She wrapped her arms tight around her clipboard and beamed at Lucifer, nothing but respect in her gaze. All the demons, and even some of the human souls milling about, kept casting him glances, like freaking Oprah had landed in the building.
“Nyx is Lilith’s sister, Jessica.”
“Oh,” was all I could say. Now the teary-eyed reception made sense. She thought I was her dead sister, a sister she hadn’t seen in hundreds if not thousands of years. I had always been an only child, so I couldn’t really identify with whatever it was she had to be going through. But my heart still ached for her. She seemed nice…for a demoness.
“I imagine that you don’t want me accompanying you on the rest of your tour but at least let me show you Downtown.”
“Downtown?” I asked.
“Yes, Downtown is what we refer to the rest of this level. The hotel, The Hell Hound Cafe, and Club Lust are all just in this building. We have an entire city of sin that puts your realm’s Las Vegas to shame.”
Lucifer grinned. “Yes, It’s like comparing a McDonald’s Play Place to Disneyland. But we’ll have to show her the rest of Downtown another time, Nyx. We’re on a bit of a time crunch, I’m afraid. You can accompany us to The Hell Hound, however. I’d like the table at the top of the tower. Have Cerberus prepare her some of his soup. She likes his minestrone.”
The demoness gave a dutiful nod and pulled her phone out of her skirt pocket, her French tips clicking away at the screen. “Yes, Sire.”
Normally I would never allow a man to order for me, but I let Lucifer off the hook, considering he’d done nothing more than read my mind. Iwasstarving, and I would kill for another bowl of Cerberus’s bomb minestrone.
Nyx walked us through the lobby into the piano bar. An Elvis impersonator was seated at the piano, playing “I Can’t Help Falling in Love with You,” whose soulful, baritone voice was almost uncanny to the King’s. “Wow, he’s…good.”
Lucifer’s purring chuckle resonated with the slow, sweet melody of the tune. “That’s no impersonator, Kitten. That’s really him. He always plays here on Saturday nights. Sinatra on Monday and Bowie on Fridays.”
“What, no Michael Jackson in that lineup?” I said asked with a nervous chuckle.
“No,” Nyx answered before Lucifer, her lips pursing in thought. “No, I believe he went to the other place… We tried to get him down here put Paradise threw a little fit like they always do. Thinking their boring little amphitheater in their Silver City is good enough for modern musicians.” She huffed an indignant snort. “I hear their acoustics are a joke.”
“Oh…”
“You’re taking this very well, Kitten,” Lucifer observed as we walked down a hallway, passing a cluster of women all dressed up like they had come straight out of the fifties. One of which I was pretty sure was Marilyn Monroe. “Hi, Lucifer,” she greeted him with a flirtatious wink, other girls giggling like a bunch of Xanax-induced hyenas as they hurried off toward the piano bar.
“I’m not really sure I’m buying intoanyof this,” I admitted through a frown. “For all I know, I’m still dreaming. Or you drugged me, and I’m hallucinating.”
He arched his brows. “You know it’s not any of those things.”
“Yeah, well, at least let me pretend.” Logical Jessica needed to pretend this all had a reasonable explanation behind it.
Nyx led us down a hallway toward a large doorway with a glowing pink fluorescent sign reading “Lust.”
The club wasn’t terribly unlike Siren’s. In fact, it was almost identical in branding, with the same color pallet of pink, red, and black and even the same furniture. The only thing different here was there was no old church or stained glass windows, and the dancers didn’t wear plastic horns. The succubi in Lust were all in their true, demonic forms, with their real horns decorated in glittering rhinestones and tassels to match the accessories they wore on their nude, scaled bodies.
”They really are succubi,” I breathed.
“Mhm, we have plenty of incubi working here too,” Nyx added, her voice a gravely purr as a male demon with yellow skin walked by, wearing nothing but tiny silk briefs that left little to the imagination.
She led us up a flight of stairs to the second level. A sign declared this was “The Hellhound Café,” which had to be Cerberus’s restaurant. My tummy began to rumble with all the delicious smells as I spied on the dishes of the patrons seated at the tables scattered around us. Instead of stopping to take a seat here, we continued up a spiral staircase threaded through a tower that sat at the center of the restaurant. The very top opened up to an observation deck where only a handful of tables sat, all of them empty. At the center of the tower’s platform was a bar, where a familiar face was hurriedly preparing drinks.
“Cerberus!”
The wiry-haired chef beamed at us as he took the drinks and hurried out from behind the bar with so much zeal he almost spilled the alcohol. “Hello again, My Lady!”
Nyx seated us at a table for two beside the floor-to-ceiling windows that wrapped all the way around the platform, giving us a view of Downtown. It was dark outside. Too dark. The only thing penetrating the inky void were the bright lights of the various buildings, including what looked to be a Ferris wheel. It was storming outside, rain pelting down on the glass, making for a peaceful ambiance that drowned out the chatter of the busy dining room below us.
“There is no moon here,” Lucifer said, taking the old fashioned Cerberus offered him.
I guess there wouldn’t be since we were in the Underworld. Nyx excused herself with another hug and left, with Cerberus in tow to fetch the soup.
“Are you ready for the next memory, Jessica?” Lucifer asked, carefully watching my every reaction as I gazed out the window. My attention shifted from the city outside to my own reflection that stared back at me in the glass, the dark cityscape making the window highly reflective of the lights inside the restaurant. Already, this trip had me asking questions I thought I already knew the answer to. Like who was the devil, really? And was Hell really such a bad place, or had humanity gotten it all backward?
And the biggest question of all, though, was how did I fit into all this?
