And if that wasn’t enough to set the two demonic civilizations apart, once I passed the abandoned suburbs and industrial districts and could see downtown, I realized that Pandemonia’s walls were as representative of the anomalous population they contained as were any of the Church’s city enclosures.
Rather than a tall, smooth steel wall, welded and virtually seamless, Pandemonia’s defenses were a patchwork of metal—chair legs, chain-link fences, traffic barricades, car frames, shopping carts, garden gates, street grates, ladders, scaffolding, steel pipes—all apparently fused together by welders high on some sort of psychotropic drug. The effect was that of a metal briar patch surrounding the entire former downtown area, as far as I could tell, easily penetrable by light and sound but not by any creature larger than a cat.
The only gap in the bizarre fusion of steel was the city gate, facing almost due east.
I parked my borrowed car in the middle of the road a hundred feet from the gate, and for a moment I could only stare up at Pandemonia while I took deep breaths, trying to avert sheer panic. This was it. My chance to succeed where the Church had failed. To drive the worst of the demonic presence from earth and reclaim the badlands in the name of humanity.
If I survived, I swore to myself, I’d go after the Church. Starting in New Temperance.
First things first, Nina.
Metal squealed when I opened my car door. I turned off the engine—and with it, the headlights—then got out of the car, leaving my stuff in the front passenger’s seat because they’d only confiscate it if I tried to bring it with me. I’d taken seven steps toward the gate when light flared with a fizzy-sounding pop, trained right at me.
I was literally in the spotlight.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice demanded, followed by a high-pitched squeal I associated with every PE teacher I’d ever had—someone was using an electric megaphone. “Identify yourself or you will be shot.”
“That’d be an awful waste,” I shouted, shielding my eyes from the light with one hand at my forehead. “My name is Nina Kane, and I’m an exorcist. Tell Kastor I’ve come to talk.”
“Where’d this one come from?” A pink-bra-clad woman in her late thirties reached for me as Felix pulled me down the dark, narrow hallway by my left arm, and the steady flow of adrenaline that had been keeping me both awake and alert spiked like electricity run straight through my chest. “She’s pretty. Tired, and kind of smelly, but very, very pretty.” Her fingers brushed my shoulder, and I shuddered in revulsion.
I’d been in Pandemonia no more than an hour and had yet to leave the building built into the city gate, yet I’d already seen at least twenty people. All of them had wanted to touch me. Few of them had any impulse control whatsoever. And if I were to add up the clothing worn by all of them combined, I wouldn’t have had enough material to cover two high school students attending any Church school in the world.
Pandemonia’s dress code appeared to be “clothing optional.”
I hadn’t lived a covered-up, buttoned-down, bottled-up Church-run existence in months, but even close-quarter cohabiting with boys in the badlands hadn’t prepared me for the flagrant immodesty inside Pandemonia. The display of flesh was disorienting. Unnerving.
No matter where I looked, I wanted to avert my gaze. And sanitize my hands. And scrub my eyeballs with a scouring agent.
“Don’t touch.” Felix slapped the woman’s hand away from me, and when she lunged at him, hissing, her brightly painted nails flashing in the overhead light, I realized her bra wasn’t a bra at all. It had the structural integrity of armor—something like a corset from the pages of my history texts—intended to both to support and display the flesh it hardly covered. Based on the lacy straps and ribbon trim, I could only conclude that the garment was actually meant to be seen rather than covered up.
That bra was her actualshirt.
Felix pinned the woman in pink against the concrete wall by her neck, without letting go of my arm. I could easily have pulled free, but if free was what I wanted, I wouldn’t have surrendered in the first place.
“That’sNina Kane,” Felix growled, his nose inches from the choking woman’s forehead. “No one touches her, Dione. Kastor’s orders.”
“Nina Kane the exorcist?” Her eyes brightened with interest.
“Thus the order not to touch.” Felix let her go, and Dione circled us like a cat on the prowl, waiting for the chance to pounce again, heedless of the red mark around her throat from his fist.
“She’s even prettier than the other one….”
“The other…?” Horror washed over me like the first wave of heat from a bonfire. “Grayson? Is she here?” If so, where was the rest of Anathema?
“The one with all the curls?” Dione said, and I nodded. “I heard her screaming. Would you like to know what Kastor has done with her?”
“Yes,” I said, though I wasn’t sure that was the truth—knowing what had happened to Grayson yet lacking the ability to stop it was like torture.
But when Dione only laughed instead of answering, I realized she knew that. And she—like the rest of demonkind—wanted to see me suffer.
When I wiped all emotion from my face, determined to deny her any further pleasure at my expense, she pouted and turned back to Felix. “Who caught this Nina Kane?” Her movements were fluid and eerily graceful, and if she ever decided to attack me for real, I’d probably never see her coming. “My money’s on Aldric.”
“Aldric’s gone.” I shrugged, my hands zip-tied at my back, and gave her my best taunting smile, hoping she couldn’t smell the fear behind it. “So’s Meshara. I burned them both out.”
Dione laughed, and light from the dusty fixture at the end of the hall shone dully on her spiky hair, the tips of which were dyed a contrasting shade of pink. “That’s what you think you’re going to do to me? Burn me out?”
I shrugged, careful to exhale in her direction in case the demon viruswassomehow airborne. “I don’t think I’ll have to,” I said, and her smile faltered but the hunger in her eyes swelled. “And no one caught me. I came to see Kastor.”
