Vijay paused, confused. The demon opened his mouth.
“You, shut up!” Morgan snapped. “Vijay, go get your phone and call 911.” Her brain was racing. 911 would want him to report on the body, but she couldn’t risk having him in the same room with the demon. “Then get down to the lobby to let them in, it’s after hours and the door is locked. Tell them he’s unresponsive and I’m starting CPR.”
Vijay stared a little too long and then nodded. The demon opened his mouth again. “He’s—”
“I’ve got him, Vijay, get moving!” If she could get Vijay out of the room, she could check if Tim’s phone had the dismissal ritual as well. She had to get the demon out of here before the paramedics showed up. She was definitely not making it to movie night.
As Vijay wobbled perilously near the salt line, Morgan tried to grab his arm and haul him to safety. To her surprise, he turned with her and kept turning. Momentum spun heraround. She tripped over Vijay’s foot, slipped on the salt, and fell straight into the surprised demon’s arms.
Vijay nodded vaguely, pleased she hadn’t hit the floor, and continued out the door. “OK, calling 911. Gotta get my phone, gotta call 911…”
Morgan froze. The demon, to her surprise, also froze. Vijay’s voice, muttering with the intensity of the deeply stoned, faded down the hallway.
The demon’s chest was pleasantly muscular.
“Oh, shit.” Morgan and the demon said together.
“Stay back,” Morgan scrambled out of his unresisting claws, throwing up her hands in her best impression of her mother about to conduct a ritual. She was under no illusions that she was convincing anyone at all.
“No, no, no,” the demon said, crouching down to scrape at the salt in a futile effort to reconstruct the circle. “I’m nowhere near my quota. I cannot be trapped here. I do not accept that this is happening.”
Morgan could tell it wasn’t going to work. The buzzing that had been at the back of her head had stopped as soon as the circle had broken; the ward was destroyed and nothing short of a full ritual was going to put it back. She didn’t trust him one bit—for all she knew, he was trying to lure her into something. That was demonic nature: to deceive, to seduce, to entrap.
But she had minutes at best to get him out of here and destroy the evidence before the paramedics showed up. If the Shadow Council found out that the daughter of Fiona and Alistair Blackwater-McKey had been consorting with demons, there would be hell of the non-demonic variety to pay. If they found out she had allowed mundane humans toencounter said demon, it would be ten times worse. Never mind that it wasn’t her fault; that had never mattered before.
“Begone,” she said, trying for her most authoritarian tone. “Go back from whence you came. Your summoner is dead, you have no purpose here.”
“No shit he’s dead,” the demon said, his tail lashing. “He didn’t signanything, his soul is totally gone and wasted, this isn’t how this is supposed to workat all. No one told me humans were so fragile. I didn’t even do anything!”
This wasn’t how she’d thought this was supposed to work, either. Although if his soul was gone, she supposed there wasn’t a lot of point in the CPR. “You can’t stay here,” she snapped. “Look, I’m not going to give you my soul. There’s no one left to deal with, you have to go home!”
“Yes, that would be ideal, thanks so much for the suggestion!” he snarled back. “But you can’t pop back in empty-handed, not from a broken circle. If you get summoned and bound and dismissed without anything to show for it, that’s bad enough, but if you get free, there are expectations.”
Morgan knew about expectations.
“You couldn’t possibly rebuild the binding circle and banish me, could you?” He looked up hopefully. It was an odd expression on the saturnine face, making him look almost boyish. “I know you want to. We’ll say you recaptured me, it’ll be fine. I mean, not fine, it’s going to look terrible on my review, but it’s better than trying to explain how I could get loose on the Plane of Consumable Souls and not come back with consumable souls. Unless you want to make a Deal? You want squiggles like he did, right? Believe me, I could make it very worth your while.”
His eyes started to glow orange.
“SQLs, not squiggles. Sales-qualified leads. Doesn’t matter, there is no way I’m making a Deal with you, and you cannot consume my soul,” Morgan said firmly, wheeling the spare chair in between them as if insufficiently adjustable molded plastic could protect her.
“Ah, then perhaps your colleague?” he asked, the flash of wistfulness replaced by the original sexy swagger.
It was a good thing Brad was away. If there was anyone willing to sell his soul, it was her CEO. But the only people likely to be in the building were Vijay, who was too high to be allowed to consent to anything, and a bunch of EMTs who were going to show up any second. “No. Leave.”
“Then surely you might find it in your…” he let the pause linger long enough for her to fill in the blanks with all sorts of things, “… best interests to perform a banishment and send me on my way?”
“I wish I even knew how,” she said, with a little too much sincerity. Then added quickly, “That wasn’t a request.”
“Oh. I don’t suppose his little scrying mirror thing has the directions?” He peered at the desk.
Down below in the streets, she heard sirens.
“We don’t have time,” she declared. “If you’re not going to go back to your own plane, you need to get out.”
“Out there?” He glanced outside. In the darkness, the windows of the surrounding high-rises floated like tiny dioramas, most of them currently uninhabited. Swagger vanished. “No. No way. You cannot make me go out into the human realms all by myself. I’m going to get murdered by a demon hunter in five minutes.”
“I don’t see how that’s my problem,” she said, trying to shove down a twinge of guilt. He looked scared. But also,she was increasingly worried this was going to be her problem. There was no way someone like him could make it very far without being spotted. New Yorkers had an insane tolerance for weird behavior, and most likely most people wouldn’t do more than snap a surreptitious photo to post on their social media of choice. But other mages also used social media, and someone would see a genuine demon on the subway, and they’d go ballistic and someone would catch him and someone would ask him how he’d gotten here before dealing with him. And then the Shadow Council would be on her doorstep and her mother would, in fact, murder him. And despite the fact he was actively trying to buy her soul, she didn’t feel like he deserved to be murdered. As the thought crossed her mind, his eyes snapped back to hers.
