Don't Date Demons

by Sophie Stern

  There’s another part that’s worried losing Daisy is going to be as terrible as losing my family.

  Logically, I know it’s not the same.

  But my heart doesn’t know that.

  I can protest all I want. I can scream and shout that Daisy is just a random person to me, but she’s not. The reality is that Daisy and I have kept one another safe for years. Losing her is going to be something that I feel very deeply.

  Am I really ready for that?

  Is that something I can really prepare for?

  Despite all the harsh words, I know that I can’t do any of this without her. Before we hooked up, I was just an ordinary thief. Now, I’m the kind of thief who can infiltrate the Mountain. That kind of progress doesn’t happen without a team.

  An hour passes and then another. Daisy and I both grow restless as we wait for the buyer. The entire city seems to be alive and moving around. Every so often, I go to the windows and peek out. Police patrols seem heavier than usual.

  “Any chatter?”

  “They’re all looking for it,” Daisy says. “They aren’t saying that, but that’s what they’re doing.”

  “What are they saying?”

  “That a human girl is wanted for questioning.”

  “Description?”

  “Nah,” Daisy shakes her head. “Your shades screwed with their facial recognition program, so they don’t have much to go off except that you’re a girl. For all they know, you might not be. You could be a dude who dresses well.”

  “Why, thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  A few minutes later, I hear a distinct beep and I jump to my feet.

  Daisy does, too.

  “Is it him?” I ask.

  “It’s him.”

  “What did he say?”

  Daisy grins and looks over at me.

  “Tonight,” she says. “This is it.”

  She looks more excited, more relieved than I’ve ever seen her.

  “What are you going to do with your half?” I ask, sitting down to pull on my boots. I never wear them in the apartment if I can help it. The floors are too nice and we pulled too many hours working on putting this place together. If I scuff up the floor because I’m too lazy to take off my boots, I’ll never forgive myself.

  “Me, husband, and baby are going far away,” Daisy says with a smile. “He’s not going to believe it.”

  “You didn’t tell him?”

  “Nope. We don’t talk about work. Ever.”

  “Wait, so do you know what he does?” It seems like something that would come up at some point.

  “Not a clue,” Daisy shrugs.

  “That doesn’t bother you?”

  “He’s home to take care of the baby when I need him. That’s enough for me. You’ll understand when you’re married.”

  “Maybe,” I say, but I’m not sure if I would ever be comfortable with that kind of relationship. She doesn’t even know what his job is? I mean, yeah, Daisy and I aren’t exactly on the right side of the law, but that doesn’t mean anything. Right? It doesn’t mean we’re bad people. It just means we’ve been put in a hard situation.

  Everyone has.

  Living in the shadow of the Mountain in City 3140 means that everything we do is designed to keep us alive for one more day. This city is brutal, and it will take you out in a heartbeat if you let it. The darkness overwhelms all of us and that’s why Daisy and I are both ready to leave.

  “What are you going to do about him?” Daisy asks.

  Her eyes are glued on the guy I saved. He’s resting on the bed, eyes closed. Part of me wonders if I should cuff him to the bed, but he’s no prisoner. If he wakes up and leaves while I’m gone, it doesn’t really matter. It’s no love lost.

  I look at Daisy and raise an eyebrow. She wants to know what I’m going to do with him? Hell, even I don’t know what I’m going to do. Saving someone wasn’t in the plan for the plan.

  “I know I said I didn’t want to know,” Daisy softens her voice. “But I can’t help but wonder.”

  “Wonder what?”

  “If this is the first step in you getting your happily ever after,” she says with a soft smile.

  “Doubt it,” I shrug. “I’ll probably just wait until he wakes up and boot his ass out. We have to come back anyway to clean up.” I look at the man and wonder what his story is and how he really ended up in the clutches of a vampire.

  He’s handsome, attractive. Even being beat to smithereens, there was no hiding just how beautiful the guy on my bed is, and there’s a little part of me that wishes Daisy’s sentimental side could reign.

  That’s not in the cards for me, though.

  Not tonight.

  After we get our cash, we’ll come back and destroy everything in the apartment. We won’t do it before we leave in case something goes wrong. Daisy and I are careful, though. We’ve never had anything go wrong when we go meet with a buyer.

  Then again, we always insist on very precise terms.

  First off, we never take credit and we never take anything that could be linked to our bank accounts. Even now with the vampires running wild, the world is run with cold, hard cash. You can use a microchip linked to your bank account to pay for anything you want, but that means your purchases are tracked, monitored, and governed by the vampires.

  No thank you.

  Second, we always choose the location. We make sure we’ve got it monitored and covered by our cameras. We make sure we can see who is there and what to expect. We never walk into a situation without knowing exactly what we’re facing. There are only two of us, after all. We can’t afford to risk our lives.

  Today is going to be the final payoff for everything we’ve worked toward. We’re going to meet with the buyer, hand over the blade, and Daisy and I will each walk away with a suitcase full of crisp hundred-dollar bills.

  Then we’ll walk right into our futures.

  “Ready to go?” She asks.

  I take one more look at the man I saved and then I look at the blade once more.

  “Ready,” I agree. “Let’s do this.”

  Chapter Three

  Harrison

  Everything hurts. Body parts I didn’t know I had blaze with pain. My throat hurts. My legs hurt. My stomach fucking burns. I open my eyes and instantly close them again. Hell, even my eyelids hurt. They’re swollen, but I suppose that’s to be expected when you take a total ass beating like the one I got.

  Fuck.

  I try to sit up. Nausea overwhelms me, but I push through until I’m in a sitting position. Luckily, I heal quickly. In a few hours, I’ll be as good as new. Even being an Earthborn demon without powers, I’m still able to heal unusually fast. It’s quite nice.

  I try to remember what happened and how I ended up here. Where am I, anyway? Once again, I open my eyes. This time, I force myself to hold them open. I look around. It’s a small space. A studio apartment, maybe? There are no decorations, no pictures, no mementos. This place is cold as fucking ice.

  For a minute, I worry that I wandered into the den of a serial killer, but then I see the Mountain uniforms sitting neatly on the sofa and I remember the woman who saved me.

  I don’t know her name.

  She definitely saved me, though. There’s no way around it. Without her, I would be dead right now. I’d literally be swimming with the fishes because the vamps would have slaughtered me and dumped by body in the river. I don’t even blame them. They’re just doing what they’ve always been told to do.

  They aren’t really thinking for themselves.

  The problem with being a supernatural being is that there aren’t really any guidebooks on how to do it. Being a human is easy. You go to school, get a job, and start a family. There are a series of steps that every human person is supposed to take. There’s even a specific order in which you’re intended to take those steps.

  It’s quite endearing, actually.

  But being a vampire is different.

>   One day you’re human and the next day, you’re craving blood. Instead of going to the grocery store and splurging on cupcakes, you go to the grocery store and splurge on cashiers. It’s a nasty business, being a vampire, but somebody’s got to do it, I suppose. Then again, what do I know?

  I’m not one of them.

  Caught in a world that’s not my own, I live among the vampires and the humans. For years, I thought I was doing okay, but then Zax walked into my life. He showed me how much greater things could be if there was no leader in charge of the vampire world.

  Little did I know that Zax wasn’t actually interested in getting rid of the King of the Mountain.

  He just wanted to take his place.

  With a growl, I push myself to my feet and look around. I fight back dizziness and move to the little kitchen area. There’s a water bottle on the counter. It’ll do. I take a sip and do everything I can not to puke it right back up.

  “Baby steps, Harrison,” I tell myself. It’s not a lot, but it’ll have to do. I’ve never been particularly good at the self pep-talks, but everyone has to start somewhere, right?

  I take another look around. There’s the bed where I was resting, a table with chairs in the kitchen area, a little sofa, two desks with chairs, and a dresser.

  No sword.

  No girl.

  This place feels strange.

  Everything about it just seems a little bit off.

  For one thing, I can usually smell a lot about a human when I’m in their place. I can scent their moods and their routines. I can tell what they like to eat for breakfast and what kind of shampoo they use. I’m guessing that a quick peek in the bathroom will reveal that there isn’t shampoo at all because this isn’t a place where people live.

  It’s a place where people visit.

  So why am I here?

  The woman who rescued me was soft and kind. She was a fierce fucking warrior, but she smelled so fucking good. She was gentle. She went out of her damn way to rescue me, which is strange because I had the distinct impression she was running from something.

  Or toward someone.

  I passed out at some point. I have no idea if she threw me into a van or if she carried me here on a bike. Seriously, I’d love to know exactly how I ended up in the middle of what must definitely be some sort of safe house because there’s really nothing here.

  Except the laptops.

  Two computers sit side-by-side. They’re both closed, but that doesn’t mean anything. Maybe someone got excited and forgot to lock their computer before they closed it. Maybe their password is easy to guess. I’m a little bit of a computer expert, which is exactly why Zax wanted to keep me on for so long. As a fallen angel, he’s kind of a pretentious asshole, but he’s terrible with human technology.

  He’s got to get help where he can.

  There’s no one here now. Presumably, the girl who saved me doesn’t want to kill me, but maybe the laptops will give me a clue as to where she’s gone or who she is. I’m not under the impression that she’s off to anywhere she’s going to need a gallant rescue from, but perhaps I can learn a little bit about my savior before she returns.

  I open the first laptop only to find it requires both facial recognition and a fingerprint. Clever. This model is state of the art and I’ve only seen it a few times. Whoever uses this is smart, but I’m smarter. I hit a combination of buttons that brings up the option to enter an emergency password for backdoor access. A few swipes of the keyboard after that and I’m in.

  The desktop looks fairly mundane at first glance. There is a normal-looking background of an ocean: a remnant of a time long ago. No one has seen an ocean in years. I don’t even know if they exist anymore. With the division of cities and the overgrowth of the jungles, no one travels between cities anymore. At least, no one that wants to stay alive.

  When angels and demons came to the world, they brought chaos. Everyone assumed that it would be the end of civilization, but what really happened was that civilization grew dark and haunted. Vampires came out of the shadows, shifters went feral, and humanity learned to hide in the darkness.

  Now the world is in chaos, and this picture of an ocean is a piece of something that was lost long ago: hope.

  This desktop might look mundane.

  It might look plain.

  But nobody has that strong of a security system on their computer if they aren’t hiding something.

  I click through a few boring, meaningless files until I see the one that’s going to give me my answers. I click the file and open it.

  “Got you,” I murmur. I wondered how that girl had such a powerful weapon, but I didn’t get a good look at it. I didn’t realize she had the blade. No wonder those vamps went down so fast when she hit them. She had the Sword of Edith.

  Until tonight, I didn’t know that the thing really existed.

  It was sort of a legend down among demons. Everyone talked about it like it was the one thing that could keep the vampires at bay, but we all knew it was total bullshit. When I grew up, I stopped worrying about finding magical items because everything in City 3140 kind of sucks anyway.

  But this girl, apparently, didn’t stop looking.

  She found it.

  Not only did she find it, but she fucking stole it.

  Brilliant.

  The files on the computer have blueprints for the Mountain. There are files showing where the cameras are, where the exits are, and what the guard schedules are. This is all very detailed information that must have taken weeks or even months to prepare. I’m impressed. She’s a thief, I take it, and a fucking good one, from the looks of it.

  But there must be two thieves, right?

  Perhaps one is a boyfriend or lover.

  Two thieves, two laptops.

  It only makes sense.

  I finish clicking through the files, but I don’t really find anything else of use. Time to try the other laptop. By this point, my eyes are still swollen, but I’ve managed to find a way to comfortably keep them open with worrying too much about it. My eyes are now a distraction, but they aren’t horrifyingly awful to deal with, either.

  Besides, I’m a demon.

  I’ll heal.

  The second laptop is a little easier to get into, but it’s no less detailed when it comes to information about the sword. So, the two thieves were in it together, I take it, and tonight was the night they grabbed the sword. No wonder the girl was near the Mountain and was able to grab me. She must have been leaving after getting her prize.

  Why, then, did she take the time to rescue me?

  I don’t really understand.

  If I was stealing a ridiculously magical item, I wouldn’t be taking detours to save people, especially not someone out of my species. Then again, maybe she didn’t realize what I am. Maybe she thought she was helping out another human.

  With a sigh, I keep clicking through the other files. I can’t find much about what the thieves want the weapon for, but I do discover that the owner of the second computer has a personal folder on it with a few random pictures.

  I click through them, not recognizing anything until I see one of two girls. One of them is the woman who saved me. Her bright blonde hair is so light that it’s almost white. She’s with a friend who has dark hair and deep brown eyes. The women are like night and day. One has a smile: the other, a frown. One has bright, bubbling eyes. The other seems more cautious. Together, they look like an unstoppable duo.

  Are they the thieves?

  Are they a team?

  The next picture causes a wave of nausea to roll through my gut as I feel a sudden pain pushing through me.

  This is a picture of the other thief: the one who didn’t rescue me. This picture shows the girl with the dark hair. In this photo, she is smiling. She’s smiling like the whole world is hers because she’s not alone in this picture. She’s with her family. This is a picture of her with her husband and child. The kid, I don’t recognize, but I know the man staring at the
camera.

  I’d know those eyes anywhere.

  Zax may be a man of pain and horror, but he’s also a family man, apparently, because he has a wife and a child.

  I guess escaping him is going to be harder than I thought.

  Chapter Four

  Amy

  “Let me do the talking,” Daisy says when we start to near the meeting point.

  I’m not about to argue with her.

  Am I shy?

  Not particularly.

  Do I want to be responsible for talking to the dude who’s about to hand over more than a million dollars?

  Also no.

  In a situation like this, a lot could go wrong. Daisy and I usually split up our meetings. When we go to see a client, one girl stays behind to handle things from the tech end and the other goes to collect the cash. There is so much fucking money at stake tonight, though, that we agreed on a couple of terms.

  Number one?

  We meet him.

  Alone.

  The buyer meets us and no one else. The area we chose is dark and secluded, but there aren’t many spaces where he could stash a crew around. The warehouses that surround the docks are mostly empty, used only by fallen angels for fights and shenanigans. The particular dock we chose to meet at has been abandoned for weeks, by our count. We shouldn’t be disturbed when we meet this guy.

  Besides, Daisy has cameras planted all over this place and they’re all looped to the feed that flows both to her wrist unit and to my shades. We’ve both got visualization that no one is at the dock yet. If there was someone moving into place, we’d be able to see. We’re both armed to the teeth and besides, I’ve got the knife.

  I don’t know if Daisy has realized just how powerful this thing is. Obviously, it’s magical, at least on some level. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have knocked those vamps down. Not as quickly as it did. I still can’t shake the feeling that there’s more to this buy than I realize. Something is missing and it’s bothering me more than I care to admit.

  Usually, I’m on top of these, but I have a strange feeling about this entire situation.

  I knew the knife had a magical quality, but suddenly, I’m wondering exactly why this buyer wants this knife so badly.