Page 8

Chapter Eight

“Just out of curiosity, how hard is it to get you out of that dress?” Damon asked, grinning at me from the far side of the back seat of our limo.

I glanced down at the mounds of embroidered midnight-blue silk satin spilling out over the seat. There was a reason Damon was sitting over near the door. My dress took up enough room for three people. Beautiful, but unwieldy. Like the ornate deep-blue sapphires spilling from my ears in loops and whorls. I’d used an illusion on the bracelet Cerridwen had given me, to make it look like sapphires, too. I could remove the illusion now, but the rest would have to wait. The gala had wrapped up before midnight and we were headed home.

Where I would get rid of the dress and drag the man into bed. So, I could be patient. As much as I wanted to let Damon take my clothes off, the dress had cost a mint. One of the ones he insisted on paying for because the theme for the evening required an actual damned ball gown not a mere evening gown. So I wasn’t going to let him ruin it. My girlfriend-of-billionaire dresses got resold or donated to charity auctions when I wasn’t going to be able to wear them again. This one fell firmly into that category.

“Too hard to contemplate in the back of a limo,” I said, holding out a hand to ward him off. Not really necessary with the wall of skirt acting as a barrier.

Pity. We didn’t often use a limo, but tonight had been the kind of event where you had to arrive in style and the gown wouldn’t fit into a regular car. The best thing about the limo was it had a lovely soundproof partition between the driver’s section and the back. And I could reinforce it with an aural ward if Damon and I wanted to indulge in other activities on the way home.

But tonight we were going to have to wait. Which was a waste of the massive back seat.

I pouted. Ball gowns were ridiculous, and this one was worse than most. The bodice was fastened with tiny buttons and the skirt had about a thousand layers of tulle supporting it. It did, however, have pockets hidden in the side seams. I insisted on them whenever it was possible. There had been a couple of slinky evening gowns where I’d had to go without, but the designer had managed it this time. But even with pockets, it was a hundred percent impractical. The satin was treated with nano tech to stop it wrinkling, but nothing could alter how much space it took up.

“It’s unfair that they wrap you up in these beautiful things and then make you hard to unwrap,” Damon said.

I shrugged. “Well, you know, you can complain to the people who put on your galas about their dress codes.” Tonight had been a Marie Antoinette theme. A bit on the nose for billionaires, but at least they hadn’t gone full fancy dress.

As much as I didn’t enjoy wearing ball gowns, I did love Damon in a tux. Something about the black and white against his dark hair and brilliant blue eyes just did it for me. Even more than usual.

“Hmm, if I can’t take it off. What about an alternative approach so to speak?” Damon asked, loosening his seat belt and sliding a little closer, pushing more of the fabric into my lap.

At least it wouldn’t wrinkle. But I still didn’t think he was going to get far. As much as I wanted him to, as I watched his eyes go hot and intent. “I’m warning you, there are about fifty layers of tulle beneath this.” I flicked my fingers at one of the roses embroidered on the skirt.

His brows flew up. “Isn’t that…scratchy?”

“Welcome to women’s clothes,” I said, teasing him. “They’re often dumb, or hadn’t you noticed? But there are layers of other things between me and the tulle.” I wasn’t an idiot. I could put up with a dress that was tight or heavy or awkward, but I wasn’t going to put up with one that was actually painful.

“So you’re just too hot, not itchy?”

“Fortunately I know how to do a cooling charm now. So as least I didn’t sweat my way through six courses.”

The ballroom of the Phenix Hotel had been decorated with extravagant garlands of white roses intertwined with tiny golden bees and lilies. In between the flowers were tall white candles in golden candlesticks. On the tables, on stands around the room, and lighting the elaborate chandeliers.

Glorious to look at, but the candles only added to the heat in an already crowded room. And, as always, I wondered why they didn’t just ask everyone for a donation and give that plus the money they would have used putting on the event to the charities they were trying to support. Lizzie had explained to me that people wanted a reward for their money. She agreed it was dumb, though.

But when you played at certain levels, you had to do certain things for show. Damon donated a lot of money he never talked about, even outside his own foundation. But there was something about being seen to be charitable that seemed to matter.

“Let’s just make out,” I said, “Save the rest for when we get home.”

His grin widened. “I am on board with that plan.”

I thought about Lianith waiting at home for us.

Damon had put her in one of the guest bedrooms with two pounds of top-shelf steak, retrieved from the refrigerator, and several water bowls. Callum claimed she knew how to use a toilet for her…needs. I hoped so. Offering a litter box to a creature who could talk to me seemed wrong somehow

I’d ordered a couple of fancy water fountains and food bowls and a few large plush pet beds while I was being curled and primped and polished but they wouldn’t arrive until the morning. Hopefully nixlings were like cats and she had napped a lot.

I wriggled—as much as my skirts would allow—closer to Damon while Boyd pulled up to a traffic light.

But before Damon could lean in and distract me, something caught my eye out of the window. Something dark, skittering up the side of a building.

I went cold and hit the intercom button without thinking. “Boyd, pull over please.”

“What?” Damon said, twisting around.

I pointed out past his shoulder. “I saw something on that building. Something climbing up the wall.”

“A person?”

“No, smaller.”

He watched a moment before turning back to me. “I can’t see anything. Probably just a trick of the light.”

“No,” I said, “I definitely saw something.” I didn’t want to be right about it, but the skittering motion reminded me of an afrit. Too small to be an imp and I had no idea if imps could even climb a wall. Afrit could though. “I need to check it out.”

“Are you sure?”

“Lizzie and Zee got called out about a ‘giant bug’ earlier this week,” I said. “They didn’t find an afrit but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t one. I can’t take that chance.”

His mouth went flat as he gestured at my gown. “You’re not dressed for chasing afrit around in the middle of the night.”

“It was headed for the roof, I just need to get up there. I’ll take Maia.” I hit the button to lower the partition between us and the front seat where Maia was sitting with Boyd. “Maia, I need you to come with me.”

“You’re just going to waltz in there? It’s nearly one a.m.” Damon objected.

I eyed the building. It had to be an office block or apartments. Eight floors. No one had rebuilt any skyscrapers in San Francisco after the Big One.

“I’ll figure something out.” My training sessions with Callum, chasing illusionary creatures around the city, had taught me there was a way to get into most buildings. Or there was always Lizzie’s lockpicking lessons to fall back on.

“Luckily you won’t have to,” Damon said, reaching inside his jacket for the tiny datapad he carried to events.

“Why not?”

“I own it.” He swiped something on the screen and said, “Mitch? I need you to contact whoever’s on security at the office building we bought last year in Alamo Square. Maggie and Maia need access immediately. Tell them to give Maggie anything she asks for, but otherwise stay the fuck out of their way.” He listened for a moment. “Yeah, one of those things. I’ll let you know if we need any help.”

“There’s the usual in the trunk?” I asked him when he ended the call. He nodded. We kept go bags of gear and weapons for both of us close at hand these days. I didn’t love that we needed them, but it was useful to have them for moments like these. I didn’t have time to change clothes, but I could grab a gun.

“All right,” I said, reaching for the door handle. “Call Cassandra. If she doesn’t answer, call Callum. Tell them I think I saw an afrit.”

Maia had already retrieved my gun from the trunk by the time I’d wrestled the dress out of the car. I took it from her and shoved it into my pocket. I had a license to carry a gun—but no point causing a scene if I didn’t need to.

At least my shoes had low heels. I’d figured no one would see them under the gown anyway and it was heavy enough to make it tricky to walk in without adding stilettos to the mix.

I grabbed the skirt with both hands, lifting it so I could move more easily and followed Maia as we headed for the building.

I should have let Damon mess it up after all. If we had to fight an afrit, I wasn’t sure it would survive in fit condition to be donated anyway.

But there wasn’t much I could do about that. If we waited for Cassandra or Callum, the afrit could be long gone. And I wouldn’t have spotted it in the first place, if I’d given in to back-of-the-limo sex with Damon.

The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring, but my heart was speeding up. Afrit usually traveled in groups. And those groups were usually being directed by an imp, if not lesserkind.

The Cestis hadn’t found any signs of imps or lesserkind when they investigated the afrit I’d killed with Callum, and last night’s call had been a false alarm according to Lizzie. But maybe not. Maybe the caller had seen something and the Cestis hadn’t arrived in time.

Not that the presence of an afrit downtown was proof there’d been one in Dockside.

“How do you want to do this?” Maia asked as we neared the entrance.

“I think the roof. It was climbing and there’s no reason to think it got inside the building.” Afrit might be the cockroaches of the demon world, but they couldn’t creep in through the kinds of tiny cracks and crevices actual bugs could. It would need an open door or window or an uncovered vent into a heating or cooling system. If Damon had bought this building I knew it would be all up to code. Which for office buildings required windows that didn’t open and a top-class security system.

“Okay, straight up then,” Maia said. She had one hand on the gun at her hip, ready to draw. I slid a hand into my pocket and closed my hand around the pistol’s grip.

The entrance into the building was floor-to-ceiling glass. A guard in a dark-green uniform waited inside the door. Mitch worked fast. The guard—a black man with his hair buzzed short—nodded as we approached and hit a button on the datapad he carried. The doors slid open smoothly and closed as soon as we were through.

He raised his eyebrows at my dress before he wrestled his expression back under control. “How can I help?”

“No one else gets in unless you get the okay from Riley Security,” I said.

“Sure thing, ma’am,” he said. “There’s a service entrance at the back, but we don’t have any deliveries scheduled tonight. So everything’s locked up tight.”

“Please keep it that way. We need to get to the roof,” I said.

He pointed at the elevator across the lobby. “You can take the elevator to the top floor and the fire door’s down the corridor, to the right.”

He handed me a security pass, old-fashioned, but faster than setting up a palm screen.

“This will let you up. Don’t lose it. The door will lock behind you.”

“Okay, thank you.”

I handed the pass to Maia, who slid it into one of the many pockets in her jacket. She was wearing the formal version of her uniform, a sleek black blazer and pants with a crisp white shirt that blended in better at black-tie events than their standard uniform. It looked like a normal suit, but it was made of some kind of tactical nano fabric and had a lot of concealed pockets and pouches to let the bodyguards carry all their gear.

“If you see anything odd, call Riley,” I said to the guard. “They’ll deal with it.”

“What kind of odd, ma’am? There’s a bunch of clubs a few blocks down from here. This time of night, the foot traffic leans rowdy.”

“Anything other than your usual,” I said. I had no idea where he stood on witches. Plenty of humans lived most of their lives ignoring us, and some actively disliked us. Regardless of his stance on magic, there was no way I wanted him to find out about demonkind tonight. That would be a whole other level of trouble. “Do you have cameras on the roof?”

“Only one, by the exit.”

“Can you show me the feed?” I nodded at the datapad.

“Sure.” He pulled it up. I studied it briefly. No sign of an afrit. But the field of vision showed a wide stretch of the roof. Which was a problem. I didn’t want him watching us if we did have to deal with an afrit. And if we didn’t, I didn’t want any chance of the papps hacking the security to get footage of me running around like a crazy person in the middle of the night. “Okay. You need to cut that feed.”

His mouth flattened. “Ma’am?—”

“You won’t get in trouble,” I said. “This building is owned by Riley Arts, right?”

He nodded slowly. “Since last year. Gaming company. They run the building management through a subsidiary. But they don’t have any offices here.”

“No.” I pointed out the window. “See the limo? The guy in there is Damon Riley. And I have his permission to do what I need to do in here. So cut the feed, please. If there’s any trouble down here, call the Riley head office security team. Don’t try to intervene.”

He bristled slightly, but nodded, “Yes, ma’am.”

At least I wasn’t going to end up on a newsfeed or explaining to Cassandra that she needed to deal with a human freaking out about demons. Maia and I headed toward the two elevators on the opposite side of the lobby. It was all gray and white with touches of gold in the lighting, the planters, and the frame around the currently dark information screen above the reception desk.

The guard must have called the lifts down because the doors opened instantly when we hit the button.

I waited until they closed again, hoping the security guard wasn’t nosy enough to try to listen in to our conversation after I’d already told him to cut the feed. But I kept my voice low just in case. “Alright, if it’s an afrit, we should try and trap it and wait for Cassandra or Callum to get here. It may be helpful if they can see it alive.”

Maia pursed her lips, considering. “It would be safer to fry it.”

“Yes. And we’ll do that if we have to, but there’s only so much Cassandra can tell from a dead one. If we can keep it alive, she can study it and then fry it when she’s ready.”

“Alright,” Maia said, “but that’s only going to work if there’s something up there we can trap it with.” She looked me up and down like the guard had. “You’re not going to be able to move fast in that damned dress.” She reached around behind her back and pulled out a Taser. “I have this. It has a decent range so you can stay out of reach.”

Solid plan. But I didn’t know whether a Taser would stun an afrit or kill it. Or just feed it a bunch of energy it could use to fight us.

“Let’s stick to guns and fire. If we can’t trap it, we shoot it. Or fry it. The first priority is that it doesn’t get away.”

“Fire is safer than the guns. It will draw less attention. Though, worst-case scenario, I have a silencer.”

So did I. But bullets could ricochet and do weird things. I preferred to stick to fire. I doubted there’d be much junk up on the roof. Damon set strict safety standards for all the properties he owned, so I doubted frying an imp would do much damage.

It was only seven floors, but the elevator ride seemed to take forever. By the time we came to a halt, I was tapping my foot impatiently, trying to ignore my speeding pulse. We stepped out and the elevator started to descend again.

The door to the fire stairs was right where the guard had told us. Maia pushed in front of me and opened the door, scanning the stairwell before stepping through the door and doing a more thorough inspection.

“Clear,” she said. She blocked me as I moved to join her. “I go first.”

“Have you ever fought an afrit before?” I asked

She’d been practicing with the training program Damon had developed for me, but I didn’t know what she’d done in real life.

“No,” she said. She lifted her palm and summoned a flame. “But I have the general idea.”

“That’ll do it. So you go first, but you have to let me do what I need to do.” That was the rule with bodyguards. Let them protect you. But when it came to magic, I was stronger than Maia. I’d managed to fry an imp without knowing what I was doing. But she was better trained. Not just in witchcraft, but in half a dozen forms of martial arts and self-defense.

Not to mention all of Damon’s security people had stringent training in firearms and other weapons, as well as close combat.

If the afrit was up here and we could get to it, hopefully we should be able to contain it.

And hopefully there was only one—my brain added less helpfully. If there was a whole squad of them, we would need a different plan.

Maia had just reached the landing after the first flight of stairs when I heard the door open behind me.

I readied myself to tell whoever it was to fuck off when Damon stepped through. Which didn’t change my impulse. I held my arms out, blocking his way and scowled. “No. You can’t be here.”

He stood in the doorway, leaned against the partially opened door to hold it in place and folded his arms, matching my scowl. “Clearly I can.”

“Funny. You’re funny. You know what I mean.”

“Yep, and you know I’m not going to sit in a car downstairs while you do this.”

Heartwarming but exasperating. Was that a thing? If it was, he was it. “You don’t come on training sessions with me,” I said.

“No. But that’s different. And you can stand here and argue with me and whatever it was you saw might be gone by the time you get up there or you can accept I have your back.”

Fuck. “Okay, but if it’s anything bigger than an afrit you have to promise me you’ll get out of harm’s way.” We stared at each other for a long moment.

Eventually he nodded. “Okay.”

I didn’t totally believe him but he was right, we were wasting time. And he was a better shot than me. “Let’s go,” I said to Maia.