The demon shakes his head as a purple-blue mark begins to glow on the hand he used to fight the cockroach.
“Now I’ve pissed off skreet,” he says, then glares at me. “And it’s your fault.”
“Skreet?” I ask.
“I don’t have time for this.”
He steps toward the doorway. Where once there was the opening to the coffee bar, now stands a rippling portal of smoke and embers.
“Hey, where do you think you’re going?” I snap, following him.
He whirls on the spot just before the doorway. “Donotcome into my realm. Your kind is not welcome there.”
“Well, then don’t come into mine!You’renot welcomehere!” I fire back. “And neither is skreet, whatever it is!”
He laughs in a cold, patronizing way. “Then you better stop spilling sugar, Firecracker.”
I gasp. Did he justnicknameme?
“I wouldn’t have spilled it if you hadn’t scared me,” I say.
“I wouldn’t have scared you if you hadn’t walked through my bartender and addled his mind,” he retorts.
Bartender?
“The blue guy?” I ask.
He straightens and huffs, a curl of smoke coming from his wide nostrils. “Stay. Out. Of. My. Realm.”
With each punctuated word he grows fierier, not just in voice, but appearance. It’s as if his entire body is coming alive with flames.
I could absolutely not win a fight against this demon, but something about the way he shielded me so protectively tellsme he wouldn’t hurt me anyway. But I’ve been known to make stupid choices and have a shitty gut-check so…
“Fine. Protection wards are going up tomorrow,” I say, crossing my arms.
He mimics me, but the gesture is much more impressive with his flexing forearms. “Fine. I’ve been meaning to redo them anyway. I’ll be back here at the same time tomorrow night to help you.”
I scoff. “I don’t needyourhelp.”
“You are mistaken, and I won’t let your pride cause the rift in our realms to grow any farther.”
“Look, buddy, I just got here. There’sno wayI’ve done the kind of damage that I’m sensing here in that short a time. I’d have to be purposefully poking the planar boundaries for weeks to get something like that cockroach rip to happen, and even then, it’d go somewhere stupid, like daisyland.”
I have never ripped a hole in the planes. I’ve never even come close to crossing more than the astral plane. I am talking directly out of my butthole here, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to show me up.
He smiles and the predatory nature of it does weird, warm things to my insides.
“You’re just a baby mage. You don’t even know how to use your power.”
“I amnota baby. I’m twenty-two years old.”
He snorts. “May as well be two how you blunder about with your magic.”
He turns back toward the open portal, and, no, I do not look down at his ass. I’m looking at the tail poking out through the back of his black trousers.
“Tomorrow night, Firecracker,” he says. I look up to see he’s glancing over his shoulder at me and may have seen my eyes pointed at his ass. He smirks—letting me know he got the wrong impression—then disappears into the smoke and flame with a snap.
“Asshole…”
