A Hand in Hell

Chapter 16

I chucked the chunk of bar at his head on impulse, but he ducked it easily, and the scent of my favorite vice filled the air along with a cacophony of shattering bottles. "I should kill you myself, you piece of trash! Right here, right now!"

"You don't have time if you want any chance of recovering her alive," he said quickly. "They're probably saving some for tonight. I doubt they would kill her right off the bat."

"Where are they?" I ground out through gritted teeth.

"509 Railway Street. Old abandoned place in the bad part of town." He smiled sardonically. "Good luck."

Lying across the bar, I reached under the counter and pulled out the half-empty bottle of Jose Cuervo he always saved for me, then I turned and started toward the door, my limp long gone now that I had my anger back. "Well, you'd better find some vampires to ship yourself off to in the next half hour, because there's a demon who wants to sink her claws into your worthless hide, and I hear she's pretty fucking hard to outrun."

He laughed heartily, but said nothing else, and, already tearing the lid from the bottle, I burst into the sunlight with an odd feeling settling into the pit of my stomach.

Furboy never purposely antagonized me like this. And he certainly never laughed about it to my face.

Something stank here.

-?-

I slammed the door so hard that the car shook for several seconds afterward, and I struggled to reign myself in as I walked up the cracked, overgrown sidewalk that lead to the building. It was smaller than I'd expected, barely big enough to be considered a warehouse, and that did nothing to ease the tension that had built up in my every muscle. I could already feel that something was wrong here, something more than the drugs and the violence that flitted freely through this end of town, more than the vampires Furboy had told me would be in this place.

My eyes were fixed on the rusty metal door set into the crumbling brick at the front of the building, half hidden by a thick bush, and I knew I was walking into a trap. The bartender's laugh echoed through my mind, more sinister than I remembered. It would be demons. It would always be demons. And that would never slow me down.

Lauren…

I took a final, hearty pull from the bottle of tequila, then tossed the empty container aside to thunk heavily in the grass and wiped hastily at my alcohol-basted lips. I shoved the branches of the bush aside, tightly gripped the door handle, and pulled the door open with enough force to elicit a shriek of pain from the old hinges.

"Vera!" She caught my eye the moment I passed through the door — straining against the shimmering, ethereal chains that kept her kneeling on the cold concrete floor, struggling to get free from their deep purple grasp — struggling to get to me, though she'd run away only hours ago.

I left the door hanging from its bent hinges and rushed to her side, forgetting to take a look around me, forgetting to remember the danger that I knew lurked here. "Lauren!" I cried, falling to my knees a foot from her and sliding the rest of the way on bare skin. I tore at her bonds, but they only seared my hands, unmoving no matter how hard I pulled — the work of a demon.

"Odd," came a familiar drawl from behind me, and I spun on heel and bended knee to bare my teeth at the source, just as my gut demanded. It was the leader, of course, perched tall and proud atop a stack of dusty, moldy old boxes with one leg crossed over the other, and he looked legitimately perplexed. "I never expected you to become so attached to the human, certainly not in such a short time. How long has it been? Two days? Three? It's been a matter of hours, and yet…" He trailed off, his crimson eyes lingering on mine through the lenses of my sunglasses, and my resolve faltered.