I turned my attention to the screen. Samson King sat at a long table, speaking into the microphone placed in front of him, decked out in a tailored button-down that I'd recently seen on the cover of GQ. His hair was more artfully gelled than a performing boy band's at the Teen Choice Awards. Projected behind him was a huge logo featuring a stylized red SK in the middle of a black diamond. The flurry of flashbulbs were blinding even on my side of the TV.
"He's still in Prague, right?" Standing, since I didn't want to dirty the furniture, I squirmed, trying to relieve the throb in my back from my wounds.
Rohan rummaged amidst the shit on the coffee table for a tin of salve.
"Sì. He's there," said Drio.
Samson had flown from Vancouver to Prague a few days ago to shoot the remaining scenes of Hard Knock Strife, with its age-old plot of "childhood buddies get caught up in a gangster lifestyle." His character finds redemption in the end, scarred but wiser. In other words, total fiction.
I sighed as Rohan tugged up the back of my sweater to gently apply the mint-based, healing gel to my skin. The relief as it numbed the area was immediate.
Drio jerked his head toward the TV. "Watch, they're replaying the clip."
Samson had the build and smug handsome looks of a rich-kid college athlete even though he was pushing thirty. The good guy with enough of a bad boy edge to keep from being too All-American, he was always up for a party –that was both his character in this flick and the essence of his brand. He gave people life at its funnest and the masses thirsted for it like water.
Our suspicion was that Samson fed off the envy he inspired and the humiliation he drove people to in their quest to be more like him. Coupled with the number of deaths around him that couldn't be directly linked but were too frequent and too much the inevitable end result of the misery he incited to be accidental, we had probable cause to believe him a demon.
Emphasis on probable.
Once we had proof that he was a demon, either his true name, form, or hard evidence about the specifics of his master plan, we'd kill him, because that was what we Rasha did.
I barely registered the feel of Rohan dropping my sweater down, his ministrations finished, listening as Samson announced his retirement from acting to follow his interests behind the scenes. This made no logical sense. He expounded on his plans, pointing to the logo behind him and explaining his new ventures of a record label and management company, with further media expansion to come.
Drio muted the sound, not interested in Samson introducing the two clients he'd already signed, the baby-faced teen boy that I recognized as a viral singing sensation on his left, and on his right, the jet-setting It Girl in her late twenties who was making quite the name for herself as an indie actress. Both of whom wore identical expressions of boredom until it was their turn to speak.
Rohan tossed the salve back on the table with a clatter. "What's King playing at?"
I gnawed on my lip. "Signing a YouTuber hardly lines up with unleashing the apocalypse or enslaving humanity as his minions."
Drio snarled a ferocious torrent of Italian swear words. I was both impressed and unsettled by how long he could go without pausing for air.
"What if we're wrong?" I asked. "If he's not a demon?"
"That's why we don't assume anything until we have irrefutable evidence. We also don't want our assumptions to make us lazy or complacent," Rohan said.
"Or tip our hand. Even if our gut screams ‘demon,' we play it smart," Drio added.
"Got it." I scratched at my skin, demon death goo flaking off me, revealing a bumpy red rash.
"Library. Ten minutes," Rohan said.
A shower imperative, I sprinted up the wide, curving staircase to my bedroom on the top floor. Barely a month in to my new living arrangements, moved out of my parents' house for the first time in my life, and I'd yet to choose the paint color to replace the bleh beige adorning my walls. Though the furniture was decent enough dark wood, and at least I had my own tiny bathroom.
The sole personal touch I'd given the room was to hang my large framed poster of Gregory Hines caught by the camera in mid-tap step, his face lit up in glee. I hadn't gotten around to unpacking two of the five Rubbermaids I'd carted my belongings over in, but the other three did a pretty epic job exploding out over every surface. Folding and organizing were for saps. I preferred hunting and rooting, the thrill of the never-ending treasure hunt for my personal belongings.
Stripping down, I tossed my clothes in the trash and stepped under the hot spray in the small black-and-white tiled bathroom. I used to go through clothes because I hated the visual reminder of bad decisions when wearing hook-up togs more than once. At least the wear and tear of killing monsters left me with no regrets. Though demon kills required lube job levels of skin maintenance.