Chapter 2

I crept down the narrow staircase and along a short, dimly lit corridor, keeping my back to the wall.

Cherry nagged me to hurry up, but rushing could get me killed.

I peered around the corner.

The corridor was dank and cobwebby, but free of anyone wanting me dead. Unfortunately, there was a closed door at the end of it.

I pressed my ear against it, but when I didn’t hear anything other than the faint strains of the Supremes singing “You Can’t Hurry Love” from upstairs, I wrestled the door partially open from the bloated frame and slipped through. My legs buckled from the spike of excitement that punched through me, courtesy of the Baroness.

Something splatted against the wall above my head and fell onto the back of my neck. It felt like a warm, wet sponge and I yelped, batting it away as I slid on a patch of wet ground.

I looked down to see what on earth that had been and immediately wished I hadn’t.

It was a freaking ear, with a gold hoop still dangling from it.

Cherry made a disgusted sound, chiding me to get my shit together.

Remember when that spider fell on the back of my neck? I suppressed a shiver. Human ears are not better than spiders .

The weak bulbs overhead were strung with a multitude of stripped extension cords. Did these people want a fire? Because that’s how you got a fire.

I moved forward between the many shadows, the air in here so infused with that lemon stank that my eyes watered.

Maybe that was a blessing because it blurred the sight of the mangled bodies.

I sucked in a breath. Sure, the freezing temperature would keep the corpses from decomposing quickly, but what was wrong with the more traditional cellar offerings of canned fruits and winter vegetables?

Only one person in my line of sight was still alive, a woman—missing an ear. Jasmine Bakshi, a seventy-something of Indo Canadian heritage, was the lone female and suspected mastermind of the group. The wiry senior was also providing her own soundtrack to this destruction, humming a peppy tune, which, if memory served, was from the Beach Boys’ catalogue.

There was zero possibility that this businesswoman had voluntarily taken Crackle, and yet my magic sight verified that her mesolimbic dopamine pathway was affected.

I raised the Zen Zapper with a steady claw.

Claw?

I blinked three times rapidly, but it didn’t turn my left hand back into human fingers or erase the frosted toxic green scales striping my skin.

Oh fuck. Oh no.

My teammates would be coming through the door any second now. My heartbeat spiked and the scales bloomed farther up my arm and along my hands, locking down into a protective armor.

Jasmine bit down on her thumb with enough force to tear it half off, snapping me out of one horrified stupor and into another.

I re-aimed my weapon at her.

She growled at me with a mouth full of blood, her thumb dangling off her hand by a tendon.

On the upside, she wasn’t reacting to Cherry Bomb, but damn.

How had Crackle gotten into everyone’s system and why was the drug making these people turn themselves into “some assembly required” humans?

I shot Jasmine with the electroshock/calming magic combo, but before I could rip the prongs out of her torso, she grabbed hold of the connective wires transmitting the electric current and wrapped herself in them, bucking off the floor like it was a mechanical bull in a country and western dive bar.

Ride ’em, cowgirl , Cherry snickered.

So not appropriate , I hissed back in my head, freeing Jasmine from the tangled wires.

Thankfully, her spasming was subsiding and the white flame magic had kicked in. She rolled onto her back with a glazed look.

Sadly, one of the Zen Zapper wires had broken. I dropped the weapon with a baleful glare, intending to have words with Maccabee R&D when I got back for not making it sturdier, and scrubbed a scaley hand over my face. I needed Francesca down here to heal the injured woman.

In my head, Cherry commanded me to breathe. Do you trust our instincts?

I looked from the door to my claw. Yes .

Okay, then , she said. We practiced this . True. It was a new addition to my personal training regime. What are you going to do?

I centered myself, letting my frosted scales armor the exposed skin on my face, and neck, though I didn’t go into my full bulked-up shedim form. There was a moment when I almost changed my features all back because I’d never willingly shown any part of myself in front of humans.

As I always said, I was Cherry and she was me, and we had been working on trust and control in a whole new way these past couple of months. I could reverse it if needed, but for now, my protection stayed in place.

I twisted my Maccabee ring around—it was dim down here, and hopefully, if the pillbox compartment was hidden, the band itself wouldn’t be a dead giveaway of my identity. Using a dusty towel that was flung over a box of Crackle wrapping papers, I triaged the zoned-out Jasmine and made a tourniquet for her hand. Her head was also covered in blood, but the flow had stopped, and the wound appeared shallow.

For her own safety, I snapped magic-nulling handcuffs on her.

A series of low, animalistic grunts sounded from a far dark corner.

“Edward?” I’d forgotten about the other operative.

There was an agonized cry followed by a rusty chuckle.

I hesitated, torn between escorting Jasmine up to Francesca and dealing with this new crisis. Swearing under my breath, I ran deeper into the cellar, my crimson hair whipping into my eyes.

The ground was uneven, and I had to mind my footing and keep my horns from hitting the sloping roof, and then I was pulling up short in confusion.

A demon who resembled the unfortunate aftermath of a wild night between a sloth and a bratwurst sausage sat inside a tall cage made of thick iron bars whose door was secured with a heavy gold padlock. About three feet high, the shedim had bumpy brown skin and stumpy arms with long fingers. Long toes too. She looked dirty and small in the cage, but she was absolutely enthralled with the shivering mass in front of her.

It was a shadow, rocking back and forth—a man on his knees with his arms wrapped around his midsection.

Edward .

I lurched forward to help him, watching in horror as he straightened with a wet hiss of pain and held the small dagger he always carried aloft.

Then he stabbed it into a bleeding wound in his gut.

My stomach dropped into my toes. Were his actions a result of a demonic compulsion or the drug?

Crackle first hit the news back in the 1990s in Vancouver when an Eishei Kodesh rave turned into a horror show. Thanks to the testimony of the few survivors, it was determined that Crackle fucked with the synesthetic quality of our flame-based magic.

Partygoers destroyed themselves chasing the ultimate sensation. Red Flames, who experienced their magic as textures, burned people alive, seeking the feeling of velvet perfection against their own skins.

A Yellow Flame survivor described wanting to achieve the scent of umami, which is a taste, not a smell, but that didn’t stop them from attempting it via cleansing magic, bursting eyeballs and shattering bones in other people in the process.

The partygoers not on Crackle, who were screaming and running for the exits, couldn’t find their way out. Orange Flames, whose magic use was temperature-based, entombed rooms—and bodies—in ice, chasing a glacial coolness in the hot, sweaty warehouse, while the few Blue Flames present, those of us who illuminated weakness, decided now was a good time to turn their synesthete vision into an underwater paradise in a million shades of blue. Which sounded poetic except they’d done it by illuminating tiny flaws in the building’s foundation, directing people to the weak spots.

That in itself wouldn’t have been a problem, but White Flames then stoked people’s enthusiasm to turn the indoor event into an outdoor one. The crowd bashed on those places with fists and furniture, shifting the walls off their foundation until part of the ceiling in the main dance room caved in.

People were buried alive.

A thorough investigation by the Maccabees traced the drug back to a shedim (the plural Hebrew term, used conventionally for both singular and multiple demons, like the word “fish”). This demon, based in northern British Columbia, had infused its secretion into the candy to create this misery and chaos.

The shedim was hunted and killed.

I inched closer to Edward, who snapped at me with his teeth then licked the knife.

The drugs we’d found in the barn were one hundred percent evil organic and needed to be torched. But even with this organic version responsible for the violence these people had inflicted upon themselves, there was no way any of them—and especially not Edward—had taken it.

The shedim was locked up, so she hadn’t physically forced the drug down their throats. Had she compelled them?

Why didn’t she try to compel me?

On second glance, the shedim wasn’t simply sitting there like an evil voyeuse, she rocked back and forth so quickly, it was like she was attempting to get liftoff.

That did not make it better, but it did make me doubt she had any compulsion ability. Ergo, Edward was affected by the drug somehow.

Crackle didn’t go away once the original demon was killed, but it did change into a non-magic, chemically produced version that produced a blissful high in both Trads and Eishei Kodesh—without the carnage.

The version of the drug that we’d expected to seize.

None of that helped me now. I stepped into a shadow, taking a circuitous approach to my teammate so as not to agitate him further.

The Maccabee’s eyes were blank. He grunted each time he stabbed himself, the blade sliding free with a disconcerting slurping sound, but he didn’t stop, despite now being so incapacitated that he’d collapsed onto his back and lay sprawled in the dirt.

I crouched down beside Edward. I’d never used my synesthete magic to suss out a partner’s weakness unless they were so injured that they couldn’t tell me how they were hurt, but when he didn’t respond to me calling his name, I took that as a green light.

There were three parts of his body lit up in blue: his gut wound, his heart, and his mesolimbic dopamine pathway. It was scarily easy in my Cherry form to take the dagger away from my teammate, who had a good fifty pounds of solid muscle on me. He should have fought back hard at what appeared to be a new and different shedim disarming him.

The caged demon growled, her eyes glinting yellow. Not all shedim could recognize infernals, so her hostility could have been toward me as a fellow demon encroaching on her conquest. That would be better, since she wouldn’t assume I was weaker than she was.

Edward didn’t register my presence at all. His only reaction when he could no longer stab himself was to shove his fingers into his wound and try to rip himself open that way.

I slapped magic-nulling cuffs on him, overwhelmed by the carnage, but Edward was bleeding out and training took over. I tore off my jacket and pressed it against his wound.

“Like them submissive?” the shedim croaked and winked at me. She didn’t have eyelids, so it was more one bulbous eye bulging farther out than the other for a moment, but I got the gist.

I screamed myself hoarse for Francesca and Paul, but my teammates upstairs didn’t answer. Ice filled my veins as quickly as Edward’s blood seeping through my jacket. I’d have reverted forms and checked why they’d gone silent, but I was scared to stop applying pressure to Edward’s wound.

Awareness finally returned to his gaze. He flinched at the sight of me, his eyes wide and his skin draining of what little color he had left. Oh, for the good old days of ten seconds ago before he’d seen what I was. At least he didn’t realize it was me, Aviva. Just another rando shedim.

I ignored the sting in my chest. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

“Hurt! Hurt!” the imprisoned demon cried gleefully, her bumpy skin percolating.

The shedim-induced jonesing at the rave that made the drug newsworthy didn’t match the damage tonight, because those partygoers hadn’t turned their Eishei Kodesh abilities on themselves. Lethal as that original demonic form of Crackle had been, it didn’t inspire self-mutilation.

So what accounted for the difference?

Bratwurst Demon kicked a chamber pot out of her way, upending the full container of urine, which sank into the dirt. Gross.

I moved my jacket to check how badly Edward was still bleeding, and whether I could risk leaving him to get help. Why hadn’t Francesca or Paul come down here yet? Even if they hadn’t heard me calling out, one of them should have come to check on Edward and me.

Had they been ambushed by more Eishei Kodesh drug manufacturers? Our intel report had mentioned only four people. Weren’t Sonny White and Jack Meister the two dead bodies down here?

A drop of sweat trickled down my spine.

Could the compulsion to self-mutilate also be transmitted by touching someone who’d been in direct physical contact with the shedim? Paul and Francesca had touched Kaden with their bare hands, and Edward would have attempted to assist Jasmine.

A thread of worry snaked through me. I’d touched them too. Then why hadn’t I?—

I looked at my scaley armour.

You’re welcome , Cherry said smugly.

Yeah, all right. I glanced up at the dirt ceiling, praying Paul and Francesca weren’t turning their bodies into their best deconstructed selves, then shook that dark thought off, and returned my focus to Edward.

His blood had slowed to a trickle. Like his breathing.

I wrenched my eyes to his. They were dull on the life force front, yet jam-packed with his lingering horror at my shedim form.

He took a final shuddery breath and lay still.

I stuffed my sadness—for Edward and this entire situation—down tight. I hadn’t known him well, but he’d been a kind soul, always ready to lend a hand, and a committed operative. He deserved justice.

Retribution , Cherry amended silently, like it was a treat that would cheer me up.

I let out a deep breath at his blood soaking the knees of my snow pants. She wasn’t wrong.

Jasmine was humming again, some slow tune that kept breaking into hiccuped sobs, but she was still alive. As were Francesca and Paul, upstairs.

I hoped.

Check on Francesca and Paul and leave the jailed shedim alive until everyone else was secure? Or take her on myself? I raced through the pros and cons of each but concluded that if my teammates were incapacitated or if touching the shedim (which we’d inevitably do when fighting) induced violent urges, then my armored scales placed me in the best position to take her down so no one else fell victim.

I found the keys next to a severed arm and unlocked the cage.

Bratwurst Demon didn’t move.

“Get out,” I snarled.

Instead of using the open door, she contorted her body like an octopus and slipped between the bars.

I lunged for her with my claws, longing to rip into her, but she sidestepped me.

“Stupid humans thought this would hold me,” she sneered, crushing the gold padlock into a twisted mess. “Foolish children.” No sooner had she dropped the lock into the dirt than her gumption drained out of her and her entire sausage-like body slumped. “Need to eat.”

The shedim wasn’t getting a last meal, but she was right about one thing: she was on death row.