Something was wrong. I couldn’t hear Cale breathing.
I sat up on the bed, careful not to put any weight on my right arm, and turned on the nightstand lamp. Dim light illuminated the room—revealing that the gun and blade I’d left on the nightstand were gone.
As was Murphy.
Mother. Fucker.
I should haveknownI couldn’t trust anyone who’d date a fucking succubus. Or who was so unfailinglynice.
I had one still-damp boot on and the other half laced up when a quick glance around the room for my duffle instead revealed my nine-millimeter, deliberately and obviously arranged on the dresser. Next to the Ruger lay my blade, still sheathed.
Cale had taken them—probably just to prove he could—but left them where I’d be sure to find them before I panicked. Much.
My shoulder holster and ankle strap turned up in the top left drawer of the dresser. I immediately buckled them both into place, donning my weapons as quickly as possible to fight back the encroaching sense of unease that descended any time I woke up in an unfamiliar place. Or walked around unarmed for more than a minute and a half.
Weapons were my security blanket. In the most mature sense possible.
So what if I looked ridiculous with a gun strapped over a black sports bra and jogging pants? Better ridiculous than bleeding, right?
On the bathroom door, I found a white sticky note with the hotel’s logo printed across the top, above a hand-written message in neat, square writing.
Went out for breakfast. Be back in half an hour. We have more to talk about.
C
Okay,so Cale hadn’t absconded. He’d gone for more food.
It waspossibleI had trust issues.
At the bottom of the note was a ten-digit number, obviously to his cell phone. The Shelby County area code told me he lived in or around Memphis. Which meant we were practically neighbors.
Sleep-deprived and grumpy, I ripped the note from the door and dropped it into the bathroom trash on my way in. Two minutes later I emerged, my bladder relieved, my teeth brushed, and my mood unimproved. I grabbed the last Twinkie two-pack from my backpack and the television remote from the table, then settled into an armchair in the corner for a snack and glance at some scrolling news headlines. If the shit had hit the fan—meaning the downed plane with Lorelei’s body in it had been found—CNN would be reporting it every fifteen seconds for the next two weeks, thanks to Devich’s billionaire celebrity status.
Halfway through the second Twinkie and three minutes into the predictably dull news broadcast, I sat straight up as a sudden realization sent a tingle of irritation up my spine. Cale’s gun was gone. The Glock I’d shot Lorelei with and had refused to return to its owner. He hadn’t left it on the dresser with my other weapons.
Nice try, Murphy, I thought stuffing the remainder of the cake into my mouth.But there are no takebacks in a finders-keepers scenario.
Hell, there was a chance he hadn’t even taken it with him, considering how seldom he seemed to think about the gun even when hewaswearing it.
“Zipped up and completely inaccessible in his jacket…” I mumbled as I snatched his backpack from the floor where he’d left it.
The only thing the damn bagdidn’tcontain was a gun. A quick glance through the contents revealed the most random assortment of shit, none of which he’d need on a hike through the woods except for his flashlight. That had come in handy. But the hardback book? Unless it was a wilderness survival guide, it was worthless as anything other than campfire fuel.
Curious, I lugged his bag onto the bed, noting that my right arm hardly hurt at all. I plopped down cross-legged on the rumpled bedspread and began pulling things from Cale’s backpack one by one, organizing them in a semicircle around me.
There was his green notebook, scuffed and bent around the edges. A North American atlas, the pages still crisp and pristine. And the book: a well-worn hardback copy ofDemons Throughout History.
What the hell wasthatfor?
Intrigued by Cale’s unexpected reading interests—and oddly fascinated by the jacket image of demons frolicking in lecherous abandon—I pulled the book into my lap.
Inside the front cover was a full-page color print of a drawing by Botticelli, which, according to the caption, was fromInferno, Canto XVIII. It showed Dante and Virgil touring hell in their brightly colored robes, while legions of the damned suffered below them. How cheerful.
No wonder Cale didn’t want a nap. He probably had nightmares.
Why the hell was he reading up on demons, anyway? Xaphan was a djinn, and Cale had said djinn were different from demons because they weren’t bound to hell. Maybe the similarities were numerous enough to warrant studying a brother-species? Or maybe there were no serious texts on djinn, and a book on demons was as close as he could get.
Flipping through the book, I found more full-color illustrations, including everything from Michelangelo’sLast Judgmentto graphic novel images of the infamous lobster-red Hellboy. On every other page was a new image of death and damnation. Furry wolf-like creatures devoured sinners whole. Fra Angelico’s winged, horned monsters stabbed, hanged, disemboweled, beheaded, starved, cooked, and consumed the damned. Signorelli's deathly-blue demons tortured a knot of naked human sinners in every conceivable manner, arms, legs, and heads flailing about in chaos beneath a stone arch and a cheery, bright blue sky.
