and groupies, or serial killers and copycats.”
“That’s not true.” Naracion was indignant. “We’re way more evil than them. We’re the Off-Blacks. It’s still many shades darker than the Greys.”
I sighed. I understood the whole insecure thing. I really did. Growing up the way I did, I knew what it was like to want to be more than what everybody thought you’d ever be. In normal circumstances, I might even feel sorry for these guys, but I had a family member to rescue and didn’t have all day. “Wait, are you saying you guys are vying for the attention of the same master?” Those losers following a force that didn’t exist, I got. But the Greys? I suppose there was no accounting for fanaticism. And the power only made them more dangerous.
“Of course.”
“Look, just tell me what you know about them. Don’t make me make you beg.” At this rate, I might be the one who ends up begging. If the three musketeers had had the smarts, I’d say they’d dragged this out on purpose.
“So as I said.” Bonaventure the Third took pity on me. “We and the Greys have a long history. We spy on them whenever we can. It takes work, because they have money and know people.”
“Yeah, just because they got all those things, they think they’re better than everyone else,” Naracion grumped. It made sense that the Greys were well-connected. It would take the greasing of some major wheels to pull off the kidnapping of a vengeance demon.
Bonaventure the Third continued. “A few months ago we heard that one of their agents just bought a fake invitation to the ball on the black market, under the name of Prince Guillermo Cristobal Canus, Duke of Naukra, Earl of Florgato.”
“Let me guess, the name was so grandiose and fake it made you suspicious?”
“Er, no.” Bonaventure the Third paused, then muttered, “Although, that should’ve been a red flag. But no, we got suspicious because we know the real Guillermo Cristobal Canus, and he’s a small-time incubus stripper with a fancy stage name. Anyway, one thing led to another and we uncovered the plan to snatch the Aequitas girl and take her to the Shadow World. So we decided to intercept the package and see what all the fuss was about.”
I remembered the kiss Esme had had with Mr. I’m-Sharing-A-Name-With-A-Stripper. The chaos my half-brothers created must’ve messed up the Greys’ plan, whatever it was, and I’d ended up in the Shadow World instead.
“Any idea where they might’ve taken her? Is she still in purgatory?”
“No idea.” Bonaventure the Third and his sidekicks shook their heads.
I was ninety-five percent sure these guys were telling me the truth, but I decided to put them through one more round of torment just to be sure. I turned to Fir. “Give me the In His Shoes.”
Fir nodded. “One In His Shoes, coming right up.”
I looked at the three idiots. “By this spell, may you suffer the same fate you put every animal you ever adopted through.”
“No!” they howled in unison.
I expected starvation, skinning, and mutilation. What happened next was far, far worse.
The three stooges changed into the prospective costumes of jailbird, tooth fairy, and panda. Invisible hands repeatedly stuffed their mouths with gourmet tuna bites, silencing their screams of terror. Other invisible hands cuddled and squeezed and brushed them to within an inch of their lives right before my very eyes.
It was beyond pathetic.
“I think it’s fair to say this is a dead end,” Fir said dryly. “So hey, are we even?”
I snorted. “The sooner I say yes, the sooner you get me into trouble again. Hold these knock-off monks for now while I go after the real thing, will ya?” I asked as I walked up the stairs leading out of the basement.
“With the spell on or off?”
“If I tell you to turn it off, would you do it?”
“No. This is way too much fun to watch.”
“Figured.”
Chapter Fourteen
WHOM COULD I ASK for help? Because if Esme’s douchebag of a date was working with the Greys, then I was going up against some serious magic. The tone in my dad’s voice right after my attack in the Shadow World, when he’d mentioned the silver web—whatever that was—had said it all.
My magic wasn’t all that strong even on the best of days, and now was definitely not it. I was going to need some help.
Dad’s covert mission was on an undisclosed plane, very rugged from the sound of it, and Mom was with him. I didn’t have the faintest idea how to find Esme’s mother. Last I’d heard, she’d branched out into the digital world, pouring her essence into the Internet for weeks on end, triggering mass heart attacks for men who sought affairs from sites such as Ashley Madison. Enid was on vacation and had made it clear to the world she wouldn’t be checking any of her communication devices before the new semester began.
There was Serafina, but I couldn’t call her. Though her vengeance power was potent, it was also mostly untrained. That coupled with her shy nature, I knew that bringing her along in a dangerous situation would likely cause harm to both her and others.
There was Madeleine. But just because I had something over her head didn’t mean she’d make a good ally. The very fact that I saw her at a club that was run by people who had a connection with Esme’s kidnapper was making Madeleine rather suspect. And come to think of it, she was part of Esme’s date preparation, however relu
ctant she seemed at the time. If that little witch was somehow involved…I’d get her later, after I got Esme back safe and sound.
Only the Council knew how to contact Dad. I’d have no choice but to go to them. They might not like me, but they liked Esme and would for sure want to help locate their star pupil.
I stood in front of Hart House at the University of Toronto in the early morning, Esme missing now for a whole night. I hadn’t slept a wink. My heart was beating in that accelerated, yet steady rhythm. My throat was dry from breathing through my mouth in an effort to prevent hyperventilating. I was beyond tired, beyond worried, maybe even beyond vengeance. I just wanted to find Esme. Then I’d let them have it.
On the human side, the collegiate gothic building of Hart House served as a student centre. On the demonic side, it was the offices for the Board of Governors, University of Demonic Studies.
As I was suspended, I had to get into the demonic school ground through the human one. I did it without issue, thanks to a little cloaking spell Fir cooked up.
I landed on the demonic side just behind the thick oak front door. Luckily there weren’t any students around. I walked forward, my footsteps echoing in the empty hallway.
The coats of arms of all the supernatural families who’d donated to the university were displayed in the enormous lobby. They bore the same last names as many currently sitting on the board and, by default, the Council. Still very much the old boys’ club.
But maybe they’d be a bit nicer if I caught them in their offices and interacted with them on an individual basis. Well, maybe not High Judge Advocatus, but the others. It would get them away from the whole mob mentality. I hoped.
I briskly walked towards the Great Hall on the east wing of the House. The warm color of the Italian travertine floors and pastel glass windows did nothing to calm my nerves. I was quite sure the Greys weren’t some embittered past target of Esme’s. Promising as she was, my half-sister simply hadn’t been around long enough to deal justice to many powerful supernaturals yet. So I had no idea what the bad guys wanted with her, and that only made me even more anxious.