“N-no. It won’t change what happened. B-but you were l-looking for me?”
“Yes, I was. I wanted to ask you about Mr. Wong.” I pointed to the new subject of our conversation as he hovered in the corner. “When you first saw him, when you showed up a couple of weeks ago, you seemed to recognize him.”
“N-no, I don’t know him.” He took a step back like he was going to leave.
I stood and put an arm on his shoulder. It was a show of encouragement, but that’s all it was. A show. I really did it to keep him there. I’d recently learned that as long as I had physical contact with a departed, he or she couldn’t vanish. It was great. But the moment I lost contact, they could disappear before my eyes and I had no way of getting them back. Or so I thought. Angel swears I can summon any departed I want to at any time. It was an interesting concept. One I’d try someday, but today, I just wanted to know more about Mr. Wong. No idea why the urge suddenly hit me. It just seemed important. His story seemed important.
“Duff, I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. I just want to know what you know about him.”
He glanced over his shoulder toward my roomie, then shrugged at me. “I don’t know anything except what I see.”
“What do you see?”
He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as he studied him. “I see a f-force, like a thick shield around him. It’s powerful. I c-can see that, too. Power. Strength. Like he’s m-made of it.”
Man, I needed to learn that trick.
“Can’t you see it?” he asked.
“I wish. I’ve tried. I’m just not sure what to do.”
“I—I could help you,” he said, stepping closer.
Maybe Reyes was right. Maybe he had a crush on me. Then again, maybe he really could help me.
“Then,” he continued, his expression full of hope, “you could see what Reyes is.”
I felt Reyes’s heat flare to life around us. Duff jumped back in surprise.
“Duff,” Reyes said as he materialized in the doorframe, “are you trying to get me in trouble?” He was doing his menacing bit again.
Duff didn’t say anything. He dropped his gaze to the floor in submission. Or fear. I wasn’t quite certain which.
“Reyes,” I said, my tone warning, “I’m just asking him about Mr. Wong. No one seems to know anything about him except he has a power or a force around him.”
Reyes glanced over, barely interested. “I didn’t notice before, but, yeah, I guess he does.”
Duff laughed.
“You have something to share with the class?” Reyes asked.
I was just about to warn him again to be nice when Duff said, “That was a mistake.”
“What was?” Reyes asked.
“You not noticing.”
Reyes frowned. He seemed confused when he looked back at Mr. Wong. Then even more so when he turned back to Duff. He suddenly wore a mask of suspicion. Wariness.
I began wondering a lot of things, not the least of which was why Duff had suddenly lost his stutter.
* * *
I had a lot on my plate: A na**d dead man riding shotgun everywhere I went. A mysterious Asian man hovering in my corner who was made of something powerful, whatever that meant. Another man who sold his soul to a demon who was indifferent to the fact that it was for a good cause. A demon who was going around tricking people out of their souls so he could eat them. Which, ew. A rascally neighbor who’d proposed to me and was expecting an answer sometime this century. And an ongoing child-abduction case that had led me to believe that my man might have a brother he either does or doesn’t know about. I was so not good at tying up loose ends. And to top it all off, I was one step closer to getting my BFF slash receptionist laid by my uncle.
That was so wrong. No matter. Life was good.
Until I lost seventeen million dollars in a card game.
I looked across a table set in the middle of a dark, smoky back room of a warehouse and studied the Dealer. The demon who supped on souls in his spare time. He was not what I’d expected at all. Then again, what did one expect when meeting a demon? This guy was terribly handsome, if a little too Goth for my tastes, and much younger than I’d imagined. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, and he looked like he came straight out of a vampire novel, with shoulder-length black hair, a white ruffled shirt; and a six-inch top hat that he never took off. There was something horridly attractive about him. Maybe it was his confidence. His perfect skin. His long, pale fingers. Or his penetrating bronze eyes—a color so rich, so vividly chromatic, I’d never seen anything quite like it. I’d found myself caught in his mesmerizing gaze on several occasions throughout the evening.
But I had to remember, this wasn’t really the demon. This was the unfortunate human the demon had chosen to possess. So the beauty that encased him was stolen, just like the souls from which he took nourishment.
He seemed just as fascinated by me. He’d focused all his attention on me the moment I arrived, and rarely looked away. At any other time, that kind of constant inspection would be unnerving. Tonight it was intriguing.
The only thing that broke the spell was a darkness that even I could see. It escaped him when he turned his head too quickly or leaned forward too abruptly. The darkness, the demon inside him, would hesitate a microsecond too long and leave a smoky trail of its essence, like a child coloring, unable to stay in the lines. I had to keep one thing in mind at all times: Underneath all that charisma and spellbinding charm lay the heart of a demon who stole people’s souls.