A Hand in Hell

The bar was packed, the massive bodies of demons and the sweating bodies of their little kitties and puppies blocking the way to the bar as they stood swaying on the dance floor or crowded around the tables. I took Lauren's hand in a firm grip that she didn't bother to return and starting pushing my way through the throng of creatures. Half of them didn't even look human anymore — dangerous, considering that this was still a public place and anyone could enter.

"'Scuse me!" I called over the crowd, leveling a particularly balky male with a fang-baring sneer when he opened his mouth to protest. A rough shove sent his broad body lilting sideways, into his terrified human companion, and I continued forward, bellowing all the while. "Two pretty girls, coming through! Move your ass if you want it to remain attached!" Finally, I broke free of the crowd, pulling Lauren to my side with a tug and a relieved sigh. "Phew. That was fun, wasn't it?" I asked dryly, and she nodded in agreement, eyeing the mass of shifting bodies with a frown.

"Are all of them demons?" she asked, shouting over the bass-heavy music.

"No," I answered, leaning in close to her ear so that I didn't have to shout. "Many of them are, especially the giant things with horns, but a lot of them are just humans like you."

She turned to me, eyes wide in alarm. "They've all been kidnapped?"

I shrugged and turned toward the bar, bored with her goody-goody nature for the night. "I don't know the details, but I'm sure some of them were obtained through less than commendable means." My eyes finally found the bartender, his scruffy face peeking through a pair of chunky men, and I started forward, dragging Lauren along behind me. "There he is, the asshole."

Shoving my way between the two men, I slapped a palm on the counter and smiled cheerfully when the bartender jumped, startled. "Heya, barkeep! I sure hope you have something for me."

"Ah, Vera," Lauren muttered in warning, and I glanced up to find one of the men I'd shoved aside glowering at me and the other eyeing the human appraisingly.

I grinned. "Walk away or die," I said brightly, guiding Lauren quickly and gently to the safe space between my front and the bar, finally releasing her hand to place a palm on the counter to either side of her, making my possession of her as plain as possible. "Your choice, boys."

"Stop it," the bartender snapped when one of the men opened his mouth to speak, an unkind glint to his dark eyes. "I don't want to have to throw anyone out tonight. We're up to one month free of incidents, and I'd really like to keep it that way."

"Whatever," the man sneered, then he and his buddy lumbered away, each growing a pair of bone-white horns even as I watched. I snickered.

"Look at how tiny those things are!" I cackled, turning away from the two sets of stick-straight, two-inch-long nubs to face the bar. "They're not actually trying to show off, are they?" I watched over Lauren's head as the bartender rolled his eyes, and the girl twisted to look up at me in wonder.

"How big are your horns?"

I answered her with a wink and a wicked smile, then turned my attention to the bartender. "So, barkeep, it's been a while since we last talked." I leaned to one side to rest my elbow on the counter around Lauren, pouting at him from my chin's new perch upon my palm. "Why haven't you called? Do you not love me anymore?"

He rolled his eyes again, and I smirked. "It hasn't even been a day. Or do you not understand how information gathering works?"

"I need to know where to find these pricks, like, yesterday," I said lightly, pulling Lauren closer to me for no reason other than because I could. "I had enough faith in your abilities to think that you'd be ringing me up by five o'clock tonight with a list of haunts and homes, but alas, it seems I may have put my faith in the wrong man."

He sighed. "The night only just started. There was no one around to probe for info before an hour ago, but you expected me to be ready for you by five? Are you sure you know how this works?"

"Like I said," I all but hissed, forcing a sinister smile. "I had faith in you."

He rolled his eyes yet again, and I had a hard time not plucking them out of his skull and popping them like grapes. "I've gotten two tidbits of information tonight. One, that human group who's after your ass are making a fool of themselves. Everybody around here knows that they've got someone on their side with the power to find and take down a demon, but instead, they're —"

"Taking in humans that look vaguely like me, right?" I interrupted, and I sighed to send the hair framing Lauren's face swinging, unamused by the man's surprised expression. "We met them earlier. I'm sure they're taking the 'take down' part seriously, but I don't think they're even trying to find me. What else ya got?"

"Uh, well," he started, his expression emptying as he shook off his surprise, "if what I've heard from a couple of less-than-reliable sources is anywhere near correct, one of the members of the Demon Council is a woman by the name of Mishakkon, and she's doing some sort of work around these parts, dressed up and docile in a human skin."

"What kind of work?" I asked, straightening from my slouch against Lauren. "Where can I find her?"

He shrugged, his eyes flicking to the left as a woman waved for his attention, and he said quickly, "I'm not sure of the specifics, and it's only just a hunch, but something to do with police work, I think. They're trying to cover up your murders before more humans get suspicious. I'll let you know if I find anything else." And with that, he walked away without even a goodbye — a clear dismissal if I'd ever seen one.

I huffed. "Rude."

"What does that mean for you?" came little Lauren's voice, and I rested my head on her shoulder with a sigh, staring straight ahead at the array of half-empty bottles. I miss you, Jose.

"It means I've got virtually nothing," I answered as I snaked my arms around her middle, holding her close to me. She tensed, but I'd expected nothing less. "If Mishakkon is who I think she is, she'll be hard to ferret out of the police force — like looking for a needle in a Goddamn haystack. She's not especially powerful from what I've heard, but she's clever. It's unlikely that I could figure her out and get the jump on her before she had the entire Council raining down upon my head."

"I thought you were confident in your abilities," she remarked wryly, and I tilted my head to the side to gaze up at her smirking face.

"Oh, I am." My eyes flicked to the images playing across the screen of the television mounted to the ceiling behind the bar, and a smirk of my own flickered to life upon my lips. 687 Church Street — a blackened shell of a home with smoke still rising from its charred rafters, yards behind an overdressed, overly solemn newswoman. Firemen and policemen stood picking through the remains. Suspected arson on Church St., read the white text of the caption over its navy-blue background. That was fast. "And because of that, I think I know just what to do next."

"What?" she asked, turning to face me as I lifted my head from her shoulder and straightened.

"How often does it take that many police only half an hour to get their lazy asses to the scene of a fire, do you think?" She shook her head slowly, confusion creasing her forehead. "Do you think arson is often discovered before the house has even stopped smoking?"

Her brow furrowed deeper in understanding. "You think this Misha woman was waiting for something to happen to that house?"

I nodded, already taking her hand and pushing away from the bar. "And I think she's probably on the scene right now, yes, altering evidence like a boss."

"So we won't be searching for another victim tonight, then?" she asked in a shout as we reentered the throbbing, noisy throng of bodies.

My voice rose in a cackle over the music. "We'll just have to see what happens at the scene of that fire, won't we?"

I wasn't above taking a demon as a pet. Not by a long shot.

But really, was I above anything?

-?-

I slammed the door hard enough to shake the car, smiling sweetly at the man at the edge of the scene who glanced curiously in my direction. "Excuse me, sir?" I called as I approached, heels clicking away on the asphalt of the cracking and potholed street.

He turned to face me more fully, eyeing me in the dim lighting of the nearby street lamp — thrown off by my sunglasses, no doubt. "Er, yeah?" He was young, yummy, even, I noticed as I grew closer, but his dark, broody self just wasn't what I was here for. But later, maybe…

"Is there a Misha here, by chance?" I asked innocently, sweeping to a stop before him with my fingers laced behind my back. "Maybe with the police guys?"

"Uh, who's asking?" His eyes slid down my frame, more scrutinizing than flattering, and I sighed. No fun, this one.

"Someone who's looking for a woman named Misha," I answered simply, a saccharine smile curving my lips. "I assume she's here, then?"

His eyes tried desperately to find mine through the dark lenses of my sunglasses as he nodded. "Yeah, she's here, but I don't think you should go around interrupting their investigation. Why do you need her?"

"I need to speak with her."

"Why?"

I sighed again, then quickly sucked in a fresh breath and held it. I'd expected a run-around, this being a crime scene and all, but everything about this man was trying my patience — and patience wasn't something I was known for. "Please," I said, my smile long gone. "It's an emergency."

"I'm sorry, but you're not allowed to be here," he said dismissively. "Unless there's some specific reason that you need to be here and you can prove it, I'm gonna have to ask you to leave."

My last tendril of patience snapped, and with the flicker of a thought, I ruptured a slew of blood vessels in his brain, sending the muted scent of blood wafting to my nose — or perhaps it was just my imagination. He was on his knees in seconds, and I leapt backward a split second before he vomited all over the sidewalk, my nose wrinkled in disgust. Corn? Delicious.

"Help!" I cried, forcing my emotions from my face. "I think something's wrong with him!" It was a matter of seconds before police officers and firemen and medical personnel surrounded the man in a tight clump, and my eyes drifted toward the remains of the burnt house. A woman stood on what was left of the front porch, her arms crossed and her thin lips curved in an amused smile. She appeared to be in her mid-forties — much older than a persona that any demon I knew would deign to create — with a wisp of gray here and there in her golden brown bob, but I knew it was her, the demon Mishakkon, just by the way she looked at me.

"Miss, what hap—?" But I started quickly away from the officer who spoke to me, and though he called to me, asked me to come back, the steady clicking of my heels on the concrete didn't falter until I stood at the foot of the porch's stairs — the only part of the house that had remained fully intact.

"Misha, I presume?" I asked lowly, crossing my arms over my chest to mirror her stern stance, and she chuckled.

"Some nerve you have, killing a human right in front of a Demon Council member," she teased in a voice much higher than I'd expected from such a serious-looking woman. "You're lucky I don't give a rat's ass what you do to them."

"Why are you part of the council, then?" I asked, my head tilting curiously to one side as I regarded her. Sharp, age-lined face; professional black jacket and pencil skirt; sophisticated posture — but why the smile? Why the nonchalance?

An enigma, this woman. And I'd only known her for a matter of seconds.

"The power, of course," she nearly purred. She started to lean her hip against the blackened railing at the porch's edge but quickly thought better of it and settled with merely cocking it. "While the council was formed primarily to clean up your mess, we've got other matters to deal with — meaning that my power extends to other demons. They're generally less likely to get in my way, and I'm guaranteed to take any and all of them out with no repercussions."

"Unless they kill you, you mean," I interjected snidely, resting an elbow on the wooden railing at the end of the stairs, and her look instantly soured. "From what I hear, you're not the toughest little pussycat. Clever, manipulative, maybe, but in the world of red-eyed monsters, that can only get you so far."

Her lip curled in a sneer. "Is that your attempt at a threat?"

I shrugged, smiling sweetly up at her hunched form. "Just a simple observation. Unless the council position gives you some kind of magical, mystical strength boost, the power of it will do you no good."

At the sound of rapid steps on the walk behind me, I turned. "Excuse me, miss," said the very man I'd made it a point to walk away from. "We need to ask you some questions. We need to know what happened to Roger." My eyes flicked past him to the whirling lights of an ambulance I somehow hadn't noticed, and I sighed.

"I asked him where to find Misha, he asked me why I wanted to find Misha, then he fell to the ground and started doing…that." A wriggle of my fingers in the direction of the vomit-covered sidewalk punctuated the sentence, and I leveled him with a tight-lipped glare. "There's nothing more I can offer you, and I'd appreciate it if you left Misha and me to our conversation." Cowed by my stare, he headed back to the ambulance at a brisk walk, and I turned back to the demon woman in disguise at the porch's edge. How did she change her eyes like that, I wondered? How did she avoid the conspicuousness of the dreaded sunglasses?

"So what is it you came here to do, exactly?" she asked, standing ramrod straight and giving off such an air of annoyance that I thought I might choke on it. "Threaten me into submission? Bribe me? Beg me to stop the council? What?"

"Actually," I began slowly, excitedly, a wicked grin aimed up at her, "I've come to kill you."

She cocked an eyebrow, her stance relaxing until it looked like she was simply chatting up an old friend and not staring into the eyes of her soon-to-be killer. "Kill me? Really? A member of the Demon Council, in a public place, surrounded by policemen who are already looking for a certain arsonist — i.e., you?"

"You've already guided them in the wrong direction to keep my demonic origins as far away from them as possible, I'm sure." My smile grew, and I let my gaze wander to the firemen and police officers who had begun to return to their work about the scene as I leaned against the intact railing once more. "And besides, you saw what I did to that man. You saw how quick and easy it was for me to —" My eyes darted back to her when a harsh ringing began in my ears, a sharp pain burrowing into my brain like the tip of a drill bit. Her gaze on me was cool, assured, and I knew it was her.

"I promise you," she said softly, her salmon-pink lips almost hypnotic as they moved, "I'm faster."

My resolve hardened, my ire peaked, even beneath the strain of the sudden onslaught of power on my mind, beginning to burn and tingle its way through my synapses. "I beg to differ," I hissed, and I was suddenly inside of her, riding the waves of her own power coursing through her even as I ripped through her cerebellum and flooded her cerebral cortex with the icy heat of my own raw power.

The pain in my mind increased tenfold, and I staggered back until my stiletto heel caught on a break in the sidewalk and sent me sprawling across the concrete. Fire — heat — raw, untamed power — rippling through my mind in burning ebbs and flows. I could see nothing but blackness, feel nothing beyond the agony encased in my skull though I knew I was on the ground, and a scream bubbled up in my throat like a mouthful of blood, but I wouldn't let it out.

And suddenly, everything was in focus again. That same man frowned down at me through the tinted plastic of my sunglasses as he knelt at my side, saying something to me in a whisper, and the crippling flames that had been running amok through my neural tissue were now nothing more than a twinge, the smoking remains of a half-put-out fire — just like the house before us.

Slowly, I sat up, a hand to my throbbing head, and the man's words finally became audible to my ears. "Are you all right?" he asked for what was probably the dozenth time. "What happened? Do you know what happened? Are you okay?"

I waved him off when he reached for my arm and said grumpily, "Yeah, yeah, I'm fine." I rose to my feet, brushing some imaginary dust from my ass in quick swipes, and looked toward the porch, my eyebrows rising high when all I could make out was the bottom of Miss Misha's low black heels at the edge of the porch, a crowd of men in uniform around her. Well, would you look at that. "Oh, no," I said in an innocent gasp, my hand over my mouth as I turned to the man who was now on his feet at my side. "What happened to Misha? Is she all right?"

He shook his head solemnly and lowered his gaze. "We don't know, ma'am."

"Oh," I whispered, shooting a wide-eyed, worried frown the woman's way before I started down the sidewalk away from her ugly little shoes. It was too hard to fake this with the headache from hell trying to tear my skull in half. "Well, I'm sure I'll hear about it on the news later. Ta-ta!"

"What? Wait!" But I offered him only a wave over my shoulder as I crossed the street to where my car still sat waiting, and I slid into the driver's seat and quickly started the car. I was surprised to find Lauren still dutifully waiting in the passenger's seat, especially after the commotion I'd caused, but I made no remark.

"Is it…done?" she asked hesitantly, and I smiled to myself as I sped down the road, watching in the rear-view mirror as that man flailed in a panic in the middle of the road.

"This step, yes," I answered, whipping around a corner to leave the policeman's line of sight. "I know I should have made more of an effort to get information from her, to make the rest of the steps move along a bit more smoothly, but I didn't really have the chance. She practically had a knife to my throat the second I told her I'd come to kill her."

"You told her that you came to kill her?!" she sputtered. "Why would you do that?! Of course she had a knife to your throat after that!"

I rolled my eyes and ran a light just as it turned red. "It's not a big deal. Really, all it did was make things more interesting."

"She could've killed you before you even tried to kill her!"

I finally slowed to a stop at a stop sign, and my eyes slid to her, serious, as I fought to keep the pain from my expression. "Would that really have been so bad?" But she only looked away, to the comforting shadows of the night beyond the passenger's side window, and I turned back to the road, silently accelerating through the intersection.

An enigma, this woman…

Did she want me dead or not?