A Wolf at the Door

“Seriously?” I ignored Tai’s incredulous question in favor of examining Bodyguard #2. Crew Cut eyed me with a raised brow, but held still as I passed the mirror over him. I mentally put him at a couple of years older than me, and though it was hard to say for sure with him seated, but I thought he was a bit taller than me, too. The requisite muscles filled out his plain white T-shirt, just like Tai’s, but he wasn’t some grotesquely built weight lifter. Those were usable muscles. Fighter’s muscles. Seriously, if these guys were already familiar with the concept of demons, what the hell was I doing out here? They looked like they could handle themselves.

“And what’s your name?”

“Bobby McGee.”

That made me pause, and I looked up from checking out the guy’s boots to see if he was screwing with me. “Really?”

He scowled, a scar at the corner of his mouth puckering the skin along his jaw. “Hey, your name is Jesse James.”

“Good point.”

Bobby McGee was likewise clean, and I went next to check out the guy on the couch. He raised a brow at me too, but where Bobby’s had been calculating—no doubt measuring me up as I had him—this one was decidedly lecherous. “Oh, I love your hair! Can I braid it?”

“No.” No one braided my hair. Except my wife. And me. You know what I meant.

“I’m Dante, by the way.” He offered his hand, but I left it hanging there until I’d looked him over thoroughly in my tiny little mirror. Mentally, I labeled him “groupie.” He didn’t seem to serve any purpose that I could see, yet. “You find what you were looking for?”

“No.” Thankfully, we seemed to have a distinct lack of Scrap demons so far. When I was done checking the groupie over, I shook his hand (that he’d left hovering there in midair, waiting). His grip was firm, but his touch was cold. Scraps or no Scraps, I let go quickly.

And that just left Miss Gretchen Keene. She stood up as I turned toward her, holding her arms out to the sides. “Take a good look. Most men would kill for this.”

Already, her attitude was starting to grate on my nerves. I didn’t think we were destined to be friends.

The first thing I examined was the black tattoo scrawled down the inside of her left arm. Some small part of me expected to recognize it, expected to hear the Yeti’s low chuckle from some dark corner of the room. But the Yeti was gone for now, dispatched by my own hand a few months ago, and her demon brand wasn’t from a demon I’d seen before. The black coils curled and writhed under my gaze and I forced myself to look at it longer than I should have, just to be sure. My head ached when I finally looked away.

“Turn please.” She did. It was easier to examine her when I didn’t have her lovely…assets sticking in my face. Her back, though…I wasn’t expecting that either.

At first, I thought my eyes were just protesting the hard work I’d had them doing, staring at Gretchen’s demon brand. But when I’d blinked them a few times, I realized that what I was seeing was real.

Her skin was pale, as most true blondes will be, but just beneath the skin was something even lighter, shining faintly when the light hit in a certain way. It reminded me of butterfly scales, a shimmer seen for only a split second when the sun shone just right.

Her back was covered. The iridescently white tattoos spread from the tops of her shoulders to the small of her back, ending right where a married man should stop looking anyway. Once I really tried to see them, I could see the intricate loops and whorls, the whole complicated design almost swaying under my gaze. I caught myself swaying in time to it and looked away.

So that’s what a trapped soul looked like. Many trapped souls, actually.

It was fascinating and sickening all at once, and I wasn’t sure if I wanted to reach out and touch those faintly seen shimmers or turn and walk right out the damn door.

“Are you done?” Her tone of voice told me I was, whether I liked it or not. I stepped back, tucking my key chains and such away.

“Yeah. You’re all clean.” When I really thought about it, I guess it wasn’t surprising. I mean, Gretchen was some demon’s pride and joy. They wouldn’t want some skuzzy little parasite sucking on all those glorious souls she was carting around.

“Good. Now let me make a few things perfectly clear to you.” Again, the hands on the hips. “I don’t like you. I don’t want you here. The only reason I’m allowing this is because Reggie thinks it’s a good idea. So you will sit down, you will shut up, and you will stay out of my way, are we perfectly clear?”

Oh, that was it. “Then let me make myself perfectly clear. I don’t like you either. I think what you’ve done to other people puts you one rung below slime on the evolutionary ladder. I am here because I owed someone else a huge favor. At no time did I say I’d take orders from a spoiled little rich bitch, so what you do or do not allow really means diddly-squat to me.”