Free The Devil's Playground by Jenna Black Page A

ignored at the bar, and since she wasn’t at the far end, that meant she wasn’t the human I’d seen in my trance.
    “She’s a demon,” I told Barbie.
    Barbie sighed. “All right, then. I’ll go tell her I changed my mind.” She still didn’t look happy about it, but I knew that was because of her limited exposure to demons. It was hard for her to look past the external package and see the powerful, nearly immortal being within.
    I watched as Barbie pushed her way past the milling crowd and approached the bar. Ms. Pathetic’s face lit up when Barbie sidled up to her, and even
I
felt a tug of guilt for getting her hopes up like this only to dash them. And worse.
    I was sure Barbie felt the same guilt, only stronger, and I halfway expected her to walk away. But she had committed herself to this path, and she wasn’t deviating from it. Her mark didn’t stand a chance. Barbie could coax a preacher into robbing a bank with the crook of a finger.
    After only a couple of minutes of conversation, Barbie slipped her hand into Ms. Pathetic’s and started leading her toward the stairway to the second floor.
    I pulled out my cell phone and texted Adam a one-word message: “Incoming.” Then I followed in Barbie’s wake, giving her a big enough head start that Ms. Pathetic wouldn’t notice me coming toward them. Not that she was likely to notice anything other than Barbie right now.
    The club was air-conditioned, but no air conditioner in the world could combat a night this hot and humid, not with a couple hundred people packed together, radiating body heat. Half the dancers looked like they’djust come out of the shower, their hair wet, their clothes plastered to their skin by sweat.
    By the time I got across the room, I was sweating, too, and about ready to deck the next person who grabbed me and tried to pull me onto the dance floor. The alcohol was flowing freely tonight, the crowd more boisterous than I’d seen in my past forays here.
    Barbie and our mark were just disappearing into a room at the end of the hall when I made it to the head of the stairs. I glanced down at the dance floor as I was shoving my way through the loiterers, and caught sight of Shae. She was strolling gracefully through the crowd, surveying her domain. I moved away from the balcony, hugging the wall and hurrying. I doubted Shae would object to what we had planned, but what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt us.
    Struggling through a sweating, inebriated crowd of mostly demons was hard work. I felt like I’d run a marathon by the time I finally made it to the door behind which Barbie and Ms. Pathetic had disappeared.
    I knocked on the door—two series of three knocks, which was our agreed-upon signal—and moments later, the door cracked open just wide enough for me to slip inside.
    It was Barbie who’d opened the door. Her already fair skin was even paler than usual, and there was a sheen of tears in her eyes. Her halo was crumpled in a corner, where presumably she had thrown it. She wasn’t a wuss by any stretch of the imagination, but I doubted she’d been exposed to as much violence as the rest of us.
    Ms. Pathetic lay on the floor, curled into a fetal position and whimpering. Raphael stood between her and the door, and Adam circled her like a shark.
    “I was hoping you’d be more talkative, Mary,” Adam said, in a purring voice that held more menace than the fiercest growl. Even with the door closed, the music from downstairs was uncomfortably loud, but Adam’s voice carried over the ambient noise.
    “Let me try asking you this again,” he said pleasantly. “How long have you been on the Mortal Plain?”
    “All they’ve been able to get her to say so far is her name,” Barbie said to me in a deliberately low voice. I think she was trying to hide a quaver, and it occurred to me that it wasn’t a good thing that this scene wasn’t bothering me like it was her. A few months ago, it would have.
    There was no crumpled