by Hannah Jayne
I sat up and pointed to Nina, who was rooting around in our refrigerator, frowning at a plastic bag of blood. “And that is not the weirdest thing that happened to me today,” I said. “Geez.”
“Hey, Soph, it’s okay.” Alex was crouching down, his muscular thighs flexed, his palm on my knee.
“Totally,” Nina said, tearing open her snack. “There are worse things than being the spawn of Satan.”
“Oh yeah? Like what?”
Nina and Alex exchanged a panicked glance. “Like, uh, you could be ... help me out here, angel,” Nina murmured out of the side of her mouth.
Alex held up his palms. “Hey, you’re on your own with this one, Nina. I was going to go with the ‘there, there’ form of sympathy. Clean, neat, no promises.” Alex turned back to me, patting my knee and smiling softly. “There, there,” he said.
“At least you know who your father is,” Nina said helpfully.
“Might be. We’re not sure yet.” I looked from Nina to Alex. “Right?”
Alex remained silent and I felt my blood pressure rise. I looked at Alex, aghast. “You knew about this, didn’t you? You know that only Satan had the magical immunity thing going on and that I might have some kind of a connection.”
Alex stepped back, putting up his hands in case I decided to swing at him. “Look, I’ll admit I thought about it—a little. But frankly, it’s really hard to consider that your girlfriend might be Satan’s kid.”
I paused, feeling a tiny prick in my heart. “Girlfriend ?”
Alex immediately pinkened and my heart did a double-thump. “I mean ...”
“No, that’s okay.” I imagined Alex and me pressed up against each other, stealing kisses, holding hands—doing the things that couples did. I imagined my engagement ring and sparkly veil—and my father, Satan, walking me down the aisle.
“Crap,” I muttered. “Still, what does this have to do with the Vessel?”
Nina’s eyes widened. “He’s the other big cheese that wants the Vessel, right?”
Alex nodded slowly and I felt the blood pulsing in my cheeks. “Oh, great. So, not only does Ophelia want to kill me because she thinks I know where this stupid thing is, but now my father, who may or may not be Satan, may or may not want to kill me to get a hold of this thing that I have no idea about.” I put my fists on my hips. “You’re sure there’s not an unsolved murder that we could team up on? You know, maybe work up to this whole fate-of-humanity thing?”
Alex patted me awkwardly on the shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. We’ll figure something out.”
I wasn’t so sure. My stomach started to churn and I felt as though my whole world—my whole, Sophie Lawson, demonically normal world—was slipping away. I didn’t know my father, I couldn’t know my mother. My grandmother was gone and I was alone in the world—and now, somehow, I might not be.
I wondered whether it would be better to be an orphan or the daughter of the dark king.
I stood up, surprised my shaky legs could hold me. “I’ll be right back.”
I clicked the bathroom door shut behind me and went to the sink, turning the faucet on. I splashed cold water on my face and looked at my reflection in the mirror. Green eyes gone glassy and cold. Miniscule lashes flecked with tiny droplets of water. Pale white cheeks pockmarked with angry red blotches. The face that I had recognized and scrutinized my whole life through—flesh and blood—and now some of that blood belonged to the devil. Maybe.
The tears started involuntarily. The weight of knowing heaved against my chest, seeming to squeeze out every last inch of air.
I thought of all the images of Satan that I had seen in the past—a sinister, red-faced man with a cleanly cut beard, a prominent widow’s peak, and jet-black hair pushed back. I thought of the cloven feet, the pointed tail, the two sharp horns sprouting on his head. Images of evil, of tortured souls writhing in a fiery hell while Satan gleefully watched on. Satan.
My father, the devil.
My round face and bushy brows were courtesy of my mother. Ditto for my diminutive stature, my stubby toes, and what my doctor politely referred to as “childbearing” hips. What had my father given me?
I bared my teeth—straight, Crest white, supremely human, fang free. I checked my nails—half a manicure, each nail that wasn’t chipped or bitten filed into a neat square. No claws. I wiggled my toes—all ten of them. No cloven hooves.
I had no physical traits of my father—in devil form—so I supposed that was good. And I didn’t consider myself a sadist or anyone who took pleasure in the pain of others except for the occasional schaudenfraude.
So what did it mean to be Satan’s kid?
I glanced back up into the mirror and sucked in a shaky breath, using my index finger to tap the glass.
“Grandma?” My voice sounded small, foreign, and tinny. No one appeared; the only person looking out was me, with red-rimmed eyes and a clutch of fire-red hair. I lifted my hand to knock again, but the thought that my grandmother may have known this weighed on me.
There was a gentle knock on the bathroom door.
I peeled the door open and slipped out, trying to avoid the quiet stares.
Nina looked at me, her eyes registering concern. “We’ve got to do something. Look at you, Soph, you’re upset. This is not okay.”
Nina looked from me to Alex and then widened her stance, slamming her fist into her flat-open palm. “We’re going to do something. We have to do more than just read books. Sophie, I’m going to find Ophelia and we’re going to find out if you’re the spawn of Satan if it kills me. Again.” She nodded her head definitively, crossed her arms in front of her DUDE, WHERE’S MY COUTURE? shirt and stared both Alex and me down with her black eyes.
“The spawn of Satan?” I repeated meekly.
“Oh.” Nina pressed her reverse-French manicured fingers against her mouth. “Satan’s kin. Is that better?”
Frankly, with my working in the demon Underworld and sharing a bathroom with a card-carrying member of the soulless undead, I’d always considered myself more Hell-adjacent, rather than directly in line with anything from the actual dark side. Yet here I was, in my living room, being told that daddy dearest might actually be devil dearest.
“Aw, crap,” I muttered again, massaging my aching forehead.
“Come on, Soph. You’re okay.” Nina shrugged toward Alex. “He’s an angel, I’m a vampire, and you’re—”
I held up a silencing hand and Alex leaned in. “You’re Sophie Lawson, regular girl.”
I smiled softly in spite of myself, relishing the feeling of delicious warmth as it spread through my body. I didn’t even pause to consider that my life was crashing down around me, my father might be responsible for every bad thing that happened in the world, and I was becoming a knock-kneed schoolgirl because a cute boy was being nice to me. “You really think I’m regular?”
Alex cocked his head with that sexy half-smile. “Actually, I think you’re way better than regular.”
I sat up a little straighter, feeling a lump rise in my throat. But whether it was from my newfound family tree or the sweet, earnest expression of my friends, I wasn’t sure.
Nina’s head swayed back and forth like a spectator at a tennis match. “Did we really just have a Hallmark moment right now? Sophie might very well be in the clutches of world-ending evil and you’re acting like a couple of eighth graders!”
I shrugged, and Nina used her index finger and thumb to pinch the bridge of her nose and blow out an exasperated sigh. “Am I the only one in the room who isn’t thinking with her genitals?”
“Sorry, Nina. What do you suggest we do?”
“There has to be someone who knows something; there has to be some way to find out more,” said Nina.
“There is. I think I know where to find help,” Alex said solemnly.
“Where?” Nina asked.
“Heaven.”
Chapter Nine
“ This is Heaven?”
I yanked o
pen the door, immediately wrinkling my nose and rubbing my greasy palm on my jeans.
“Yeah,” Alex returned. “What did you expect? Clouds and harpsichords?”
Heaven was a dive bar at the mouth of Hayes Valley and nothing about the place reflected its name except for a chipping depiction of God giving life to Adam painted on the wall just in front of the illuminated restrooms sign.
I immediately felt a nervous blush wash over me. “Geez. Why is it that otherworldly information never comes from a stodgy man in a suit at the Burlingame Hilton?”
Though I wasn’t a teetotaler by any means, my last bar experience was trying my bloody best to fit in at the vampire bar, Dirt. It didn’t seem like I was doing any better at Heaven, where every face swung to scrutinize us once we stepped into the dimly lit place. Alex got the interested once-over from the ladies sipping brightly colored martinis at the table in the corner; Nina was being admired by a drag queen drinking a Sam Adams, and everyone else was focused on me.
“Blend in,” Alex ordered.
“With what?” I asked, my eyes sweeping the half-human, half-demon, half-other clientele.
I tried to paste on Paris Hilton’s patented too-bored-for-this-planet look, but I was having a hard time tearing my eyes from the gentleman at the end of the bar. His amber eyes were almond shaped and deeply focused; he took long, slow pulls from his beer without steering his gaze from me. There was something vaguely familiar about his ash-blond hair, something recognizable about the slope of his nose, his thin lips. My mind reeled as I tried to place him. I was still working on it when Alex nudged me.
“That’s Piri,” Alex said, gesturing to the man behind the bar.
“That’s the pixie you were telling us about?” Nina asked, incredulous.
On our drive to Heaven, Alex had filled us in on Piri, a local pixie who spent most of his time in the “upper world” (that’s ours), and was the go-to guy for finding out the seedy goings-ons of human-angel-demon dealings.
Alex looked at Piri, nodded his head. “Yeah, that’s him. Why?”
While it’s true that very few demons reflect their Dis-neyized /Wes Craven/Hollywoodized images, pixies were generally fairly well depicted.
Except for this one.
Though he had the same fine-boned features and porcelain skin I was used to with other fairy folk, the stern set of his jaw and his narrowed, beer-bottle brown eyes—eyes that raked over us as we stood in the doorway—generally didn’t give off that cutesy Tinkerbelle vibe.
Piri stood behind the bar, his huge mitt-like hands set on the hardwood top, his fingers tapping in a slow, bored rhythm that made the tattooed coiled snake on his forearm jump. His bare, bulging biceps were littered with images of thorny roses and screaming eagles, their talons arched and sharp.
“You know, in the sixteenth century, rose tattoos were given to prisoners sentenced to death,” Nina said matter-of-factly.
I studied the burgeoning bush spewing rose blossoms out from under Piri’s leather vest and gulped. “Good to know.”
Piri’s thick eyebrows rose and he eyed our trio with an unwelcome glare. Nina paused when her cell phone trilled a jaunty out-of-place tune.
“I need to get this,” she said, pointing to the spastically vibrating jeweled device. “It’s Dixon.”
“This is Nina,” she trilled into the phone.
Nina disappeared out the front door and Alex and I shared a look. I shrugged, pasted on my most welcoming smile, and sauntered over to the bar. I seated myself directly in front of Piri and hopped up onto the cracked Naugahyde stool. “Hi there,” I said, all smiles and normalcy. “Can I get a cosmo?”
Piri said nothing; he just blinked, revealing a spiderweb tattoo that started at his inner eye and blossomed out toward his temple. I felt myself involuntarily wince.
Alex sat down next to me and faced ol’ baldy. “Scotch. Neat. You Piri?”
The bartender lined up two smudged highball glasses and upturned a scotch bottle over each one. He slid the half-full glasses across the bar to us. “Who wants to know?” was his response.
I looked at the amber liquid in my glass and dropped my voice. “Actually, sir, I ordered a—” I gazed up into unforgiving eyes. “Never mind.”
I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye and I noticed the guy with the ash-blond hair had moved one stool closer to me. I gave him a closed-lipped smile as he grinned at me and raised his half-full glass in one of those “Hey, how ya doin’?” bar salutes. He inched a small bit closer and opened his mouth to speak, but my whole body was on high alert, focused on Piri and finding my father.
“I’m with someone,” I said to the blond-haired stranger.
“Brilliant. I’d like to be with the peanuts if you’d hand them down.”
My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I slipped the bowl of peanuts to the guy. He didn’t take his eyes off me as he shook a handful of peanuts in his palms, tossed them into his mouth.
“Very smooth,” Alex whispered in my ear.
I clutched my glass and narrowed my eyes at him. “Are we just here visiting, or did we actually come for a reason?”
Alex cleared his throat, threw back his entire glass of scotch. He seemed to savor it a minute before swallowing.
Piri raised his eyebrows when Alex slapped the empty glass on the bar. “’Nother?”
Alex nodded and Piri’s eyes grazed me and my still-full glass. “I’m good,” I said, bringing it to my lips. The wafting scent of the amber liquid burned my nostrils and I worked hard not to cough. “Smells good,” I said in a scotch-induced hoarse whisper.
I sipped my drink and tried not to wince as the scotch burned my throat and Alex got Piri to talk.
“I don’t recognize you—either of you,” Piri said as he worked a bar rag. “Where you from?”
“Not important,” Alex said. “You know a Lucas Szabo?”
Piri stopped wiping the bar. “Maybe.”
“Well, would you know, maybe, where someone could find him?”
Piri jutted his chin toward me. “Who’s the girl?”
“Lucas Szabo,” Alex repeated.
I looked around nonchalantly but could feel Piri’s dark eyes boring into me, studying me.
“I asked you a question.”
I thrust out a hand. “I’m Sophie.”
Piri ignored my offer to shake. I watched his lip twitch and I saw that he was fighting a smile.
I heard the tinkle of ice against glass down the bar. “Can I get another?” the blond-haired guy was asking.
Piri regarded his customer disdainfully but still filled his drink.
“You know him?” Alex asked again once Piri returned to us.
“Please?” I asked Piri. “It’s important that we find Lucas Szabo.”
“Because?” asked Piri—but I had the feeling he already knew.
“Because he’s my father,” I supplied.
Piri crossed his arms in front of his chest, and I worked not to stare at the troop of scorpions that were tattooed down the front of his arm. “I can help you find him,” Piri said finally. He leaned forward, his elbow gently tapping Alex’s glass of scotch. Alex watched the glass as it wobbled to the lip of the bar and then dropped gracefully, shattering on the floor. Alex leaned down and Piri bounded over him, clearing the bar in a single smooth motion. A pair of gossamer wings tore through Piri’s leather vest and caught the stolid, beer-soaked stench of the bar and then his hands were around my neck, his thumbs pressing against my windpipe. I hurtled to the floor, Piri on top of me, choking me, and I felt the breath leave my body, but I opened my mouth anyway, gasping, working. The first scrapings of a severe headache blossomed from the back of my head where I hit the ground.
Piri groaned when Alex’s body made contact with his; I felt Piri’s nails rake across my neck, scrape at the skin on my cheek as Alex dragged him off me. Piri landed with a thud and howled as his head mashed against the shards of broken glass on the floor. Alex had his kne
e pressed against Piri’s chest, his hand on Piri’s throat. Piri’s short legs and arms flailed under Alex’s weight. I gaped at Alex, who wore an expression so fierce, so angry that it startled me.
“Don’t you touch her, demon,” Alex spat between gritted teeth.
Piri’s chest rose and Alex’s knee drifted up an inch. Piri cut his eyes to me and they were hard, cold. “She’s not even human. She’s a thing, a prize—and you want her as badly as I do.”
I shuddered at the sound of Alex’s knuckles connecting with Piri’s jaw.
“Alex!” I shouted.
“He doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say.”
I stood up, mildly surprised that my shaky legs held me up. “Let’s just go.”
Alex looked at me and then down at Piri. “If I let him up, he’s just going to come after you again.”
Piri tried to nod his head, his lips arching into a horrible, grimacing smile. I scrambled behind the bar and pried the pour spout off two bottles of coconut rum. I upended the bottles over Piri, who howled and writhed.
“You can get up now,” I told Alex.
Alex looked down, incredulous. “Coconut rum kills pixies? Who knew?”
“It’s not the rum,” I said, shrugging at Piri, his wings soaked and stuck to the floor. “It’s the liquid. Sticks ’em down. And the coconut is just ... festive.”
Alex nodded, carefully stepping off Piri and brushing his palms on his jeans. “I will ... keep that in mind.”
We crossed the bar and left Piri on the floor behind us, wings pinned to the ground, legs and arms floundering wildly. His bald head was red with effort and when I looked back at him he growled, “Your days are numbered, girl. A prize like you isn’t safe anywhere.”
We stepped out the door, letting it snap shut behind us. Nina clicked her phone off and grinned at us, dropping it into her enormous purse. “What’d I miss?” she asked.
“Nothing,” Alex said, his jaw tight.
I used my index fingers to rub little circles on my suddenly pounding temples. “This is just getting weirder and weirder. I’m a prize? A pixie wants to kill me?”
Nina stamped her foot. “Someone wants to kill you? You said I didn’t miss anything!”
