Vanity Scare Page 4

  Like someone that knows exactly what they’re talking about right now.

  The keys were behind her on the counter. I moved forward until she was leaning back against the counter and I was right over her. Then I reached down and scooped up the keys—and I hugged her. She was snug and warm and perfect.

  “I know,” I said. I let go and backed up, and I did that thing where you push somebody’s hair back from their face just because you want to touch their cheek. “Okay. Let’s go save motherfucking Dagan.”

  FOUR

  Quillan

  Dagan’s apartment was… Dagan’s apartment.

  It was part of this enormous luxury-condo complex. He was only on the third floor—not rich enough to spring for a penthouse, I guessed—but everything about the building was suspiciously chic and strangely normal. Christina flashed her badge to get us into the elevator, saying we were doing a wellness check on a federal employee. Which was at least partly true.

  When we got to his door, I noticed it wasn’t any different from the other doors, except for a red X sticker about the size of my palm stuck under the peephole.

  “Gross,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Christina. “Does it mean something?”

  “Definitely.”

  “Okay, what’s it mean?”

  “Dagan lives here, and he makes bad decisions,” I told her, and opened the door into the living room. It wasn’t much of an answer and I was well aware of that, but at the moment, my mind wasn’t on Dagan and his bad decisions. Instead, I was taking in the scenery around me and wondering if we were about to walk into a less-than-pleasant situation.

  There was a big, black leather couch sitting atop deep red squish-plush carpet, and a huge, awful white crystal chandelier hanging over everything. A shiny coffee table, also black, sat in the middle of the room, filled with weirdly normal magazines, coasters with little roosters on them, and—yeah, there it was. An enormously thick book with a fully naked woman on the front, covered by big blocky letters that just said Fever. Little white letters at the bottom said it was a catalogue.

  Honestly, I didn’t want to know what in the hell it sold. But this was Dagan we were talking about, so I could make some assumptions.

  We walked into the kitchen and turned on the lights. Black cabinets, white marble countertops, and a small shiny black dining room table with some suspiciously handcuff-looking augmentations attached to it. There was a stainless-steel toaster still plugged into the wall, and the whole place smelled like burning chocolate. Which probably had something to do with the suspicious table, but I cannot express how much I didn’t want to know how or why.

  I unplugged the toaster and picked it up, looking it over for… I didn’t know. Something weird and gut-twisting, I guessed. Anything from bloodstains to lewd stickers. Maybe something that implied Dagan was using it for something other than making toast.

  “Okay,” I began. “This is… normal. Kind of. Mostly.”

  Christina cleared her throat and pointed. I looked.

  A piñata of a nude woman in a black harness with a whip in her mouth leaned dejectedly against the lower cabinets, its side busted open. Condoms, ball gags, and papier-mâché hearts poured out in unfriendly numbers.

  “Okay, nope,” I said, and immediately walked back into the living room, taking the toaster with me. I heard Christina laughing behind me.

  “What did you think his apartment was going to look like?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.” I stared at everything, toaster in my hands. “I didn’t want to think about it.” Parts of the place were totally normal—like, there wasn’t anything super weird about the coffee table—but this was definitely not the kind of room you wanted to subject to a black light. Not unless you wanted to have lots and lots of really specific nightmares.

  “It doesn’t look lived in,” I announced. It came out as a really disconcerted mutter. The kind of whispering you do in a haunted house when you’re only twenty percent sure ghosts aren’t real. I fully expected Dagan to drop naked and erect out of the ceiling with a rose in his mouth.

  Going to stop thinking about that now…

  “No, it doesn’t look lived in,” Christina agreed. She walked into the living room and gently took the toaster out of my hands. I felt a sudden dumb urge to snatch it back and hiss, “precious.”

  “But Dagan probably doesn’t spend a whole lot of time here,” she finished.

  “Do demons sleep?” I asked, realizing that I didn’t actually know. Maybe Dagan only had a bed for, like, the really obvious things you use beds for when you’re not sleeping in them.

  “Rarely,” Christina told me. She set the toaster on the coffee table and started pacing over the plush red carpet, eyes roving over the furniture. “When they need to commune.”

  “Commune?”

  “With their home dimension, the demon plane.” She turned on a lamp, which cast an unpleasantly eerie red light over the already unsettling space. “If demons go to sleep, it’s compulsory.”

  “That sucks,” I said. I couldn’t imagine Dagan getting along with his relatives, if he even had relatives. It wouldn’t have surprised me at all to learn that he’d killed them all for kicks. But maybe that was unfair.

  “Come on,” Christina suggested. “Let’s check the bedroom.”

  I got this close to saying, “Do we have to?” in my best whiny-ten-year-old-on-a-road-trip voice. Dagan’s actual bedroom was the last place in the whole universe I wanted to check. And remember that Bram’s bedroom is also on that list.

  Christina grabbed my wrist and led me in. And then she stopped walking. A light was on, a lamp by the window, next to an armchair and a small bedside table.

  “Federal agents,” she said. Not to me.

  There was a guy. Older, forties maybe, with dark hair pale skin. Suit and vest and tie, coat on the bed. Sitting in a chair by the bed like he was waiting for someone. Blue plastic container of bubbles in one hand, bubble wand in the other. And he was just… he was just chilling there. Blowing bubbles.

  And fuck, I had so many questions.

  Since he was sitting there, blowing bubbles, I figured he’d been there for a hot minute. So, either he was waiting around for Dagan, got bored, and found bubbles somewhere in Dagan’s apartment—which meant Dagan just randomly had bubbles—or the dude knew he’d be waiting here for a while and brought his own bubbles with him?

  Honestly? I didn’t know which was weirder.

  When he saw us, he stopped blowing bubbles and stood up. He didn’t look embarrassed at all.

  “I’m looking for Dagan Halsir,” he said, and he leered.

  “Halsir,” I repeated, realizing I’d never actually heard Dagan’s last name. Actually, I hadn’t even realized demons had last names. I’d only met one, Dagan, and he just went by Dagan, like Madonna. Or Cher. Or the artist formerly known as Prince. Not that Dagan was as amazing as the artist formerly known as Prince, or Madonna, or Cher, for that matter.

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  “Someone who’s looking for Dagan Halsir.”

  Great. He was going to be difficult.

  “Sir, you’re trespassing on private property,” Christina told him.

  He spread his hands wide. “Can you prove I’m not allowed to be here?”

  She frowned for a moment. “Why are you here to see Dagan?” she asked, putting her badge away.

  The man laughed darkly, a sound that reminded me of the gurgle of ink being poured from a bottle. He definitely seemed like Dagan’s kind of guy. “Believe me when I say, sweet lady, that I don’t want to see him. In fact, I should very much like never to see him again.”

  He sat down again and held the bubble blower to his face, blowing softly. Two bubbles appear in the air, and the third popped before it got free. He scowled at the wand and replaced it in the blue plastic container. “But he has something of mine and I’d very dearly like it back.”

  “We haven’t seen him,” I said. I sounded
like a lying five-year-old.

  “What did he take from you?’ asked Christina.

  “What did he steal,” the man spat, lacing his fingers together in the kind of way that basically screamed please-don’t-trust-me-I’m-evil.

  “Okay, what did he steal?” Christina corrected herself, mimicking his inflection. It seemed to amuse him.

  “Something very precious to me.”

  “Great, that narrows it down,” Christina muttered. “Well, we haven’t seen him.”

  “But you’re looking for him as well,” he said. “Which means perhaps he’s taken something from you also?”

  “We were doing a wellness check,” I explained. “Nobody’s heard from him for a while.”

  “A wellness check,” he repeated. “On behalf of someone else, I expect? A woman who asked you to check up on him, perhaps?”

  Christina frowned again, crossing her arms. “What makes you think that?”

  “You don’t seem to be the kind of worldly beasts Dagan keeps in his employ, and I suspect you’re not, in fact, his friends.” He chuckled again. “Dagan doesn’t have those in excess.”

  Okay, true enough. Christina didn’t stop frowning. “We’re just doing our job, sir.”

  “Hmm.” The man looked her up and down with the kind of oily eyes that get your teeth kicked in. I took a step forward without realizing it, but Christina put her hand on my arm.

  “There’s much goodness in you,” he said. “A purity of heart, a sacred valor unknown in my world.”

  “And where would that world be, exactly?” Christina asked.

  He set his bubbles down on the side table and stood with a flourish. “You would do well to abandon this wellness check of yours altogether, before Mr. Halsir drags you into something you don’t want to be dragged into.”

  “What exactly did he steal from you?” I demanded. I really didn’t like the way he was looking at Christina.

  He rolled his eyes. “A scarf.” He smiled, like it was funny.

  “A… a scarf,” I asked incredulously.

  “A scarf. It’s very important.” He screwed the lid onto the bubbles and picked up his coat, fussing with his hair before putting the container of bubbles into his coat pocket very carefully. So, he’d brought them—or now he was stealing them.

  And he took something else out of his other pocket. A wallet. Small, black, thin.

  “Dagan dropped this, by the way,” he said, setting it down on the bedside table. There was a weird smug-pretentious-bastard thing going on with his voice. “Perhaps you can get it back to him.”

  “Woah, wait,” said Christina. “Dagan dropped this where? Where did you see him last?”

  He smiled. “Do tell me if you come across the scarf,” he said. Then he nodded at Christina and approached me. Before I could figure out what the hell he was doing, he reached out, threw his arms around me and… gave me a hug? Then he pulled away, nodded succinctly, and disappeared. The air sizzled like it was burping after swallowing him.

  “Um… what was that?” I asked after he’d done his disappearing act and left us standing there for at least five seconds in complete and total bewildered silence.

  “Maybe it’s his way of saying goodbye?” Christina answered with a shrug.

  “Maybe. Weird. I feel dirty now. Like I need to take a shower.” She frowned at me. “Hey, you’re not the one he hugged!” Then I shook my head. “I wonder who the hell he was, anyway?”

  “Somebody else who was looking for Dagan,” she answered. “Great.” She sighed.

  “What?” I asked, because the sigh sounded very content-specific. “What are you thinking?”

  “Well, what do we know about Dagan, exactly?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “We know he’s from the demon plane. We know he’s a sadistic son of a bitch and he’s rude. He’s also nowhere near as funny as he thinks he is, and…”

  “Thanks, Quill, but that wasn’t what I meant.” She smiled at me. “What do we know about his family? People he would have known in Dromir?”

  I shrugged. “Nothing specific.”

  “But you know something?”

  “Just that he really didn’t want to go home. Apparently, that was why he helped Sam in the first place, so Splendor wouldn’t get eaten by darkness or whatever and he’d have someplace to keep living.”

  Christina nodded slowly. “I think we just met the man he was running from.” She pulled her phone out of her pocket, unlocked it, and made a call.

  “Knight,” she said a few seconds later. “Yes, we’re fine. Listen, there was somebody here, a demon. No, he’s gone now, but he was looking for Dagan.”

  “Demon?” I whispered. She held up her hand and walked over to the window as I thought about the fact that the guy was a demon. As a fairy, Christina could read what type of classification a creature was, so that wasn’t the weird part. The weird part was that I hadn’t really gotten a demon read from him. More like a thug from a Dick Tracy-esque movie.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Mmhmm. I don’t know. It doesn’t look like Dagan’s been here for a while, but that might not be anything out of the ordinary for him. …Yeah. Okay. We’ll stay until they get here. Yeah. Okay, bye. Thanks.” She hung up and looked at me. “Okay, so we’re waiting here for the crime scene guys just in case there’s blood or something we can’t see.”

  There were a lot of things in here that we couldn’t see, I was sure of it. Most of them were bodily fluids, and seeing as how it was Dagan’s apartment, there was also blood, probably. He was into pain-type shit. Or so I’d been told.

  I nodded and looked around for something safe to sit on.

  “Maybe we should just wait for them outside?” asked Christina.

  “Yeah, definitely,” I answered.

  “I don’t want to be in here when the black light comes out.”

  “Fuck, me neither.”

  FIVE

  Quillan

  After a couple of hours of explaining just what had happened at Dagan’s, we were excused by the crime scene investigators. When we got home, we found Timothy in a state.

  Like, rumbling and twitching and twisting like he was trying to get himself out of the dirt to go for a walk. Timothy had broken down the back door and was reaching around with a leafy vine, like when your phone skids under the couch and you just start flailing around until you knock your hand into it.

  “Timothy!” Christina could tell something was wrong the second we pulled up. She ripped the keys out of the ignition and ran into the house like something was on fire, leaving the front door wide open.

  I followed her in, picked her keys up off the floor, locked the Jeep and the front door, and hustled my ass into the kitchen after her. There were lots of growly noises coming from the kitchen. And thumping. Like that refrigerator ca-chunk-thud-hmmmmmm noise, but it was way louder. And angrier. So, either Timothy was having a day, or our fridge was alive and ready to bust some heads.

  But it wasn’t the fridge (good). It was Timothy, sweeping his little green tentacles through what was left of the dining room table (bad), through piles of broken glass (very bad), and what was definitely blood (significantly worse).

  “What the hell?” I said, running forward.

  “Timothy, it’s me, it’s me,” Christina cooed to the plant. Then she touched the flailing green vine thing and it stopped freaking out, like she’d pulled a plug somewhere. The cosmic-horror-from-the-edge-of-space roaring stopped. Timothy’s vine pulled into the backyard with a sad little rumble that I think might have been strawberry-not-tomato-plant for “shit, my bad.”

  “It’s okay,” Christina said reassuringly. She walked into the backyard. The only light was coming through the hole in the wall that used to be a door from the kitchen, and only the light over the sink was on. So Timothy was lit from underneath like something out of Are You Afraid of the Dark.

  Timothy gurgled and squirmed.

  “Tell me what happened, honey,” encouraged Christina.


  So she and the plant had a conversation while I got a broom and just kinda swept awkwardly behind them. I felt like I was eavesdropping on somebody in the high school counselor’s office. Except one of them was speaking Spanish. Or, like, Portuguese, I guessed, because I knew a little Spanish. Actually, this was more like sign language.

  “What did the bad man say?” asked Christina. Which is among the literal worst things you can overhear in a one-sided conversation with the bloody, thrashing plant monster that lives in your yard.

  Timothy gurgled and rumbled and made these weird sweeping movements with his stem-things that might have been hand gestures? Like, maybe he was pantomiming something. Or maybe it was just windy?

  Christina came back in eventually, and I’d gotten most of the glass and wood splinters cleaned up and put into industrial-strength garbage bags nested in seven other industrial-strength garbage bags.

  “Okay, so the guy from Dagan’s apartment was here,” she said, and she looked pissed.

  “When?”

  “Like ten minutes ago.”

  “Fuck,” I said. “Did he follow us?”

  “No.” Christina fished something out of her back pocket, a little brown folded-over square that looked like it had been swallowed and regurgitated by a giant bird. One that wasn’t very good at regurgitating things.

  “Oh, hell,” I said, recognizing the disgusting square. I took it from her and unfolded it, and yep. My face. My ID, all scratched up.

  “I guess he palmed it when he was feeling you up,” said Christina.

  I grimaced. “Can you find literally any other way to say that?”

  “Probably. Manhandled?”

  “That’s worse.”

  “Assaulted?”

  “There you go.” I turned the wallet over in my hands and saw what was left of my insurance card. Part of the address had been ripped off, either in whatever scuffle Timothy had with the guy or just because Timothy found my wallet and was feeling vindictive. But you could still see most of it, and it probably wasn’t ripped when the demon dude was looking at it. “Fuck.”