“Dr. Neely?” I said, blinking at him. He’d been carrying the pizza box, and he wore a baseball cap with the pizza place’s logo on it, but how anyone could have mistaken him for a pizza delivery guy was beyond me.
He doffed his cap and bowed. “At your service.”
I was still a couple of steps slow, trying to figure out a) why the doctor was here, and b) why he was pretending to deliver pizza.
The TV went silent, and I glanced over at Andy, whose face had gone pale.
“Raphael,” he said, and there was a tremor in his voice.
Dr. Neely smiled and performed another fancy bow. “In the flesh, as it were.”
I might have been slow on the uptake at first, but now that I understood what was happening, I moved damn fast. Before Raphael had risen from his bow, I closed the distance between us and jerked my knee up, catching him squarely in the nose. He howled in pain and clutched his face, blood seeping between his fingers.
I glanced over at Andy again. “Is he one of those demons who gets off on pain?” I asked. Being incorporeal in their own world, some demons find physical sensation so fascinating that they greatly enjoy even unpleasant sensations—hence Adam’s fascination with pain, both his own and others’.
Andy chuckled, and there was more life in his eyes than I could remember seeing since he’d awakened. “No.”
“Oh, good,” I said, then planted my fist in Raphael’s gut. He made a loud “oof,” then collapsed to the floor. He couldn’t seem to decide whether to clutch his nose or his stomach. As he was thinking about it, I made a dash for the coat closet where I kept my Taser, arming it in record time.
I put a respectable amount of distance between myself and Raphael, assuring myself I’d have time to pull the trigger if he launched himself at me when he’d recovered. Then I waited.
Being a relatively smart guy for a son of a bitch, he remained on his knees even after he got his breath back and the bleeding in his nose stopped. In Neely’s body, his eyes were an arctic blue, and before he managed to pull himself all the way together again, he gave me a look that froze my marrow. Then he pulled his usual urbane mask on and smiled ruefully at me.
“You’d think I’d have learned by now what kind of reception to expect from you,” he said, sounding so amused I could almost forget the way he’d just looked at me before he’d regained control of himself.
My finger tightened on the trigger of the Taser as I remembered all the shitty things Raphael had done to me and to people I cared about. Never mind that he’d actually saved my life in the end. He and I were never going to be anything resembling friends.
“Is there any particular reason I shouldn’t Taser you into a quivering mass of Jell-O?” I asked.
His smile faded and he sighed. “If that’s what you want to do, I’m in no position to stop you. When you’ve finished torturing me, though, we need to talk.”
He sounded so damn calm and rational that some of my fury faded. Yeah, I knew he was a cold-blooded bastard even if he was marginally on my side. But I figured if he were here to bulldoze his way past me to kill Andy, he’d have done it before either of us had realized who he was. I hadn’t exactly been on my guard when I’d opened the door.
Idiot, I chastised myself. Suspicious as I was by nature, I hadn’t been suspicious enough.
I kept my distance but lowered the Taser. Like I said, Raphael was a pretty smart guy—he didn’t even try to get up, and he kept his hands open and splayed over his thighs where I could see them.
“What do you want?” I asked. “And how long have you been in Dr. Neely?”
“I took Neely last night, after I heard that Andrew had recovered.”
The hand with the Taser started rising again almost like it had a will of its own. “Then that poor bastard Adam found in the alley last night really was your former host.”
Raphael looked puzzled. “No. I’m not sure who you’re talking about, but I can guarantee no one has found my former host in an alley.”
Andy made a strangled sound in the back of his throat, and Raphael gave him a penetrating look. “No, I didn’t kill him, if that’s why you look like you swallowed a live frog.”
Andy managed to look scared and skeptical at the same time. “So there’s someone out there who knowingly summoned you to the Mortal Plain, knowingly transferred you into an illegal host, and has lived to tell the story?”
Raphael’s ice blue eyes fixed on Andy in a chilling stare. “He won’t be telling anyone anything, but not because I did him any harm. Amazingly enough, it’s possible for someone to host me for a couple of days without hating me.”
Andy’s lip curled in a sneer. “Or becoming an animated turnip?”
For someone as scared of Raphael as Andy seemed to be, he had quite an attitude, but I had the feeling I’d stepped into the middle of a long-standing feud. I figured it would do no one any good if I let the hostilities escalate, so I interrupted before Raphael could retort.
“All right,” I said, “so the vegetable Adam told me about wasn’t your former host, and you hate each other’s guts. Why don’t you tell me what the hell you’re doing here? Or is that a deep, dark secret? Because if you’re here just to pick fights with my brother, I’m going to pump you full of electricity and let him work out some of his hostilities on you.” I pointed the Taser for emphasis.
Raphael gave me an unfriendly look. “You really are a cast-iron bitch, you know?”
“Your point being?”
That drew what sounded like a reluctant laugh. He shook his head and quickly sobered. “When I returned to the Demon Realm, I told Dougal that you were no longer hosting Lugh. I told him you’d managed to ditch him into a different host, one whose face I never saw.”
“Oh, thanks a lot!” I said, appalled. “Now I’ll have every demon in existence after me.”
He shrugged. “I had to tell him something. He was mad enough at me already for not just letting his people summon Lugh into the sacrificial host. If I’d refused to tell him who I’d chosen to host him, I wouldn’t have been in any position to help you right now.” I supposed he had a point, but I still didn’t like it. “Dougal’s sent me back to the Mortal Plain with a twofold mission—to find out from you who’s now hosting Lugh and to eliminate Andrew, who by all rights should have been dead the night I left the Mortal Plain.”
My Taser hand sprang back to the ready, but Raphael showed no sign he was about to attack.
“Don’t worry. I’m not going to do it. You may find this hard to believe, but I do respect Lugh, even if he and I will never be the poster children for brotherly love. If you would let him surface, I know he’d command me not to kill your brother, and I would respect that command.”
I snorted. “Yeah, like you respected his command to tell him what the hell you know about Dougal’s activities?”
He shrugged. “I have my reasons for that.” He turned his head to look at Andy. “Besides, Andrew knows me well,” he said with what I could only describe as an evil smile. “I’m sure he has some idea what the consequences would be if he said something inadvisable.”
Of course, Raphael had been living in my brother for ten years before he’d fled back to the Demon Realm, which meant he should have known me pretty well by now, too. While he was giving Andy the evil eye, my finger tightened on the Taser.
I didn’t consciously decide to shoot him, but somehow the pressure on the trigger became just enough. The Taser popped, and the probes rocketed across the room and buried themselves in Raphael’s back. He screamed and collapsed, his muscles quivering helplessly. I worked hard to resist the urge to go beat on him some more while he was down.
Over the distance between us, Andy’s and my eyes met, and he smiled faintly. “Remind me never to get on your bad side.”
“Too late,” I quipped back, ejecting the Taser cartridge and reloading while I waited for Raphael to pick himself up and dust himself off. It would take a while. Demons take Taser shots even harder than humans do. “That was a gentle warning,” I told Raphael, who glared at me as he lay twitching on the floor. “Not only are you forbidden to hurt my brother, you’re forbidden to threaten him.”