There were dirty cops. This wasn’t news to me.
But Niles?Surely not.
The pain in his eyes told me he knew what I wanted so desperately to know, but he either wouldn’t or couldn’t tell me.
Who the hell was I dealing with here?
CADE
Frank wasn’t kidding when he said his contact didn’t blend in with humanity as we did. He was something out of a horror movie, and there was no way in Hell or Earth that humans would trust him or let him get close enough to gain any trust. Tall and lanky, his arms and legs appeared too long for his body. He dragged his fingers lazily over the dining table as I sat, and even the sound of his skin on the cheap pine was unnerving. His face rested in his other palm, not bored, simply observing me, and while I was comfortable in my strength, there was a dark power behind him that made my demon shift uncomfortably under my skin. Whether to get the fuck out of this house or to attack, I wasn’t sure yet.
Attacking would be a mistake. His deep eyes watched me, withdrawn as though he was watching me from another world, another plane of existence. Short, shaved hair, thinning before he took a razor to it, sat atop a drawn-out face, ending in a harshchin he tapped with his fingers as he finally leaned back in his chair, done with his study of me for now.
“Earl,” I said simply as I settled back into my chair, the metal legs scraping noisily across the dirty linoleum. Earl lived in a cheap apartment, worse than mine, and cockroaches had scattered when he’d turned on the light. Something told me he didn’t mind the insects.
“Frank sent you.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway, and Earl’s lips curled into a smile that only served to increase the sense of uneasiness that floated between us. I wasn’t meant to tell him, but he already knew, and there’d be no sense in denying it.
“I need some information.” There seemed little point bothering with small talk, and Earl simply raised an eyebrow lazily at me, returning his fingers to the dining table between us to resume his ministrations, tracing small circles and figure eights.
“Frank doesn’t pay me enough to be giving out information.” He glanced around the small room, there was barely space for his legs under the small two-person table, and I pushed my chair back, unwilling to make physical contact with him. Scowling, I shoved my hand in my pocket before rolling the small wad of cash across the table, another gift from Frank.
Earl smiled again, a lopsided grin that displayed the teeth on his left side more than his right. His long fingers curled around the cash, and he slid it from the table and into his pocket without counting it. “What do you want to know?”
“Three years ago, a man named Mitch Murphy was murdered. He was also known as Garrett Porter.” Earl’s eyebrows raised slightly, but he said nothing to interrupt, so I continued, “I want to know who killed him.”
“Why?”
“WhyI want to know is none of your fucking business.”
He was neither offended nor concerned at my language and disrespectful tone, but there was a pulse of power that surged from him. I refused to flinch, but it made my stomach drop. He was the worst of the worst, exactly the sort of being you avoided even in Hell. A demon who, after centuries, had grown bored with torture and came to Earth to terrify the living. While I can’t claim I was on Earth for anything noble, it was certainly a purer motivation than the demon who sat across from me now. Every second in this apartment was torture, and I wanted to get the hell out of there.
But I needed something first, anything to help Nikki.
Earl sighed, watching me, rolling his tongue around in his mouth as he thought. He knew something, it was written all over his face, but he was deciding how much to tell me, what information was worth three thousand dollars.
“There’s a nightclub.”
He stopped talking, and I grew impatient. Surely, that’s not all he had to say. “And?”
“Murphy ran his business from there. He’s dead, but the business is still going. You see?”
“The new owner killed him?”
Earl smirked. “I’m not saying that. I’m telling you only the facts.”
“Which nightclub?”
He stared at me for a beat longer. “Urban.”
I’d never heard of it, and I wondered if Nikki had. Surely, if it were the basis for her father’s business, it would have come up in her research? But at the same time, she thought him to be a professional man, an upright citizen, and someone who dealt only in real estate wouldn’t work out of a nightclub. Perhaps she didn’t know. Someone in his position would have had the means and the knowledge to hide ownership of places he didn’t want discovered, which led to the issues Nikki was having trackingdown any information. The new owner, whoever he was, would have continued that web of paperwork, tangling it further until it was unbreakable. If you knew someone who knew someone, you would know where to go to source drugs or whatever it was you wanted. But Nikki? She had cop written all over her, and she was simply not the sort of person to give out huge bribes to those she had morality issues with only for information that may not pan out.
Not to mention she’d been searching under the wrong damn name.
“Is that all you have for me?” I asked, standing and moving around the back of my chair, gripping and holding it between us, ready to lift and brandish it like a lion tamer if he tried to reach for me with those intimidatingly long arms.
Earl watched me, his eyes rolling up before he gazed around the room lazily.
