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 pointed 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.
She braced one hand on the door and the other on the frame, as if to hold her place. The metal creaked under her grip. “I’m alive. Forever, apparently.”
“Focus that anger. But not on me.”
“Isn’t that what Darth Vader told Luke?”
“We aren’t the dark side,” he said. “Only shadowed.”
For a long moment, she stared at him. Then she got into the car and sat with her hands tucked between her knees, shoulders hunched.
As he walked around to the driver’s side, he racked his brain for the words of comfort she so clearly needed. Bad enough to theoretically lose her old life to the demon inside her, but to have seen that old life brutalized must be devastating. Uneasily, he remembered how his wife’s inevitable aging, their retreat deeper into the forest so that none might question his endless youth, had eaten at him. If that had happened all at once, he would have been as torn apart as the men inside the Shimmy Shack.
“Nim,” he said as he climbed into his seat.
She turned to him. “I want to destroy them. Like you did that show-and-tell monster. I want to rip them into pieces so small we won’t even find their eyeballs to watch the dark creep in.”