Labyrinth of Stars(24)

Tourists spilled into the narrow road. Grant and I skirted the crowd, listening to gasps and camera clicks, and uneasy laughter. My heart tightened into a painful knot when I peered around them and saw a little girl, no older than eight or nine, grab a cobra from its tank and slip a wire noose over its head.

No fear on her face. Just focus: cold, unrelenting. Little hands pulled hard on the cobra’s writhing tail—straightening that long, muscular body with an ease that would have been only slightly less disturbing if she hadn’t been dressed like a ballerina, wrapped in a ratty pink tutu with bows in her braided hair.

A middle-aged man stood beside her. He held a curved blade, fake rubies glittering up and down the hilt. No costume. Just bloodstains on his pants and a smile on his face as he gazed at the gathered crowd.

Demon. Possessed by one, at any rate. I saw the shadow thick as ash above his head, flecks of darkness snowing down upon his shoulders.

His gaze found mine. His smile slipped. I made a gun sign with my hand and pointed it at his face. Grant shook his head, and the demon took a step back, placing himself behind the child.

Grant and I shared a quick look but kept walking. We weren’t here for him, or any girls who weren’t our own.

We moved fast. Grant’s breathing became labored though his pace didn’t slow. His color wasn’t good—too pale, but with a flush high in his cheeks that looked like a fever. I wasn’t feeling well, either. Sweat poured down my back, between my breasts. So humid it was difficult to breathe though I’d never had a problem before with heat. My body felt hollow, weak, heart pounding so hard. I blamed it on the near miscarriage, but there was a part of me—very small—that kept seeing that Mahati demon vomiting to death: blood and bile staining the snow. I couldn’t shake the dread.

I touched the sinuous bodies coiled tight around my throat. Scales soft, warm. Dek and Mal loosened their holds on me, making it easier to breathe. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t worried about anyone seeing them on my shoulders. We were past that now. It was all too late.

Zee slid through the shadows beside me, nothing but a sliver, a glimpse, a glint of red eyes. Raw and Aaz glided above the street, leaping between the neon lights that covered storefront windows and the signs hanging vertically from cracked, aging buildings. I felt them, close as my skin, close as my heart, racing quick. Little kings. Little family.

Tourists thinned. So did the light. More locals now, men dressed in house slippers and limp white tanks and slacks; several teen girls in miniskirts, smoking cigarettes and drinking bubble tea, giving us bored glances. Just more foreigners, overdressed for the heat.

Two old women stepped into our path: short, compact, hard lines etched into their sharp chins and cheeks. Small feral eyes, glittering. Hands flashed; for a moment I thought they held knives or balls of light. Their auras were full of demonic shadows. More of the possessed.

My first instinct was to kill them. Not the human hosts but the demons inside. My entire body tensed with the need—and I had to tell myself, had to remember, that things were different now. We were all on the same side. More or less.

The demons gave us wary looks and waved the flashlights they held, pointing the beams at a narrow metal door squeezed inside an alcove barely wide enough for my shoulders.

“He’s on the top floor,” one of them said with distaste, as though the words were shit in her mouth. Or maybe being forced to help us made her ill. I didn’t like it, either. Seemed against the natural order of things.

“You’ve been watching him?” Grant asked.

“Blood Mama made us, all these months,” replied the possessed woman, while her friend looked past us and gave some tourists a toothless grin. “The Wolf can’t be trusted.”

I started to walk past her, and she stopped me. “Our mother says you didn’t listen.”

“Listen?” I thought of that waitress in Texas. “I listened fine. The message just wasn’t worth shit.”

The old woman stepped forward, deliberately ignoring Grant. “You should have let your baby die and made another, with a different father. That was what you should have heard in her message. Your attachment to the one in your belly will fuck us all.”

I grabbed her throat, and the woman squawked like a flattened chicken. The tourists who were passing us—a slight, elderly white woman, and her equally elderly black husband—gave us startled looks and kept on walking, fast. The demon’s friend also backed away—right into Raw, who appeared from the shadows with a snarl.

“I’m going to kill you,” I told her.

“Let me do it,” Grant said.