A Fistful of Evil: An Urban Fantasy Novel (Madison Fox, Illuminant Enforcer Book 1)

by Rebecca Chastain

  “I’m at home,” I said. “Which is where you’re normally at on a Sunday.”

  “Pwshaw! I work too much. I need to have more fun. Mr. Hunk here agrees, don’t you, sexy-pants?”

  “Where are you?” I demanded. I was wide awake now. Bridget didn’t understand the concept of “work too much.” I trotted down the hall for my shoes, wincing as my bruised feet hit the carpet.

  “A bar. The one with the bird.”

  My hands froze over my tennis shoes. “The Golden Goose?” I guessed, heart sinking.

  “That’s it, darling. We’ve got a link thesh tight. A bond. Like sisters. Tell me what I’m thinking right—hum? What’s that, hot buns? Oh. Hang on. Dice?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Mr. Sexy wants to talk to you. You remember him? We met him the other night. Oooh, pushy, pushy, hunkalicious. Gimme a kiss and I’ll give you the phone.”

  There was a loud, wet smack, then a rustle as the phone exchanged hands. I remained frozen, crouched over my tennis shoes, dread doubling gravity’s pull.

  “Hi, Dicey-wicy.” Tim’s smooth voice made my fingers spasm around Medusa. “I know you’re there; I can hear you breathing.”

  Black dots danced in my vision. “If you hurt so much as one hair on her head—”

  “You’ll what? Stick me with another pet wood? I’ve been replaying that moment over and over again in my head all day, Maddie. The way you looked at me, the way you tasted . . .”

  In the background, I could hear Bridget say, “I like the way you taste, Mr. Hunky-dory.”

  “Don’t touch her,” I ordered.

  “If only it were that easy, Maddie, but you know how women can’t help themselves around me.”

  I closed my eyes. If Tim was anywhere near as strong as he’d been yesterday, Bridget would be all over him. She’d be lucky to escape with only the slime of atrum. I forced my eyes open and finished reaching for my shoes.

  “What do you want?” I ground out.

  “You really hurt my feelings yesterday,” Tim said. “I thought we had something going, and then you tried to kill me.” He tsked. “You owe me an apology.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I cradled the phone between my ear and shoulder and shoved my feet into the sneakers, ignoring the throbbing fire of scraped blisters.

  “Hum.” Tim made smacking noises like he was sampling the air’s flavor. “Nope. Not quite what I wanted, I guess. I think I’m hungry for something more.” He purred the last word, and my spine tingled.

  “I could fill you up,” Bridget said, loud enough in my ear that I knew she had her body pressed against Tim’s. “Why don’t we go back to my place?”

  “Oops. Gotta go,” Tim said.

  The connection went dead. “Shit, shit, shit,” I chanted. I threw Medusa aside and laced my shoes with fumbling, frantic fingers. I picked her up a moment later and scrolled through the numbers in her phone book while I shrugged one arm into a jacket. I selected Niko’s number.

  It rang through to voice mail.

  “It’s Madison. I got a call from Tim—the demon. He’s got Bridget. Meet me at The Golden Goose.”

  I clicked Medusa shut, stuffed her in my back pocket, and ran for the front room. My new pet wood was in the backpack. I stuffed it in my other back pocket. My eyes fell on the boots and the knife sticking out the top of its sheath.

  “Niko, you’d better be on your way already,” I said as I slid the knife into my purse after sheathing it in its original leather case. I was out the door less than two minutes after Tim had hung up on me.

  I drove like a bumblebee in flight down the streets of Roseville, dodging and weaving through traffic, riding my horn when I got stuck behind someone. I was the biggest jackass driver I’d ever seen, and I vowed to remember this moment the next time some idiot cut me off. “My best friend is going to boink a demon!” I shouted by way of apology to the truck driver I screeched in front of to make a sharp right through an empty bank parking lot. If touching Tim had left me coated with atrum, I didn’t want to contemplate what rolling around with him naked would do to Bridget. “Nothing. It will do nothing, because it’s not going to happen,” I promised myself.

  I screeched into the parking lot, using my emergency brake as I squealed into a parking space at the sidewalk. I shot free of the Civic and into the acrid plume of burned rubber. Coughing, I darted the few steps to the bar entrance, blinking to Primordium along the way. There was no way I was going to take a chance of falling under Tim’s spell.

  The door bounced off the frame when I flung it open, drawing every eye in the bar. I spotted Bridget immediately, but it was the rest of the bar that stopped me in my tracks.

  A cluster of women loitered at the pool tables, cue sticks in hands. They didn’t look like they’d done much pool playing, given the placement of the balls. Already, they had turned away from me to cast flirty glances across the bar toward Tim. Their body language shouted intimate invitations, but even the men seated at the bar ignored them. I guess having a roomful of women focused on one man wasn’t an ego booster. Almost as one sullen entity, the men staring at me swiveled back to hunch over their beers and watch the game on the TVs over the bar.

  The humans may have all gone back to what they were doing, but the evil creatures continued to drool over my pristine soul. The walls, floors, and furniture were coated with atrum, thicker than before Niko and I had cleansed the place. In eddies around every human were clusters of imps, and crawling along the walls, furniture, and humans were vervet. At some signal from Tim, the creatures went back to feeding, lowering the lux lucis levels one bite at a time.

  Bridget waved cheerfully from her seat on Tim’s lap, her black-smudged fingers fluttering within an inch of Tim’s razor-sharp antlers. Were they tangible but invisible, or did they exist only in Primordium? I’d never had the chance to check, and I hoped today would be equally void of opportunities. Bridget looked dreadful. Her soul was normally one of the cleanest I’d ever seen, aside from my own. It was even a point of pride with her, and she’d cajoled me more than once over the years to describe its pure, white lines to her.

  Given that she was dressed skimpily enough to get cold at noon in July, it wasn’t difficult to get a good reading of her soul. If I didn’t know better, I would have said Bridget and Tim had already spent some time rolling around naked together. My best friend was smeared with tarlike atrum from the tip of her scalp down to the toes that peeked out of her self-proclaimed sex-me-up pumps. If she could see her soul now—and drag her attention away from Tim—she would be devastated.

  I wanted to run across the room and tear her from Tim’s arms before beating the demon to a pulp. Unfortunately, in my haste, I hadn’t considered the ramifications of a public encounter. My weak plan would get me arrested, for sure, if not pulled apart, limb by limb, by the women at the pool tables first. Not to mention that I doubted Tim would hold still for me to pummel him.

  Indecision held me rooted in place. Tim gave me a knowing smile filled with razor-sharp teeth, clearly enjoying watching me realize I was impotent. When he winked at me, nausea churned up my windpipe.

  “Take a fucking picture.” A man jostled my shoulder as he pushed past me. He had his girlfriend—no, that diamond ring meant wife—by the arm and was dragging her from the bar. The man stopped. “He’s good-looking, but he’s nobody. What’s so special about him?” he demanded.

  His wife didn’t answer, too busy straining around me to keep Tim in sight.

  “Oh, my card,” she exclaimed, and her free hand dug through her purse, though she never took her eyes from Tim. When she located a business card, she struggled against her husband’s grip on her arm. “Let me give him this,” she pleaded, still not able to tear her eyes from the demon’s vision of perfection. “He looks like he, uh, might need my expertise.”

  “It’s a pheromone thing, isn’t it?” the man said, and I realized he was talking to me.

  “Someth
ing like that. Get her out of here and she’ll be fine.”

  “Fucking scientists.” The man grimaced and tugged. His wife tugged right back. The woman wore a string of mouse-size imps circling her neck; her husband had a vervet gnawing at his shoulder. There was nothing I could do about the evil creatures at the moment, but as the man pushed through the door, I realized there was something I could do.

  “Hey,” I called. I think he was surprised that I could look away from Tim, and it made him pause. “Go easy on her,” I said. “She’s not herself, not in control of herself.”

  “No shit, lady.”

  He peeled his wife’s fingers from the doorjamb and the door slammed shut behind them. I turned back to my own personal hell.

  “Dicey-poo! Come here!” Bridget called.

  On leaden feet, I went. Bridget patted the cushion beside where she sat on Tim’s lap. I ignored her and perched across from them on a different couch, far enough away that I hoped I be able to avoid Tim if he attacked. Before I sat, I cleansed the seat of atrum, defiantly meeting Tim’s gaze when I finished.

  “New trick?” he asked. Whatever Niko had done to wound him after I’d passed out hadn’t left so much as a scar. Looking at the pit of darkness that was his body made me feel lightheaded, and I gripped the couch cushion against a rush of vertigo. A day of distance between our encounters hadn’t done anything to improve his appearance in Primordium, either. If anything, his beak nose seemed sharper, his chin pointier, his antlers longer, and his mouth much more full of teeth. If only I could show Bridget—and the other women at the bar—the real Tim. Then they’d run screaming, but at least they’d be safe.

  “What now?” I asked.

  “We should go back to my place,” Bridget suggested.

  “All of us?” I asked, surprised despite myself. I shook my head, reminding myself not to be drawn into her drugged and drunk world.

  “It’s not a bad idea,” Tim agreed.

  I liked the thought of being somewhere private with Tim, but not for the same reason as Bridget. I tried to picture us piling into Bridget’s Prius, the stilted conversation on the drive to Bridget’s house. Nope. Wasn’t going to happen. There was no way I was going to let Tim know where Bridget lived, let alone travel through that much of my region, tainting it as he went.

  “I just got here. But you can leave any time you want, Tim.”

  “Not without me.”

  I glared at Bridget. She flipped her hair back over her shoulder and glared right back. Her hand slid up Tim’s arm, and she turned to smile at him. When she lifted her hand to run it through her hair, she spread atrum along her scalp.

  “I think you’ve had a little much to drink, don’t you?” I asked her, trying to sound reasonable. “Why don’t you come sit over here by me?”

  “Way over there?” She wriggled a little, giggled, then shook her head emphatically like she was five years old, biting her bottom lip.

  “I’m sure Tim could use a little air,” I tried again. “Maybe he’ll even go get us another drink.”

  “You could join us,” Tim offered. He leered at me. “You would have yesterday.”

  Bridget licked a line from the base of Tim’s throat to his ear, then whispered something to him.

  “Bridget. Bridget!” I raised my hand toward her, trying to get her to come to me.

  Tim walked his sharp fingers from her collarbone down her chest, and she giggled. I clenched my fists in helpless anger, watching his claws pierce her soul, replacing lux lucis with atrum at each puncture. Trying to reason with Bridget was useless. I knew from yesterday’s experience that she wasn’t listening to anything but her swarming hormones.

  “I’ll join you,” I said desperately. “But you have to let her go.”

  Tim looked like he was considering my offer. “Bridgie-widgie, would that be okay with you? Maddie doesn’t want you to be with me.”

  Bridget shook her head again, tears shining in her eyes. “Don’t you like me?” she asked Tim.

  “Oh, yes. You’re wonderful.” He leaned toward Bridget, and I had to look away from all those sharp teeth puncturing Bridget’s soul in a revolting mockery of a kiss. When I looked back, the demon was watching me, his glowing eyes filled with mirth.

  “Did you know this place has a back room?” Tim asked.

  “It does?” Bridget squirmed in delight. “Let’s go!”

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Tim stood, dumping Bridget to the floor. I sprang to my feet and grabbed for Bridget’s flailing arm. I caught it and pulled her toward me. She held on to Tim with her other hand. I reached for Bridget’s face and turned her to look at me, trying to keep Tim in my sight at the same time.

  “Come on, Bridget. Time to go home. We’ll come back tomorrow, I promise.”

  She shook her head and tried to tug free of my grip.

  “Tim’s a very bad man. He’s not who he says he is. Please, let’s go.” If I could get myself between Bridget and Tim, I knew I could get Bridget to safety. I wasn’t sure how, but it was as good as any plan I’d come up with in the last five minutes.

  “Are you a bad boy?” Bridget purred to Tim.

  Tim had been waiting patiently, holding Bridget’s other hand like a boyfriend. Now he jerked my best friend’s arm. Bridget tore free from my grasp and collapsed against Tim’s chest. She gave no indication that Tim had hurt her wrist, but I knew it was going to leave a bruise.

  “I’m a very bad boy,” Tim said. Bridget shivered and tried to crawl up Tim’s body. The demon stepped around her and clamped his hand down on my wrist before I could move. “This is getting boring. I’m ready to kill you.”

  “Oooh, la petite mort. Isn’t that what the French call it?” Bridget giggled.

  I put up a struggle, but it was a weak one. I couldn’t take out Tim in public, and I couldn’t let him out of my sight with Bridget. In the end, I walked as far behind Tim as his grip on my wrist would allow, settling for avoiding as much atrum taint as possible. Already, a black ring crept up my arm from his hand, radiating like a slow-motion solar flare of evil.

  I tried to think of a plan. The only thing that came to mind was run.

  My final hope for luck to save the day in the form of the bartender kicking Tim out for forcing his way into the private back rooms of the bar was dashed when Tim and the bartender shared a wink. The bartender didn’t appear the least bit surprised, and I was nauseated all over again when I realized this probably wasn’t Tim’s first time taking his “date” into the back room.

  The hallway to the back was lined with boxes after we passed the small kitchen. In Primordium, the whole hall was the black of inanimate objects coated with atrum. The only semi-bright light in the place was Bridget ahead of me. I didn’t chance blinking back to normal sight to see better. A few bruises on my shins were worth not falling victim to a demon. Even Bridget had a hard time staying pressed to Tim and navigating the tight hallway. I tried to breathe normally, but my bravado had fallen away somewhere near the bartender. Only my fear of Tim killing Bridget kept me from screaming my head off.

  Tim locked us inside a tiny office with a single desk and a cluttered mess of filing cabinets, boxes, and paperwork. As easily as I’d cleaned my cushion earlier, Tim raised a pulsing barrier of atrum across the door.

  Déjà vu.

  Raw fear iced my veins, settling in a knot in my stomach. I scurried to put the desk between us.

  “Should I kill you first, or make you watch me fuck your friend, then kill you?”

  “Oooh, I like option two,” Bridget said. She shoved everything off the desk with a sweep of her arms. The resounding crash should have brought the owner back to check on us, but I wasn’t going to pin my hopes on it. Bridget climbed up on top of the desk and sprawled on her side like a pinup girl in her short pencil skirt and loose blouse. When her hand reached to start unbuttoning her top, I grabbed for her. She wasn’t expecting it, and in one heave, s
he dropped to my feet on the safe side of the desk.

  “Tsk-tsk,” Tim said, shaking his pointer finger at me.

  “Hey! That wasn’t nice!” Bridget clawed her way up my pant leg and shoved me to the side. I staggered against a filing cabinet, shock slowing my reactions.

  “Let’s give the lady what she wants. A fuck, and then you can die,” Tim decided.

  Bridget’s head swiveled back toward him, her expression melting to adoration with an unnaturalness that made my skin crawl. Tim stalked forward until he was pressed against the opposite side of the desk. Bridget leaned forward, trying to get her knee up on the desk so she could crawl across, but she was hampered by her skirt. Not to be deterred, she reached for the back slit and ripped the skirt up the seam. I suddenly had an eyeful of bare, atrum-coated backside, from heels to thong-(un)covered buns. Her uncharacteristic lack of modesty finally snapped me into action.

  “No, Bridget!” I threw a stack of paper at Tim. “Get back! Go away!” I threw the desk lamp at him, then a stapler, then a stack of paper-filled folders. They missed but made him duck and dodge.

  “Paper fight!” Bridget cried. She scooped up the pieces that landed on the desk and tossed them back into the air.

  Tim lunged for me, knocking the desk against our thighs. Bridget went down with a squeal, but I kept my footing. I grabbed anything I could get my hands on and tossed it at Tim, but it was a futile gesture. Eventually, I would run out of objects, and there was still only one thoroughly blocked way out of the room.

  That eventuality arrived a lot sooner than I was ready for. My hands scrambled around the surfaces next to me, coming up empty. I didn’t dare turn away from Tim to look for anything else. I knew the moment I took my eyes off him he would pounce. Either on me or Bridget, and neither option was a good one.