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Siren:You didn’t answer the question.
Me:Both. What are you doing right now?
Siren:Shopping for lingerie.
God dammit. The woman had an evil streak.
Me:Are you trying to torture me or Nacio?I’d put Nacio on guard duty for the two weeks I was away. He might still be pissed at me, but he wanted Siren safe just as much as I did. I knew I could trust him to keep trouble and danger away from her while I was gone.
Siren:Two birds, one stone. *smirking emoji*
Me:Careful. You’re treading into dangerous territory.
Siren:You’re hours away. What are you going to do about it?
Me:I’m coming home eventually, and I’m keeping track of everything so I can punish you for it later.
Siren:What exactly does that entail?
Me:You’ll have to wait to find out.
Siren:If I told you I wasn’t really shopping for lingerie, would you spare me the torture of anticipation and tell me?
Me:Not a chance.If I was going to spend the next twelve days obsessing and missing her, then she was too.
Siren:I hate you.
Liar.
Me:And I don’t care.And now we were both liars. It was the first flat-out lie I’d ever told Siren. But she’d done it first. Joriel would probably tell me something about two wrongs not making a right if he knew, but what can I say? I didn’t exactly have parents who instilled good values from childhood. Everyone was lucky I wasn’t more fucked up… including me.
Me:If you wear the new lingerie when I come back, I might go easy on you.
Siren:I am not actually lingerie shopping. It was a joke.
Me:Your loss.
Siren:I’ll see what I can do.
I wasn’t sure how she’d done it, but every bit of my brain space was devoted to her and imagining what kind of underwear she’d be wearing when I came home again. There wasn’t room for any other thoughts or feelings. She took all the bad out of my life even if I knew it was waiting for me once I opened the bathroom door and returned to the real world.
* * *
The thingabout low-ranking demons is that no matter where you go in the world, you can always find pockets of them living in abandoned buildings or somewhere deep in subway stations. Usually they spend their time in spirit form, influencing humans and trying to drag them down. But a few are given permission to enter Earth in physical form, either to be on standby or because they’resupposedto be doing a specific job for whoever their master is.
Lesser demons mostly prey on those who are already lost, the ones who believe that the world doesn’t care, that their souls are worthless. And the only people who ever see them in their physical forms are the humans no one misses or cares about, the ones who are alone and down on their luck. They prey on the Thomases and Daphnes of the world. And that was why I always took a perverse pleasure in hunting them.
“I have a bit of a problem you’re going to help me with,” I said, twirling the iron stake I’d drenched in holy water at a cathedral earlier this afternoon. “I’m looking for a female who’s organizing an awfully big pack of demons entirely too close to my family. As you might expect, I’m a little unhappy.”
The demon chained to a chair in the basement of an old school we’d commandeered for our little chat didn’t say anything.
I leaned closer to the demon and positioned the stake over his bare forearm. “Let’s get one thing clear,” I drawled. “I don’t like your kind. I’m secretly hoping you make this difficult so I’ll have an excuse to draw this out and hurt you. And the good news for me is there are plenty of you running around, making the world a worse place, so I don’t have to worry about killing you and sending you back to whatever hellhole you came from. If you can’t give me answers, I’ll find someone who can.”
His gaze slid from me to where Joriel stood several feet behind me. “And I take it you’re the good cop?” he said with a sneer.
I couldn’t see Joriel’s expression, but I could hear the smile in his voice as he answered. “I guess you’ll just have to wait and see.”
Joriel came across as the nice one in the secret order. He was the patient one, the tactful one, but there was a reason Joriel wasn’t a messenger of Heaven anymore. Anyone, demon, human, or angel, who thought he was any less dangerous than Nathaniel or me was in for a rude awakening.
