Without opening my eyes, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tissue I had stashed there. Before coming to the club, I’d dotted the tissue with some vanilla-scented oil. I made a pretense of wiping my nose as I drew the scent of vanilla into my lungs.
By the third breath, the club began to fade around me, the music suddenly seeming to come from far away. I let the trance take me, then opened my otherworldly eyes.
The sight I saw was almost enough to shock me back out of the trance, though I should have been braced for it. This was a demon nightclub. I knew most of its patrons were demons. But that didn’t stop the moment of existential terror when my otherworldly eyes took in the sea of red auras that surrounded me. There were humans here, too, of course, their blue auras dotting that red sea like buoys. But the ratio of demons to humans was higher even than I’d expected.
I forced myself to calm, then focused on the bar. This was harder than it sounds, because in my otherworldly sight, I can’t see objects, only living beings. The bar, being an inanimate object, was invisible to me. My depth perception was also kind of screwy, and I couldn’t figure out how far out I needed to look to find the bar.
For a moment, I thought I couldn’t do it. Then I noticed a set of auras that formed an almost straight line, behind which only a single human aura appeared, and I realized that had to be the bar. Aside from the bartender, there was only one human present, and he or she was at the far end.
I shook off the trance and opened my real-world eyes. Ms. Pathetic still sat alone and ignored at the bar, and since she wasn’t at the far end, that meant she wasn’t the human I’d seen in my trance.
“She’s a demon,” I told Barbie.
Barbie sighed. “All right, then. I’ll go tell her I changed my mind.” She still didn’t look happy about it, but I knew that was because of her limited exposure to demons. It was hard for her to look past the external package and see the powerful, nearly immortal being within.
I watched as Barbie pushed her way past the milling crowd and approached the bar. Ms. Pathetic’s face lit up when Barbie sidled up to her, and even I felt a tug of guilt for getting her hopes up like this only to dash them. And worse.
I was sure Barbie felt the same guilt, only stronger, and I halfway expected her to walk away. But she had committed herself to this path, and she wasn’t deviating from it. Her mark didn’t stand a chance. Barbie could coax a preacher into robbing a bank with the crook of a finger.
After only a couple of minutes of conversation, Barbie slipped her hand into Ms. Pathetic’s and started leading her toward the stairway to the second floor.
I pulled out my cell phone and texted Adam a one-word message: “Incoming.” Then I followed in Barbie’s wake, giving her a big enough head start that Ms. Pathetic wouldn’t notice me coming toward them. Not that she was likely to notice anything other than Barbie right now.
The club was air-conditioned, but no air conditioner in the world could combat a night this hot and humid, not with a couple hundred people packed together, radiating body heat. Half the dancers looked like they’d just come out of the shower, their hair wet, their clothes plastered to their skin by sweat.
By the time I got across the room, I was sweating, too, and about ready to deck the next person who grabbed me and tried to pull me onto the dance floor. The alcohol was flowing freely tonight, the crowd more boisterous than I’d seen in my past forays here.
Barbie and our mark were just disappearing into a room at the end of the hall when I made it to the head of the stairs. I glanced down at the dance floor as I was shoving my way through the loiterers, and caught sight of Shae. She was strolling gracefully through the crowd, surveying her domain. I moved away from the balcony, hugging the wall and hurrying. I doubted Shae would object to what we had planned, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.
Struggling through a sweating, inebriated crowd of mostly demons was hard work. I felt like I’d run a marathon by the time I finally made it to the door behind which Barbie and Ms. Pathetic had disappeared.
I knocked on the door—two series of three knocks, which was our agreed-upon signal—and moments later, the door cracked open just wide enough for me to slip inside.
It was Barbie who’d opened the door. Her already fair skin was even paler than usual, and there was a sheen of tears in her eyes. Her halo was crumpled in a corner, where presumably she had thrown it. She wasn’t a wuss by any stretch of the imagination, but I doubted she’d been exposed to as much violence as the rest of us.
Ms. Pathetic lay on the floor, curled into a fetal position and whimpering. Raphael stood between her and the door, and Adam circled her like a shark.
“I was hoping you’d be more talkative, Mary,” Adam said, in a purring voice that held more menace than the fiercest growl. Even with the door closed, the music from downstairs was uncomfortably loud, but Adam’s voice carried over the ambient noise.
“Let me try asking you this again,” he said pleasantly. “How long have you been on the Mortal Plain?”
“All they’ve been able to get her to say so far is her name,” Barbie said to me in a deliberately low voice. I think she was trying to hide a quaver, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t a good thing that this scene wasn’t bothering me like it was her. A few months ago, it would have.
There was no crumpled furniture, no dents in the wall, no broken glass, so I had to presume Mary hadn’t put up a fight when Adam and Raphael had jumped her. She wouldn’t have been able to take them, but I was surprised she hadn’t even tried. Demons weren’t usually wimps, even the ones who didn’t like pain.
“How long?” Adam roared, and Mary curled more tightly around herself.
“T-two d-days,” she stuttered, her voice hard to understand because she had her chin ducked to her chest and her arms over her head. The fact that she was blubbering didn’t help, either.
“Very good,” Adam said in his most condescending manner. “Now, it seems clear to me that you are in an unwilling host. I’d like to know how you got to the Mortal Plain, and why you’re in this particular body. Just keep talking, and I won’t hit you anymore.”
She didn’t uncurl, but she relaxed just a little. Giving in to the inevitable, I suppose. “My host performed a summoning,” she said, sounding defensive.
“There’s a difference between being willing to do something and actually wanting to do it. Tell me, Mary dear, did your host perform that summoning ceremony of her own free will?”
Mary didn’t answer, and Adam punished her with a brutal kick that made me wince and Barbie gasp. I had to remind myself once more that this was a demon, not the fragile mortal she appeared to be. And that she had taken this host when the host was unwilling—stealing her life, violating her every boundary. Mary did not deserve my pity. No matter how pitiful she seemed.
“Do I need to repeat the question?” Adam asked. “Or would you prefer to answer me?”
“No, my host isn’t really willing,” Mary sobbed desperately. “They hurt her, then threatened to kill her if she didn’t perform the summoning.”
“They?” Adam prodded. “Who are ‘they’?”
“She doesn’t know. They were strangers, and they wore masks.”
“I didn’t ask whether your host knew them. I asked who they were.”
“Please,” Mary said with another sob. “I don’t know. I didn’t care enough to ask. I just wanted to get out.”
“Get out of where?” Adam asked, his brow furrowed.
“Prison,” she hiccuped.
“Shit,” Adam said. Raphael’s response was even more colorful.
I didn’t know exactly what this meant to them, but I wasn’t about to ask in front of Mary.
“How many prisoners have been sent through?” Raphael asked, and it was just as well Mary still had her chin tucked protectively down and couldn’t see the look on his face or she might have died of fright.