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  As many times as Rachel had carried mouse-me in her purse, she should have known to bring a bigger one. I knew she had at least one purse big enough—she’d carried both me and Greta in it after one of our big werewolf fights. While I wrestled her lipsticks, her wallet, her keys, a compact, a pencil, two pens, some Kleenex, a tiny sewing kit, some Band-Aids, a Tylenol bottle, several individually packaged wet wipes, and God only knows what else, I seriously considered throwing out everything that wasn’t me. Better not to leave a trail, I decided.

  Rachel walked up to the front door and pulled it open. Once inside, her footsteps started to echo. It sounded like the room was big and the floor was tile or marble. It was hard for me to tell. I smelled coffee, donuts, and other breakfast-y kinds of things in the distance. Food court, probably. If I strained, I could make out the sounds of people talking in another large space. There was even a fountain or a waterfall; I couldn’t tell which, but I could hear the water.

  “Can I help you, ma’am?”

  The voice was male and the speaker was taller than Rachel. I guessed it was a security guard from the tone he’d used. He sounded at once willing to help, friendly, and mildly suspicious. Pulling off all three at once as well as he did made me suspect he’d been doing this awhile.

  “I’m here to see J’iliol’lth,” Rachel told him. “I’m an assistant to Lord Eric. He’s expected.”

  “Is he here now?”

  Someone was watching me. I couldn’t see them, but as he asked that question, I felt a presence sweeping through the lobby. It was a low but constant pressure on my senses. It brushed the edges of my mind, began to push inward. Nobody had mentioned anything about any psychic checkpoints or mental searches, so I felt no need to cooperate. Using the same technique I used when controlling lesser vamps, I pushed back hard.

  The pressure went away, but the presence was still there, flitting about like a gnat, too small to squash but still an annoyance. It was probably that obnoxious imp I’d talked to on the phone.

  “Yes, he is with me now. Could you please show us to J’iliol’lth’s office or a waiting area with no sunlight?”

  “Let me call on up and see.”

  The guard and Rachel both started walking and I was once again assaulted by the contents of her purse. A zipper tab came out of nowhere and tried to go where no one had gone before. I was halfway out of her purse before I saw daylight and slid back down, landing on top of a compact. I made a mental note to put some kind of thrall compulsion on Rachel and make her only buy really big purses from now on.

  By the time we got to J’iliol’lth’s office I had discovered a small leather pouch inside a little zippered pocket sewn into the lining of her purse. It smelled like spices and old bones. I couldn’t tell exactly what was in it, but I wanted Magbidion to take a look at it. If his suspicions about Rachel were correct, it might be important.

  “Greetings, ma’am. Please tell your master he may now appear. The shades are secured. I assure you, the room is quite safe for him.”

  Rachel turned around and opened the bag carefully. I would have liked to do something impressive—turn into a revenant and try to make it look like I was coming out of her mouth, but for all I knew, I might have eaten her soul by accident. Instead, I leapt off of the top of her purse and landed in my human shape. Both of us turned to face J’iliol’lth.

  I was still wearing jeans, tennis shoes, my Welcome to the Void T-shirt, and a black leather belt, but I’d added a pair of sunglasses and a leather jacket. The sunglasses would keep our pal “Jill” from noticing the strangeness of my eyes if they went purple again. They were still doing the black-with-purple business off and on unpredictably. I was sure I’d have been able to control my eyes if Rachel would just stop screwing around with me. With her tantric magic or whatever it was.

  J’iliol’lth was an ugly son of a bitch. He wasn’t red, like I’d expected, and he didn’t have little horns or a pitchfork. I always expect demons to look like that, although I’ve never met one that did. I guess it’s some kind of nonhuman prejudice. The confounding thing was how familiar he looked. I couldn’t place it.

  J’iliol’lth had black skin with small brackish-brown sores that oozed dark green pus. Patches of gray moss covered his skin in an odd approximation of hair and his beady little eyes were transparent except for cloudy brown irises and stark white pupils. Even so, he wore an expensive suit. I guess he thought it would make him look more businesslike. In his case, it didn’t help much.

  He also had a smell. It wasn’t so bad, a touch of mint and a little wintergreen, but he was colder than room temperature and his heart, if he had one, was silent. I try not to trust anyone who doesn’t have a heartbeat.

  The office itself looked normal except for the window treatments. The blinds were ghastly metal creations covered with a surreal paint job. They were bolted to the wall, drawn closed with a set of chains, and locked tight with a small padlock. Someone was trying to make sure I felt comfortable and safe. Just like a demon…

  “Ah, Mr. Jones,” he began. “How good of you to come, and at such an inconvenient time, too.”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I said, dropping down into one of the two available chairs opposite his desk. Rachel gracefully lowered herself into the other. I stared at one of the motivational posters he had hanging on the wall. It was about leadership and had a picture of a lion. This demon was really going all out to make sure he fit in. “Nice poster,” I said sarcastically.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jones.”

  “Eric,” I corrected. “No one calls me mister anything. Of course, some people call me asshole or bastard or motherfucker, but I usually kill them. You should probably just stick with Eric.”

  Rachel gave me a wide-eyed look of warning, but I ignored it. It’s what I tend to do with all the good advice I’m given. J’iliol’lth smiled politely. I couldn’t tell if he was getting angry yet or not, but my guess was that I could get him there.

  J’iliol’lth opened his mouth to speak, but I interrupted him. “So Jill…Can I call you Jill? I want Marilyn’s soul back and I want it now. I know you want something for it and I’m happy to work with you there, but do you think you could cut all the posturing bullshit and just spell out what you want?”

  The moss on the demon’s head whitened and the mint smell grew stronger. As he clasped his hands together, they made a slightly disgusting squishy sound. “Eric, please, let’s both do our best to be cordial here. I’ve held on to Miss Robinson’s spirit in good faith and I’m quite certain—”

  I took off my sunglasses and “Jill” stopped speaking. I caught Rachel staring at my eyes, too. I guess she hadn’t seen enough of the purple glow, yet…Either that or with her influencing my emotions toward calm, it scared her that I could still get this angry. According to Magbidion, Rachel was using no small amount of mojo to keep me from being able to black out, to force me to stay in control. The only things Mags and I couldn’t figure out was why.

  “Jill” looked questioningly at Rachel as if he expected her to do something. Maybe it was because we’d told him she was my assistant, but it seemed like more than that. I made a mental note of it and decided to press my advantage, if it truly was an advantage. I popped my fangs.

  “Look, Jill, I’ve been having some anger management issues lately. What’s four-month-old news for some folks is two days ago to me, so let’s not mince words, okay? Because even though I haven’t eaten today, you don’t look very appetizing and I don’t want to be picking demon out of my teeth. What the fuck do you want in exchange for Marilyn?”

  J’iliol’lth regained his composure instantaneously and smiled a toothy white smile. “So you have no problem with the associated costs?”

  “I’m not signing anything. I’m not shaking hands and you can’t have my soul, what there is of it, in exchange.”

  He managed to look crestfallen at that and I wondered how much of it was an act and how much was real.

  “I’m afraid it is not just a
matter of the cost. I’m certain that she’s special to you, but Miss Robinson was likely already hell bound. She had long since ceased believing in any sort of deity—”

  “Good, then I should be able to buy her off you cheap.”

  “Normally, yes, in any other circumstance, by all means I would have given her to you as a sign of good faith, but the purpose for which she was intended has rather exacting parameters. To retain her soul as a courtesy to you, I was forced to use the next most compatible soul in my possession, a soul which was a bit more”—he paused midsentence and his eyes flashed—“costly.”

  Shit. I crossed my arms. “How costly?”

  “You see, the ritual in question required a willing sacrifice, a soul who was aware that he or she was sacrificing themselves for another.” He was positively giddy just describing it. “Self-sacrifice, especially the sacrifice of one’s soul for another, even if the sacrificial soul is already hell bound, is quite rare. The next most comparable soul I had was a Catholic priest from oh…ten years or so ago, give or take…He gave his soul to save one of his parishioners who’d bargained theirs away to me. I’d been saving him for a special occasion.”

  “Fu-uck me,” I cursed. “What the hell kind of ritual was it?”

  “Normally I charge for this sort of information, but for you…consider it a gift to the vampire who killed my brother, J’hon’byg’butte.”

  El Segundo was about to bite me on the ass. I killed a lot of demons in El Segundo. Okay, to be fair, Talbot killed most of them, but he ostensibly worked for me and in the demon world, as in the vampire world, that made it all my fault.

  “Eric.” The demon stood up and walked around his desk as he spoke. “My dear, dear, Eric, I’m afraid your friend, Mr. Malcolm…Roger…came to me for an enhancement.”

  “God, you must be loving this,” I said. “What sort of enhancement?”

  J’iliol’lth leaned against his desk and looked down at me. I stared up at him and tried to make my eyes glow red. They didn’t. Instead, two little color-changing dots hit the demon in the pupils and he turned away quickly. He didn’t have eyelids, so he couldn’t blink. Interesting.

  “Sorry,” I said casually, putting my sunglasses back on. “Anger management. I’m sure I mentioned it. What kind of enhancement?”

  “He wanted me to make him a Vlad, like you,” he said, walking back behind his desk. The mint smell went sour, replaced by a rotten citrus odor. Was that what demon fear smelled like? I could sense that Rachel was afraid, too. Both of them probably knew more about my anger management issues than I did, but I wondered if they knew that I wasn’t quite as ignorant as they thought I was. I leaned back in my chair.

  “How?”

  “He was going to capture you and bring you to me. We were going to use your essence to ‘promote’ him to Vladhood.” He opened his desk drawer. “You undid his plot and defeated him when you had your lupine friends devour him; you should be very happy.”

  “Yeah, I’m thrilled all right. What does all of this have to do with Marilyn?”

  “We worked out a contingency, an intercession.” Just as the final word passed his lips, the chair I was sitting in sprouted scaly orange hands that grabbed my arms. Rachel’s scream told me hers had done the same. Smoothly, in one motion, J’iliol’lth drew a gun I recognized from his desk drawer: El Alma Perdida.

  “You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Bang. The shot rang out. A familiar burning sensation spread through my chest. Silver licks of flame poured out of the wound. J’iliol’lth dropped the gun with a howl, his hand sizzling where he’d touched the butt of the gun.

  “Shoulda staked me,” I roared. El Alma Perdida was made to hunt werewolves. The bullets are magic. If a werewolf gets shot with one of them, the bullet steals its soul. A bullet from El Alma Perdida also shape-locks any supernatural creature it hits. As long as the bullet stays inside them, they can’t change shape. A vampire can’t pop his claws, can’t even pop his fangs. Unfortunately for J’iliol’lth, my fangs were already out.

  J’iliol’lth said a word I didn’t understand and the chains on the curtain vanished, dropping the padlock to the floor where it transformed into a tiny demon with little red horns and a pitchfork—the imp.

  Another orange-scaled hand rose up from between my legs. This one had a sharpened wooden stake in its grasp. It stabbed at my heart, J’iliol’lth opened the curtains, and I kicked off of the floor with both feet as hard as I could. My demon chair flipped up and over, but its grip didn’t loosen at all. The stake plunged into my chest and bounced off my sternum. I sank my teeth into the only knuckle I could reach and the creature yowled.

  “How’s it going, son?” John Paul Courtney’s voice drawled inside my brain. My mouth was full, but there were plenty of things I felt like saying. “Still fornicatin’ and consortin’ with demons, I see,” the ghost of the gun added. “You could have at least woke up when the demon sent some of his boys to collect the gun. But no, you was jest starin’ off inta space.”

  The back of my head hit the floor and the chair rocked over on its side. Both the demon and I let out “oofs.” Sunlight poured into the room and my ankles caught fire between my socks and the jeans. The demon chair’s orange scales ignited as the silver flame from my bullet wound touched them. The hand holding the stake at my chest recoiled. I tucked my burning shins up under the demon chair and it howled.

  “Fire sucks, don’t it?” I snarled. The demon chair let go. “Flame on!”

  You’ve got to question the wisdom of using a nonfireproof demon to restrain a vampire and then opening the curtains. I think J’iliol’lth had intended for me to be staked by the time I caught fire. No such luck. I may be stupid, but I’m not slow. Flame engulfed my entire body as I stood. I raised both hands over my head, clasped them together, and brought them down on the floor. Go, go, vampire strength.

  “Someone stop him!” J’iliol’lth shouted.

  Fire, pain…it causes some vamps to freeze up, roll around on the ground. I catch fire on a semiregular basis. It comes with having a poor time sense and a bad memory. I’m not immune to fire; I’m bored with it.

  “But he’s on fire!”

  “Why didn’t you stake him?”

  “He caught fire!”

  Blinded by flames, I couldn’t see anything, but vampire hearing is very good. Somewhere nearby a toilet flushed. Water moved through the pipes. Water was just what I needed.

  The floor gave out on my third strike, dropping me to the next level. I ran toward the sound of the moving water, smacked into a wall and punched my way through it, still following the sound. People screamed, cried, and ran, but I ignored them in my pursuit of the water. Another toilet flushed and I burst through the wall and into the ladies’ room.

  Grabbing the bowl of the nearest sink with both hands, I tore it free of the wall. Water sprayed out of the shorn pipe, dousing the flames. Behind me, a woman backed away, screaming. I needed blood quickly, more than she could spare.

  But there was one thing I needed more. I grabbed her throat. “If you can help me get the bullet out of my chest, I won’t eat you.” She swallowed hard and nodded.

  Her waterlogged purse lay on the floor nearby. When I released her, she snatched it up, rummaging through it purposefully. “I…I think I have a pair of tweezers.”

  For me, the healing hurts worse than the burn itself. Vampire nerves stop registering pain after the initial injury.

  My entire body had been charred. With a sound like two vinyl records melted together and being pulled apart, my skin began to regenerate.

  Three dog-headed demons burst into the women’s restroom. One of them had an ax decorated with fancy filigree. The second wielded a frost-covered sword. Demon number three just came with claws and a mouth full of sharp pointy teeth. I threw a sink at them to buy time. Everything slowed to a crawl, rivulets of water drifted through the air in lazy streams, and I realized my vampire speed had kicked in. I’ve never been good at controlling it, but I w
as glad it had decided to show up.

  The contents of the woman’s purse fell slowly toward the tile. I spotted the pair of tweezers flipping through the air. I snatched them up with a grin. Some demons have the speed thing, too. These guys didn’t. By the time they made it halfway across the room, I had the bullet out.

  Can you say uber vamp? I knew you could.

  16

  ERIC: RENEGOTIATIONS

  I walked back into Jill’s office in uber vamp mode, holding the frost-covered sword in my right hand and the heads of his three dog demons in my left. Seven other demons stood around the room, not counting the two funky-looking chair demons. Sunlight began its slow sizzle on the ebony skin of my uber vamp form. It stung. I had no idea how long it would take for me to catch fire this way, but it undoubtedly made me seem like a badass.

  Jill closed the shades. “If everyone would excuse us, please?”

  Rachel ran over to me when the chair let her go, skirting the big hole I’d put in the floor. She moved to embrace me, but I pushed her away. Hunger can do strange things to a vampire, alter perceptions. I couldn’t see Rachel’s skin anymore, just the veins and the blood coursing through them. My color differentiation faded as well, rendering the world in shades of monochromatic red. I knew if I stayed hungry long enough the perception changes could become permanent.

  “I’m too hungry,” I explained. “If I feed on you, you’ll die.”

  “I’ll order in,” J’iliol’lth said casually. He pushed a button on his desk. “Julia?”

  “Yes, Master?” the speaker on his desk crackled.

  “Could you send a couple of girls up here, please?”

  “Right away, Master.”

  I broke my rule about accepting blood from strangers. Both of the women looked like supermodels. They came willingly, apparently resigned to death. I didn’t want to know why a demon like J’iliol’lth kept beauties like this on tap or what he held over their heads. Did he own their souls? How can you tell if someone’s soul is in hock anyway? I knew Magbidion’s was owed out but it’s never been something that I could smell.