mentally marked the positions of two other people, both male, but refused to look toward the crazy half-naked chick.
“This is Jesse James Dawson. Reggie told you he was coming, remember?” If Tai was uncomfortable with her nudity, it wasn’t evident in his voice. Maybe this was normal? Naked Tuesdays or something? Geez.
“Oh yeah. The demon slayer.” That made me look up in surprise. Very few people knew what I did. It wasn’t like demons ran PR campaigns or took out television ads. For her to speak so openly, in front of witnesses and everything…I wasn’t expecting that.
Dear God, where was I supposed to put my eyes? I mean, the girl was smokin’ hot and the next best thing to buck naked. I think her legs went all the way up to her eyebrows, and even without makeup on, she was stunning. Her hair was piled up on top of her head, gold like only comes out of a bottle and all artfully messy-like, but it only made her even more gorgeous. Was this what demon magic could do? I could feel warmth in my face and fought the urge to look away again. Instead, I focused on her eyes. They were blue—darker than mine, I could tell from a distance—but there was that slight shadow behind them that I recognized instantly. She was soulless.
That forced my eyes to her left forearm, looking for the telltale black tattoo. It was there. I could see one dark curlicue snaking toward her elbow, but it was mostly obscured by her stance. Still, if it stretched that far, it was a helluva tat. A helluva contract.
Gretchen raised a brow when I finally raised my eyes to meet her gaze. “Well, are you any good?”
“The ones who aren’t good don’t live to get better.” Every eye in the room was on me, which struck me as odd when they could have been staring at her. I could feel Tai standing behind me, and off to my right at the bar was another big man with a crew cut who had to be the other bodyguard. The third man was hanging over the back of the sofa, watching me, his short dreads dyed an unnatural shade of fire-engine red. I couldn’t see much of him except his head, but somehow I didn’t think he was a fighter.
“Well, show me something.” Gretchen waved her hand and plopped onto the leather couch, curling her bare feet beneath her. “Do a spell or something.”
This day was just getting weirder and weirder. “I don’t perform on command, Miss Keene.” Never mind that I couldn’t “do a spell” if my life depended on it. “I will, however, check the room over if you don’t mind.” What I couldn’t do, my friends could do for me.
My mirror was still in the bundle of anti-demon stuff hanging off my belt loop. I picked it up and turned it toward Tai first. It was hard as hell, trying to get a look at the big man in such a tiny glass, but I managed it while walking a few slow circles around him. He was clean.
“What are you looking for?” He watched me curiously when I headed next toward the man at the bar.
“Fleas.” More precisely, I was looking for huge demonic fleas, things I called Scrap demons. As long as Gretchen had been demon-sworn, I’d be amazed if there weren’t at least a couple of the little beasties lurking around. They tended to latch on to the soulless, sucking their life force like greasy little parasites.
“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.
