“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 spine. 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.