Had her death been my fault?
My hands tightened on the wheel, but I couldn’t focus on that now. Steve deserved my full attention. He’d never once looked at me like I was some sort of freak. He should have, but he didn’t. I owed him for that. Plus, I was driving around in his car. If he turned up dead, that probably wasn’t going to go over too well with Officer Hernandez. I had to find him—him, and whatever was with him. Hurting him.
We can hurt them back, you know.
“That’s exactly what we’re going to do, asshole.”
You shouldn’t call me that.
“No problem.” I smirked. “How about you tell me your name?”
Silence greeted that request. I parked Steve’s car three blocks away from The Descent in a well-lit upscale parking garage surrounded by well-lit upscale cars. I was keyed up, stressed out, not quite sure how I’d ended up in this part of town, and not quite sure how to find my way back home. Those were problems that I’d deal with later. For now, though…
I stopped, squinting down the long street toward The Descent, taking in the winking neon lights, the heavy onyx marble storefront. Despite all the coasters Steve had dragged home from this place, I still had a hard time believing he was actually here.
Steve drank too much, smoked weed, and had probably dabbled in half a dozen other designer drugs in the time that I knew him, but he wasn’t really into a darker vibe. And despite its fancy lights and well-dressed bouncers, I knew instinctively that The Descent was about as dark as Chicago ever got.
The club was located in a decent enough area of town, a few blocks off Fifth Avenue. The kind of place that an unwary tourist might stumble into after a show or an overpriced dinner. It touted its music as house and goth, and its neon light show got good ratings on Yelp. From what I could tell from the pictures posted online, the people who writhed on its dance floor were young, pretty, and wound tight with need and greed. That also didn’t seem like Steve, but then again, I didn’t know everything about him. And I was almost certain he was here.
Jolting myself back into action, I continued moving down the street, vaguely aware that I wasn’t dressed like most of the people standing in line for The Descent. I wore dark jeans, a black tank top and hoodie, and the still-fading ink from the night before. I had on boots too. Big, clunky, shit-kicking boots, the kind that could stomp a man to death. I was young, but I wasn’t rich, and I wasn’t pretty. I also didn’t care.
It was that last bit that made it all come together.
I stalked up to the front of the line and stared at the bouncer by the door. There must have been something in my face, my attitude, because he didn’t laugh me off the sidewalk, simply stared back at me with his watery, bloodshot eyes. He was a big man, smarter than he wanted people to think. Broken by the death of a brother, the coldness of his mother, or the spiritual absence of a father gone for far too long. He was a mark, I thought, but a harmless mark. And he looked at me with a weary, regretful smile that made my pulse quicken.
Bad things came to The Descent, I knew at once. Tonight, I was one of them.
“Name?” he asked.
I opened my mouth to speak, to say the name of the demon I had released from Mrs. Klein’s sister Iris, if only for extra credibility. But something else issued from my throat, the softest sigh, a quiet, unexpected word. “Delia.”
He stepped to the side, and I was through.
Utter chaos greeted me, a frenzied pulse of light and music, laughter and dancing, shouting and the stench of humanity too closely pressed together, desperate and fearful and alive. The air inside Descent tasted like panic and sweat, with an underlying sweetness that made my stomach turn if only because of how familiar it was. Not quite brimstone, not quite rot—something in between. Something hungry.
I felt the cool wash of light sweep over me, tasted the sharp tang of liquor and want. But Steve wasn’t here. He wouldn’t be here under the lights on the open floor. He would be where the others crouched and breathed in darkness, the ones who watched, the ones who took.
I could take too, I thought. I could find these other rooms, enter them, and see the creatures that had dared to go too far. I could save him.
There will always be a Steve to save.
Ignoring my inner dickhead, I headed for the back of the dance floor where two hulking bodyguards stood. I smelled the darkness within them as I approached, but it wasn’t possession. It was simply brutality and vice. They were the kind of guys who liked to see beautiful things crushed. And they were on the outside of the rooms they guarded. What was waiting for me in there?
I approached them, and they looked up as one, sweeping me with a practiced gaze, taking in my cheap tank top and heavy boots, my ragged dark hair and ink-stained skin. I was not the norm in this crowd. The first one smiled, not a good smile, and dropped a meaty hand to his belt. “What do you want?”
“I’m the exorcist,” I said, my voice abrupt, flat. How an exorcist should talk, I decided. “They’re expecting me.”
“You’re not on the list.”
A cold smile curved my lips. “I’m usually not.”
Something in my expression stopped them from asking any other questions. The first one turned, keyed the door, and disappeared into the darkness, while the second blocked the door with his foot, but held out his hand to stop me from following. He wasn’t as smart as the first one, and he wasn’t as corrupted, but he was about fifty percent more jacked on coke. I looked into his eyes. There was no demon inside him…but there didn’t have to be. This guy had ensnared himself.
“You don’t want to stop me,” I told bouncer #2 as more intuitive knowledge flooded me—way more information than I usually got, deeper and fuller, running along the edges of the ink still staining my skin, sinking into my bones.
“Sure, I do.” He grinned, his lips peeling back from his too white teeth. His body was large, his black shirt stretched tight over pecs he’d worked hard to blow up in the gym, and I knew his story too. Knew it and used it, as I stared into his too bright eyes.
“Your dad’s losing hope,” I told him, getting right up into his face. “He thinks you’re going to die up here in this city of filth. Your mom drinks too much, and now he does too. He needs you. He’s not good at this.”
