The Devil's Playground

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 his 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.”

I plopped heavily into a cushy love seat across from Lugh. I’d spent two months living in the land of denial, and the universe seemed determined to tear the carpet out from under me. First with Shae’s ominous news, then with Lugh’s latest machinations.

“Is it a coincidence that you decided to butt in on the same day Shae came to talk to me?” I asked, already knowing the answer.

“I’d been meaning to do it for a while,” he said, “but I’m afraid I was growing a little complacent, too. After Shae’s visit, I realized I was procrastinating, so I decided to get it over with. I have never been anything but honest with you, and I owe Brian the same courtesy. When he makes love to you, he makes love to both of us. If he can’t learn to deal with that, then it’s best to find out sooner rather than later.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose. I didn’t have a headache, but after that little speech, I should have. Lugh had never lied to me—that I knew of—but that wasn’t quite the same as being completely honest. It didn’t take a rocket scientist to know there was more to this story than he was telling.

“If it was best that he find out sooner rather than later, then why did you wait until now to make your point?”

He flashed me a rueful smile. “With all the troubles you and Brian have had since I’ve been in residence, do you really think he’d have been in the proper state of mind to deal with that dose of reality?”

I wished I had a snappy comeback for that, but none leapt to mind. There had been a lot of bumps in the relationship road for Brian and me, and I doubted things would ever be easy. But we loved each other, and though I don’t believe love truly conquers all, it conquers a hell of a lot. Could it conquer Lugh?

“I’m not the enemy,” Lugh reminded me, and I scowled at him.

I tried to remember what it was like in the days before I had Lugh in my life, but they seemed impossibly distant.

I blinked, and suddenly I wasn’t sitting on the love seat anymore. I was sitting on the couch beside Lugh. I hated it when he did that, but there was no point in protesting.

He laid a hand on my shoulder, the touch innocent and yet strangely intimate. “Brian will come around,” he said. “He’s fought too hard to keep you to give up because of me.”

“You can read my mind. You can’t read his.”

Lugh’s mouth quirked into a grin. “I can make an educated guess. And my guess is that he’ll come around eventually. It’s just going to take a little time and … adjustment.”

I regarded him suspiciously. “You think he’ll ‘come around’ to the idea of you trying to seduce me, too?” In Lugh’s mind, there was no competition between himself and Brian, because I never had to choose between the two of them. Lugh could only interact with me as something other than a phantom voice in my head when I was asleep. Brian could only interact with me while I was awake. Therefore, in Lugh’s opinion, no conflict.

“That might be a little harder for him to accept,” Lugh admitted, startling me. This was the first time he’d ever indicated that he thought there might be a problem with his cozy little plan.

Once again, he answered my unspoken thoughts. “After seeing his reaction when he thought you’d had an affair with Adam, I can hardly pretend that I don’t know he’s the jealous type.”

I laughed halfheartedly. “You say that like it’s unusual, like most men would have no objection to their girlfriends having sex with another guy. If that’s what you think, then you don’t understand humans anywhere near as well as you’ve pretended to.”

To my surprise, Lugh leaned back on the couch, cocking his head and seeming to give my words serious consideration. “It’s not that I don’t think other men would be jealous. But there is a certain …

territoriality to humans that is foreign to the demon experience. Still, perhaps my lack of a separate physical body would lessen the strain on most men. There is no one he can lay his hands on and fight, if that makes sense.”

Perhaps to Lugh, but not to me. “So if demons aren’t ‘territorial,’ as you call it, about their lovers, then that means Adam wouldn’t mind if Dom screwed around on him.” Not that Dom ever would, but I had no doubt that Adam would object vociferously. After all, he was already at least mildly jealous of Saul, who had resided in Dom’s body when he and Adam first became lovers.

“Walking the Mortal Plain changes us. It’s hard to live within our human hosts, knowing their deepest thoughts and feelings, without being influenced by them. That’s part of the reason why my brothers were so eager to develop a less intelligent host. Raphael said it’s because he doesn’t like hearing his host’s opinion of him, but I suspect he’s more concerned with how his host’s opinion might influence him.”

“So Adam has become territorial because his host is territorial?”

“That would be my assumption.”

“And yet you haven’t absorbed any of that territoriality even though I’m not your first human host.”

He shrugged. “Humans aren’t all the same. Surely you don’t think demons are.”

“Whatever. Why are we having this conversation? You already explained your position to me earlier, so why can’t you just let me get a good night’s sleep?”

Yes, I was technically still sleeping, but these dream interactions with Lugh took something out of me. The longer we spent talking, the more tired I’d be in the morning.

“Since you called a council meeting for tomorrow, and since Brian is a member of the council, I thought it would be best if you and I worked things out beforehand.”

“This isn’t something we can ‘work out’ just by talking.”

“I know, but it’s a start. I hope that you at least understand my position, and understand that I’m not arbitrarily trying to make things difficult for you.”

I heaved a sigh. I already knew that. One of the things I could count on with Lugh was that he had good intentions. Too bad those good intentions didn’t make everything better.

“Get some sleep,” Lugh said, like it was somehow my fault I wasn’t soundly asleep right now. “I have a feeling that by tomorrow, all of our personal lives will have to take a backseat once again.”

And on that cheerful thought, I drifted off into la-la land.