Free 'Tween Heaven and Hell by Sam Cheever Page B

latter. I prefer my demon well lighted and easily squashed.
    As I adjusted to the complete darkness, my eyes began to
pick up the auras of what must have been minor demons if they couldn’t mask
themselves from me. Either that or they weren’t worried enough about big, bad,
ole’ me to hide. The auras lined the long hallway, about one every six feet or
so, on both sides and although they shimmered with some sort of latent energy,
they didn’t make a move toward me.
    I watched them closely as I moved through them into what
passed for a lighted room in the place. Although the hallway was open to the
main room, the demons had somehow deadened the noise of the main floor in the
entranceway, leaving it silent as a tomb and certainly as dark as one.
    However, as soon as I walked through the wide archway that
separated the two spaces, the sound of the place crashed into me, nearly taking
my breath away with its force. From all around, the crush of hot, sweaty bodies
pressed into me and although Abrine had obviously taken great pains to perfume
the air and filter out the raunchy smell of hundreds of gyrating bodies packed
into a space that was entirely too small to accommodate their existence, I
could smell a faint undercoat of demon beneath the perfumed air. It was that
rotting earth, mold and decaying flesh kind of smell that demons gave off and
that they could never fully mask from non-humans. It clung to every table,
stool and wall in the place and caused my nose to close off in self-defense.
    I tried to block it out of my sensory pool and turned toward
the bar, where I hoped to get the information I needed. I was momentarily
disappointed to see the roiling mass of human and demon flesh between me and
the bar, but then I mentally rolled up my sleeves and went to work chiseling a
path through the clinging, gyrating wall of flesh.
    It only took me a couple of minutes to push, shove, threaten
and wriggle my way through them all. The last obstacle between me and the bar
was a particularly revolting couple, where he was of the extremely good-looking
human type and she was of a particularly disgusting demon type, with purple,
warty-looking skin and green Brillo pad hair that moved even when she wasn’t
moving. I determinedly averted my gaze from the moving hair as I passed by. I’d
been killed by curiosity once too often on that front.
    Some demons, known as supra-demons, serve as hosts for
other, smaller demons that resemble something from the reptile or maggot
family, depending on their size. Of all the demons, I’ve found these to be the
foulest, in more than just the obvious way. As I took a tall, surprisingly
empty stool at the gleaming bar, I glanced one more time at maggot head, I
couldn’t seem to help myself. She turned bulging brown eyes to me and winked as
a slimy, white wormy-looking thing crawled down the side of her face. I pinched
my lips together in revulsion and turned away. The last thought I gave her was
to wonder what the human was seeing as he looked at her. Little did he know
that the Miss America he thought he was sidling up to was a complete illusion
and he was really rubbing up against something that was too repulsive even for
his sad, human imagination to conjure up.
    The bartender that smiled at me when I finally hit the bar
was small, finely boned and almost too pretty, with close-cropped black hair
and smoldering, black eyes. He was definitely sexy, but not really my type.
Generally I like my men in a larger size—tsk, tsk, such dirty minds. Unbidden,
my devil’s face filled my mind’s eye and I shook it off. I must have shivered a
little because the bartender, whose name was riding above his head on a
holograph, smiled at me with large, very white teeth that looked familiar. He
leaned close across the counter and looked into my eyes with velvet black ones
of his own. “Are you cold, little Tweener?”
    I glared up at him, finally realizing that he must be one of
the royals. I didn’t remember