good deal softer, so my brain no longer felt like it was leaking out of my ears. Daisy led us to a booth in the back and flopped down on a velvet banquette. Nick sat next to her, leaving Jenna and I to scoot into the seat opposite them.
Daisy pulled out yet another cigarette, this time offering the pack around. Nick took one, but I shook my head when he held the box out to me. “No thanks. Don’t smoke.”
“Fair enough,” Nick replied.
A tall woman with auburn hair came up to the table. She was wearing a bright purple dress that was so short, I thought it might have started its life as a shirt. She would’ve been pretty if her face hadn’t looked like she’d just taken a big swig of sour milk. “You two again,” she said.
Daisy rolled her eyes, but Nick looked totally unruffled. “Ah, Linda, my sweet. I was hoping you’d be our waitress tonight. I’ve missed that sunny smile of yours.”
Linda folded her arms across her chest. “Bite me, freak.”
Nick grinned, and for just a second, he looked so much like Archer that I clenched my teeth.
“Who’s to say I won’t, Linda?” Nick asked, raising his eyebrows. Daisy elbowed him in the side. Linda just glared until Nick waved his hands. “Truce, truce,” he said. “All right then, Daisy and I will have our usual.”
I wondered what that might be. Evil Juice? Some kind of demonic energy drink?
Linda’s surly gaze flicked to Jenna, who uncharacteristically blushed.
“They have any kind of blood you could want on tap,” Daisy offered.
I really didn’t want to think about what that meant.
Jenna gave a nervous smile. “Then a, uh, glass or whatever of O-negative.”
“Fine,” Linda said. “And you?”
“Uh, water is fine,” I said.
“Oh, come on,” Nick said, draping his arm across the back of the banquette. “At least let me buy you a drink.” He flashed that unsettling grin again. I scooted a little closer to Jenna.
“I don’t drink.”
As Linda stalked off, Nick laughed. “Oh my God, a straight-edge demon! I freaking love it!”
“Yeah, I figure occasionally ripping people’s internal organs out is vice enough for me,” I quipped.
It was the wrong thing to say.
Nick’s laugh abruptly ended, and even Daisy bristled.
“Sorry,” I said quickly. “I didn’t mean—” I blew out a breath. “Self-deprecation is like my second language. It was nothing against you guys.”
Daisy seemed placated by that, but Nick was still watching me with an unreadable look.
“We’ve never hurt anyone, Sophie,” he said. “Neither has James, neither have you.”
“Yeah, but we could,” I replied. “Mrs. Casnoff said that demons can be fine for years, and then suddenly monster out.”
Nick’s gaze flicked away from mine. “Isn’t that what they’re hoping we’ll do?” he muttered darkly.
“What does that mean?” Jenna asked, but Daisy leaned forward, cupping her hand around Nick’s knee.
“Let’s not get into all of this tonight,” she said. “We have the whole summer to teach Sophie about demon- hood.”
Nick grumbled, but Daisy caught his chin and gently pulled his face to hers. He kissed her with surprising tenderness, and I felt my face grow hot. I hadn’t realized they were together, at least not like that.
Daisy and Nick finally pulled apart. “Okay.” Nick slouched against the wall, his fingers flirting with the hem of Daisy’s skirt. “If we’re not going to talk about demon stuff, what are we going to talk about?” Even though his tone was friendly, his eyes were hard when he said, “After all, isn’t that why you’re here, Sophie? To get a crash course in all things demon?”
Suddenly I wished I did drink. Why was it that everyone here wanted to get all intense with me right away? “I guess.”
Linda reappeared, setting down Jenna’s glass of blood with a thunk that sent some of its contents slopping over the sides. I think she would have slammed down Nick’s and Daisy’s drinks just as hard, but Nick took them from her before she could. A look of disgust flickered over her face when their hands touched. I guess I should have been offended at that, what with her slighting my demon brethren and all, but I couldn’t really blame her. There was something about Nick and Daisy that made my skin crawl. I could only imagine how creepy they seemed to regular Prodigium.
Especially when I noticed that the liquid in Nick’s and Daisy’s glasses was pitch black and oily looking.
“Um, what is that?” I asked after Linda tossed me a room-temperature bottle of water and huffed away.
Nick quirked his eyebrows at me and raised the glass in a kind of toast. “And so the education begins! This, Sophia, is Cassandra’s Elixir. It’s a potion they brew here at Shelley’s.”
I twisted the cap off my water bottle. “A potion? Like with eye of newt and all that?”
Laughing, Nick dipped a finger in his drink and licked it. Ew. “No, no eye of newt. Just water from the Aegean Sea, a couple of shots of hundred-year-old brandy, and a whole lot of magic. Oh, and a dash of faeries’ blood.”
I took a sip of water to keep my mouth from puckering in disgust.
“What does it do?” Jenna asked, turning her glass of blood around in her hands.
“They say it puts you in the right frame of mind to receive visions of the future,” Daisy said. Then she took her drink from Nick and threw it back like it was water. My esophagus burned in sympathy as Nick did the same thing.
Daisy put down her empty glass, her eyes brighter and cheeks flushed. “But really it just makes everything in here”—she pointed to her temple—“go all…hazy. It’s nice. You should order one.”
“Yeah, I think I’ll pass on hazy for tonight.”
Nick shrugged. “Your loss.” He leaned back in the booth, wrapping his arm tighter around Daisy. She snuggled against him as he said, “So should we get to the bonding part now?” He nudged Jenna’s foot with his own. “Why don’t you tell us how you got vamped? That’s probably an interesting story.”
It wasn’t. It was a sad story, and one that Jenna hadn’t told me until we’d been rooming together for months. I waited for Jenna to tell them that she didn’t want to talk about it.
Instead, she took a deep breath and said, “I fell in love with a vampire. I let her turn me because I bought into that whole eternal love spiel. Then The Eye staked her, and I…I killed someone because I was starving. Eventually the Council took me in and sent me to Hecate.”
Her voice was flat and emotionless, but I could see how much it cost her to tell that story, even such a condensed version of it.
“Oh, wow,” Daisy breathed. “I’m so sorry.” For a second, I thought she was making fun of Jenna, and my hands tightened into fists in my lap. But then I really looked at her, and saw that her sympathy was totally genuine. There might have even been tears in her eyes.
“Yeah,” Nick said, sounding completely sincere. “That’s rough.”
No one at Hex Hall had known about Jenna’s past except me and, I guessed, Mrs. Casnoff. Still, nearly everyone there had treated Jenna like a freak and a killer. But the two demons across from us were looking at Jenna with nothing but compassion.
The music had changed, going from that thumping techno to something softer and slower. It was a welcome relief. “So you two really have no idea how you became demons?” I asked. Hey, if they were gonna pry into Jenna’s personal monster business, I could pry into theirs.
They didn’t seem offended, though. Daisy laid her head on Nick’s collarbone. “We really don’t.” Her face got distant as she said, “Not even dreams. It’s like everything before is just this big black hole.” She waved her fingers dreamily in front of her face, and I saw Nick’s fingers tighten on her shoulder.
“All we know is that someone did this to us,” he said, his voice tight.
Jenna shot me a look before saying, “How could you know that?”
“We can feel it,” Daisy said, closing her eyes. When she opened them, they nearly glowed with unshed tears. “It’s like we were…”
“Violated,” Nick finished, and Daisy nodded slowly.
“Yeah, exactly,” she said. “It’s like everything inside us is different. Our brains, our souls, our blood…”
I found myself nodding. After all, hadn’t Dad said demonhood was literally in our DNA? And I’d been born this way. How weird would it feel to just wake up a demon one day?
