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Eleven
“Demons!” Bunny screamed, clapping her hands around her mouth so the sound would carry across the Grand Ballroom.
A tall guy wearing what looked like a silver ballgown who was sitting next to the mutilated Muse screamed, which set off a chain reaction of other people doing the same. Others, like Cerberus, already seemed poised for a fight. He bounded off the stage like a giant Pitbull, eyes narrowed, and fingers tipped with claws.
All around her, people were fighting or running. Bruce the cherub hovered above the melee, hiding behind a modern-style chandelier and sobbing. Death had joined the fight closer to the front of the room, which made Bunny worry. Without his celestial powers, he was almost human. Was he still immortal or could he die?
That thought spurred Bunny forward through the fray. She sprinted a few yards, ducking and weaving between people grappling with smelly demons until a solid-looking body blocked her path.
Bunny looked up—and up, and up—into the face of a woman who could easily be as huge as Cerberus, if not bigger.
She shuffled toward Bunny, a dark and vacant expression in her eyes and a menacing smile on her lips. Bunny would have reached for another fly strip, but she’d used the last one to secure the fire escape, not realizing the demons had already infiltrated the event.
She needed to find something to fight with, and soon, or this giant woman was going to pulverize her.
Bunny stumbled backwards as the giant raised her arm to strike her down.
And then, just when the fight seemed to be in favor of the possessed, a resounding crash broke through the room like thunder, followed by a shower of broken glass falling like crystal rain from the dome above.
The giant—and everyone else in the room—looked up to see the silhouettes of two sets of impossibly huge wings, one black and one white.
Raphael and Michael used their wings to slow their fall, landing like imposing superheroes in the thick of the fight.
Bunny didn’t waste the opportunity to gain the upper hand, which meant ducking underneath the giant woman’s legs to try to get to Death at the front of the room. She almost made it too—until she felt a huge hand grab the back of her neck and painfully hoist her into the air.
“Argh!” she screamed, drawing Death’s attention from where he was dealing with the rampaging repairman.
“Bunny!” he yelled, elbowing the demon-possessed dude in the guts, and taking off to come to her aid.
The giant woman held Bunny aloft as though she weighed no more than a shrimp cocktail. If her stomach wasn’t already empty, Bunny would have thrown up, the stench of her breath was so foul. Bunny could see the gaping black hole at the back of her throat, the woman opened her mouth so wide.
The moving gaping black hole. The gaping black hole that seemed to be creeping up her tongue on its way out of the woman’s ginormous mouth.
A cloud of shadow burst out of the woman, completely enveloping Bunny. She coughed and gasped for air, which only made it harder to breathe as the shadow invaded her lungs. It permeated her ears, her mouth, filling her up so she felt heavier and heavier. And then the woman dropped her.
Bunny hit the floor with a crunch and an oof, relieved the fall seemed to dislodge the shadow. It drifted a couple of yards away in a swirling mass that slowly became more dense, until it formed into a man with cold blue eyes.
“You fucker!” Bunny growled at the Soul Dealer.
“Hello, Bernadette.” He grinned down at her. “Miss me?”
* * *
“Areyou sure we should be doing this?” the young man from the check-in counter asked, rushing to keep up with the woman who was his supervisor. “Part of the booking conditions were that they didn’t want to be disturbed.”
“They?” The woman raised a brow suspiciously and scoffed. “She’s been in that room all day by herself. No food, no water, no bathroom breaks. Call it a welfare check.”
They paused outside the main door of the Grand Ballroom, and the woman reached for the door handle before she glanced down at the classy silver trash bin beside them. “Is that a used box of fly strips?” She pulled a face and sniffed disdainfully. “Remind me to tell Maintenance that they need to take their trash with them when they’ve finished undertaking pest control measure. She reached for the handle again.
“I just think—” the young man began before he was interrupted by the unmistakable sound of a crapload of glass shattering inside the Grand Ballroom. His gaze darted to his boss, startled. “What the?”
With slightly more apprehension than she’d had before, the woman pulled the Grand Ballroom door open as quietly as she could.
The dome had been completely decimated and was lying like frosty snow all over the ballroom floor. The hundreds of chairs the staff had painstakingly set out in rows were all over the place. They’d even ripped the stage curtains. Some of the chandeliers were flickering like they were being attacked by giant moths, and one of the fire suppression sprinklers was hissing with water.
There, amidst the carnage, the woman they had let into the room earlier that morning was poised in a boxing stance. Every so often she threw a punch, dodged, or tried to lift her leg high enough to do something that could only be called a half-kick.
“Is this for real?” the guy whispered, watching the woman moving for all the world like a mature-aged Buffy undergoing some virtual reality training sequence, completely alone, in a room that looked as though it had been trashed by some secret late-night corporate rave.
