He flinched back. “Who the fuck are you, cunt?”
I leaned in closer. “You were too dumb to stick with school, but you aren’t too dumb to work, to fight. Don’t fight me. Not tonight. Fight the asshole who wants to nail your sister after the game tomorrow night. He’ll hurt her.”
“The fuck he will.” With a heavy push, the guard shoved the door open and stepped aside. “Your boy’s in cell three. Four is the exit. They try to get you into two, they’re gonna hurt you. If you’re lying to me,I’mgonna hurt?—”
“I’m not.” I was already past him before he could finish his threat, and the door banged shut behind me. The hallway was long and lit by flickering, neon-esque LED lights, with a half-dozen doors lining one side. Its industrial tile floor had been painted to look like stained concrete, and decorator-quality epithets scrawled both sides of the corridor. All of it fake, of course, but very atmospheric. Someone had taken their time. The lights above the “cell” doors alternated blue, yellow, and red. Cell two was colored red, with two more lights after it. White for three, then blue for four.
I headed down the hallway, and a second later the door to cell three opened, and the first beefy bouncer emerged to lumber down the hallway toward me. He held himself too stiffly, and he didn’t meet my eyes. “Three, not two. Three,” he rasped, still without looking at me, and as he passed, a new smell assaulted my senses. Urine.
Nice.
I picked up my pace and shot forward, reaching the spring-loaded door of cell #3 before it could snick shut. I slipped in, my eyes instantly adjusting to the low-level red hazethat illuminated the room. I smelled Steve’s aftershave almost instantly, but I couldn’t see him, could only see the table overflowing with drug paraphernalia, booze and food, and a scrum of people jittering to the pulsing, pounding music, all of them eager, jacked-up addicts, their necks punctured with what looked like bite marks, their eyes spinning and wide.
Beside them, a black-suited Eastern-European-looking man with high cheekbones and broad shoulders at odds with his long, lean body stood in an obvious position of power, the lord of all these scrabbling sycophants. He lazily fondled another half-stoned woman who was doing her level best to fuck his right thigh, but his eyes were on me.
Nothiseyes, of course. His eyes had long-since been compromised by the dark creature that had a stranglehold on his guts. But when those sneaky rat-red eyes met mine, it was game over for the demon. I knew him in a heartbeat.
I wasn’t the only one.
Pithius. Of course.
“Pithius,” I snapped, as another flood of information washed over me, this time not intuition, but a direct download from my personal demon-GPT, who apparently thought Pithius the fifth-level lust demon was an attention-grabbing whore who damaged dirty when he should just kill. In a flash, I got about eight centuries of the creature’s degradation, destruction, and madness—for whom this current victim, Nikolai Volkov, was barely a trifle.
The information dump left me dizzy, my creature’s contempt for Pithius rolling through me like nausea. Territorial. Possessive.
I grimaced. If that kind of demon was inthisguy, I thought, what the hell was fucking with?—
“Nooooo…” The panicked groan from the far, shadowed corner of the room jerked my attention over—a section I hadn’tnoticed at first, a circular conversation pit of overstuffed seats where bodies lay strewn like fallen toys. I saw Steve, finally.
Steve was not doing well.
“Christ,” I muttered, with enough emphasis to make all the demons in the room hiss. Steve was cut up, tourniqueted, and his blood was spilling out over the writhing bodies of two other partiers—one man, one woman. More red liquid dropped from a bag hung over them, and I didn’t know if that blood was real or fake. It smelled real enough, and the pain Steve was in had finally gotten real enough as well to shatter the haze of whatever dope was running through his system.
But Steve’s long, anguished groan told me something else, too—namely, he was still Steve. He wasn’t held by a demon, only by the foolish handmaidens of a demon. That was bad enough, given the shape he was in, but it also meant I didn’t have to play nice at all with dickhead number one.
“Pithius!” I roared, turning back to Nikolai Volkov—only to recoil in surprise as he lunged toward me, his woman cast aside. He reached for my face, fingernails whittled into talons, teeth biting and gnashing. There was metal at his wrists and around his neck, and some sort of hard girdle around his waist beneath his trousers. This bastard was going to be a bitch to take down, unless?—
Eyes, Delia.
I didn’t hesitate.
My hands shot out as if I’d done this a thousand times before, jabbing out, up—no hesitation, no slacking off. My right thumb missed its mark but the left one struck gold as it pierced the soft, gelatinous orb. Nikolai gave an unholy bellow of pain. Pressing my advantage, I grabbed the guy by his long black hair and jerked him around, trapping his other eye with my glare, adding my own roar to his cries. With his body already pierced and bleeding, extracting the demon was easy, especially since Ididn’t need to worry about Nikolai’s pain. But between Pithius’s screech of horror and outrage and the frozen sweep of evil rushing into the room, the other humans and their minor demon parasites all jolted out of their fugue state.
Panic vibrated through the room, clearly more powerful than the lesser demons trying to maintain control, and the other partiers rushed for the door, leaving Steve and Nikolai behind.
Fortunately, there were half a dozen knives between me and Steve’s slowly exsanguinating body, and I scooped two up, cutting and thrashing to get through the tide of humanity. Then I sliced through the lines holding Steve fast, cut the tourniquets and yanked out the ports. He still bled, and he wasn’t a small guy, but with a strength I knew I didn’t have, I threw his arm over my shoulder and dragged him out of cell three—straight into utter chaos.
The crowd was trapped in the hallway, disoriented and screaming, trying to rush back toward the main club. I stumbled, went down, then another set of hands reached out, pulling Steve from me, then yanking me up as well for good measure. Our impromptu savior hauled both of us in the opposite direction of the club, down the hallway toward a glowing blue light and then out another doorway into the cool, clean night.
The stranger pulled us into the alley and draped Steve over me again, then he stepped back inside Descent before the doorway to hell closed. As he released me, our skin scraped, and renewed energy shot through me, hot and surging. The man smelled improbably of crackling electricity, sex, and expensive champagne. I looked up, staggering beneath Steve, and recognized him.
It was the European lord of the Descent underworld, the one-eyed victim of Pithius—and he was still standing, still alive, despite the rage with which his demon captor had departed his body.
“Thank you,” he breathed in a low, sonorous rumble, watching me intently with his one working eye while the other one hung halfway down his face.
I decided right then that whatever drugs the guy was on, they were totally worth it. And despite the gore dripping along his jaw, Nikolai Volkov washot.
The growl from deep within me was almost inaudible beneath the screams from the hallway. Almost.
