bedeviled & beyond 01 - bedeviled & beguiled (8 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Let Me Out of Here!

And so the damsel’s distress did grow to such uncommon heights,

She wished to sprout soft wings of fire and in this way take flight.

Myra turned away from my flapping, panicky profile and addressed the High Council as if I were not even there. “She has been summoned by Dialle and commissioned to serve as their interface with Nerul’s Court. Since she is one of ours, it seems only logical that she would report her findings to us.”

His cappuccinoness nodded with that same furrow between his dark brows that had moved in when he’d spotted me in the potted palms. “Yes. It does seem that Dialle’s court has given us a gift. Do you think it is possible he does not know of her relationship to us?”

As Myra opened her heavenly lips to respond I finally lost my temper in a big way. “Excuse me!” I turned to include the entire room in the scolding I was about to deliver. “Do any of you see the little person with the long red hair and a pissed off look on her face standing in this very spot?” I paused to convey my frown around the entire room before I set it down on the haughty angel at the center of the long table. “Did it ever occur to any of you that I might have something to say about any of this, since it is my life we’re talking about here?”

His highjerkiness gave me a long, penetrating stare, which left me with the impression that he was considering how best to dismember me and dispose of the body. Then he turned back to Myra as if I hadn’t spoken.

“She will need to be trained for this mission.”

Myra nodded, apparently she hadn’t heard me either. “I have already taken care of that. She will meet with several members of the council over the next couple of days to learn all she needs to learn.”

I looked from one to the other and decided they had lost their frunkin’ minds. “I’m out of here!” I said to no one in particular, which was appropriate because I knew no one was listening anyway. As I turned, I came up against my angel, who put her hand on my forehead before I could pull away. Immediately I heard that whoosh of air that told me I was about to take celestial flight. “Shit, shit, shit, shit, shit.” I wasn’t even going to be allowed the satisfaction of huffing out of there under my own steam, with my ruffled feathers and my disjointed nose. Apparently I was to be “escorted” out.

I landed in my office without Myra. My hand still hovered above the door panel where it had been when I’d been shimmered away in the first place. With a scream of frustration I opened the door and slammed it shut about five times. Realizing that slamming the door was seriously juvenile behavior, I slammed it about five more times and then forced myself to calm down so I could use my brain. What I decided was that I wasn’t going to feel better until I kicked some serious butt.

I stalked across my office and grabbed my purse and coat, checking to make sure my demon laser was in my purse. I also strapped a very large silver knife to my thigh. I wasn’t taking any chances that this little demon jerk would get away from me.

Glancing at my watch, I left the office, descended to the parking floor and stepped into the Viper. I mashed the buttons on my poor Viper’s directional information unit mercilessly until I’d programmed in the location of the spot where my new client had told me there was a nasty little demon that needed to be taught some manners. The way I was feeling at that moment, I was just the totally pissed off, small but mean, half angel but also half devil, little critter to teach him those manners. And teach him I would do. Sitting back with a sigh, I tried to calm down enough that I could breathe. It only took a few minutes to get there. Then I turned to gaze out at the other traffic roaring by me in the sky.

Since traffic had taken to the air, about ten years previous, the skies had become increasingly congested. Where, at first, most people didn’t have the guts or the desire to take to the sky in a flying car, over the last couple of years more and more of Earth’s creatures had found out what an exhilarating experience it was to ride with the winged things above the stale, overused air of domestic habitation below.

When I had first taken to the sky, right after the world government passed the Right to Fly law of 2079, the sky had been wide open and free. Now it was so filled with flying vehicles and floating advertisement blimps that I had to put my repelling shields up just to travel a couple of miles to the corner store.

I flicked a passing Air Bus the winged salute as it roared by so close that its shield thudded into the Viper’s shield and blew us sideways to skim against a colorless, little air booger on the other side. The driver of the sad little booger cringed away from the window and looked at me with a pale, pinched face and huge, terrified eyes. She looked about sixteen. Must be new to the air. By gross contrast, the driver of the bus grinned manically at me, wagging his tongue suggestively while I gifted him with my best repertoire of swear words, which he couldn’t hear but which made me feel infinitely better for having delivered them.

Oh for the early days of flight, when it had pretty much just been me and a few confused looking birds up there.

The Viper touched down in a part of Angel City that had lost the war between modernization and decay when the wrong element had moved in several years earlier. Because of its innate goodness, with its scores of small, tidy family homes, neatly mown and tended postage stamp yards and churches on every corner, Ashland in the northern section of the city had been a perfect target for demonic inhabitance. Nothing draws a demon in like virtuousness. There is no sweeter thrill to a demon than destroying that which is decent.

I realized with a start that the nightclub I was about to enter was Demonica, the heart and soul of Demondom, a truly trendy nightclub, a really dangerous place to visit and the demon King’s main source of questionable income. I hadn’t recognized the address when my client had given it to me.

King Abrine was even known to be around the place on most nights. Rumor was he liked to scope out the clientele for future pleasure, or pain, or both, depending on what the involved parties were into on any particular night.

I scowled at the gnarly faced demon at the door and flashed him my business card when he asked me to cough up a truly evil cover charge. He screwed up his purplish-black face and curled an overly wide mouth at me when he saw the name of my company, a trickle of drool rolled down his leathery chin. “You here to vanquish one of my people, Phelps?”

I smiled back with what I hoped was a much prettier smile than he had offered me, with his chipped, gray teeth and scabby lips. I covered the business card with my Strange Crimes badge, which was only sort of official but which usually had the intended effect. “You know the law, drool boy, I’m here on official business and you gotta let me in, minus that ridiculous cover charge.”

“They ain’t nothin’ on that badge about waivin’ no cover charge, bitch girl.”

I just shrugged and stood my ground, smiling benignly at him.

The pretty young lady standing behind me in line frowned and glared at me before tossing her heavy mass of brunette hair and turning to the demon to give him a flirtatious smile. The creature that grinned back at her probably looked like Prince Charming or his brother Fred Charming to the flirtatious woman. Demons never let humans see their true likeness. If they did they’d never get any of them to come around, which would be ruinously bad for business.

Ignoring her, I continued staring at the gnarly faced badass sitting on the tall stool beside the door. Before we could exchange any more knife-edged repartee, the buzzer on the wall beside him sounded and he turned away from me to punch something into the televisual on the wall.

The unit was screened on three sides and, although I leaned forward and squinted really hard, I couldn’t see the face on the screen. Whoever it was, though, drooly boy reluctantly let me pass. Though the look on his face told me that he’d rather have ripped me into bite sized pieces and had me with tartar sauce.

“You can go in,” he said in his wobbly, razor-like demon voice, “but you better behave or you’ll be dealin’ with me.”

I pretended to quiver in my tall, leather boots and turned away from him. As I opened the door, however, I closed my eyes briefly and said a silent prayer. It always unnerves me a little to walk into evil’s abode. Fiery though I may be, I have a deep dislike of being outnumbered.

And outnumbered I was. Entering the pitch black of the front entranceway, I thought immediately of those haunted houses and spook walks I used to love as a child. The feeling of complete blackness was meant to terrify and titillate and for me, it definitely did more of the former than it did of the latter. I prefer my demon well lighted and easily squashed.

As I adjusted to the complete darkness, my eyes began to pick up the auras of what must have been minor demons if they couldn’t mask themselves from me. Either that or they weren’t worried enough about big, bad, ole’ me to hide. The auras lined the long hallway, about one every six feet or so, on both sides and although they shimmered with some sort of latent energy, they didn’t make a move toward me.

I kept an eye on those auras as I moved through them into what passed for a lighted room in the place. Although the hallway was open to the main room, the demons had somehow deadened the noise of the main floor in the entranceway, leaving it silent as a tomb and certainly as dark as one.

However, as soon as I walked through the wide archway that separated the two spaces, the sound of the place crashed into me, nearly taking my breath away with its force. From all around, the crush of hot, sweaty bodies pressed into me and although Abrine had obviously taken great pains to perfume the air and filter out the raunchy smell of hundreds of gyrating bodies packed into a space that was entirely too small to accommodate their existence, I could smell a faint undercoat of demon beneath the perfumed air. It was that rotting earth, mold and decaying flesh kind of smell that demons gave off and that they could never fully mask from non-humans. It clung to every table, stool and wall in the place and caused my nose to twitch in self-defense.

I tried to block it out of my sensory pool and turned toward the bar, where I hoped to get the information I needed. I was momentarily alarmed by the roiling mass of human and demon flesh between me and the bar, but then I mentally rolled up my sleeves and went to work chiseling a path through the gyrating wall of flesh.

It only took me a couple of minutes to push, shove, threaten and wriggle my way through them all. The last obstacle between me and the bar was a particularly revolting couple, where he was of the extremely good looking human type and she was of a particularly disgusting demon type, with purple, warty looking skin and green Brillo pad hair that moved even when she wasn’t moving. I determinedly averted my gaze from the moving hair as I passed by. I’d been killed by curiosity once too often on that front.

Some demons, known as supra-demons, serve as hosts for other, smaller demons that resemble something from the reptile or maggot family, depending on their size. Of all the demons, I’ve found these to be the foulest, in more than just the obvious way. As I took a tall, surprisingly empty stool at the gleaming bar, I glanced one more time at maggot head, I couldn’t seem to help myself. She turned bulging brown eyes to me and winked as a slimy, white wormy looking thing crawled down the side of her face. I pinched my lips together in revulsion and turned away. The last thought I gave her was to wonder what the human was seeing as he looked at her. Little did he know that the Miss America he thought he was sidling up to was a complete illusion and he was really rubbing up against something that was too repulsive even for his sad, human imagination to conjure up.

The bartender that smiled at me when I finally hit the bar was small, finely boned and almost too pretty, with close cropped black hair and smoldering, black eyes. He was definitely sexy, but not really my type. Generally I like my men in a larger size. (tsk, tsk, such dirty minds!). Unbidden, my devil’s face filled my mind’s eye and I shook it off. I must have shivered a little because the bartender, whose name was riding above his head on a holograph, smiled at me with large, very white teeth that looked familiar. He leaned close across the counter and looked into my eyes with velvet black ones of his own. “Are you cold, little halfling?”

I glared up at him, finally realizing that he must be one of the royals. I didn’t remember seeing him the night before, when I went for my little unplanned visit to Hades on Earth, but he obviously knew who I was. “No. Actually, Torre, it’s much warmer in here than I would like. All these mashed together bodies and demon flesh. It’s not only stuffy, the heat in here feels like hot, burning, tongues of fire on my skin.” I offered him my bad girl smile, “you ever feel that way?”

His gaze burned into me. “More than you would care to know, Mx. Phelps. Now, what can I get for you?”

“An audience with Abrine.”

His beautiful, black eyes widened just enough to tell me I’d surprised him. “What would a pretty little thing like yourself want with a big, bad demon king?”

I shrugged and smiled. “I think you might have some idea, if you use your imagination.” Hating myself, I ran my tongue over my suddenly very dry lips and leaned across the bar toward the handsome devil. He grinned back and met me halfway, pushing his face close enough to mine so that we were both breathing the same small pocket of air. The effect wasn’t really that awful, his breath smelled minty and was very warm on my face. I forced myself not to pull away, instead I parted my lips just a notch and drew his aura into me, under the pretense of being taken over by physical rapture because of his nearness, I closed my eyes and held his essence inside my head, where I could roll it around and measure it.

He was fairly powerful, which made me wonder what he was doing working behind a bar in a demon club. He didn’t seem to be powerful enough to climb into my head, however, which I had come to recognize as a definite plus when dealing with devils. As I rolled him around in my mind something flared, something I didn’t really recognize but which wasn’t entirely foreign to me either. Whatever it was, it made me gasp and push his aura away in panic.