"And Rover will be here to watch you," I added.
"We'll make sure to call you as soon as we learn anything," Devona finished.
Shamika didn't even think about it. "I'd rather go with you." She hurried on before we could say anything. "I don't think I could stand to just sit around here by myself waiting. And it's not like I can't take care of myself. I am Arcane, you know."
But you're just a teenager, I thought, but I didn't say it. Regardless of appearances, everything and everyone in Nekropolis is dangerous in one way or another. You have to be in order to survive from one tick of the clock to the next. Just because Shamika looked sweet and innocent didn't mean she couldn't be lethal when she had to. Scorch's teenage girl guise was a perfect example.
I looked at Devona and she looked at me. This time I didn't have to access our telepathic link to know what she was thinking. Devona smiled at Shamika.
"OK, honey, but stick close to us," she said. "All right?"
Shamika smiled gratefully and nodded.
I hoped Shamika really could take care of herself and that Devona wasn't letting her burgeoning maternal instincts get the best of her.
"All right then," I said, turning to Scorch. "Take us to your leader."
EIGHT
We saw no sign of Lazlo when we stepped outside, so I figured he was still tending to his cab. Besides, the only times he’s sure to show up is when I’m truly desperate for a ride, and as much as I wanted to get to Demon’s Roost, our current situation wasn’t exactly a dire one. Bogdan said farewell and headed off on foot to track down whatever Arcane sources he intended to consult, and I can’t say I was sorry to see him go. After a few moments of discussion, the rest of us decided to follow suit and take shanks’ mare, as some of the longer-lived Darkfolk put it, and we headed down the sidewalk, traveling east in the general direction of Demon’s Roost.
Varney was thrilled. “Righteous! There’s more chance of getting good footage if we hoof it!”
I didn’t reply. I was still mad at him for the “improved” video he’d shown us earlier. And, truth to tell, I was a little depressed, too. Without realizing it, I’d kind of gotten used to being a celebrity in town, but seeing how Varney’s producer had felt the need to noir-ify the footage Varney had shot of me made me realize that maybe my unvarnished life wasn’t all that fascinating after all. Being brought back down to earth was probably a good thing, if sobering.
We hadn’t gone far when my hand vox rang – actually, its mouth called out the words “Ring-ring, ring-ring!” – and I answered. It was Tavi.
“I’m at Papa Chatha’s,” he said. His voice was guttural and hard to understand, and I knew he was still in his wildform. “I can’t get inside because of the security spells on the place, but I’ve sniffed around outside. It was hard to pick up Papa’s scent, not because he hasn’t been here for a while but because you’ve been here recently. Nothing personal, but the scent of ripe zombie tends to be a bit overpowering.”
“But you found a scent trail.”
“Yes. There’s another scent mingled with it that I don’t recognize, though it’s similar to certain breeds of Demonkin. I don’t know what it is, but I’m going to attempt to follow the trail and see what I can turn up.”
“All right, but if you find him, call me before you do anything.” I’d come to respect Tavi’s skills, but Devona had hired him not because he was a fighter but because he was a reformed thief. He’d stolen something from the notorious demon Mammon who hired me to retrieve the object. I’d done so after a certain amount of highly skilled detecting, but in the process I learned that Tavi was a decent enough sort who stole primarily for the sport and challenge of it. It had taken some swift talking on my part to convince Mammon not to devour Tavi’s soul for his crime. In the end, Mammon reluctantly agreed to spare Tavi, and Devona offered the lyke a job working for the Midnight Watch. His knowledge of thievery, coupled with his contacts among Nekropolis’ criminal element, had proved invaluable to Devona’s business, but as swift and clever as Tavi was, he wasn’t a warrior, and if he did manage track down Papa and the other missing magic-users, I didn’t want him to try to deal with the situation on his own. I’d already saved his mixblood ass once, and I didn’t want to have to do it again.
Tavi promised he’d do as I asked, then hung up, and I imagined him racing away from Papa’s shack, following the scent trail at top supernatural speed. I tucked my vox back in my pocket, relayed Tavi’s report to the others, and we continued walking.
There were still plenty of people crowding the sidewalks, and traffic roared by in the street at suicidal speeds, but the atmosphere in the Sprawl was noticeably subdued. The pedestrians were quieter than usual, continuously casting furtive glances about and keeping their hands in their pockets, no doubt grasping a weapon or two. There were fewer vehicles than normal in the street, and those that passed by were more often than not armored – or encased in force fields of magical or technological origin. Hood, roof, and side-mounted weapons were prominent, everything from machine guns to rocket launchers, energy blasters to curse throwers.
The threat of open warfare in the Sprawl might not have been enough to keep the die-hard partiers indoors, but it had made them more cautious. The Sprawl was already a powder keg most of the time, and Talaith’s destruction of the bridges had lit the fuse. The only question was how long it would take to burn down and ignite an explosion.
We’d gotten maybe halfway to Demon’s Roost when that question was answered. There were two popular dance clubs on either side of the street here: Overhexed, which catered primarily to Arcane clientele, and Disco Infernal, a demonic hotspot. But the action wasn’t confined to the clubs’ interiors tonight. Revelers from both places had taken to the street, where they stood in two groups, facing each other. And from the way they were shouting and gesturing, I knew that they hadn’t met for a civilized cross-cultural exchange. Traffic had been blocked off at one end of the street by a barrier of mystic flame, while a jagged line of sharp bonelike projections protruded from the asphalt at the other end. It seemed that neither the demons nor the magic-users wanted anyone to interrupt their little get-together.
The sidewalks on both sides of the street were deserted here. Evidently our fellow pedestrians possessed stronger survival instincts than us and had gotten the hell away at the first sign of trouble. I figured it would be wise of us to follow suit, and I motioned for everyone in our group to stop.
“I think we should quickly and quietly retrace our steps, then cut over a couple streets and take a nice wide detour around this block,” I said.
“I like that idea,” Devona said softly, never taking her eyes off the shouting demons and magic-users.
“I like it very much.”
The two groups were an eclectic mix of their kinds. Many of the Arcane were dressed in standard Nekropolitan street clothes, but some wore period costumes: medieval robes, stark Puritan outfits, Arabian finery, Native American deerskins, Aztec capes, stage magician tuxedos or sparkling gowns, and a good number of them carried wooden or metal staves with lux crystals affixed to the ends. The demons varied more in their physical forms. Some were the standard diabolic type, like Scorch’s true shape, while others were bizarre amalgams of different animals: insects combined with fish, mammals with lizards, birds with crustaceans and so on…
Some of the demons wore ethnic garb that indicated which human mythology they belonged to – Chinese, Japanese, Inuit, Persian, Egyptian, Hindu – while some appeared so alien that their shapes not only defied description, they defied perception. Creatures that appeared to be made of a series of floating transdimensional geometric shapes that seemed to warp in and out of existence, and others that were purely conceptual in nature. I saw one demon I recognized as Schadenfreude, and another that was Antidisestablishmentarianism.