Servants of the Storm (15 page)

“I simply can’t wait to hear what arouses your curiosity, cambion,” she says. “Perhaps you’re ready to make a deal?”

“I want to know where Carly is,” he says, voice strained. The
fog clears a little, and I see his hands curled into fists at his sides. Because of the missing bit, his pinkie is the only finger not cutting a moon into his palms.

“How touching,” she says. “Checking up on one of your little friends. She almost got caught downtown, so I gave her a new job. She’s got Riverfest now. You didn’t think I would let her go, did you?”

“That’s not fair—” he starts, but she cuts him off.

“Life’s not fair,” she says. “And neither is death. Just ask Josephine.”

There’s a tense silence. Isaac flexes his hands and wipes his palms off on his jeans.

“I’ll see you in two years,” he says, and she laughs, a high wild sound.

“Two days, you mean,” she purrs. “I’m going to need your help cleaning up.”

He turns to walk away. She lets him get a few steps before she hops down from the bar and calls, “Just one more thing, Isaac.”

Without turning, he stops. From where I crouch I can just see the backs of his legs through the fog.

“What?” he growls.

Quick as a snake, she reaches down, grabs my wrist, and twists me upright by her side. I cry out and stand and try to pull away, but she doesn’t let go of me. Her fingers are cold and hard as bone, curled around my wrist so tightly that I can already feel a bruise forming. I look at her face and feel dizzy. From the
ink-black eyes to the tiny black veins in her cheeks to the furry, orange ears tipped with black, there’s nothing in her I recognize as human.

“I caught your next deposit,” she sings.

“Let her go. I’ll take care of it. We had a deal.”

She pulls me in front of her, my back to her chest, one of her arms protectively around my waist, a fingertip tracing my face. I flinch away from her creeping fingers, from the sharp nails pressing into my cheeks, and she laughs.

“I don’t know if I can trust you, Isaac,” she says. “After all, you were supposed to dose her. And now look where she is. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at my club. You know who wouldn’t like this a bit?”

“Yeah, I know.”

With a pointed, anxious look, he steps forward, almost close enough for me to touch him, if my arms weren’t pinned to my sides. He’s furious, and frustrated, and his dark eyes plead with me. I don’t know what he wants, whether he wants me to play along or try to escape or elbow Kitty in the stomach. He’s trying to tell me something with his eyes and body, but I barely know him, and I just shake my head the tiniest bit. Kitty tightens her grip, and I feel like she might twist my body in two different directions and pop me open like a nesting doll.

“And you know I can’t allow you to go all sweet on me. Not now.”

“I’ll fix it,” he says, taking a step closer.

“We’re past that. It’s almost time to choose. You need to quit pretending you can ever be normal.”

“I know.”

“I think you need a lesson, Isaac. I think you’re getting soft.”

“Then punish me.”

She chuckles, her chest pressing against my back.

“Oh, I think I’d enjoy that,” she purrs.

Her arm locks down on me, squeezing our bodies together in a way that’s deeply unnerving on a lot of levels. I squirm, and Isaac’s eyes lock onto mine, pleading for something just out of my reach. Kitty’s hand slides down my arm to clench my wrist again, and I gasp when I feel my bones grind together.

“Don’t—” he says, but it’s too late.

With a low chuckle the fox-eared girl yanks my hand up to her mouth and bites off the tip of my pinkie finger. She lets go of me, and I fall to the ground, screaming again and again and again as my heart pumps out through the jagged stump with sickening squirts of blood.

Kitty stands over me, laughing, but all I can see through the fog and the darkness and the lights are her black heels, and they have scales like a reptile. My heart beats fast in my ears, each thump pushing me further away from myself. I curl up in a ball around my hand, cradling it to my chest and sobbing. It hurts so much, like it’s more than just a finger.

“Go now. And take her with you. Consider it a loan,” Kitty says, her voice far away and cruel, cool as the winter moon.

Rough arms scoop me up. Everything hurts. I’m a raw nerve, and it’s too much. I can’t stop screaming. And I’m floating, floating in his leather arms, and the air swirls with smoke and pulses with light and sound, and blood is everywhere and she’s laughing again. I turn to look over his shoulder, and she’s holding something up between her fingers, something shaped like a pill, but it’s the tip of my pinkie finger, and she pops it into her mouth like a butterscotch candy.

My head droops over his arm, and he murmurs something to me, but it’s as useless as water and runs out of my ears, and it would just be easier to quit fighting the flood, and I close my eyes and let the dark river take me away.

IN MY DREAMS I’M DROWNING.
the thick water chokes me, coating my insides with scum and rot. I wake up trying to scream, my lungs burning. A whimper is all that comes out. My finger is on fire, and my fist curls around a wad of fabric, and a hand clamps over my mouth, and it tastes like rubbing alcohol, and Isaac leans close and whispers, “You can’t scream anymore, or things will get bad.”

I nod my head and swallow. He gives me a dark glare, his black eyes serious. It seems like they should be blue, but nothing makes sense anymore. I nod again. His hand leaves my mouth, just a little, just enough for me to say, “Okay.” My throat is so raw that it’s the best I can do.

He sits back, watching me. I swallow again and try to sit up, but my hand hurts too much and I can’t put pressure on it. It
feels heavy and overly warm where it lies on my stomach, and it’s wrapped in fabric. An old T-shirt. The one he was wearing earlier.

“What happened?” I manage to whisper.

Isaac hunches over me on a narrow couch, his hip touching my side as I lie on my back. He runs a hand through his hair, which is tangled and streaked with dried blood and sweat. His undershirt is wet and bloody too, and his jacket is gone, although the room is a little cold. There’s a pile of blankets over me, and I struggle a little but don’t have the strength to move.

“Are you sure you want to hear this now?” he asks.

I sigh and shudder.

“Where’s my pinkie finger, Isaac? And where’s yours?”

“You don’t want to know.”

I laugh, a mad little giggle. It’s just too funny. “Jesus H. Christ, boy. How many fingers do I have to lose before you’ll tell me shit?”

He leans in, his face deadly serious. He holds up his left hand to show me the stump of his pinkie and says, “I have to stitch your finger shut or you’ll bleed to death. I’m going to give you something that will help dull the pain. If I tell you everything, do you promise to drink this stuff?”

I sigh. “No. Take me to the hospital.”

“No. Promise.”

“If you tell me what’s really going on.”

“There’s no point in not telling you. You’re in it now, Dovey. But I’ll take that as a promise.”

“I promise. But you have to tell me first. Before I’ll drink it.”

I lift my ragged hand again and start unwinding the shirt to inspect it. He gently forces my hand down onto my stomach and pats my arm. After staring at it for a moment with an unfathomable sadness in his dark eyes, he looks me dead-on.

“There’s no good way to say this.” His eyes burn into me. “Demons are real.”

I pause a moment, waiting for more. He just stares. I snicker.

“Angels, too, I bet. And unicorns. How much blood have I lost, Isaac?”

“Enough. Because a demon bit off part of your finger. There aren’t any angels, but Savannah’s full of demons. Think back. You know it’s true, Dovey.”

Memories flash through my head. Kitty’s fox ears, her black eyes, the veins in her cheeks. The man in the fedora at Kitty’s, and his snake tongue flicking my ear. I just shake my head. I don’t want to believe it.

The couch creaks as Isaac shifts, and he talks to me in a low voice, all in a rush.

“That’s a lot to take in, I know. I’ll start with something simpler.” A wry grin. “Me. Did you hear Kitty call me ‘cambion’?”

I nod.

“Do you know what that is?”

I shake my head. It’s easier than talking.

“Merlin from Arthurian legend? Caliban from
The Tempest
, the play you’re actually in the middle of right now? Which isn’t a coincidence, by the way.”

I shake my head again and think back to Baker’s wild makeup and twig-snagged hair. “Caliban’s a monster, right?”

“Cambions aren’t necessarily monsters.” He fidgets with his cross, stares down as if the thumb-polished silver holds all the answers. “At least not physically. How about a succubus? An incubus? Heard of those?”

I shrug.

“This would be easier if you were a Dungeons and Dragons girl,” he says wryly. “I’ve never had to explain it before. Let me back up. Okay, so you know what a demon is, right?”

I give him my mom’s best lawyer look, a practiced eye roll that communicates utter contempt and questions the person’s sanity.

“Okay. So, seriously. Demons are real, whether or not you want to believe it. They’re all descended from Adam’s first wife, Lilith, who wasn’t made out of his rib like Eve was.” He walks to a bookshelf spilling over with old books and brings a beat-up tome with a leather cover to me. He flips it open to a see-through page with a drawing of what looks like Adam and Eve, naked in a garden. “Lilith was made out of clay, just like Adam, and she wanted to be his equal. Guess where that got her?”

My family isn’t big into religion, although I used to go to church with Carly most Sundays. But I can guess exactly where Lilith ended up.

“Kicked out of Eden?”

His smiles at my sass. “Exactly. But Lilith was pregnant when she was cast out, and she had thousands of children, and they
became demons. And they all have some weird animal aspect, because Lilith sprouted bird wings and hawk feet as soon as she defied God and left Eden.”

He turns a few pages of the book to show another illustration, this one of a scary woman with wings and feathery clawed toes. She looks pissed.

“Her children are higher demons. There are also lesser demons and imps. But higher demons are the ones in charge.”

“Okay, so you’re telling me Kitty’s a demon. What does that have to do with you being a . . .”

“A cambion. I’m getting to that. So demons feed on people’s emotions, most of them negative, like fear, hopelessness, grief. But some demons feed on lust and sex. An incubus is a male sex demon, and a succubus is a female sex demon. Still with me?”

I shrug. “Sure am. Nice to meet someone crazier than me.”

He ignores the dig and looks down, focusing on the book in his hands. “So here’s where it gets really weird. And gross. A succubus has sex with a human guy and retains his . . . um, fluids. And then the succubus transfers them to an incubus, and then the incubus has sex with a human woman and deposits the . . . fluids. And then the human woman has a baby, and it’s cold and beautiful and doesn’t breathe for seven days.”

“So?”

“It’s called a cambion.” He gives me an ironic and devastating smile, and says, “And that’s what I am.”

“You’re a demon baby?” I say, voice quivering.

I try to push back from him, hoping that this is a hallucination, just another side effect of whatever is making me crazy. This beautiful guy who works at a hotel and gets pit stains—he can’t be a demon. Demons aren’t real. I’m backed against the wall, but there’s nowhere to go, and the movement has made me light-headed. I have no choice but to listen to him, but I can feel my lips drawn back in disgust, in horror, in some old, animal sentiment that knows that something about him is desperately
wrong
.

“I’m exactly what I just said. I’m made out of people, but with demon help. It’s not like . . . It’s not something I did on purpose. It’s just something that I am. Cambions are cunning and attractive and extraordinarily persuasive, and demons create us solely to use us.”

“But . . . why?”

“Demons hate the sun and have weird animal parts. The higher demons might look attractive at night, but under harsh light they’re all wrong, and the lesser demons are even more twisted and ugly. They all feel deeply superior, so they don’t go out much. They think of regular humans as stupid food animals, like cattle. But cambions are smart and beautiful, with magic that demons can’t use themselves. If people are cattle and demons are ranchers, cambions are kind of like sheepdogs. So long as the demons can control us, we’re the perfect underlings. The perfect weapons.”

“So you can do magic?”

“Just a little. I can influence people, make them forget things, manipulate them.”

“Creepy.”

“But you’ll notice I’m helping you remember things. A cambion is
what
I am, not
who
I am.”

Let’s assume what he’s telling me is true. It’s a lot to take in—this whole other world. Demons herding people like cattle, feeding on them and using them. And cambions—which just sound gross. But Isaac is here, helping me now. Surely he can’t be all bad? Surely he’s more person than . . . demon thing?

“So if you’re a cambion, what about your parents?”

“They think I’m totally normal. They don’t even know demons exist. Normal people aren’t supposed to. When I was born, the doctors thought I had breathing problems and put me on a ventilator for a week, and then I miraculously recovered and have been fine ever since. I try not to visit my folks very much these days. I don’t want them to see what I’ve become.” He runs his hands through his hair, his eyes far off. “A long time ago they used to call people like me changelings. Like fairies left us behind. Or like your buddy Caliban, who was supposedly the son of an evil witch.”

“So are you . . . evil?”

A dozen emotions cross his face.

“I don’t think so. But I’m supposed to be. It’s complicated.”

He says it conversationally, as easily as if we were discussing the weather or politics or what to have for lunch. But I’m sure Isaac can see the doubt and disbelief on my face. No matter what I’ve seen this week, all the strange things that have happened, they’re all just too bizarre to be real.