“Stunning!”
“I bet it’s a blissful pain.”
“I warned you!” a single, youthful voice boomed over the crowd. I gasped and looked up to find a man not much older than I standing on the balcony above one of the restaurants, staring down at the chaotic marketplace. “Nina Kane is off-limits for your own safety!” The young man’s gaze met mine and his smile bloomed, slow and full of some secret promise.
I wanted to look away, but not watching this man seemed as dangerous a prospect as letting him watch me.
Kastor.His identity was obvious from the authority he clearly wielded and the confidence in every single aspect of his bearing.
“Welcome to Pandemonia, Nina Kane,” he said, and though he’d lowered his voice from public-address to just-for-you, I still heard him with perfect, eerie clarity. In fact, I seemed to be hearing intent he hadn’t actually vocalized.
Then, finally, he blinked and readdressed the crowd, dismissing me. “Someone take Nedes to the kennels.”
“No!” someone shouted, and when I turned, I found the kissing demon backing away from me as several of his fellow citizens closed in on him, vicious satisfaction shining in their eyes, the potential for violence resonating in every tensed muscle as they reached for him. “I only wanted a taste!” Nedes insisted, his hands held palms out as if to show that he was unarmed. “I wasn’t going to possess her, I swear!”
At his protest, the memory surfaced of my mother trying to possess my body through a frigid, soul-sucking kiss, and I suddenly understood Nedes’s crime.
“Kastor!” he shouted as hands grabbed for him. They tore his clothes and ripped hair from his head, each fighting for the privilege of hauling one of their own to the kennels, where—I assumed, based on what Finn had told me—Nedes would be locked up until his human host began to degenerate and he devolved into one of Kastor’s hounds.
“Take Nina Kane to the stables,” Kastor ordered without even looking at me. “Lock her up alone.” With that, he turned his back on the crowd and returned to the loud, lavish party I could hear raging inside, without bothering to make sure his orders were carried out.
While the crowd hauled a screaming, bleeding Nedes toward the kennels, Felix and Dione tugged me in the opposite direction, toward a stately three-story building crowned with a bell tower, which had probably been the city’s prewar courthouse. The building’s brick exterior might once have been white, but only the hardest-to-reach corners and crevices remained untouched after a century of unchecked graffiti and no structural maintenance at all, that I could see.
“That was Kastor?” I twisted to glance at the now-empty balcony behind us as the market settled back into its ambient chaos. In spite of the apparent youth of most of his citizens and my understanding that a demon’s appearance said nothing about his strength or his true age, I was surprised by the face Kastor wore. “I expected him to look older.” More like a leader.
“If he looked old, no one would listen to him,” Dione said. “No one respects the elderly.”
I frowned as we approached the courthouse. “Human authority figures are always older because they have the most experience.”
Dione laughed. “That doesn’t make any sense!”
Felix gave her an exasperated look. “Throughout human history, age has been an indicator of good health and wisdom. Only the strongest and healthiest lived long enough to learn much.”
“Well, here the younger a demon looks, the more power he has. Only the wealthy and influential can afford to trade in slightly used hosts for brand-new ones,” Dione said. “It’s an expensive lifestyle.”
And incredibly wasteful.
“Youth is a status symbol,” I said, and she nodded enthusiastically, as if she’d just taught a dog to speak.
“Exactly.”
“But it’s only theappearanceof youth. You guys are all ancient, right?”
“By human understanding, yes. We don’t really have that concept. We have no beginning and no end, so none among us is really old, just like none is truly young.”
I knew that, but I didn’t trulyunderstandit. I couldn’t imagine something that had always been and would always be, even if the earth were swallowed by a star or frozen into a ball of ice hurtling through the universe.
But the reverse was not true. Demons seemed to have no problem grasping the concept of impermanence.
Felix hauled me up the front stairs of the courthouse, and I stared in awe at the designs crawling over the steps, the stone railings, the bricks, and even the windows. Words in ancient languages. Pictures of forgotten lands. In places, just bright blobs of color in seemingly random arrangements. Some of them meant nothing, that I could understand, and others were familiar—if psychologically uncomfortable—renderings of the human condition. I recognized an arm here and an eye there, as if people were buried beneath the stones and the colors and only certain parts of them had managed to fight their way through.
I’d seen something similar once, in a prewar art book Melanie had borrowed from Adam Yung’s father. The paintings inside were classified as “abstract,” and while some looked like very deliberate swirls of color, others looked like people made of odd shapes and angles.
Pandemonia’s courthouse seemed to have popped up from the pages of that book, and the longer I looked, the more uncomfortable I became with the images. Strong strokes of red and yellow looked like flames. Crimson blotches looked like blood. Blues and greens and grays became trees, flowers, and storms, yet they were also eyes, bruises, and dead flesh.
There was too much of…everything. Yet little logic to be found.
“I don’t think she likes the decor.” Dione pulled open a door painted to look like a window opening into a world made up of fields of fire and skies full of ocean currents that never quite met the flames.
