Free The Devil's Playground by Jenna Black

said, then sauntered off, probably thinking the way she shook her ass was sexy, rather than pathetic.
    Barbie dropped the arm she’d put around my waist and gave me back my personal space. I frowned down at her.
    “She was a perfect candidate,” I protested. “Why did you turn her down?” I doubted it was due to any homophobia, considering Barbie had pretended to be with me, but I couldn’t understand it.
    “I thought we’d be better off with a male,” she answered, leaning close to me again so she wasn’t broadcasting her words to the whole room. Not that anyone could hear her over the blasting music. “I didn’t want Adam and Raphael to get squeamish.”
    I was glad I wasn’t in the middle of sipping my drink, because I’d have spit it halfway across the room as I laughed my ass off. Barbie had been a member of our council for a couple of months now, but since nothing much had happened, she hadn’t gotten to see Adam and Raphael in action. If there were ever two people less likely to get squeamish—about
anything
—I sure didn’t want to meet them.
    “Believe me,” I said between bouts of laughter, “they won’t let chivalry—” The laughter threatened to take over again, and I sucked in a couple of deep breaths to quell it. “They won’t let chivalry get in the way,” I finished when I could get the whole sentence out.
    “All right,” Barbie said, the flush in her cheeks the only sign that my laughter pissed her off. “Maybe
I’m
squeamish. I’d rather pick someone who doesn’t look so pathetic.”
    “That might be tough, since ‘pathetic’ is kinda one of the traits we’re looking for.”
    We both looked toward the bar, where Ms. Pathetic sat sipping some kind of fruity drink. No one was talking to her. Hell, no one even looked at her. She might be one of the only demons in this club who’d have trouble getting laid.
    Barbie bit her lip. “Are you sure she’s a demon?”
    Yes, I was. But not sure in the way Barbie was asking, so I took a deep breath and closed my eyes.
    “I’ll let you know in a minute,” I said, adding a mental “I hope,” because I still didn’t know if this was going to work. The music pounded through my body, distracting me even as I tried to tune it out. No pun intended. When I breathed deep, I smelled booze and sweating bodies and a miasma of conflicting colognes.
    Without opening my eyes, I reached into my pocket and pulled out the tissue I had stashed there. Before coming to the club, I’d dotted the tissue with some vanilla-scented oil. I made a pretense of wiping my nose as I drew the scent of vanilla into my lungs.
    By the third breath, the club began to fade around me, the music suddenly seeming to come from far away. I let the trance take me, then opened my otherworldly eyes.
    The sight I saw was almost enough to shock me back out of the trance, though I should have been braced for it. This was a demon nightclub. I
knew
most of its patrons were demons. But that didn’t stop the moment of existential terror when my otherworldly eyes took in the sea of red auras that surrounded me. There were humans here, too, of course, their blue auras dotting that red sea like buoys. But the ratio of demons to humans was higher even than I’d expected.
    I forced myself to calm, then focused on the bar. This was harder than it sounds, because in my otherworldly sight, I can’t see objects, only living beings. The bar, being an inanimate object, was invisible to me. My depth perception was also kind of screwy, and I couldn’t figure out how far out I needed to look to find the bar.
    For a moment, I thought I couldn’t do it. Then I noticed a set of auras that formed an almost straight line, behind which only a single human aura appeared, and I realized that had to be the bar. Aside from the bartender, there was only one human present, and he or she was at the far end.
    I shook off the trance and opened my real-world eyes. Ms. Pathetic still sat alone and