In the Demon's Company (Demon's Assistant Book 2) (20 page)

“And I’m telling you, you don’t have to be her slaves. She’s lying to you about how her magic works.”

Rayna doesn’t take the bait that time. None of them do. They all ignore me.

The front door opens. Everyone turns, including me, although I have to strain to see and it makes my neck throb. My heart pounds in time with the pain.

A woman walks in. She’s wearing leather pants and a corset over a long-sleeved black t-shirt. Her boots stomp over the wood floor. I see her telltale electric blue hair out of the corner of my eye. Vessa.

“Where’s the psychic?” she asks.

“He wasn’t with her,” Rayna says. Vessa sighs dramatically and Kai flinches like she might strike out. Instead, she walks around the chair I’m tied to, her heels clicking on the wood floor, until she stands directly in front of me.

She bends down over me, her silver-and-blue snake eyes so similar to Azmos’ and yet hers glint with unmistakable malice.

I swallow, throat dry again. I tug again on my hands, the plastic zip tie biting into my wrists. There’s no escape.

And then she does the most terrifying thing of all: she smiles at me.

“We meet again, Nicolette,” Vessa says. “Since our last meeting, I’ve learned so much about you.”

Words stick in my throat. My skin prickles like invisible needles are being run over my arms, my cheeks.

“I had my people looking all over the city for you.”

I remember the incompetent kidnapper at the bus stop and shudder.

“It turns out there’s not a lot of information about Azmos and his cohorts I can get that isn’t direct from the source. He plays his cards close to his chest.” She pauses for dramatic effect. “Luckily, I found an informant.”

My stomach roils, acid boiling and sloshing around. I have no idea what that means but it’s definitely not good.

“Strange that a creature as powerful as I would rely on such a young human for help. Several young humans it seems.” She cocks her head, the movement mechanical. She’s stiff and stilted. Azmos is a little robotic sometimes but she takes it to a whole new level. With Azmos, it’s just other-worldly. With her, it’s scary as heck. “I suppose I expected better of my brother. You do know he’s my brother, yes?”

She waits to see how I react to this news. I don’t. My heart is going wild and blood thrums in my ears but I try not to let it show.

“Although I do see the appeal of this world. It’s so easy to build an army when your kind is so desperate to cling to their short little lives. It’s like harvesting maggots.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Rayna bristle. It’s a very small motion and Vessa doesn’t seem to notice, but it gives me hope. Rayna is reasonable. She might be my salvation.

“I am disappointed, though,” Vessa adds. “So many of my kind have fled to your realm over the years, seeking the freedom to use their powers, and yet none of them has attained their rightful place as ruler of this world. Perhaps they too were weak-willed.”

Sweat beads on my upper lip. I do my best to keep my voice even but it shakes anyhow. “They haven’t done it because they can’t. They’re not powerful enough and neither are you.”

Vessa’s eyes light up like lasers. She steps towards me and every cell in my body screams, willing me to run even though I can’t. Her cool fingers brush my cheeks as she grabs my chin in her hand. I bite my tongue so I don’t scream. “I am of the Vitas race. We have the power to make ourselves gods. Long ago, my brethren did just that, performing miracles and convincing whole tribes of your species that they were gods and saints and healers and saviors. We still hold that power. It’s why other races have driven us to the brink of extinction. But some of us persist, and soon, I will prevail in ruling you.” She squeezes, her fingernails cutting into my skin, and then drops her hand. “Now, my brother had not been as cooperative as I hoped. He fled when I sent people to retrieve him.”

I snort. To kidnap him, she means.

Her eyes narrow further, slit-pupils dark. “Where can I find him?”

“I don’t know,” I say. And it’s sort of true. I don’t know where he is right this second.

She gives me the patient smile people give misbehaving pets. “I don’t want to hurt him. He merely needs to swear fealty to me. Tell me where he is, and I’ll return you to him. He can decide what to do with you. I would like to keep you alive for him as a token of respect. But I will do what I have to do.”

Fear slides like an ice cube down my spine. “I don’t know where he is.” The lies comes out automatically and I’m grateful I’ve gotten better spewing bullshit. “He finds me when he needs something. Not the other way around.”

Vessa walks to the counter and grabs Kai’s gun. He goes white as a sheet. She aims it at me and another burst of fear explodes in my chest. I have no illusions: Vessa will happily shoot me. She won’t even see it as murder, because she’ll bring me back to be her newest lackey.

She smiles at my fear and lowers the gun. “I don’t want to kill you. There’s enough,” she rolls her wrist, searching for the word, “animosity between my brother and I. I’d rather not hurt his most precious little pet. Azmos will appreciate having you intact and see that I can be benevolent. Tell me where I can find him and you will be rewarded for his cooperation when he and I finally join together.”

“Why can’t you find him?”

She sighs. “He seems to be hiding from my army. After he disliked my approach to our last arranged meeting, he’s gone to ground. He is too skittish. He needs to see he can trust my people.”

I’m not sure Vessa can trust her own people, at least not if they figure out they aren’t being magically compelled to do her bidding.

“He doesn’t want to see you.” This logic is, unsurprisingly, lost on her.

“He’s afraid I’m being pursued,” she says. “There are those who fear my power so much they seek to destroy me or keep me in chains, and given the chance, they’d do the same to him. But I’ve made sure they can’t find me in this world.”

A bristle of fear ripples through me as I remember Xanan warning me about his kind, who will happily track down the cause of the imbalance and kill anyone they think is at fault. But despite my fear, Vessa looks so smug that it’s fun to taunt her. “Of course they can. They can track your power. I know a demon who’s hunting you down right now.” It’s not strictly true—Xanan is hunting down the recruits of her army—but it’s satisfying to see doubt cross her face like a storm cloud. Anyhow, she can’t veil herself from them if she’s using her power so much that it’s poking holes in the Spirit Realm’s barrier.

“That’s not possible,” she insists, confident again. “Azmos merely needs to see how easy it is to rise above you mortal maggots, and he will rule by my side. Together we’ll take over your pathetic world and be gods as is our birthright.”

I swallow. Azmos scared the crap of out of me when he first showed up with a contract and said I’d made a deal to work for him, I was terrified. But bit by bit, I’ve gotten to know him. I’ve come to like and respect him. Azmos may share Vessa’s power, but he doesn’t share her desire to take over the world or whatever her master plan is. He certainly doesn’t hurt people in order to reduce them to helpless lackeys.

“He’ll never work for you,” I say. “And he’ll never swear his loyalty to you.”

She laughs. The sound is high, like a chorus of bells, and beautiful and terrifying. It sends new bursts of fear coursing through my veins. “Of course he will. Now, tell me where I can find him.”

“I don’t know,” I repeat.

Vessa tuts at me like a disappointed teacher. “If that’s how it’s going to be…” In one motion, she whirls and brings up the gun, aiming it at the paint splattered woman. Before the poor lady even has time to react, Vessa fires. A hole appears in the middle of her shocked face and then she crumples to the ground, dead.

Terror slams into me and I bite back a strangled cry.

Kai screams and Vessa turns, aiming at him.

He holds his hands up, biting off his scream. He mutters one word under his breath. I think it’s “please.”

Bile works its way up my esophagus. I swallow a manic laugh that bubbles up behind it. The bile burns on its way back down. I glance surreptitiously at Rayna, who’s holding it together pretty well but does look little a green.

“I’m not playing games with a child,” she says. She drops the gun on the counter. Kai stares at it like it’s a snake. “I’ll give you one hour to decide to help me. And then I’ll start cutting your limbs off until you change your mind or you bleed out so far that I have to make you mine. I’d rather keep you intact and in his power to show my brother how much I love him and how well we can work together, but I will do what needs to be done.”

She turns to Rayna. “I’m going to go check on the others. Clean that up.” She waves at the body of the woman she shot as if she’s talking about a broken glass. Then she sweeps out of the small apartment, the door banging shut behind her. No one breathes until the door to the stairwell outside slams shut.

Another guard, this one in his fifties or so with gray hair and lines on his face, enters the apartment a few moments later. “She sent me up to help,” he says, or starts to say, but the words die on his tongue as he spots the body. “I see,” he finally says.

“You two wrap her up and get her outside,” Rayna says to the Gray-haired Man and Kai. Red stays in the corner, unmoving, but smirking. My stomach turns. I wonder who she was in her previous life, before she became a demon’s lackey. What kind of person she was to find murder amusing.

“No way,” Kai says. “We can’t take a body outside, even in the dark. Someone might see.”

Rayna and the older guy considers this, while Kai pulls out a box of trash bags. I wonder if this is what they bought them for and how many of her own people Vessa has killed—for good—to make a point.

“Why do you stick around?” I ask. “She clearly doesn’t care about you.”

Kai gives me a dirty look. The older man doesn’t meet my eyes but he says, “Sometimes, you gotta do what you gotta do.”

“Like dispose of corpses?”

Kai lifts his gun and I force a laugh, even though my heart sinks like it’s already full of lead and splashes into my stomach. “You can’t shoot me. She doesn’t want you to.”

“Doesn’t mean I can’t,” Kai says. “I can hit you in the arm. Let you suffer for the next hour. Shut. Your. Mouth.”

I’m not entirely convinced he’ll actually do it but I’m also not sure he won’t, so I clamp my mouth shut while they decide what to do with the dead woman. At least they get her covered pretty quickly and I don’t have to look at her anymore. It’s bad enough knowing she’s there. They argue about leaving her there and decide Vessa will be furious and punish them for it.

Finally, they decide to haul the body into the basement. From their conversation, I learn that this old apartment building is abandoned, so there are plenty of places to temporarily hide a human corpse. That thought is not encouraging.

Red’s phone rings. She walks past me, giving me a snide look, before disappearing into the bedroom to take her call. Out of frustration, I try to move my arms again but the plastic is too thick to break by straining against it. All it does is dig into my wrists.

So escape at the moment isn’t going to happen. Maybe I can get one of them to untie me. And, I remind myself, people are on their way to rescue me. Cam will be panicked by now and Gabriel knows I should have been at the warehouse hours ago. Azmos will find me. Or Xanan.
Someone.
They have to, because the alternative is unthinkable.

When Kai and the other guy carry the corpse from the room, Rayna gets a bucket of bleach water and starts scrubbing the wall where part of the woman’s brain splattered. The splatter nauseates me, even from here, where it looks like a reddish gray stain. Rayna gags and coughs a few times as she scrubs. It’s not much of a chance but it might be the only opening I get.

I clear my dry throat. “You’re really going to stay here and wait for her to come back?”