I mentally stomped on the memory of his ex, Lily, adjusting his scarf and quietly caring for him in a dozen small ways when we’d all been in Prague.
Without having to be asked.
In the Grease lens on the world, which was really the only useful metric, Lily was Sandy and I was Rizzo. Rohan claimed to want Rizzo, so he should have known that the idea of me on some Sandy scale of good was laughable. I gazed up at him through half-lidded eyes. “Got something in mind, O wounded man child?”
“Since you asked.” He motioned for me to fan him.
“Yeah, right.”
“So hot,” he whined, taking my hands and moving them ineffectually up and down. It was so humid in the club, my skin was sticky where he held my wrist. “I know these are the wilds of Canada, but don’t you people know about A/C?”
Laughing, I blew air on him. “Poor pampered L.A. baby.”
Motioning for him to follow, I unclasped the chain blocking access to a small stairway and led him up. At the top was a small balcony overlooking the back half of the dance floor and one of the bars. The door behind it had been jacked open to the summer night. A siren cut through the alley below, its flashing lights bouncing off the building walls.
“Befriending bouncers has its perks.” I sat down on the bench, snickering as Rohan turned his face to the breeze wafting over us like a dog sticking its head out a window.
“Bootylicious” started up, and oh yes, I sang along. Rohan scoffed, with a “Figures you anthem’d this,” but I didn’t stop my beauteous phonetic rendition of the song.
That is until the chorus when Rohan spun, breaking into moves worthy of Queen B’s backup dancers. Shimmying, he wriggled closer until, keeping out of touching range, he canted his hips up in a long slow roll, running his hand down along the hard planes of his stomach. His shirt rode up, exposing a stretch of brown skin I wanted to lick. Lower and lower, his hand slid dangerously along his waistline, then lower still.
I sat there, gaping.
Rohan jumped onto the bench, feet planted on either side of me. He tossed his head, flicked off each shoulder, grinning. Clutching the burnished gold railing behind me with one hand, he twerked his ass lower and lower, his falsetto singing note-perfect.
Fuck. Me. Where had he been hiding this?
Rohan ground against me once, twice, and I lunged for him, our mouths crashing together. He tasted of anise seed and gin, his mouth cool from the ice he’d been crunching all night.
I opened my eyes, seeking a deeper connection. Seeking affirmation that he was here and this was real and that the voices trumpeting disbelief that we were a we could go screw themselves.
A flash of something caught the light from the club area below and I stilled.
Rohan’s eyes fluttered open. “Hey,” he murmured.
I craned my neck, twisting around him to peer down at the bar.
The bartender wrestled a bottle away from Naomi. One of Naomi’s hands was curled like a claw, and her expression was frozen in a snarl. She relaxed for a second, her shoulders slumping. The bartender eased up too, which was when she swiped the bottle and cracked him upside the head. He stumbled back against the bar, a few bottles cascading over his shoulder and shattering on the floor in bursts of light.
Pushing Ro off of me, I scrambled to my feet and shot down the stairs.
Most of the patrons were still caught up in their own dealings. They hadn’t had my eagle-eyed view of the club and the press of bodies was too thick for anyone not in the immediate vicinity of the bar to have witnessed the attack. I impatiently shoved my way through the chatting, flirting masses until I broke through to the bar.
The clean-cut bartender pressed a bloody rag to one temple, his body angled as far away as possible from Naomi. Shards of glass speckled his shoulders and alcohol ran down his shirt in sticky rivers.
Naomi sat on the bar top, legs crossed, swinging one slender ankle. She tipped a bottle of Bombay Sapphire back, its blue glass streaked with neon, one side smeared with the bartender’s blood. After a single disturbingly long swig, she shook the final drops into her mouth with a couple of violent jerks.
Then, to my horror, she bit into the glass, licking off whatever remaining gin coated its insides, oblivious to the blood streaming out of her mouth along her psychotic smile.
I stood there frozen, heart racing. Clueless how to process this fucked-up tableau. Naomi’s smirk was loaded with memories of every time she’d ever made me feel inadequate. I’d dealt with shit way worse than this, but there was such a cutting intimacy in her look, like she knew exactly who I was and that I’d never gotten over my weaknesses, that my past self had taken control of my brain. I froze up.
Somebody screamed right as the music cut out, breaking the spell and sending the dance floor into chaos. I ran for Naomi, but my friend Max, one of the bouncers here at the club, reached her first.
Naomi wore a matter-of-fact expression on her face as she calmly explained to Max, curling her bloody tongue around a razor sharp part of the bottle’s neck to catch an errant drop of booze, that the bartender had tried to cut her off and that wasn’t very “Full Tilt.”
Max had never been anything other than an ocean of calm, even when breaking up a stabbing outside the front door. So when this 6’4” brick wall of a man drained of all color, clutching his phone so hard he cracked the screen, my blood ran cold.
But if he couldn’t handle it, who could? My spine straightened. The past was just that, the past. I was Rasha and a hell of a lot stronger now on every level. I gave myself a mental shake and snapped into action. I pried the cell from Max’s death-grip, and called 911. Then I tossed him the phone back with a barked, “Talk to them.”
Light glinted off the jagged bottle neck as Naomi ran her thumb over it, her eyes not leaving mine, blood and gin dripping from her chin and meandering down her collarbone to stain her camisole in a gruesomely pretty bloom. “Nava, Nava, Nava. Always killing my good mood.”
I couldn’t use my magic. There were too many people around. I swallowed, hyping myself up to step closer. “Naomi, put the bottle down.”
She wrinkled her nose at me, waving the broken glass. I stepped back out of neck slashing range. She took another sip, but finding it empty, dropped the bottle on the floor where it shattered.
Shards flew. One stung my ankle and I cursed.
Undeterred, Naomi picked up someone’s abandoned pint of beer and chugged some back.
I reached out for the glass, my body turned somewhat, so she wouldn’t see the new bouncer slowly approaching from her right. Max, still on the phone, kept a wary eye on us all. “Okay, fine. Then how about you share?”
Her expression hardened. “Always gotta steal something, don’t you?”
Screw this. I rushed her, jumping back as she vomited blood, swayed, and went down like a sack of rocks.
The second bouncer caught her before she hit the ground, the beer mug rolling out of her hand onto the floor. “What. The. Fuck?” His pupils were dilated to the point of practically disappearing.
I was willing to bet the answer to that was “demons,” because even with the fentanyl crisis ravaging my beloved Vancouver, this was too insidious to be human evil, but I needed proof.
I left Naomi in Max and this other bouncer’s care and sprinted to the bathroom.
Grimacing, I plunged my hand into the mound of wet paper towels in the overflowing garbage, praying that their sogginess was water-based versus something requiring a tetanus shot. I was fumbling in there shoulder-deep before my fingers closed on the vial. I pulled it out, relieved that despite it being uncorked there was still some of the drug inside. I twisted up some dry paper towel to use as a lid and sealed the drug in.
Laying it carefully on the bathroom counter, I disinfected my arm with scalding water and a shit-ton of soap. By the time I hit the main part of the club again, the house lights were up and employees were directing confused patrons toward the front door, doing their best to keep them fro
m rubbernecking.
Two paramedics strapped Naomi’s prone form onto a gurney.
Christina stood beside them, the orange shock blanket around her shoulders sliding half-off under the force of her hysteria. Rohan had his arm around her, his head close to hers, speaking. She clutched at his shirt front.
I ran over, insides icy. Christina had taken the same drug Naomi had. The drug that had made her chew through glass and slice people. And Rohan was right next to her.
When I reached her, I felt like an idiot. Christina’s eyes were hollow and wide, possessing none of the mania that Naomi’s had. She was just terrified and at the touch of my hand on her shoulder, she fell into my arms, sobbing and repeating, “I’m sorry,” over and over.
“I’ll see if a paramedic will give her a sedative,” Rohan said into my ear.
I gripped his hand. “Tell them she did Sweet Tooth. Let them know she can’t have anything that conflicts with it.” He nodded and I laced my fingers with his, giving him a quick squeeze. He gave me a sympathetic smile and left.
Smoothing Christina’s hair, I absently registered him crossing the room to catch up with the first responders as they sped the gurney out. The gurney that had Naomi strapped to it. Naomi, who just an hour ago had been calling me mean names in the bathroom, who shouldn’t be lying there like this, motionless. “It’s not your fault.”
It was both our faults. Lead twisted my gut. Bad enough that I’d encouraged Naomi to take the night off because I’d implied she had a stick up her ass, but to have mocked her for her past and driven her to do something she wasn’t sure of? I’d taunted the universe and the universe had kicked my ass.
Christina turned her tear-streaked face to mine. “Why did it affect her and not me? What did I do to her?”
Fine questions I didn’t have answers to. Yet. The one thing I was absolutely certain of? If this was some fucked up demon product, then I’d hunt it down and destroy the evil spawn with my bare hands. Cold comfort, but I’d take it where I could find it.
Chapter 2
We didn’t get home for another couple of hours, between telling a harried Max exactly what I’d seen and driving Christina to the hospital to get checked out. Oh, and scrolling through her contacts to find her brother Henry’s number. Christina and I had hung out at university so I’d heard her talk about Henry, but we’d never met. I explained who I was and asked him to come to get his sister, since once the sedative she’d finally been given in the ER kicked in, my friend couldn’t do much more than sluggishly wave at her phone.
Once he’d arrived, Henry assured me he’d get hold of Naomi’s family and keep me posted. I hadn’t been able to get any information out of the nurses about Naomi beyond “she’s in surgery and being looked after.”
I practically staggered out the ER doors, wrapping my arms around myself against the wind lashing at my denim jacket. The silence of deep night would have been a welcome relief except the earlier thump of the bass at the club still pounded in my temples and rang in my ears. My shoulders were wound tight; fatigue clawed at my eyes and brain, making everything gritty and dull.
I trudged across the parking lot. “I’m so tired that my feet don’t want to feet.”
Rohan was a champ. He got me to his precious ’67 Shelby Mustang, settled me in, and cranked the heat.
“Thank you.” I yawned, my head falling sideways against the window.
“For what?”
I pushed a dark brown strand of hair of out my mouth. “Sticking around.”
Rohan started the ignition with a quick flick of his wrist. The motor roared to life, settling into a purr as he pulled out of the parking spot. His biceps flexed as he shifted gears. “Yeah, I was gonna go off and leave you. Dummy.”
“Remember, you are a callous bastard.” I yawned again, my mouth opening so wide that my ears popped. “Can you swing by the house?”
“It’s late.”
“I know.”
He shrugged, and ten minutes later, drove around a quiet residential block so we could check out Dr. Gelman’s sister’s place. Dr. Esther Gelman was the witch that had given me the magic ceremony to get Ari inducted and her sister Rivka lived here in Vancouver.
Like every single other time that I’d come by, the place was locked up tight. No car in the car port, no change to the closed curtains. After I’d kind of broken in and damaged the place a few weeks ago, someone had set a new and powerful ward on the property. Anyone who got too close had the overwhelming urge to go elsewhere. It even affected me to some degree. I was overcome by a strong desire to go home and do my laundry. The ridiculousness of that idea generally reminded me it was magic at work and I could fight it, but damn, it was tough.
I had to find a way to contact Dr. Gelman, but could only think of the same idea that I was loath to do. It would have to wait. The Sweet Tooth situation was the more immediate concern anyway.
I rolled down the window to get some frigid air on my face and punched in the number for Brotherhood HQ in Jerusalem to let them know I had a case to investigate. The man I spoke to, older and with a French-Canadian accent, took the details about Sweet Tooth, assigned me a case number, and wished me luck.
“Huh.” I looked at the phone after he’d hung up. “That was kind of anti-climatic.”
Ro flicked on his turning signal. “Did you expect good fireworks or bad, phoning in your first mission?”
“Not sure. But note that I’m the hunter of record in charge, Snowflake.” That was pretty cool.
He sighed. “Such domination issues.”
My chuckle turned into a yawn, my lids fluttering shut.
I woke up to the emergency parking brake being engaged in front of Demon Club, the mansion housing the Vancouver chapter of the Brotherhood of David, that was located in the Southlands area of Vancouver’s west side. Trust me, now that I was the first female member of this secret society, changing the name was on my To-Do List, though given the rest of the shit on there, like exposing duplicitous rabbis on the Executive, it kind of lacked urgency.
I stumbled up the front stairs. Heavy cloud cover obscured the few stars that could usually be seen. Without moonlight, the gardens were formless shapes. The house itself was quiet; no lamps shone out the beveled bay windows, no smoke escaped the multiple chimneys. The forest surrounding the house was still and dark.
I kicked off my chunky emerald heels in the foyer, sighing dreamily as my toes flattened out against the cool tile. Rohan tried to steer me up the curving stairs to my bedroom, but I shook his hand off. “Not yet. Get me the hawkweed and meet me in the kitchen? Please?”
My nap had only made my body realize how badly it craved sleep, and even slapping my cheeks as I shuffled down the shadowy hallway over the intricate inlaid wood floor failed to wake me up. I stepped through the arched doorway into the kitchen.
The under-the-cupboard lights were on, casting warm lemon pools over the dark granite counter. The room smelled faintly of garlic, which got my stomach rumbling, which led me to the brilliant idea of protein as a pick-me-up.
After placing my frozen meal of choice in the stainless steel microwave that matched the industrial fridge and glass-topped stove, I examined the vial with the remaining crystals. There was nothing special about the container. Made of glass, it had a label with the words “Sweet Tooth” written in script.
The microwave went “bing.” I pulled my TV dinner out, puncturing the plastic wrap with a set of keys that I found on the counter.
An aggrieved sigh alerted me to Rohan’s presence. “All the options open to you and you go for that.” He poked at the plastic tray like he was scared the contents might bite him.
“I’ll have you know this is the finest Fried Chickeny Delight available in No Name Form.” I bit into a chicken leg. “Huh. You know what it doesn’t taste like?” I asked, munching.
“Chicken?”
I dropped the leg back on the tray. “Good guess. It’s chicken-esque.”
“Technically,
it’s chicken-y.”
“Yeah, I’m not sure if ‘-y’ is a step up or down in the culinary world from ‘-esque.’” I crossed over to the fridge, pulled out the small jug of maple syrup, and doused the poultry-facsimiles like I was putting out a fire.
“Please eat real food. I honestly don’t know how you’re still alive.”
“Preservatives, obviously. And quit being such a food snob. This is real.” I tapped the jug. “One hundred percent real maple syrup, because I am Canadian and civilized.”
“Half-right.”
I took another bite. “Oh yeah. Way better now. Okay, gimme the spell stuff.” I licked off my fingers, wiping them on a piece of paper towel. Millennials–major factor in the demise of the napkin industry. True fact.
Rohan tossed a Ziploc bag with a mixture of salts and chopped up bits of yellow Snowdonia Hawkweed onto the counter. The plant was incredibly rare, but what was scarcity when you had a boyfriend with a fat bank account from his rock star days? How fat, I had no idea. He’d assured me he didn’t have billionaire status, but I suspected that multi-millionaire was still within the realm of possibility. I mean, dude had been the lead singer of Fugue State Five, international chart-topping, emo band extraordinaire. That said, multi-millionaire in Vancouver would scarcely have bought this monstrosity of a chapter house we lived in, so I clearly was not with him for his money. Real Housewives of Vancouver had never been an aspiration of mine. Besides, Ro could have been poor as dirt and he’d still be a prime catch.
I dumped the mixture in water, stirring it with the thin paintbrush that he’d thoughtfully brought. “Such a good sidekick.”
“What happens when you use the ‘s’ word?” Rohan sealed up the Ziplock.
“You tackle me.”
He stuffed the baggie in his pocket. “And what happens when you admit that I’m Batman?”
“You tackle me.”
Rohan quirked an eyebrow. “That all?”
The Unlikeable Demon Hunter Collection: Books 1-6: A Complete Paranormal Romantic Comedy Series Page 86
