Free Kingdom of Lies (Imp Series Book 7) by Debra Dunbar

night dwellers in his household. It must have been one of them I’d heard.
    Still, I was in the house of a rather hostile friend, in a city I didn’t know, with a creepy pool of water in my room. Feeling the need to be cautious, I eased out of bed and walked around the room, checking corners and under the bed before coming back around to the still, dark liquid. Taking a deep breath, I leaned over and looked in.
    And saw a face staring up at me—a drowned white face with blank staring eyes and parted lips. As I watched, the skin stretched and twisted, the mouth opening into a psychotic grin. Then I blinked, and it was gone.
    Rather than run screaming from the room, I leaned forward, curious. Demons experienced far more terrifying sights while growing up in Hel than a ghostly, drowned figure in an eerie, black pool. My initial impulse was to stick my hand in, but I wasn’t that reckless. Instead, I looked around for a surrogate, ripping what looked to be a metal curtain rod from the wall.
    “Hey! Come back!” Shouting didn’t cause the apparition to reappear, and neither did smacking the surface of the liquid with the curtain rod. Adjusting my grip, I stabbed into the pool then lowered the rod until I was holding just a few inches at the end. I still wasn’t touching bottom, so the pool had to be more than twelve feet deep.
    The rod was coated with a slick, oily substance when I pulled it out and sat it on the ground. Nothing smoked or began disintegrating, but I still didn’t think sticking any of my body parts in was a good idea. So next went the bedding.
    I sloshed the sheets and blankets around the pool like I was doing a form of primitive laundry. They slowly sank. Putting some muscles to work, I pushed the dresser over and dumped it in. It too sank, although more quickly than the bedding. The water remained a consistent level, making me think that either the pool was far bigger than this six-foot area of my room, or there was something magical about it.
    Bedside tables followed the dresser, along with candles, boxes, light fixtures, and decorative artwork. The pool remained dark and still. No ghostly face or figure reappeared. I began to wonder if what I’d seen had been my imagination or some sort of hallucination, but I’m not that creative, and I hadn’t tripped acid in several decades.
    The only thing left in the room was the bed—the giant, demon-sized bed. It had been made out of heavy wood and a sturdy metal frame. I broke quite a sweat shoving it to the water. One corner tipped in, the bed slid forward, and stuck. A ten-foot-wide bed didn’t seem to go easily into a six-foot-wide pool of water. Standing back, my curtain rod in hand, I watched to see what happened.
    Nothing. Now I felt rather foolish about destroying Zalanes’ guest room and half submerging his bed. And I had nothing to sleep on since I’d tossed all the sheets and blankets into the water. Judging it to be a few more hours until daylight, I propped myself against a wall and tried to get a bit more sleep.
    My eyes were about to close when the bed shuddered, collapsing with a hideous crack. The pool sucked it in like a wet spaghetti noodle then instantly returned to its flat, black surface. Not even a burp.
    I thought the whole thing was cool as shit, but Zalanes didn’t. His four eyes bulged as he came into the empty bedroom and saw me sitting on the floor holding a curtain rod.
    “What the fuck happened?”
    I pointed the rod toward the pool of water. “It ate your bedroom.”
    He glared. With all four eyes. “I was hoping it would eat you.”
    “Imps. They’re what’s for dinner?” I stood and stretched, tossing the curtain rod into the pool with the rest of the fixtures. “What’s in there, anyway?”
    “A melusine. I brought her from Aerie thinking I could make a fortune selling hybrids, but she eats every demon that tries to mate with her.”
    Aerie? How the fuck had he managed to get to Aerie, let alone get back? The