Tullia shrieked and jumped back, but the thin tuft of hair over her brow was already ablaze.
Felix cursed and smacked at her forehead to smother the flames while Tullia screamed.
People in the other pens began to murmur softly to their cellmates, as if they’d all just woken up.
When Felix finally put the fire out, Tullia’s thin bangs were scorched and her forehead was blistered. Fury danced in her dark eyes. Or maybe that was the reflection from the torches.
“You had that coming.” Felix pulled her farther from my cage. “I told you she was an exorcist. Now pick out a host or stop wasting my time.”
Tullia growled, then turned to the woman caged across the aisle from me. “Fifty?”
“Fifty-five with the lice shampoo.”
“I’ll take her.” The demon woman dug some cash from her sports bra—I didn’t recognize the currency—while Felix unlocked the unlucky host’s cage. He dragged the poor human woman from her cell while she kicked and screamed.
Tullia followed Felix as he pulled the host down the aisle into a room at one end of the basement. She closed the door behind them, and seconds later I heard running water as pipes groaned and squealed behind the brick wall at the back of my cell.
Several of my fellow prisoners stared at the door with their hands over their ears. Some cried silently, and others made high-pitched whining noises deep in their throats.
After a while the water and the screaming from behind the door stopped. Several minutes later the door opened and the human woman stepped out unrestrained. Her hair hung down her back in wet strands, dripping on the concrete beneath her feet as she marched down the aisle toward the marble steps leading up to the courthouse lobby. She wore Tullia’s clothes, and when she passed my cage, she paused and turned to glare at me.
I stuck my hand through the bars again and flames burst from my palm.
Tullia flinched. Then she scuttled across the aisle and jogged up the steps as fast as her new middle-aged legs would carry her.
At the other end of the basement the door still stood open. Movement in the room beyond caught my gaze, and a chill raced the length of my spine when Felix pulled the body Tullia had just abandoned past the door by one arm.
I didn’t want to know what they were going to do with the corpse.
I had no way to measure the time that passed while I sat in the dark, watching torchlight flicker against cinderblock walls, steel bars, and the grimy flesh and dirty hair of my fellow prisoners. After a while my mouth went dry and my stomach started to rumble. The pressure from my full bladder became urgent, but I refused to use the bucket at the back of my cage on general principle.
My thoughts strayed to Melanie, and I wondered if she’d had it better or worse in her jail cell in New Temperance. I was pretty sure they’d fed her, but they’d also bound her to the floor on her knees—the posture of penitence—for hours on end. Maybe for the entire two days she’d been there.
Thinking about Melanie led to thinking about her death, and about how I’d failed to prevent it. How I’d failed her. How I’d lost her, and how I might not survive in Pandemonia long enough to ever see her son again.
But at least I got to say goodbye to him, and to Anabelle and Eli. But Finn…
If I didn’t make it back, he might never find out what had actually happened to me.
When I realized I was crying, I forced myself to redirect my thoughts toward the reason I was in the demon city in the first place. To figure out how to effectively spread a virus I knew almost nothing about to the population of an entire city. The most obvious answer seemed to be poisoning the water supply, but I had no idea where that was or how to gain access to it, or how to poison it, other than drowning myself in the reservoir.
None of my other ideas—sneezing, kissing, or licking the face of everyone I came into contact with—seemed as effective on a large scale, and if transmission actually required direct contact with contaminated bodily fluids, the only person I wassureI’d infected since I’d walked through the gates was Nedes, who’d effectively committed suicide via sloppy kiss.
My plan needed work. Not thatanyplan would help if I never got out of my cell.
While I waited, thinking over everything I’d ever learned about the prevention and communication of contagions in health class, Felix brought two more down-and-out customers into the basement, and there was nothing I could do to stop them from picking out inexpensive hosts and leaving their dead, used-up former bodies in the room at the end of the aisle.
At some point I fell asleep on the floor, using my arm for a pillow, and I have no idea how long I slept. With no windows or doors open to the outside world and no meals to establish the time of day, I’d lost all track of time.
By the time the four-person contingent marched down the marble stairs and headed for my cell, I thought I was going out of my mind.
“Nina Kane?” the young man in front asked, and it was immediately obvious that these men—thesedemons—were cut from a different cloth than were the anarchy-prone buyers in the market and at the auction. These men all wore long black pants and snug black shirts—easily the most clothing I’d seen on anyone since entering Pandemonia—and they moved with purpose. With an intent that clearly went beyond the hedonistic search for pleasure.
“That’s her.” Felix stepped out of the room at the end of the aisle, where he’d been hosing down what appeared to be a room-sized shower stall. “You’d better use cuffs. She burned right through the plastic zip tie.”
“What kind of idiot would put an exorcist in plastic restraints?” the young man in front demanded, and Felix shrugged, as if he weren’t the one who’d done that very thing. “Turn around and put your hands through the bars.”
I took me a second to realize he was talking to me now. “Why on earth should I do that?”
