by Devon Monk
I unzipped my jacket. “Uh-huh. Are you done trying to lure me into a deal? Because you are terrible at it.”
A scowl crossed her pretty face, clouds storming over the sunlight of her (fake) beauty.
For the first time since I walked into the room, she really studied me. Looked me up and down. I had a funny feeling she looked into me too, but that was probably just another illusion.
“One last chance,” I said. “Exit Ordinary peacefully, or I’ll compel you to do so.”
Her gaze locked with mine, stilled and hot, like metal burning.
Yes, I could compel her. I’d done a lot of research into all things demon lately.
“You can’t,” she said.
“Want to try me?”
Some of the shine on her dimmed. She was still a stunning beauty, but that influence or charisma she’d been projecting was gone.
“I see what he sees in you, Myra Reed.”
I didn’t know what she was talking about, or, if I wanted to be honest with myself, I didn’t want to know what she was talking about. But it was interesting that she knew my name now.
Or she had from the get-go and had only pulled it out to make me think she had dug around inside my head for it.
“Just in case you’ve forgotten,” I said evenly, “I asked you who called you and I asked you to leave Ordinary.”
She shook her head. “This isn’t Ordinary.”
I resisted the urge to glance around the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what I’d think I’d see. A tornado carrying the restroom away like a one-way ticket to Oz? A galaxy of stars and time, Tardis-style? Trickling neon-green numbers Matrixing through the air?
Okay, I was a bit of a closet geek along with being a nerd. But the room was still concrete and dark green metal, lit by the light seeping through pine-needle-covered skylights. I was in Ordinary. I could feel it in my soles. We Reeds had been chosen by the gods to protect their vacation town, and I felt a connection to this soil that I’d never felt anywhere else in the world.
When I was here, I knew it. Ordinary grounded me, held me strong. Ordinary knew me, and I knew it right back.
“This is Ordinary,” I said. “And demons are not allowed.”
“Oh? I’ve been here for years, Reed. Long before this town had this name.”
Demons lied as naturally as breathing. She was lying.
“Why don’t we take this outside?” I said.
The scowl again, briefer this time. “Are you afraid we’ll be bothered here? Or maybe you’re bothered? There are so many ways I could help you, Myra. So much knowledge I can obtain for you.”
She still wasn’t moving from that spot. “What do you mean, this isn’t Ordinary?”
“What?”
“You just told me this isn’t Ordinary.”
“Did I?”
“Innocence doesn’t suit you,” I said.
“It could.” She laughed. “Why, after all these years, are you here, Myra Reed? Why have you come to this one place, this one day, at this one hour?”
“You have nothing I want.”
She shrugged. “A police officer, a Reed walks through the door with a gun at her side. There must be something you want. Maybe someone?”
I closed the distance between us, then paced a slow circle around her. She didn’t move, just stood there waiting until I stopped in front of her again.
The ground beneath my feet felt solid. Magnet and metal solid. This was Ordinary.
I stretched one foot out six inches and placed the toe of my boot right in front of the demon’s foot.
Her eyes narrowed.
It felt like the ground was pulled away from my foot. As if my boot hovered there over an empty expanse, even though logically I could also feel the concrete of the floor I pressed against.
There was soil there. There was ground there. But there was no Ordinary there.
Interesting.
“This is a crossroads,” I said.
The demon rolled her eyes. “Why couldn’t one of the stupid sisters have come here instead?”
“You’re a crossroads demon.”
She tipped her head down just a bit. “At your service.”
“Who puts a crossroads in the middle of a bathroom?”
“It wasn’t always a bathroom. It was a crossroads first. The city planners didn’t pay attention when they carved out this viewpoint. I tried to warn them.” She nodded, very seriously. “So I offered them a deal or two. A couple of them saw things my way.” She winked. “Wasn’t that fun?”
I rocked back on my heel, taking weight off my foot, then crossed my arms over my chest. “You aren’t allowed in Ordinary.”
“We just went over this. Here, this space”—she waved at the square foot or so around her—“is not a part of Ordinary. You can’t make me leave because, technically, I am not even inside Ordinary.”
“You’ve been making deals with people in this bathroom.”
“Maybe a few. A little pat on the back here, a little spurned-lover revenge there.” She shrugged. “A girl’s gotta make rent, you know?”
I did not know, since I never dealt in souls for currency.
But she was right about one thing: I needed information. I’d hit a wall in finding a way to banish Bathin and take my sister’s soul away from him.
“Why aren’t you in the records?”
“It’s your family’s job to keep track of who and what is wandering around this place. Not mine.”
“What is the price for your deals?”
“Why, are you interested?”
I stared at her, and she clicked the pen on the board again.
“Fine. Crossroads deals run the gamut. Sometimes it’s a favor for a favor. Sometimes it’s a life or a soul. And sometimes I’ve been known to extend a certain amount of…charity.”
I snorted.
“It’s true! Is there a secret desire you want, Myra Reed? A lover to hold you? A companion to walk with you through this life? Would you like to finally put down your burdens and lean on someone strong enough to hold you? Strong enough to love you? No matter what shameful faults you try to hide? Do you want someone who would live a nice, reasonable, calm, organized life?”
The shock of her words, so close to how I really felt, what I really wanted, lanced beneath my skin, zapping down to my feet and gluing me to the ground.
She couldn’t actually know all that. This was just what a crossroads demon did—they dug for vulnerabilities. It was what all demons did. It was why they could never be trusted. Why they had never been allowed in Ordinary.
Supernaturals in Ordinary were sworn to live peacefully with each other. Sworn to do no harm to any other supernatural or person or god in town. Demons all refused to sign any contracts that would hold them to the town rules.
Bathin had gotten around that by trading my dad’s spirit for my sister’s soul, and he’d done the additional trick of saving someone’s life once he was inside Ordinary.
“I don’t make deals with crossroads demons,” I said with no hint of weakness. “I do know how to get rid of them. I also know how to destroy the crossroads. Permanently. Because it’s my family’s job to keep track of that.”
Her eyes flashed fire. Then she smiled. “They say the Reed sisters are born to the elements. Eldest earth, steady and strong. Youngest water, flexible and changing. But you…you’re fire, aren’t you, Myra Reed? Burning deep and hot. Hidden beneath layers and layers of normalcy you hope no one will dig deep enough through to uncover the real you. The anger. The hatred.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Nope. Try again.”
She frowned. “No, you’re fire. I can see that. It radiates from you even though your exterior is”—she waved one manicured nail at me—“that.”
“That?”
“Cold. Implacable. Calm.”
I shrugged. It didn’t matter how she saw me—fire, earth, or strawberry milkshake. She was changing the subject, shifting the conversation to try to trap me int
o making a deal.
Yeah, that wasn’t going to happen.
“Well, this wasn’t at all enjoyable,” I said. “And since you’re not willing to answer my questions, I’ll just destroy your crossroads now.”
I reached into my coat, where a few vials of crystals, salts, rare oils, and other focusing tools were stashed. They were sealed, but a demon as old as she had to be must sense them.
I didn’t know why I’d put these particular things in my coat this morning, but they were just what I needed.
Thank you, family gift.
“Wait!” She held up her clipboard.
I paused, hand still inside my coat.
Her gaze was riveted on my hand. “Ask. I’ll tell you what I can. I promise you.”
“How can a soul contract be broken?”
Her eyes went wide. “I can’t tell you that.”
“All right.” I pulled out three vials. She visibly paled.
“Every deal hinges on different rules,” she said in a rush. “Every demon seals deals differently. The ways to break them are just as varied. No one true answer.”
I knew that. I’d done my research. “I want to know how one specific demon seals his deals.”
She pulled her shoulders back. “I don’t know how every demon handles their deals. I don’t know every demon.”
“I think you might have heard of him. Bathin.”
She stopped breathing. Just. Stopped.
Wind outside the building shook the trees. Pine needles shed in soft rain against the skylights.
“The prince?”
I’d run across that title attached to his name in a couple of the obscurer texts I’d been reading, but hadn’t been able to confirm that it was an actual title and not some sort of self-aggrandizing description.
“Is there another demon by that name?”
She shook her head.
“Tell me how to break a soul deal Bathin made.”
“I can’t.”
“Well, that’s too bad.” I flicked the top of one of the vials with my short thumbnail. The scent of pine sap and something deeper, smokier, filled the space.
Her gaze ticked over to the vial, and it wasn’t fear that filled her face. It was anger.
“He’ll kill me.”
“Not my problem.”
“It’s not just a simple answer.” She was trying to buy time. Probably trying to distract me until she could come up with some way to get out of this situation.
“Uh-huh.” I poured a drop of the scented oil on the ground to one side of her, then took a couple steps so that I was behind her and tipped out another drop. She tracked me. And yes, I was hitting the compass points correctly. North, east, next would be south, and when I was in front of her again, west.
No action with a demon, especially a demon limited in their location, could begin without some kind of containment. That was just the way of it, and why all the books and TV shows had the heroes drawing out pentagrams on the floor or creating circles of salt.
All good fictions held a grain of truth.
“He’s strong,” the demon said. “Stronger than I am. Stronger than most of us. And when he claims a soul…it’s dangerous to even try to take it away from him.”
I paused, the vial tipped. I hadn’t let the oil drop to the final compass point. “Dangerous I can handle. Tell me how to do it.”
She bit her lip and stared over my shoulder like someone was going to come through the door to save her. Not a chance. It was February, wet, cold, and in the middle of the week. No one was going to choose this roadside bathroom when they could stop in at a Starbucks or the McDonald’s in town and use the facilities.
“I have everything with me to banish you for good,” I said. “And it will take next to nothing to close down this crossroads.”
That did it. Her gaze snapped back to my face. A light sheen of sweat glossed her forehead.
Demons, all of them, had the ability to change their appearance to whatever pleased them—which was usually whatever they needed to be to manipulate marks into selling their souls.
I’d never seen a demon sweat.
She might be putting it all on—making me think she was nervous, panicked. Or there might be enough on the line if she told me Bathin’s secrets that she was legitimately terrified.
My gut said she was terrified.
“It’s a spell,” she said. “Not everyone can do it. I don’t…I don’t even know if you can.”
“Let me worry about that. Tell me how it’s done.”
“Swiftly, snip by snip, ruby and black blades in a loving hand.”
I knew the poetic words were just a cover for what one needed for the spell. Double-speak to confuse the ingredients one needed to gather. “Specifics.”
She pressed her lips together. “It’s…it’s all I can say.”
“Is this a spell in a book? Text on a stone? Tell me how to follow through.”
“It is written. One page in one book.”
“I want that page. I want that book.”
“I can’t.”
“You will. Bring me everything I need—blades, hands, snips, and that one page of that one book.”
“You don’t understand how dangerous it is. I can’t. I can’t.” She was visibly shaking now.
A tiny part of me felt sorry for her. But she was the first lead that pointed me at a specific spell, a specific way to break Bathin’s hold on Delaney’s soul since I’d started looking months ago. I was not about to apologize for doing everything I could to keep my sister safe.
“By tomorrow, midnight,” I said, “I expect to see a package on my doorstep, otherwise—”
The door swung open and her eyes flew wide.
“Myra,” a man’s voice rumbled, low and rich, lava over gold. “What a surprise to find you here.”
Chapter Two
I didn’t have to look over my shoulder to know who had just walked in the room. The scent of him—maybe cologne, maybe the fragrance of his skin—was warm with cloves and notes of something too masculine to be sweet, like aged brandy and smoke and warm candle wax. His presence burned like the sun cleaving a clouded sky.
He was heat; he was strength. He was a force that washed over me, prickled against my skin, drew me to him with a pull that left me shivering. A pull I had never felt with any other person or creature before.
“And here we are. Together,” Bathin said.
Heat kindled deep in my chest and spread down to my fingertips, to my feet, pooling in slow, lazy eddies low in my stomach.
It annoyed me that he brought that kind of reaction out of my body, that kind of want. Annoyed and confused me.
I didn’t like him.
Liar.
He had held my dad’s soul captive, tricked my sister into selling her soul for Ordinary’s safety. He had tricked us all into letting him stay here.
I could never like anyone who was that manipulative and thought only about his own desires, his own pleasure.
Liar.
He had done nothing to redeem himself in my eyes.
He saved Ben. He saved Ryder. Brought a bottle of wine on Christmas Eve and spent the night talking with me. Not pushing, not manipulating. Just a few hours of comfort, not being alone for once, if only for a short time. It was nice. More than nice. It was balm over a hell of a year. It was comfort. And so unexpected.
So needed.
I forcibly pushed those memories aside. He was a demon. Everything he did was for his own gain. Wasn’t it?
The doubt in the back of my mind remained no matter how much I ignored it.
I was attracted to Bathin. Had been from the moment I’d first seen him with Delaney. Well, second moment. At first I’d wanted to kill him for taking my sister’s soul, no matter how good looking or sweet talking he was.
Letting him into my home on Christmas to talk the night away had left me even more confused about who he was and what he was trying to do here in Ordinary.
I had, fo
r a few hours, forgotten he was a demon. Had forgotten he was my foe.
Had forgotten I shouldn’t want to want him, shouldn’t like to like him.
That night had almost, disastrously, ended on a kiss before I’d remembered that the handsome man he appeared to be was a facade over the very unlikable creature he actually was.
“Bathin.” I didn’t turn toward him. “Women’s restroom. You’re not allowed in here.”
He chuckled, and I shivered as it set off sparks under my skin.
“Oh, this is not the first women’s restroom I’ve ever been in. They are so useful for certain kinds of secrets, after all.”
“Are you here to share your secrets, Bathin?” I asked with my bored, but slightly threatening cop voice.
His footsteps came nearer, hissing as they scraped across the sand-covered concrete.
“I have nothing to hide,” he said. “But you? Here you are, talking to a demon. A crossroads demon. Who is doing work where she isn’t welcome and will not be tolerated.”
Zjoon made a little eep sound and went from a healthy color to something that would make a deceased fish look chipper.
Bathin stopped next to me.
I sighed and glanced at him.
He had on a pair of jeans that were practically painted over his thick thigh muscles, long legs, and narrow hips. A lightweight Henley was unbuttoned at the collar, the sleeves pushed back to reveal tanned, defined forearms. The shirt clung to his chest and flat stomach like a well-choreographed advertisement for men’s fashion.
It was the first time I’d seen him in something other than slacks and a button-down. Yes, it looked good on him.
Dark hair slicked back, a strong nose and cut jaw, Bathin was every heartthrob of my fantasies rolled up into one lickable package.
Not that I was thinking about licking him. Or about his package.
“Prince Bathin.” Zjoon’s voice sketched a bare whisper. “What an honor—”
“Now, now, let’s not fall so quickly into falsehoods,” he said. “I know you, Zjoon. I know your clan. And this”—he shrugged—“has nothing to do with honor.”
