The Devil's Playground mk-5

by Jenna Black

  “Surprise,” Cooper gloated as he grinned at Adam.

  In retrospect, it should have occurred to us that if the Spirit Society was recruiting as heavily as it seemed they were, Cooper would finally get his wish and become a host himself.

  “Geez, you must have been really desperate to come to the Mortal Plain if you were willing to take a host who looks like that,” I said with an exaggerated curl of my lip. It was true, though, that Cooper was about as unattractive a specimen of manhood as existed.

  The demon snarled at me. Somehow, he managed to make that rodentlike face look threatening.

  “You two get out of here,” Adam said to me and Barbie as he advanced on Cooper.

  Adam should have had an advantage on Cooper, since his host outweighed Cooper by maybe seventy pounds. And though I didn’t like the idea of leaving him to fight Cooper on his own, with my Taser not working, I wasn’t much more use than Barbie.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Cooper said, and instead of engaging with Adam, he launched himself at Barbie and me.

  Lugh surfaced without warning or conscious thought on my part. One moment, I was just a puny human trying to brace against an attack that would probably break me in half; the next, my body was no longer my own.

  Despite the imminent danger, I couldn’t help one exasperated burst of thought: Where have you been?

  Later, was his only answer. He pivoted to avoid Cooper’s charge, moving just barely slow enough to be within the realm of human possibility. He then “accidentally” lost his footing and plowed into Barbie. She screamed in pain when her wounded hand hit the floor, but at least Lugh was now between her and Cooper.

  Cooper skidded to a stop, and I was reminded of a bull circling round for another try after charging the matador’s cape. Barbie, whimpering in pain, was trying to wriggle out from under us, but Lugh kept her firmly pinned. If Cooper came for us again, Lugh was going to have to use his supernatural strength and quickness to protect us, and that would make this whole encounter a hell of a lot more complicated.

  But Adam hadn’t just been standing there twiddling his thumbs while Cooper attacked. He was required to carry his sidearm at all times, and now that he and Cooper weren’t grappling, he’d had a chance to draw his gun.

  “Don’t even think about it!” he shouted at Cooper, drawing his attention.

  Guns might not be the weapons of choice against demons, but Adam had the reflexes to get a shot off in time, unlike Barbie. And he was close enough that he could make that one shot count.

  Cooper froze, staring at the gun that pointed unwaveringly at his head.

  Lugh decided his services were no longer needed and receded into the background. Predictably, the change of control made my stomach lurch and made my head ache like a son of a bitch. I rolled off Barbie, then regretted the motion as my stomach protested. I swallowed hard and managed not to puke. Score one for me!

  Cooper stood with his hands open at his sides, looking awfully relaxed for a man who had a gun pointed at his head. Of course, the gun could only kill Bradley Cooper, not the demon, so I supposed the demon had no reason to sweat. Then he smiled, and a shiver trailed down my spine.

  “I do wonder what you plan to do now, Director White,” the demon said to Adam. “You’ve forced your way into my house without a warrant, and now you’re threatening me at gunpoint. I’ll have you know Mr. Cooper is a legal, registered host, and your attack is completely unprovoked.”

  Adam grunted a laugh. “Tell that to Barbara,” he said, indicating Barbie with a point of his chin. She was sitting with her back against the wall, clutching her wounded arm to her body, her face white with pain.

  Cooper raised an eyebrow. “You mean the young woman who tried to shoot me? Strangely, I interpreted that as a provocation.”

  “The law says you can’t hurt a human even in self-defense,” Adam said, but he sounded less certain.

  It was true that the laws in Pennsylvania were draconian where demons were concerned. Self-defense was generally not an acceptable excuse if a human was badly injured. But even if Barbie’s hand was broken, it wasn’t really that bad an injury considering she’d been meaning to shoot. Even a Pennsylvania judge might let Cooper slide on that.

  “Of course you can always shoot me,” Cooper continued. “I’m sure you’d have no trouble explaining to your comrades why you shot an unarmed man.”

  I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but that wasn’t my style. “You’re a demon. You don’t need a weapon to be dangerous. And he’s got two witnesses who can testify that you attacked us.”

  “And you’ll have no trouble whatsoever explaining to the police why you all decided to pay me a visit and ended up shooting me,” Cooper countered with a smug smile. “If that’s the case, then go ahead and shoot, Director White. Don’t worry—I won’t hold it against you and come back for revenge against your little friends after the state has brought you to justice.” He frowned theatrically. “Though on second thought, that might be fun.”

  Whose great idea had it been to come and question Cooper? Oh, right, it was mine. Shit.

  “Grab me a pillow off the couch in there,” Adam ordered me, jerking his head toward the living room.

  “Planning to take a nap?” I asked under my breath, but I did as he asked. If I’d been Sherlock Holmes, I would have noticed as soon as we’d gotten here that the living room was way too neat—Cooper had the aesthetic sense of a typical single guy, and the last time I’d been here, the place had been a mess. Now it was spotless. Of course, even if I’d noticed, I’d have assumed he’d hired a maid, not been possessed by a demon.

  I brought the pillow to Adam. I’d seen enough TV to guess he was going to use the pillow to muffle the sound of the shot. Did that mean he was planning to shoot? And if he didn’t, what was our next move?

  Shoot, or don’t shoot? I didn’t like either option. We’d have to revisit the question eventually, but I was always big on putting off till tomorrow what I didn’t want to do today.

  “Don’t kill him unless you have to,” I said to Adam. “We still have plenty of questions for him, don’t we?”

  Adam managed a feral grin as he buried the hand holding the gun in the pillow. His grin didn’t have quite the edge it usually had, but I think only someone who knew him real well would have noticed. Cooper’s argument had Adam spooked. Not a comforting thought.

  Cooper crossed his arms over his chest. “I’d be curious to see how you’re planning to convince me to answer your questions.”

  The look Adam gave me out of the corner of his eye said he was a bit curious himself.

  “Where are the car keys?” I asked, and I could see by the look in his eye that Adam immediately understood. We’d driven out here in his unmarked, and I happened to know he kept a Taser in his trunk. He wasn’t required to carry the Taser all the time, but he needed to have one readily available, seeing as he often found himself chasing down demons. I couldn’t tell from the look on Cooper’s face whether he got it, too.

  “Right front pocket,” Adam said.

  I cursed under my breath. I really didn’t want to be reaching into his pocket, especially not when he wore his jeans so damn tight. But he needed both hands—one for the gun, one for the pillow—and it didn’t much matter what I wanted.

  “Can you hang in there a while longer?” I asked Barbie. I was probably stalling, but I couldn’t help it.

  She nodded. “I’ll be fine. The leg hurt much worse.” She managed a pained smile. The last time we’d faced down a demon together, said demon had kicked her legs out from under her and broken one of them. Human against demon is never a fair fight.

  With a little grimace, I approached Adam to get the keys. I was pretty sure the expression on his face could be called a smirk, but since he didn’t take his eyes off Cooper for an instant, I didn’t feel like I had legitimate grounds for complaint.

  The fact is, Adam is drop-dead gorgeous, so it was impossible for me to reach into his pan
ts pocket without being painfully aware of him as a man. The spicy aftershave he wore. The well-toned thigh muscle I had to brush over to get to the keys. And his ill-disguised, um, enthusiasm at my touch. Have I mentioned that Adam swung both ways? He was one hundred percent loyal to Dominic, but that didn’t mean he didn’t have impure thoughts now and then.

  I’m pretty sure I blushed, but I tried to play it cool as my fingers closed around the keys and I withdrew my hand. Cooper snickered, but I refused to look at him or at Adam.

  Cheeks still flaming, I hurried out to the car. I hoped Cooper would find it entertaining to stand there with Adam’s gun pointed at his head while I dug out the Taser.

  I moved as fast as I could, not sure how long the impasse in the house could possibly last. I ran across the street to the car, hoping I didn’t look as conspicuous as I felt, then opened the trunk. Unlike mine, Adam’s Taser was fully charged. I tried to close the trunk quietly, but it still made a solid thunk.

  Firing the Taser might be as damning as letting Adam fire the gun, Lugh said.

  I was glad to see we were back on speaking terms, but though I was anxious to question him about his mysterious silence, I had better things to do at the moment. He was right about the Taser. If I fired it, it would release a flurry of confettilike ID tags that could be traced to Adam. Not to mention that the Taser would store a record of exactly when it was fired.

  Unless you’ve got a better suggestion, I thought at Lugh, keep your comments to yourself. Yeah, I was getting a bit testy, but I was beginning to think the odds of Cooper surviving this interview were very low. If he lived, he could make a lot of trouble for us—particularly for Adam. If he died … Well, if he died, and we did a good job of disposing of the body, then it was possible we could get away with it.

  “I can’t believe what I’m thinking,” I muttered under my breath. Surely I drew the line at cold-blooded murder. Didn’t I?

  I let out a hiss of breath. Yeah, maybe I drew the line at murder, but I knew for a fact Adam didn’t. He’d do whatever was necessary to protect Lugh, and even though Cooper didn’t know I had Lugh, Adam would see him as an indirect threat.

  Dithering over my moral qualms had caused me to slow down. I had my hand on the front doorknob when I heard a muffled bang from within, followed by a cry of pain.

  Holding the Taser at the ready, I rushed through the door, not knowing what I was about to find. My heart hammered in my chest, and adrenaline surged through my system.

  The sound I’d heard had to be a gunshot, and I assumed that meant Cooper had tried something. I also assumed it meant either Cooper was dead, or Adam was in deep trouble. Neither assumption turned out to be correct.

  The first thing I saw when I burst through the door was Adam standing calmly in the foyer, his gun in his right hand, pointed at the floor, the pillow in his left. Then I saw Cooper.

  He was crumpled on the floor halfway between where I’d last seen him and where Adam stood. He was rocking slightly, a soft moan escaping his throat, and his hands were clamped over a bleeding wound in his thigh. Based on the sounds Cooper was making, his demon wasn’t a big fan of pain, but a nonfatal gunshot wound on a demon would heal completely in a matter of hours, and might only keep Cooper incapacitated for a few minutes.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  Adam looked grim. “He decided to call my bluff. I thought he might still be useful, so I went for the leg instead of the head shot.”

  Cooper’s voice was gaining strength, and I was pretty sure the moan would soon turn into a scream. I didn’t think the neighbors would have heard that gunshot—or realized what it was even if they heard it—but we’d be in even deeper shit than we were already in if Cooper started screaming. We’d made enough noise as it was. It felt a little less than sportsmanlike, but I pointed the Taser and pulled the trigger.

  Electricity mucks with a demon’s ability to control its host body. So much so that they can’t even talk, much less move. Cooper might feel like screaming, but he wouldn’t be able to control his voice enough to get the sound out.

  “In for a penny …” I muttered. “Now what?” I asked out loud.

  “Now we call in reinforcements,” Adam said, and he tucked the gun back into its holster, dropped the pillow, and grabbed his cell phone.

  ten

  ADAM’S IDEA OF “REINFORCEMENTS” DIDN’T EXACTLY make my day, but we needed another demon to help us keep Cooper contained. We could have called Saul, but Barbie pointed out that her presence—more specifically, her injury—might distract Saul too much to make him useful. Which is how we ended up stuck with Raphael.

  Raphael lived in Center City, so it took him more than twenty minutes to drive out to Cooper’s house outside the Main Line. We’d had to juice Cooper a second time to keep him down, and the Taser’s battery was starting to run low. If Raphael had gotten stuck in traffic, we would have been in trouble.

  I guess Raphael didn’t feel the same need for subtlety that the rest of us did, because he drove his car straight up the driveway, parking in front of the house in full view of anyone who drove by or who was watching from across the street. No, there was no reason for anyone to be suspicious of the car, but my paranoia instincts were on high alert, and I was tempted to tell Raphael to park elsewhere. I finally convinced myself that time was of the essence, and Raphael’s car was fine where it was.

  One of the side effects of the Taser was that Cooper hadn’t been able to heal the bullet wound. I’d never thought of it before, but since the electricity ruined the demon’s control over the host body, it ruined the supernatural healing ability as well.

  The wound was still bleeding, though not as badly as before. The bright red puddle of blood on the floor and the coating of blood on Cooper’s hands made my stomach turn, but ugly as the wound was, it wouldn’t be fatal—not unless we kept Cooper incapacitated for a long, long time.

  Raphael—whom we would all have to remember to call “Tommy,” to keep his true identity secret—

  circled Cooper’s limp body while Adam kept a watch on him, ready to pounce if Cooper made a sudden move. Not that he was making any moves, sudden or not, under the circumstances.

  “You need to exorcize the demon,” Raphael said to me after a moment’s thought.

  I shook my head in confusion. “What? Why?”

  “So that Adam can do his special interrogation technique on Cooper. I can probably make the demon talk, but these aren’t ideal circumstances for it. There’s not enough privacy for me to get terribly creative, and, of course, information obtained under duress isn’t always accurate.”

  As usual with Raphael, I looked for hidden ulterior motives behind his rather merciful-sounding suggestion. Raphael wasn’t big on mercy. “Do you know this demon?” I asked him suspiciously.

  Raphael shrugged. “You know we can’t recognize one another on the Mortal Plain.” He scowled at me. I guess he’d finally figured out why I’d asked him that question. “I don’t know if I know this demon, and I don’t give a shit. I’m making a practical recommendation, but if you’d like me to try to torture some information out of him, I’d be happy to oblige.”

  He grinned at me—a feral, angry expression. I could have apologized for my implications, but why should I? Raphael was a devious bastard, and he knew it. He shouldn’t be surprised when people—

  especially me—suspected his motives.

  “What do you think, Adam?” I asked, and Raphael’s scowl darkened.

  Adam looked grim. “I think he’s right. If we keep Cooper Tasered, he won’t be able to tell us anything, and if we don’t, he’s liable to kick up enough of a fuss to have the neighbors calling the police. We’ve got a sticky enough situation on our hands already.”

  It would have been nice if Raphael had mentioned his plan on the phone. I could have had Cooper exorcized by now. But Adam had given Raphael a very abbreviated account on the phone and had stressed the need to hurry. Maybe Raphael just hadn’t fully appreciate
d the situation until he’d seen it himself. Giving Raphael the benefit of the doubt ran contrary to my nature, but I tried.

  Cooper was starting to twitch, the first sign that his muscles were coming back under control. I wasn’t sure how well I was going to do at getting into the trance state under the circumstances—I hadn’t thought to bring anything vanilla-scented with me—but I sat cross-legged on the floor beside Cooper anyway, ready to begin the ritual.

  “Not yet,” Raphael said, grabbing me and unceremoniously pulling me to my feet.

  “Get your hands off me!” I snapped, and he let go with gratifying speed.

  I hadn’t even noticed him taking the Taser away from me until he gave Cooper another jolt. He looked at me with a sneer. “You’re supposed to be a pro. Don’t you know better than to get that close to a demon who’s not restrained? If he were more recovered than we thought, he could have grabbed you and transferred before you even blinked.”

  I had to bite my tongue hard to keep any number of snappy comebacks from leaping out of my mouth. I would have looked pretty stupid saying them, though, since Raphael was right. If I were a normal, nonpossessed human, I’d have been much more cautious around an unrestrained demon who might be starting to regain control of his body. In my arrogance, I hadn’t thought of Cooper as a threat, since Raphael and Adam were here to jump on him if he made a hostile move. But if Cooper had tried to transfer to me and found me already occupied … I was getting careless.

  So I swallowed my protests and took up my post again.

  I was getting better at reaching the trance state under less-than-ideal conditions. Even with the lack of scented candles, the lingering resentment, and the gross-out factor of the still-growing pool of blood, I struggled only briefly to relax enough to open my otherworldly eyes.