“Oh, I assure you, she’s not. Where was it you were keeping those scissors, Myra? If you let me see them, I can tell you whether or not they could kill me.”
“You’re never going to see them until they’re buried in your heart. If that’s the way they kill you.”
“Promises, promises. Shall we make a date of it? A good old-fashioned stabbing? A crime of passion? You provide the crime, I’ll provide the passion?”
I bit my bottom lip so I didn’t shout at him. Or smack him. Or laugh.
He was hard on my insides. I found him equally frustrating and darkly wonderful.
No, not wonderful. He was holding my sister’s soul hostage. There was nothing wonderful about that.
“Tell me what to expect,” I said.
“Of what? My passion? Well, when a demon likes an officer of the law, he—”
“What to expect at the portal to Hell.” My heart was beating a little too fast. When he chuckled, it made me shiver and want to squirm in my seat.
What about angry sex? he had asked in the dream.
Oh, hell no.
“Your pulse, Myra,” Bathin murmured. “Whatever has crossed your mind?”
“A portal to Hell,” I lied. “What should we expect from it? Who opened it, and how did they do it? Is something coming into Ordinary or leaving?”
He waited a bit, about a block or so, staring out the window as our small, cloudy town zipped past.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t want to tell me,” I corrected.
“No. There could be many answers to your question. I don’t know which answers are the right ones.”
“Give me your best guess. I’ve done the research, I know the basics.”
He stared for a bit more, and when I snuck a peek at him, his eyes were narrow, that same look he’d had in the station, as if he were trying to read the head of a pin from miles away.
“I don’t know what was used to open the portal. It’s not a crossroads, it’s not something laying quiescent beneath the earth. It could be a summoning, a spell. If so, then the portal was called into existence from inside Ordinary. And that…that would be interesting.”
We had a lot of people with powers in town. It was possible someone from the inside had opened a portal to Hell. But it was against the rules to do so, and I didn’t know anyone who would break that law.
“Do you know who or what could be coming through?” I asked.
“No. But I think the portal was opened to allow something into Ordinary, not out.”
I worked to relax my grip on the wheel. Whatever we were about to face was coming out of Hell and straight into Ordinary.
I thought back to what I’d grabbed before I left the house today. Deck of cards, some tea bags. Extra socks. The bag I’d been carrying around for the last couple months had a rotating supply of oddities. So did the trunk of the cruiser.
Without really meaning to, I added and subtracted things out of the trunk and glove box with regularity. Delaney and Jean both gave me hell about it and liked to dig through the glove box to see what weird things I had stashed.
Jean called me the Swiss Army Reed, because she was a brat.
And yet, they never complained when I had exactly what we needed at hand.
“I think I know what’s guarding the portal,” he said.
“What?” I asked. “Basilisk? Sphinx? Devil?”
