And I figured that had to count for something.
SIXTEEN
Not even a full day had passed since I’d met Clarence at Alice’s—I mean, my—apartment, but it felt like it had been a hundred years. The place even seemed to smell musty, as if someone had died there, and the landlord had locked the place up for a year before rerenting.
And how nice a thought was that?
I opened the windows, letting the chilly October air blast in and shove out all the bad stuff, wishing I could just open a window in Rose and shove Lucas Johnson out as well. Didn’t work that way, though. The way it did work was both dark and dangerous.
“I live for danger,” I muttered.
“What?”
I turned to find Rose staring at me. She’d stripped down, and was now wearing only a T-shirt and thick socks.
“Hey, honey. It’s almost four. Go crawl into bed.” Even I, who no longer actually needed sleep, was down with that plan. At the moment, I wished I could sleep for days.
That, however, wasn’t possible. In just a few hours, I needed to go open the pub. Egan’s pub. And now that he was dead, it belonged to me and Rachel, Alice’s sister.
I frowned, wondering if Rachel even knew that Egan was dead yet. For that matter, wondering if the police were after me. I’d been running around doing so much killing, but most of the time, my victims dissolved in a puddle of goo. Not so Egan. He’d been human, and I’d killed him. Killed him in retribution for what he’d done to Alice.
And I didn’t regret it for a second.
At the same time, I wasn’t terribly keen on getting arrested, and I found the lack of police attention odd. It wasn’t, however, the kind of thing I could investigate without drawing attention to where there might otherwise be none. And so I was just going to have to wait for the other shoe to drop.
I noticed the light flashing on Alice’s answering machine and had to wonder if maybe that other shoe hadn’t decided to contact me by phone. A bit unprecedented, maybe, but not unheard of, and it was with a bit of trepidation that I pressed the button to play the messages.
Nothing from the police. But I did have at least a dozen messages, including a number of frantic phone calls from Gracie, two invitations to go out from Brian, an irritated message from Rachel, followed almost immediately by one that sounded extremely worried, then a third one that managed to hit the mark between worried and frustrated, and which told me that the pub would be opening for lunch that day per usual.
I didn’t return any of them. Not then. Not with Rose in the other room and me wanting, right then, to slough off Alice and just be Lily, even if it was for only a few short minutes.
Short being the operative word because although I curled up on the couch and fell asleep, I was immediately awakened by someone pounding at my door. I groaned, and glanced at the clock, and realized it was eight in the morning, and I’d been asleep for four hours.
I shook off the fogginess of sleep and dragged myself into the hallway. I peered through the peephole, realizing only after the fact that my visitor could have been Mr. Tattooed Demon himself, and there was really nothing to stop him from jamming a big stick through the peephole and into my eye.
But it was only Gracie, and when I let her in, she threw herself into my arms with such relief that I found myself not worrying about the apocalypse or demons or bizarre missing keys. I was just happy to have a friend.
Then she pulled away from me and smacked me hard on the arm, and I had to start rethinking that friend thing. “I saw your bike out front,” she said. “Where the hell have you been? I’ve been worried sick. My uncle was one of the cops called in to the pub, and Egan was stabbed, and no one could find you, and—” She cut herself off, wrapping her arms tight around me once more and mumbling something that sounded like, “Damn you.”
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m okay. Really.”
Once again she pulled away. “Uncle Tito wouldn’t tell me what happened. What you told the police, I mean. Can you tell me now? Or are you supposed to keep it a secret?”
What I told the police? It occurred to me suddenly that Clarence had been a busy boy after discovering the state of the pub and Egan’s body and me gone from the premises. It also occurred to me for the first time to realize that demons and their helpers had probably infiltrated the police department. That made sense, right? And that also explained why no one was waiting on my doorstep to arrest me or question me. If I’d already supposedly been questioned, what would be the need?
Of course, since I didn’t have a clue as to what I supposedly said, best to keep the details to a minimum.