In the Demon's Company (Demon's Assistant Book 2) (16 page)

“What? Why?”

There’s a pause. Then an exhale. “I tried to arrange a meeting with Vessa. Instead of coming herself, she sent a couple of goons to grab me. Xanan dispatched them easily enough but she’s clearly not willing to have a talk. I need Gabriel’s visions to tell me where she’s likely to be so I can get to her that way.”

“She sent her lackeys after you?” I ask, surprised she’d even bother.

“She is aware I’ve never been one for physical altercations,” he says. He sounds irritated by it. “That doesn’t mean I’m not willing to capture her to prevent her from harming others.”

“Are you okay?”

“Fine.” Too fast to be believable. I can practically picture the hand wave. “But I do need Gabriel as soon as possible.”

“Az, I can’t leave. I’m grounded.”

There’s another long pause on the other end of the line. I know how idiotic it sounds, telling my demon boss I can’t do his bidding because my dad is punishing me, but that is the situation. “Nicolette, please. I am otherwise occupied trying to obtain other crucial information. Where she’s been, what she’s done; I need to gage the size of the mess she’s leaving in her wake. Call him, text him, whatever you must. Just get him here.”

“My dad is here,” I say, more quietly, even though between my music and the television, I doubt he could hear if he wanted to. “I can’t go anywhere.”

“Find a way,” he says, not unkindly, but with no room for argument. “That is your job, after all.” The call ends.

I sigh and flop back onto my bed. Of course my demon boss needs something as soon as my dad is back in town. Why can’t timing ever work out right for once? How can I find Gabriel if I can’t leave the house? I don’t even know where he lives.

But I do know places to look. I swear to myself, which is becoming a bad habit of mine: blurting expletives alone in rooms. I can check with Myron, Miranda, and the coffee shop. Gabriel could be any of those places, and Myron probably knows where he lives. But in order to do that, I need to leave the house.

I can hear the television blaring down the hall. Dad is still camped on the couch. I slip into the living room.

“I can’t focus here,” I say. “Can I go to library?”

Dad gives me a withering look. “You’re grounded, Nicki. That means no leaving the house.”

“Dad, come on, the library isn’t exactly my idea of fun, and I still have a metric ton of homework to get through before Wednesday.”

“Sorry, kiddo. Since I was gone for the past three days, and I highly doubt you kept yourself locked in, I feel obligated to make sure I at least uphold the punishment for the duration of your suspension.”

I sigh and retreat to my room. And then I get another idea.

Cam doesn’t reply to my texts even though he should have gotten home from school an hour ago, but he shows as online in the chat messenger we use. I ping him and he asks how I am.

“Holding up,” I type. “I need to ask you a favor.”

There’s a long pause. The messenger client shows that Cam’s typing but he doesn’t send anything. Finally he just asks “What?”

I ask him to come to my apartment, park in back, and ring the buzzer.

“I won’t jailbreak you,” he says.

“That’s not it,” I promise, and he agrees to come over.

I put on a sweatshirt and scribble directions to Myron’s study and Miranda’s weapon cache on a piece of notebook paper, even though Cam was at the former, in case he needs a reminder of where it is. When the buzzer rings, I grab it before Dad can get up.

“Hello? UPS,” Cam says, trying—and failing—to disguise his voice in case my dad has answered. I smile into the phone at this cleverness. Even though it totally doesn’t work, it’s sweet that he tries.

“Be right down,” I say. I step into the living room. “It’s UPS,” I say. “I’ll go get it. I’m going to go get the mail, too.” My plan is to say the guy buzzed the wrong unit and I walked him to the right door, which should give me an excuse to spend a little time out in the hall, but not a lot.

Dad looks me over. I’m wearing pajama pants with pink cartoon cats on them and fuzzy socks without shoes, the perfect I-am-definitely-not-going-to-leave-the-house-like-this outfit.

“Okay,” Dad says, and turns back to his computer screen, ignoring the fishing boat on the television.

Downstairs, Cam is at the back door, his blue sedan parked behind him. I kiss him quickly, a peck on the lips.

“So, what do you need? Peanut M&Ms? A case of Sprite?”

I wish it were that simple. I hand him the paper. “I need you to try and track down Gabriel and tell him to go to Az’s warehouse. If he’s not at one of these places, then call me and let me know you couldn’t find him.”

Cam looks at me like I punched him in the nose. After a long moment, he clears his throat. “You want me to do your job.”

“I just need you to run this one errand, since I obviously can’t. If you can’t find him, then at least I’ll have tried. Azmos needs him and apparently no one uses cell phones.” Although, in most of those places, I had no reception, so if he’s there, he’s simply unreachable.

Cam puts his hand over his face, fingers pressed to his forehead, and then moves it up, pushing his fingers through his hair. He exhales. When he meets my eyes, his expression is hard. “Nic, you can’t ask this of me.”

“You know I wouldn’t if it wasn’t important,” I say. If Azmos can’t get to Vessa, he can’t stop her. Anything I can do to help—even if it’s sending Cam as my messenger—feels better than doing nothing.

“And you know that I can’t do it. Accepting this job of yours is one thing, but I refuse to participate beyond giving you a ride now and then.”

“You’d barely be participating. You’re just knocking on a couple of doors.” Cam’s glare could set fire to wet paper. “Azmos needs Gabriel’s visions so he can track down Vessa. If she isn’t stopped, big, bad demons are going to track him down, and kill anyone they think is conspiring with him, including me. This isn’t a game. It’s literally life or death.”

“And why can’t Az do it himself if it’s so important?”

“He’s busy with other things. He can’t do everything. Please, Cam,” I say again. “My dad is expecting me back any second. I don’t have time to argue. I’ll owe you big. Anything you want.”

Cam gives me a look that suggests he doesn’t think I mean it. “Don’t make promises you can’t keep.”

A tiny jolt of cold blasts through me. Because he’s right. There are things he could ask me to do that I wouldn’t. Like to quit this job. “I’ll do anything within reason,” I clarify. He doesn’t respond but he’s thinking, weighing the decision. “If you don’t do this, I’ll have to sneak out and there’s practically no chance I won’t get caught and I’d really like to not be grounded for the next decade.”

“This is really unfair,” Cam says.

“You’re the only person I can ask.” As I say it, it hits me just how alone I am in all of this. I can’t tell my dad and Mel is freaked out and not even sure what’s going on. Who else is there? Cam’s friends? Katrina, who has a massive crush on him? Amy and Justin and Brian? I like them, sure, but they’re not really my friends, and if Cam and I broke up, they’d never bother to talk to me or want to hang out. “You’re all I’ve got. I won’t ask again. Just, please, help me this once.”

Cam sighs and takes the folded up piece of paper. “This is the only time I do the demon’s bidding. I mean it. Never again.”

“Fair enough,” I say.

Cam unfolds the paper and reads it.

“He’s probably at one of those places,” I say. “And Myron definitely knows where he lives.”

He nods, sharply, and walks back to his car.

Guilt takes a few laps through me but I don’t have bandwidth to brood on it. I run inside, grab the mail, and head back upstairs.

I check my phone every few minutes as I work on an essay about the motifs in
The Great Gatsby,
complete with supporting quotes and reasons why I, personally, feel they worked. Cam doesn’t send anything to indicate the job is done and it makes me itchy. I need to get out of this apartment. I need to know what’s happening.

I regret sending Cam in my place for any number of reasons but first and foremost is that I’d rather do it myself.

The apartment buzzer rings and I jump up, accidentally knocking my book on the floor. I race into hall. Dad isn’t in the living room anymore, but when I lean into the room further, I see him out on our small balcony. He’s talking on the phone, pacing the small space. Probably a work call. I try to remember the last time he had a personal call or anything to do that wasn’t related to family or his job, and I realize I can’t. It hits me like a train that he and I are the same in a lot of ways. We both ran from our grief. He just picked the more literal method.

The buzzer phone sounds again and I pick it up.

“It’s me.” Cam’s voice but it’s gravely and rough. Panic slides into my stomach. “Let me up.”

I hit the button to unlock the front door. I’d go down and meet him but we’d probably just miss each other in the elevator. When I open the door for him, I gasp, heart slamming into my chest.

Cam looks terrible. He’s not wearing his glasses and he has a giant brown and yellow bruise flowering over one cheek. His blond hair is mussed and bent to one side and his lip is swollen and split. He’s shaking slightly and his cheeks are flushed.

“What happened?” I stammer. I’ve never seen Cam look so rattled, let alone injured.

“What do you think?” he asks, sarcastically. “Demon bullshit.”

I glance back but Dad is still out on the balcony.

Cam exhales slowly, like he’s trying to rein in his fury. “Can we…” he nods down the hall to my room.

I hesitate. I don’t want to interrupt Dad on a work call but I don’t want to surprise him by having Cam pop out of my room, either, as I doubt that’d go over well with me being grounded. But Cam’s obviously hurt. He’ll have to understand.

I grab Cam’s hand, noticing the knuckles are cracked and bleeding, and drag him to the bathroom instead. I leave the door open and turn on the light, so it spills into the hall, a sign to Dad that I’m not hiding anything. I pull first aid supplies out of the cabinet beneath the sink. In the white bathroom light, I notice red in his hair and gasp. He has blood in his hair. A lump forms in my throat. I gently touch the hair near the blood. He winces.

“It’s just a little cut,” he says, looking me in the eye. “Head wounds bleed a lot.”

I push a wad of cotton to the top of a bottle of hydrogen peroxide.

“Well?” I ask, impatient and too scared to hear it at the same time. “What happened?”

“I told you, demons,” he says, the anger wafting off him more fiercely than cold off of Xanan. After a pause, his shoulders sink and some of the tension deflates. “I was leaving Gabriel’s place—that’s where he was, by the way, at home, ignoring his phone like an asshole—when this guy the size of a freight train walked up and punched me in the jaw.” He moves his jaw, touching it gingerly, and winces. I take his hand and press the cotton to the cuts on his knuckles. He hisses slightly at the pain but doesn’t pull away.

“And you hit him back?” I ask, impressed, because I can’t picture Cam punching someone. I have no doubt he’s willing and capable but it’s hard to really get a clear mental image of something like that when the Cam I know would stand in front of a gun before he’d shoot one.

Cam shrugs, annoyed by my surprise. “Wasn’t just going to take it. But then he knocked off my glasses and punched me in the eye and slammed me into the brick wall.” He swallows, his undamaged hand going up to his head where the blood stains his hair.

“Why would he do that?”

“The demon told him to.” He shudders. “Azmos has nothing on this woman, Nic. She’s terrifying. The way she smiled, I was pretty sure she was going to eat my face.”

“That sounds like her,” I say, remembering the wild look in her eyes.

I dab at the bruise, but I don’t think antiseptic will do that any good, so I toss the cotton ball away. I grab the box of bandages and wrap Cam’s knuckles. His fingers are hot and I reach up to feel his forehead.

“Just adrenaline.” But his words are stiff, hard.

“Cam, I’m so, so—”

“Don’t.”

I freeze, waiting for the rant. He was just beat up by a demon’s henchman, so he has every right to be angry about it.

Instead, he pulls me down to him and kisses me. I can taste dried blood on his lips but I don’t mind. The kiss is passionate, desperate, and leaves me gasping. But then he pushes me away, tries to get to his feet, and then stumbles back down. He huffs out a breath.

“I shouldn’t have gone,” he says, focused on the tile behind me. “I knew better than to do your job for you.”

“I shouldn’t have asked.” It’s my way of apologizing but he does not acknowledge it. Then a thought occurs to me: he was leaving Gabriel’s place, which means Vessa knows where Gabriel lives. “Is Gabriel okay?”

Cam frowns, a small crease appearing in his brow. “I don’t know,” he says slowly. “He was inside.”

“I’m sure he’s fine.” Cam meets my eyes, giving me that ‘don’t bullshit me’ look of his. “He’s been dealing with demons and the arcane for a lot longer than we have. I’m sure he’s better at defending himself than he looks, though. When I left his place, he was wearing boxers and a robe and looked like he was going to pass out standing up.”