The Devil's Playground

thirteen

I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING GROGGY AS ALL HELL and mildly embarrassed about my encounter with Lugh last night. It was hardly the most embarrassing dream he’d ever given me, but it was much more … personal.

I zombie-walked to the kitchen to put on a pot of coffee, then stared at the pot as it brewed. It wasn’t until I’d finished my second cup that my brain cells started to wake up, and I noticed the glaring omission from last night’s conversation.

When I’d woken up in Lugh’s bed, I’d gone into seduction alert, and that had pushed all thoughts of the real world and our much larger problem aside. Lugh flat-out didn’t do things like that by accident. He’d put me in that bed and distracted me with sex either because he didn’t want to talk to me, or because he’d been driving my body while I was asleep. Lugh usually had no problems with talking, so my money was on the latter, even though I didn’t feel queasy at all—I never did if I wasn’t conscious when Lugh took over.

I talked to Raphael while you were asleep, Lugh confirmed.

I wondered if maybe the silent treatment had been better after all. Time for more steam to come out of my ears. I really hated being used like that. “Couldn’t you have just told me what you were doing?” I fumed. I felt silly having an argument with a voice in my head, but that didn’t stop me from arguing.

“Did you have to do the whole seduction thing and keep me in the dark?”

He didn’t answer, but then, he didn’t have to. I knew exactly why he hadn’t told me he was driving my body around. Even though I could now let him take control when absolutely necessary, everything in my psyche recoiled at the idea. When I was awake for the process, I had to make a conscious effort not to kick Lugh out. When I was asleep, all it would take was a tiny knee-jerk reaction, and I would pop awake, thrusting Lugh into the background once again.

I folded my arms across my chest stubbornly. “The last time you wanted to talk to Raphael like that, you let me wake up.” It had been hard as hell not to let my subconscious barriers go up when I awakened, but I’d managed it.

That was before you started getting so sick from the control changes. You were already feeling sickly. If you’d awakened while I was in control, you would have felt much worse.

I was running out of good reasons to complain about what he’d done, though I had to admit, the idea of Lugh and Raphael talking to one another while I couldn’t listen in wasn’t a comfortable one. I doubted they’d been reminiscing about old times.

“Care to comment?” I asked.

We were merely discussing our options, few though they are at this time.

“And what did you decide?”

We did not come to any firm conclusions. I heard an echo of laughter in my head. Strangely enough, Raphael and I had difficulty agreeing on anything.

I couldn’t help a short burst of laughter myself. The two of them had gone a long way toward repairing their fraternal relationship, but I doubted they would ever see eye-to-eye. Still, at least it was better than the open hostility they’d started with.

For now, we must content ourselves with finding Jonathan Foreman, the demon Cooper revealed as the leader of the illegal recruitment campaign.

The mention of Cooper didn’t make me happy. If he wasn’t as much of a chickenshit as I thought, he could have spilled the beans already.

That won’t be a problem, Lugh assured me, and something in his tone of voice set off all the alarms in my head.

“What did you do?” I asked in a near whisper.

What had to be done.

Heat rose in my cheeks—an angry flush, not a blush—and my hands curled into fists. “What did you do?” I repeated through gritted teeth.

I didn’t do anything. But I did … approve Raphael’s plan.

“Which was what?”

Lugh hesitated, and for a moment I thought he was going to chicken out and not tell me. But unlike me, Lugh doesn’t run from conflict.

Cooper could not be allowed to live. But we couldn’t afford to kill him when Adam might be a suspect. So Raphael went back and made sure it looked like a God’s Wrath attack.

“Oh, God,” I moaned. There was nowhere to sit in my kitchen, so I leaned my back against the fridge and allowed my butt to slide down to the floor.

God’s Wrath is the most militant of the anti-demon hate groups. They specialize in “purifying” demon hosts. By “purifying,” they mean “burning alive.” God’s Wrath didn’t care that an innocent host was killed when they burned these demons to death. According to God’s Wrath, only an impure person would allow a demon to take over his or her body. They considered that the case even with the most unwilling of hosts. They probably think rape victims were “asking for it,” too.

Cooper was an obvious target for God’s Wrath. Probably was even before he was possessed.

Certainly true. He was a high-ranking member of the Spirit Society, after all, and the Spirit Society might as well have been named the Satan’s Little Helpers Society as far as God’s Wrath was concerned.

And since Raphael’s host used to be a member of God’s Wrath, he knew how to stage an attack and make it look real.

I made another moaning sound. I hadn’t liked Cooper, but even if I’d been willing to kill him, it wouldn’t have been a death like that!

Raphael assured me that he would kill Cooper quickly before setting the fire. It was infinitely more humane.

Who wants to take bets on whether Raphael gave a shit about how humane Cooper’s death was?

I care, Lugh said. And Raphael promised to follow my orders, even though he didn’t like them.

“And you believed him?”

Yes, I believed him. Weren’t you the one who was trying to convince me earlier that he had changed?

Yeah, I believed Raphael had changed some since I had first met him. But he hadn’t changed that much. He would never be the soul of compassion, nor would he ever be the good little soldier and follow orders—unless he agreed with them.

We would never know for sure whether Raphael had followed this particular order, kept this particular promise. Even if he did kill Cooper quickly before the fire, he would have done it in a way that the police wouldn’t be able to detect after the fact. If he’d broken Cooper’s neck, or done something else that left an obvious physical injury, then the police would have to start looking at possibilities other than a God’s Wrath attack, because God’s Wrath needed the demon’s host alive so the demon could die in the fire.

I shuddered and tried to make myself stop thinking about it. I had come close to being burned at the stake myself, and sometimes I just couldn’t help putting myself in other people’s shoes. I couldn’t imagine what kind of pain Cooper must have been in when—

Raphael swore to me that he would give Cooper a quick death. I can’t claim I trust Raphael in all things, but I believe his promise was sincere.

That made one of us. Then again, maybe killing Cooper first would have made Raphael’s task easier, more foolproof. If Cooper had been alive when the fire was set, then there was always the chance he might escape. When I thought about it that way, it gave me a little more hope. The risks involved with Raphael killing Cooper first might have been less than those involved in letting him die in the flames.

I wouldn’t believe Raphael had killed Cooper first because of compassion, or because of honor, or because he was following orders. I would believe he’d do it if he thought it expedient.

But the ugly truth was, there was nothing I could do about it now.

I was pretty damn pissed at Lugh, and I was glad he kept any further comments to himself. Regardless of how necessary Cooper’s death had been, regardless of whether Raphael had shown mercy or not, Lugh had lied to me. Perhaps not in words—after all, I didn’t think until this morning to ask what the hell he was doing with my body while he was busy seducing me—but a deception of that magnitude was as bad as a lie in my book.

I went into my office for a couple of hours in the early afternoon. I still had paperwork to file on my last exorcism, and I hoped dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s would get me out of my own head for a while.

The phone calls started coming in shortly after I stepped in the door. First was Barbie.

“Have you watched the news at all today?” she asked cautiously, without even bothering to say hello.

So much for coming to my office to escape. I should have left my cell phone at home. Or at least not answered it.

“The news about Cooper, you mean?” I asked, and my voice sounded tired to my own ears.

Barbie hesitated a long time. “Where are you?” she asked. “I think we need to talk, and I’d rather not do it on a cell phone.”

She had a point about the cell phone, but I didn’t want to get together and talk about it in person, either. In fact, I didn’t want to talk about it at all.

“We’ll talk later,” I told her. “I’m … not up to it right now, okay?”

Another long silence. “Just tell me one thing.”

I should have known better than to hope Barbie would let it go. She was kind of like me that way.

“Maybe,” I said, drawing the word out a bit, not trying to hide my discomfort.

“Saul has a theory. Do you think he’s right?”

The question almost made me smile. Barbie was really good at being cagey. Even if somehow signals got crossed and someone was overhearing our conversation, they would never in a million years guess what Barbie was asking me.

If Saul had a theory, it had to be that Raphael had something to do with Cooper’s death. Saul was even quicker to think ill of Raphael than I was.

“Can you keep him from doing a Godzilla impersonation if I say he’s right?”

“Damn,” she said, and she sounded as tired as I felt. “That’ll be tough to pull off. He’s already pretty testy, if you know what I mean.”

I grimaced. Yeah, I did. I doubted he was happy with any of us for letting Barbie get hurt, and for making her wait so long to take care of her injury. Not that we’d actually made her wait—she’d never have voluntarily left Cooper’s house when there was still a lot of shit left to hit the fan—but Saul wouldn’t see it that way.

“You’re the one who decided you wanted to date Bad Tempers ‘R’ Us,” I said, trying to sound funny. I think it came out more sour than funny. “Don’t let him do anything stupid.” What I expected petite little Barbie to do if the demon Saul decided he wanted to have a knockdown-drag-out with Daddy was beyond me. I just knew I didn’t want any part of it.

She sighed. “I’ll do my best.”

A male voice—Saul, no doubt—spoke in the background. Barbie must have put her hand over the receiver, because I couldn’t make out the words.

“I’ve got to go,” she said when she came back on, her voice tight with tension.

My conscience twinged a bit at leaving her to deal with Saul’s temper on her own, but since she’d volunteered for the job, I tried not to let it bother me.

“You gonna be all right?” I asked. So much for not letting it bother me.

She laughed a bit nervously. “I’ll be fine. It’s Saul’s security deposit I’m worried about.”

As if to punctuate that point, there was a loud crash in the background.

“I’ve got to go,” she said again, and this time she hung up without waiting for an answer.