Page 119 of Dead Beat

The question took Darlington aback.

“Most of the time,” he managed. “I try to be.”

“So do I!” Tripp nearly shouted, as if that explained everything.

Darlington took a deep breath. “It’s possible my suspicion was unwarranted. But I haven’t tried to eat anyone, Tripp. You have.”

Tripp looked down at his scuffed sneakers. “I know I’m not me. Not exactly. But I feel like me. I can’t help being hungry all the time.”

That much Darlington understood. Tripp’s albatross had preserved some part of his soul, a piece that kept his appetites in check, an intercessor between the demon’s needs and Tripp’s human desire to belong. Maybe Kittscher would have racked up more kills without his salt guardian keeping watch. And if it hadn’t been for Cosmo, Darlington’s great-grandfather might have ended up just like Reiter, with a field of corpses buried behind Black Elm.

“I get it.”

“I can feel it—him? The thing that ate me. Or the thing that is me? It’s like my stomach is always growling, but it’s like … my cosmic stomach. My mental stomach.”

Darlington did his best not to react to that tortured turn of phrase.

“But it’s … it’s funny too,” Tripp continued. “It’s…”

“Playful.”

“Yeah!”

Always it came back to the game. Demons didn’t want an easy kill any more than they wanted an easy answer, and they would never move in a straight line when they could make a more complicated pattern. They fed on each other when there was no other sustenance to be found, but human emotion was far more delicious to them.

When Darlington had been consumed by the hellbeast, he had known only fear, but he’d understood quickly that he was not in a portal. The smell of sulfur had overwhelmed him and he’d been thrown into the memory of his grandfather’s death, the terror and shame of that choice that had shaped the rest of his life, his desperate need to know that he had done the right thing, not just the thing that was asked of him. In that moment he had seen the yoke before him and Golgarot had made his offer. He’d given up some part of himself to preserve the rest of his human soul. He’d become both prisoner and warden. But he wasn’t sure what had been lost, only what had been found: an animal self, an understanding of violence.

For all their love of dances and bargains, there was an ugly turn the demon took when thwarted. He’d seen it in Golgarot, in Reiter, in Kittscher, a profound cruelty, an urge toward vulgarity. That was the danger of becoming something that cared only for its belly, only for its own needs and desires. He did not want to be that thing.

“You said you don’t dream.”

“Do you?” Tripp asked.

“I do.” And that gave him hope that he was still more human than monster.

“Are you going to kick me out? When we beat Golgarot?” Tripp spoke the demon prince’s name in the accent of hell, a demon’s voice, guttural and full, completely unlike the dopey, easygoing Tripp who Darlington had become accustomed to.

“Are you so sure we will?”

Tripp looked baffled. “Of course. We’re the good guys.”

“Alex might have some qualms about that description.”

“Dawes wouldn’t be with the bad guys.”

Darlington blinked. “That’s … very true.”

“She wants me here.”

“I can’t make any promises, Tripp. But if we win, and if you swear not to start snacking on the locals, and if we don’t all die, then yes, I’ll make sure there’s a place for you here.”

“Sweet.”

Tripp held up his knuckles for a fist bump, and though Darlington wondered at the depths to which he’d sunk, he obliged.

Darlington met Turner by the front porch and released a low whistle.

A snarling pack of jackals emerged from under the house. Turner stumbled backward, reaching for his gun.