The Devil's Playground mk-5

by Jenna Black

  Adam invited himself in and draped his jacket over the hostess stand. Then, before Dominic could get a word in, Adam grabbed him, pulled him close, and planted a wet, showy kiss on his mouth. Dom tried to pull away, but if a demon has hold of you and doesn’t want to let go, you aren’t going anywhere. Dom’s stepmother put a hand to her chest as if she were about to have a heart attack. There was a bit of a gleam in Adam’s eyes as he gave her a visual once-over, and I realized that particularly exuberant display of affection had been for her benefit.

  “Asshole,” Dominic muttered when his mouth was no longer occupied, giving Adam a halfhearted shove on the shoulder.

  Adam made a clucking sound with his tongue. “Watch your language, or I’m going to have to teach you a lesson later.”

  Dom’s face went beet red, and the glare he shot his lover was obviously genuine—and heartfelt.

  “Don’t,” he said tightly. “Not here; not now.”

  It’s not all that easy to make Dom angry, but there was no question he was pissed off right now. Obviously he’d mentioned to Adam that his stepmother might be a problem, and Adam had decided to stage a confrontation at his own convenience.

  It never ceases to amaze me that Adam, whose name should be in the dictionary beside the word “hardass,” will actually back down to Dom, but I’d seen it happen on more than one occasion. Adam held up his hands in a gesture of surrender, and though he didn’t verbally apologize, the apology was in his body language and his facial expression.

  The damage, however, was done. Dom’s stepmother—who I knew from her first few words to me was perfectly capable of speaking English—said something angry and accusatory-sounding in Italian. She was fingering her crucifix again. Dominic answered in kind, complete with expansive hand gestures. He was Italian by heritage only, but from the way he was talking and gesticulating now, I could almost convince myself he’d just flown in from Italy yesterday.

  Dom’s stepmother whirled and slammed the kitchen doors open. Without a look at either Adam or me, Dominic ran to follow her. I couldn’t tell if he was following to continue their argument, or whether he was hoping to appease her. All I knew was he wasn’t happy.

  “Nice work,” I said to Adam with a grimace of distaste.

  He took that as an invitation to come join me at the table. “Dom’s been tap-dancing his way around this for two weeks,” he said as he grabbed my leftover risotto and pulled it to his side of the table. “I didn’t think putting it off was doing anyone any favors.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. I considered Adam to be something that at least bore a mild resemblance to a friend, but no one could ever accuse me of liking him.

  “You should have left that up to Dom,” I said.

  Adam shoved a fork full of cold risotto into his mouth and chewed vigorously before answering. “If I’d left it up to Dom, he’d have ended up being the bad guy in his wicked stepmother’s book. This way, I get to be the bad guy. It won’t make things go smoothly for him, but it might make the bumps in the road a little smaller.”

  One of the reasons Adam so often rubs me the wrong way is that he does these totally obnoxious things, then manages to explain them away so that I end up feeling he’s right.

  “Help yourself to my risotto,” I said, because I refused to acknowledge that he might have a point.

  “Don’t mind if I do,” he said around another mouthful. “I wasn’t expecting to find you here,” he continued. “Anything wrong?”

  I almost laughed. I might feel comfortable confiding in Dominic, but Adam was a very different story.

  “Nothing I plan on sharing with you.”

  “You cut me to the quick.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet.” But as I sat across from Adam, resentfully watching him polish off the last of my dinner, it occurred to me that there was something I should discuss with him.

  “Shae paid me a visit today,” I said.

  Adam’s jaw visibly tightened, but that didn’t stop him from scooping the last few grains of rice onto his fork and eating them. He and Shae had a history, and it wasn’t a very nice one. Since he was the Director of Special Forces, he’d had to deal with Shae in her role as informant on a regular basis. Shae had always resented him for it, and whenever she had a chance, she lashed out at him. I was almost surprised she hadn’t met with an unfortunate accident yet. But then Adam was one of the good guys, so he only murdered people if it was for a good cause, not just because they pissed him off.

  Dom’s stepmother burst out of the kitchen, her head held high while her eyes gleamed with tears. She sneered at Adam, ignored me, then stomped out the front door. Dom had followed her out of the kitchen, but he stayed inside the restaurant, his head bowed so that I couldn’t see his face. I suddenly wanted to be anywhere but here. If Adam and Dom were about to have a lovers’ quarrel, I didn’t want a front-row seat.

  “Well, I’d better get going,” I said, pushing my chair back from the table. It didn’t come off sounding like a smooth exit line, but I wasn’t a good enough actress to hide my spike of discomfort.

  “Oh, no, you don’t,” Adam said, grabbing me by my wrist. “First you need to tell me what Shae wanted with you.”

  “Um …” I responded intelligently, my eyes fixed on Dominic. Tension screamed in his shoulders, reminding me again that I wanted out. “I’ll tell you all about it later.” I tried to pull my arm from Adam’s grip, but I wasn’t going anywhere unless he allowed it.

  Adam followed my gaze to Dom and shook his head. “You can yell at me later,” he said to Dom. “We have all night for that.”

  Dom finally raised his head, and the expression on his face wasn’t one of anger. I winced at the pain in his eyes. I knew what it was like to be scorned by my own family. Unfortunately, I didn’t know any words that would take the pain away.

  “Fuck,” Adam muttered under his breath. He let go of my wrist, stood up, and gathered Dom into a hug. Dom didn’t return it, his arms held stiffly to his sides, his fists clenched. But I knew how much he loved Adam, and I knew the two of them would work it out.

  Swallowing a lump of unreasonable envy that had gathered in my throat, I slipped away from the table and out the door. Neither Dom nor Adam seemed to notice me leaving. So I ended up leaving Dom’s restaurant feeling even worse than I had when I’d come in.

  That’s what I got for trying to open up and talk about my problems.

  four

  IT WAS ALMOST MIDNIGHT, AND I WAS IN MY PJS, WHEN the front desk called to let me know I had a visitor. Adam, of course. I should have known he’d come after me once he’d done his best to make Dom feel better. In the old days, I’d have told the desk not to let him up. But then Adam would pull his badge and pretend he was on official police business, so it did me no good.

  “Send him up,” I said with a sigh of resignation.

  I didn’t feel like changing into respectable clothing, so I merely covered my PJs with my disreputable robe and waited.

  It took the better part of forever for Adam to make it to my twenty-seventh-floor apartment, seeing as our elevators are so slow it was arguably faster to walk. I opened the door before he had a chance to knock, having heard the ding that signaled the elevator’s arrival. He raised an eyebrow at my outfit.

  “Did I get you out of bed?”

  I’d have loved to lay a guilt trip on him, but I doubted he’d feel guilty, so it wasn’t worth the bother of trying. “Nah. I was still up.” I opened the door wide enough to let him in, and Adam headed for my couch without any further invitation. He plopped down heavily and ran a hand through his shortcropped hair.

  “How’s Dom?” I asked as I sat cross-legged on the love seat.

  Adam waggled his hand in the gesture for “so-so.” “I tried to talk him out of reconnecting with his family once Saul was exorcized, but he didn’t listen to me.”

  “It’s his family,” I protested. “You can’t seriously expect him to just cut them off.” A funny protest coming from
someone who had as many family troubles as I did, but I knew how strong family bonds could be, even when you could barely stand one another.

  “Why not? My host severed ties with his family even before he became a host.”

  Adam had told me about this before. His host had come out of the closet when he’d turned eighteen, and his family had been so appalled that they’d kicked him out. And, as far as I knew, they hadn’t spoken to him since.

  “Not everyone’s that much of a homophobe,” I said.

  Adam shrugged. “You saw the expression on that harpy’s face. And she’s probably the most accepting of them. After all, she wanted to help out in the restaurant, as long as she could live in the land of denial and pretend Dom and I were ‘just friends.’” He shook his head in disgust. “I simply can’t understand why you humans are so hung up on this sexual orientation thing.”

  I remembered the crucifix Dom’s stepmother had fingered. “I’m guessing they’re old-school Catholics. According to Catholicism, homosexuality is a sin. If she thinks he’s going to burn in Hell forever because of his lifestyle, then …”

  “Don’t get me started on religion,” he said grimly. “I understand that even less.”

  Despite all the contact I had with demons, despite the fact that I should know better by now, I still sometimes found myself thinking about them as if they really were human. They are similar to humans in so many ways that it’s easy to forget that they’re not.

  “Demons don’t practice religion?” I asked, curious despite myself.

  Adam shook his head. “No. My host has tried to explain it to me, but he was never religious himself, so his understanding isn’t so great.”

  I held up my hands. “Don’t look at me for an explanation. I was brought up in a Spirit Society household.” The Spirit Society practically worships demons, but they’ve never gone so far as to declare demons deities. Perhaps it’s a religion in its own right—actually, in my opinion it’s more like a cult—

  but since it had failed to indoctrinate me, I can’t say I have that great an understanding of it.

  I was in danger of having a nonessential conversation with Adam—something I tried to avoid at all costs—but I was saved by Adam’s sudden change of subject.

  “It’s late and I want to get back home. Tell me why Shae came to see you.”

  So I told him everything, watching his face carefully for a reaction, but I could read nothing in his expression. Despite his distaste for Shae, Adam was a member of The Seven Deadlies, and I knew he still visited there on occasion to satisfy some of his more dangerous urges with demons who could heal whatever damage he caused. Dom wasn’t exactly happy with the arrangement, but he seemed to have accepted it as necessary, knowing that Adam was not having sex with his playmates at the club.

  “Have you noticed an increase in illegal demons at the club?” I asked.

  Adam shook his head. “I don’t go there as a cop—unless I’m meeting Shae. I don’t socialize there, either. I try to get in and out as fast as I can. But the next time I’m there, I’ll pay attention. And I’ll do some discreet inquiries at work, see if there’s any rumbling on the street about people ‘disappearing.’”

  “What do you think it means, if Shae is right?”

  His expression was troubled. “Nothing good.”

  “Yeah, that much I figured out on my own.”

  “I don’t have enough information to be making guesses, but I’ll make one anyway. Dougal’s got to know that Lugh won’t stay in hiding forever. Even if Dougal’s abandoned his quest to kill Lugh, he can still take advantage of Lugh’s absence.”

  I followed Adam’s line of thought easily. “By sending more of his supporters to the Mortal Plain.”

  Adam nodded. “That’s what I’m thinking. There are a limited number of willing hosts available, so maybe he’s institutionalized a program to funnel demons into un willing hosts.”

  “Using people from the fringes of society so no one will kick up a fuss. Or possibly even notice.”

  Adam nodded again, and I shivered in a phantom chill. The more I thought about this, the less I liked it.

  “And if that’s really what’s going on, what are the chances it’s only happening in Philadelphia?”

  Adam didn’t have to answer that, because we both knew the answer was zilch.

  “Just how many demons are there who want to come to the Mortal Plain?” I asked.

  He met my eyes with a steady stare. “Enough that the waiting list is decades long.”

  “That’s a lot,” I muttered, wondering how many of these demons had managed to come to the Mortal Plain in the months that we on Lugh’s council had been growing complacent. Sure, we knew that eventually we were going to have to take some kind of action against Dougal. His original plan had been to use Lugh’s True Name to summon him into a host who would be immediately burned at the stake. Raphael had foiled the plan by summoning Lugh into me, but Lugh could not afford to return to the Demon Realm while Dougal and his followers had his True Name, or the original plan would go into effect again. Since I’m not immortal, Lugh will have to go back to the Demon Realm eventually, and if we haven’t wiped out every trace of the coup by then, his goose is cooked. So to speak.

  With Lugh in residence I was likely to live to a ripe old age, so there had been no great urgency to find a solution. But if Dougal really had created some kind of illegal pipeline onto the Mortal Plain—if it wasn’t just some localized anomaly—then we needed to get our act together and soon.

  As king of the Demon Realm, Lugh should know the True Name of every demon who had earned one. If theory were reality, we could simply use Dougal’s own strategy against him. However, in a moment of naivete, when Lugh had ascended to the throne, he’d tried to reconcile with his brothers by not forcing them to reveal their True Names. Ah, the famed twenty-twenty hindsight!

  “I guess we need to call a council meeting,” I said.

  “I’d suggest tomorrow,” Adam responded, clearly feeling the same urgency that I did.

  “I’ll call everyone first thing in the morning,” I agreed, suppressing a yawn. Adam gave me a look that said I shouldn’t be yawning at a time like this, but it was after midnight and I couldn’t help it.

  “We can meet at noon,” I said when I finished yawning. “That ought to give me enough time to catch everyone. Now go home to Dom and let me get some sleep.”

  “I should go to The Seven Deadlies,” he responded, looking less than thrilled with the prospect.

  “Maybe I can spot one of these illegals Shae was talking about, and we can have a little chat.”

  “You can go tomorrow night. Dom needs you tonight.”

  Adam’s lips compressed into a thin line. “Lugh’s needs come before Dom’s. Or mine.”

  Tell him to go home, Lugh said. If he’s going to go to The Seven Deadlies, he should wait until after the council has had a chance to discuss it.

  I relayed the message to Adam, who accepted it without question. Once upon a time, he would have questioned whether the message really came from Lugh, but he knew from experience that I was a shitty liar, so these days he usually took what I said at face value. Someday I’d have to learn to take advantage of that.

  I wasn’t surprised that Lugh didn’t let me sleep peacefully until morning. Unlike me, he was a big fan of the therapeutic conversation—though his therapy methods were highly irregular.

  I “woke up” in Lugh’s living room, though in reality, my body was still sound asleep and the room was a figment of my imagination. An imagination over which Lugh had total control, I might add. I saw what he wanted me to see, and usually the setting gave me some hint about what kind of conversation we were about to have.

  The living room was a relatively neutral setting as long as I wasn’t lying on the couch and there was no fire in the fireplace. That meant he probably wasn’t making an attempt to seduce me, as he would if he’d conjured his bedroom, nor was he going to try to cow me with hi
s authority, as he would if he’d conjured his throne room.

  Lugh was sitting on his favorite couch, which was upholstered in the softest leather I’d ever encountered. I’d been hosting him for several months now, and I’d seen him—at least, I’d seen the image of himself he created in my dreaming mind—more times than I could count. But that didn’t stop me from feeling a tug of attraction every time I set eyes on him.

  He’s about six foot five, with long, raven-black hair, golden skin, and a body to die for. He was eye candy from head to toe, and he liked to dress in such a way as to show off his masculine beauty.

  The black leather pants and the knee-high black boots were practically a uniform for him, but what he wore—or didn’t wear—on top changed with his mood. Tonight, he wore a black tuxedo-style shirt, the tiny buttons undone to about the middle of his chest. He smiled at me—the smile that reminded me he knew exactly how I responded to him, no matter how much I wished that I didn’t.

  I folded my arms over my chest and declined to sit down. It got incredibly tiresome to talk to someone from whom you could hide absolutely nothing.

  Lugh’s smile broadened. “And it gets tiresome to always feel like you have something to hide.”

  I answered through gritted teeth. “You know the one way to guarantee that any conversation between us will go badly is to start it by responding to my private thoughts, so why do you do it?”

  He didn’t answer me, merely fixing me with a steady stare. He’d told me before that he responded to my thoughts just to remind me that they weren’t really private. It was a form of honesty I could do without, although he had a point when he said I’d resent it if he allowed me the illusion. The illusion wouldn’t hold, and when it faded, I’d feel like he’d lied to me.

  “I suppose that’s your justification for butting in with Brian earlier,” I grumbled. “That he’d feel deceived if the status quo continued.”

  Lugh’s chin dipped in a barely perceptible nod. “It was time to acknowledge that you cannot have a relationship with each other without having a relationship with me. You’ve accepted me. Now it’s time for Brian to do the same.”