“I’ve been with Rose,” I said, keeping a keen eye on him as I gauged his reaction.
“Rose? Your sister Rose?” The shock on his face seemed legitimate, but I’d learned not to trust anything tossed at me by the little beast. “I thought I made it crystal clear that you gotta cut yourself off from your old life. You can’t be Lily anymore. You need to let it go, kid.”
“I did,” I lied. “I have.”
“And yet you went flouncing off to the Flats?” he retorted, referring to the Boston neighborhood where I’d grown up. “Doesn’t sound to me like you’re walking away from the old Lily.”
“Rose came to me,” I said. “She came to the pub.” I paused, both for dramatic effect, and also because the truth still ate at me. She’d come to the pub looking for me. “She came, and the demons got her.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?” Clarence asked, sounding genuinely perplexed. “I send you out to kill a demon. I don’t hear from you for more than a day. And now you come back with some story about how the demons snatched your sister?”
“It’s not a story,” I said. “There were three of them, and they had Rose in a room in the basement strapped to a slab, and she was about to be some demon ass-hole’s sacrifice.”
“You’re sure?”
“I was there,” I said. “Hard to miss.” I managed an offhand shrug. “Not like this is coming out of the blue, right? I mean, the pub’s always had a freaky reputation.” The Bloody Tongue—now half-owned by me in light of Egan’s untimely demise—has been around for centuries and is a staple on Haunted Boston tours. Before I dipped my toe into the wonderful world of demons and hell and darkness and light, I’d assumed that was all hype and hoopla.
I’d assumed wrong.
Turned out that Alice’s family had been deep into the dark arts for generations, and though Clarence had assured me that Egan scorned such devilish things, the truth was exactly the opposite: Egan was in tight with the demons, going so far as to pull homeless girls and runaways off the street and sell them to the demons, a little fact that had pissed off his sister, Alice’s mother. Her mom had been trying desperately to extricate herself from the family business, and her efforts were not appreciated. When it became clear that she was going to be trouble, Egan murdered his sister.
When the demons insisted that Egan provide them with a specific girl for a sacrifice—his niece Alice—he’d gone along, undoubtedly fearing their wrath more than he loved his niece. What the demons didn’t tell him was that Alice was part of a whole big scheme to create a fancy, schmancy warrior. All he knew was that he sent his niece off to be a sacrificial lamb one Saturday night. And on Monday evening, her body came strolling back into the pub for her shift. Granted, the new Alice was me, but Egan didn’t know that.
To keep Egan from asking a bunch of messy questions, the demons did what I actually considered a pretty smart thing: They told Egan the sacrifice had failed, that Alice was tainted goods, and that Egan needed to provide another. When Rose had wandered in looking for Alice, Egan had snatched the opportunity and delivered my little sister to the demons.
“So tell me exactly what happened,” Clarence said. He was leaning forward, his brow furrowed, which had the effect of making his eyes bulge out even more than usual.
“Rose called while I was fighting the demon priest.” There was a big fat lie. I’d killed a priest, all right, but he hadn’t been demonic. “And by the time I checked my messages, it was too late. She’d already left her house.”
“What was the message?”
“She was going to the pub and wanted me to meet her there.” Not an outright lie, but the real truth was that I’d already learned about the sacrifice and was racing to the pub to stop it when I got Rose’s message.
“And she was there,” Clarence said.
“I didn’t see her right away, but Deacon Camphire was there.”
“The filthy demon got ahold of your sister,” Clarence said, instilling so much fury into his voice that I almost broke out into applause at his stellar acting abilities.
“Guess so,” I said, saying a silent apology to Deacon, despite the fact that he and I had planned out my cover story for Clarence long ago. Even when I’d been planning to kill Clarence, I’d still needed a solid story. Because to kill a beast like Clarence, you had to be sneaky. And you had to get close.
“I know for a fact Deacon killed Egan,” I added. “I saw him over the body, but he took off. Got away before I could slam my knife through his slimy, black heart.” Okay, maybe that was pouring it on a little thick. “Anyway,” I continued, hurrying on before he could put too much thought into my story, “Egan told me that they’d taken a girl downstairs. And when I ran down, I found two demons standing over Rose, and there was someone else escaping out the back.”