“Why do you have a demon proof panic room again?” I asked, standing in my friend’s basement. It seemed like a good question to ask, because…demon proof panic room.
Seanan shuffled her feet. “To be honest? I’m not entirely sure why. Our parents built it one day without any explanation. My working theory is that Dad is embezzling money from the company, and we’re all gonna die horrible deaths because of this, but he wanted to give us half a chance to survive.”
Seamus, who dragged Lochlynn into the proof, looked at his sister with an expression of completely disbelief. “You are an idiot. He built it after those fires last year. Remember, when that crazy asshole tried to burn down the casinos, and then went ‘missing?’”
“Oh,” I said, shuffling my feet. I had offered to help carry our demon in, but Seamus refused to let me. So, I stood in their basement, watching him drag the man into the room. Their basement had been sectioned off into three separate areas. One area had been turned into a man cave for their father. I understood that he spent a lot of time down there. Seanan once since me a series of messages, saying that she had forgotten how he looked and that when he came upstairs, he sported a lumberjack beard. I didn’t know what to make of those messages even now.
Another section had been turned into a game room, complete with pool table, dart board, and arcade machines. I’d spent many a night in that room, playing on those games. Turned out that arcades were nothing but fun.
The third section had been converted into this panic room. It had been painted light blue, which bothered me for some reason. The walls had soundproofing material all over them and inside, I thought. Supposedly, it would keep some blast waves from hitting a person inside. I didn’t know if it could, but I also didn’t think that their father had anything to worry about there.
One half of the room had anything that a person could need to keep entertained. A television, with four different gaming consoles set aside, a shelf of movies, another of books. A minifridge sat in the corner, looking innocuous amongst everything else. Two chairs and a couch had also been moved in. A treadmill had been set up in the other corner. I wondered how long Mr. Nash thought they would need to be in that room.
The other half, however, contained the demon proof area. When I asked why only half of it could protect someone from a demon, Seanan told me that it had cost so much, her father wouldn’t even talk about it.
That half of the room had glass walls. For three of those walls, they pressed right up to the normal structure of the house. The last one blocked it off from the rest of the room. I could see white swirls in the glass, though I couldn’t fathom what they did. It looked…uncomfortable in there since the only thing that had been moved in was a twin bed.
Seamus hefted our still unconscious captive onto that bed. Lochlynn draped over the end, because he was just too damn tall. The blood had dried on his face, though, and I thanked whoever listened for that. It meant that he had stopped bleeding. I didn’t know where the blood had come from in the first place, but I could be happy that it stopped.
Seamus quickly backed out of the demon proof area and closed the door behind him. I watched the magic as it ran down the seam of the door, sealing the room off completely.
“How do we get it open again?” I asked.
Seamus waved at me. “Don’t worry about it, I know how to do it.”
“Then tell me,” I said.
He didn’t answer, which only frustrated me. The three of us watched Lochlynn, and knots started to tie up my stomach. What if this room didn’t work? What if someone came looking for him? Actually, what would we do when someone came looking for him? So much could go wrong, and I still felt frayed from our adventures of trying to get him out to the car without anyone noticing.
It had taken me flirting with the valet, Seanan driving her brother’s car, and Seamus running really fast with a body in his arms. We had stuffed Lochlynn in the truck, just hoping that he wouldn’t wake up before we got back to the Nash’s house. It hadn’t been easy, either. And Seamus might’ve bonked his head on the basement stairs.
It used to be that houses only needed basements if they lived in tornado country and weren’t at immediate risk for flooding. Now, most houses had basements, because most houses had been built around demons, and demons could get into fights with each other and cause disasters. Such as tornados.
Shaking my head, I slumped back into one of the recliners downstairs. My feet thanked me, since they had gotten tired of being in the heels a while ago. I pulled both shoes off and tossed them into the corner. “We’re so screwed,” I said, shaking my head. “Like, way beyond screwed, and into ‘definitely going to die’ territory.”
Seanan looked back at me, and then turned to our prisoner. “Maybe we can convince him to keep quiet.”
“How? Are we supposed to break his thumbs?”
“I wouldn’t mind giving that a try,” Seamus said, staring at the unconscious demon. I could see the hatred in his eyes, and it bothered me for reasons I couldn’t quite pinpoint. I hated demons too, after all. Just because this one had been willing to let me go didn’t change that.
“When are your parents supposed to be back?” I asked.
“A week at the least. Two at the most,” Seanan said. “They always honeymoon for as long as work will let them. And they get an insane number of vacation days.” She rolled her eyes.
Seamus nodded. “We’ve got plenty of time to figure out what to do with him. Don’t worry, Tomorrow.”
Yeah, because saying that to me would work.
We heard a ding from upstairs, and I turned to look at them. “What was that?”
“Someone’s at the door,” Seanan said, standing up. Panic filled her blue eyes, and she looked over her shoulder. “What are we supposed to do? Are we supposed to act normal, or not answer the door at all?” She flailed her arms, almost smacking herself in the face.
Seamus held his hands up. “Calm down,” he said. “I’ll go answer the door. You two stay down here. If you hear anything strange, slam this door closed. It’ll keep any human from getting in here.”
“What about something that’s not human?” I asked.
He didn’t answer that. I watched as Seamus vanished and tried not to panic. What if the demons had already come for their son? They could blast that door down without hesitation, and then what about Lochlynn? We couldn’t go into that room with him. If he woke up, then he would destroy us. It felt like we had made a mistake. Then again, it had felt like that since Lochlynn caught me in that hallway.
Minutes passed, and then I heard Seamus’ voice. “It’s all right,” he called down. “Nothing to worry about.”
A second later, he stepped into the room with my sister on his heels. Yesterday looked irritated already, but I mostly just felt surprised at seeing her. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
She raised an eyebrow. “Are you kidding? My sister goes to a casino in the middle of the night, and then calls me to ask that I lie to Linda for her, and you don’t think I’m going to come looking?”
I pulled back in surprise. “How do you know where I went.”
“You have a tracking app on your phone. Linda put it there. The same one is on mine,” Yesterday said, unshouldering her bag. She dropped it into one of the chairs unceremoniously, and then crossed her arms over her chest. “Whenever you lie to her about where you’re going, I hack into the app to change the address. Which, by the way, is the only reason you get away with anything.”
I blinked, dumbfounded. “What?”
Yesterday nodded. “Yeah. You’re lucky too, because you aren’t the best liar. Your eyes always get all big and worried looking. Linda thinks you have anxiety, because I’m nice enough to made it look like you don’t lie.”
I didn’t know what to say, because…I hadn’t known any of this. I stared down at the screen on my phone, frowning. “But I don’t see the app anywhere on here.”
“That’s because it’s disguised as a map app, and you probably put it in one of your folders. You need a special passcode to delete it, and only Linda has that. Now, you wanna tell me what the hell you guys were doing?” Yesterday looked at all of us, her dark eyes serious as could be.
I didn’t know what to say, but Seanan took care of that. She lifted her chin, staring at my sister with something close to contempt. “We were trying to Derrick, not that you’ve ever cared about him.”
My sister didn’t rise to the bait. “Seriously? You’re still on that? He made a deal with the demons, and they took him. Why are you still trying to save someone that threw themselves off the boat to drown?”
“Because he’s my friend,” I said. “I get that you don’t have any of those, but mine matter to me.”
Yesterday huffed out a breath and looked around the room. Her eyes landed on Lochlynn for the first time, and I watched them widen. “What the hell did you guys do?” she asked in a breathy voice.
I shifted, uncomfortable. “We didn’t do it on purpose,” I said.
“What did you do?”
Seamus put his hands up, stepping closer to Yesterday. Once he had gotten her attention, he said, “We had to. He caught Tomorrow snooping around the casino. I tasered him, and he went down a lot harder than I thought he would have. He hasn’t woken up since then.”
Yesterday covered her face with both hands. “I think my head is going to blow right off my shoulders. You attacked a demon?”
“Um…Not just a demon,” I said. “His father owns the casino that we were at.”
I thought my sister would blow chunks all over the place, she looked so sick all of the sudden. Shaking her head, she joined her bag on the seat she had thrown it on. “You…not only kidnapped a demon after attacking him, but it’s the son of one of the most prominent demon families in the US.”
“What?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”
Yesterday looked at me. “When I found out where you were going, I decided to do a little research. The demons who were throwing the party this year own more than a third of Blackwell Industries. In demon terms, that means all the underlings report to them, and they get a cut of whatever businesses they’re a part of.”
“I’m gonna blow chunks,” Seanan said.
“I thought you were reading when we left,” I said, just because the rest of what Yesterday had told me felt too big to process right then.
My sister rolled her eyes. “I was. I had to stop because of this mess.”
“How did you even get out of the apartment?”
“The fire escape is by my window,” Yesterday said. “I keep it down at all times, so that the noise doesn’t bother Linda, tell her I’m headed to bed, and she thinks I’m the good one, so she doesn’t bat an eye.”
Shaking my head to clear it, I turned to look at the sleeping demon. He hadn’t moved yet and looked innocuous there. He certainly didn’t look like the son of one of the most powerful demon families in the US. He looked kind of sad, actually, with the dried blood on his face, and the way he laid there, limply.
“What are we gonna do?” I asked.
“You’re going to hope he doesn’t wake up. Take his tied-up body, and dump it somewhere,” Yesterday said. “Maybe he’ll be too embarrassed to point the finger at you. Maybe tasering him fried his brain, and he won’t remember. Either way, you need to get rid of him before this situation becomes that much worse.”
“No,” Seamus said, before I could agree with my sister. And I would have agreed, immediately. We had gotten in over our heads and needed to stop this nonsense before we started to drown.
“What do you mean no?” Yesterday said. “Have you not been listening to me? You have to do something about this.”
“I have been listening, and I understand what you’re saying. I’m also saying no because this is our last chance to save Derrick.” Seamus turned to look at the rest of us, his eyes pleading and full of dreadful hope. “Guys…you don’t know what they do to humans. If we don’t save Derrick now, then he’s going to die horribly.”
“Why do you put it like that?” I asked. “That we don’t know?”
Seamus shoved his hands through his hair so hard, he had to have pulled some strands out. He paced back and forth in jerky movements, and I watched his chest pump up and down. “I saw it, okay? Like ten years ago, or something. Dad had to stop by the office to pick something up, and I wandered away. Demons keep their human cows hidden away for a reason. If the public saw what happened to them, then no one would ever make a deal unless they had literally no other options. Some wouldn’t even do it then. It’s torture, what they do.”
Seanan rubbed her hands down her silk dress, gnawing on the corner of her lip. “What does it look like?”
He shook his head, as if he couldn’t respond. “It’s ugly, okay? Trust me that you don’t want Derrick to keep suffering like this. He might be too far gone already. But this guy…” He pointed to Lochlynn. “This guy knows where the humans are kept. He has to, because all demons feed off souls. He has to know, and if we get him to talk, then we could save Derrick. If we let him go, then Derrick dies.”
“If you don’t then all of you die,” I said.
“What, did Tomorrow get all the compassion in the womb, or something?” Seanan asked, pushing away from the couch. “Derrick is our friend.”
“And I’m being practical,” Yesterday said. “I get it. He’s your friend. You love him. He sold his soul for a demon. Hey, he even did it for the right reasons. He’s accepted his fate, and now it’s time for you guys to do the same. Do you think that Derrick would want you going on such a foolish journey?”
“I don’t care what he wants,” I said, looking at me sister. “I don’t care, because he’s not here. He left, and that means he gave up all his rights to have a say in what we do. And what I’m going to do is try to save his sorry ass. Even if that means putting myself in danger. I’m sorry, Yesterday.”
My sister’s teeth ground together as she stared at me. “Fine. Fine. If you’re going to do this, then fine. I’ll help.”
“Yeah, we don’t need your kind of help,” Seanan said.
“Really?” Yesterday asked, and then pointed directly at the caged demon. “Do you really think you don’t need any help, because from where I’m standing, you’re screwing up left, right, and center.”
“Let her stay,” Seamus said. “At this least this way, we can keep an eye on her. She can’t call someone to let the bastard out.”
Yesterday didn’t say anything to that. She just shook her head.
“Then how are we going to do this?”
“We need to watch him,” Seamus said. “We’ve never put the demon panic room to the test before. I don’t know if it actually works. When he wakes up, we start interrogating his sorry ass.”
“Who takes the first shift?” Seanan asked.
“I will,” Seamus said.
“No, Tomorrow will,” Yesterday broke in. “Because she has to be home by morning, so that Linda can see that she spent the night here, like I told her you were going to. She can’t take the other shifts. Seamus, you can take the second shift. Seanan can take the third. Tomorrow and I will come back after that, so that we can start the whole thing over again. If he wakes up, try not to piss him off, and make this entire day that much worse.”
She grabbed her bag again, hefted out a sigh, and walked away. As my sister disappeared, I wondered how she had even gotten to the house that quickly. Neither of us could drive.
Seanan glared at her back. “Who the hell does she think she is?”
I sighed. “She’s right though. If Linda comes looking for me and finds this…I can’t even begin to imagine what will happen. She’ll have to tell her bosses about everything, you know.”
“And they would come,” Seamus said. “She is right. Okay, Seanan, you and I should get some sleep. We’ll drive you home in the morning.”
I nodded. Before they abandoned me, I had Seamus watch the demon for long enough that I could change into my street clothes. No more sultry black dress, and back to ripped jeans and a sweater that hung down to my thighs.
“Yell if you need anything,” Seamus said as he left. “I should be able to hear you from my room.”
“Got it.”
I sat in the recliner, watching them go. When the door closed, I turned back to Lochlynn…and felt like a mouse someone had put in the snake’s cage.
***
My neck hurt, and that clued me into the fact that I had fallen asleep in the recliner. I’d turned it around, so that I could watch Lochlynn, which proved to be boring as hell. I must’ve fallen asleep after a few hours of that. With that realization, my eyes ripped open, and I shot up to look toward the cage.
Lochlynn sat on the bed, wide awake.
He had one of his legs propped up, with his elbow resting on it. The other leg dangled down, resting on the floor. He’d made an effort to wipe the blood away, but I could still see specks of it here and there. Especially around his nose, where most of it had been in the first place.
When our eyes met, he smiled. “I see that you’re finally awake,” he said. “I’ve been waiting for almost two hours. It’s rude to keep your prisoners bored.”
I swallowed past the dry feeling in my mouth. “Well, sorry. Maybe I should’ve turned the TV on before falling asleep.”
“It would have been the kind thing to do,” Lochlynn said.
My eyes darted around his cell looking for a weak spot that he had been exploiting. I didn’t know what I expected to find. Cracks in the surface? A hole that he could almost fit his hand through? I didn’t find anything of the sort. As a matter of fact, the entire cage looked just as it had when I fell asleep.
“Looking for my escape attempts?” Lochlynn asked. “You won’t find them, unfortunately. This little trap was expertly built. I’d loved to know who did it, so that I can tell my father that someone is creating such things. Do you know their name?”
“Even if I did, I wouldn’t tell you,” I barked.
Lochlynn smiled. “That’s fine. The only people that could do something like this are witches. We have a full database of every witch in the city. It shouldn’t be too long before we figure out which one did this and have them in custody. It won’t end well for them, unfortunately. My father is the kind to take this contraption personally.”
“So, you’re threatening people?” I asked, sneering. “You can’t escape, so you’re going to give me more incentive to keep you in that box?”
Lochlynn smile didn’t fade. “I see no reason to bother doing anything else. It’s not like you would’ve let me out otherwise. I didn’t even touch you, and yet your friend decided to attack me.”
“He didn’t know what a taser would do to you,” I said.
“Why would he?” Lochlynn asked. “We don’t make it public knowledge, how to defeat us. I wouldn’t get cocky with that thing, though. It worked on me, but it won’t necessarily work on another demon. An older demon, that’s spent so much time building up their defenses.”
I frowned. “Well, thanks for the tip.”
“You’re welcome…”
“I’m not telling you my name,” I said.
Lochlynn snorted. “Because you would be so hard to find otherwise? You walked into our casino. Do you have any idea how many cameras are on the casino floor? Hundreds of them. We got your face from every angle imaginable, and it’ll take only a second to identify you.”
My face paled. “Were their cameras…in that hallway?”
His face changed slightly, tensing. “Sadly, no,” Lochlynn said. “Not that you have to worry about that, anyway. It would take days for my father to even notice that I had disappeared. Longer if not for my mother.”
I thought of Landers and Danette, and how odd they had seemed. Detached and cold.
“So…What’s your name?”
I almost didn’t tell him anyway, but he had been right. They had my face on their cameras, and my name would be easy to find in any database they had. If Lochlynn walked away from this, then I would be dead anyway. “My name is Tomorrow,” I said, sitting back down on the recliner.
“Tomorrow,” Lochlynn repeated, looking at me from head to toe. “Well, Tomorrow, what is it that you want from me? Or do you and your friends make a habit out kidnapping people for the fun of it?”
“We didn’t go in there intending to kidnap you,” I said.
“So, what? It just happened?”
I opened my mouth, and then closed it. “Well, yea.”
Lochlynn laughed and rose from the bed. He looked even bigger standing up, and my heart stupidly tripped in my chest. I tried to hide the fear but knew that he could see it. Lochlynn approached the wall that separated us slowly. “You expect me to believe that you didn’t have this planned when you have a demon room such as this? When you happened to end up alone with me with a taser? When you managed to sneak into the hotel full of demons? You want me to believe anything that you say?”
“Well, when put like that,” I said.
His eyes sparked with an anger that brought them to life. I felt it slice through my chest and wished that I could snatch the words back. Instead, I stood there while he set his hands against the glass. Smoke started to rise from it, and I watched his palms begin turning red.
“You are in over your head,” he said. “You have no idea how lucky you are to have caught me, instead of someone else. Because when I get out of here, I’ll just kill you. Any other demon would make you beg first.”
He pushed away from the glass, seeming unaware of the wounds on his hands. Lochlynn walked away, and sat down on his bed again, resuming the same position he had bene sitting before. And he watched me.