The Unlikeable Demon Hunter: Crave

Chapter 1-3

“Befriending bouncers has its perks.” I sat down on the bench, snickering as Rohan turned his face to the breeze wafting over us like a dog sticking its head out a window.

“Bootylicious” started up, and oh yes, I sang along. Rohan scoffed, with a “Figures you anthem’d this,” but I didn’t stop my beauteous phonetic rendition of the song.

That is until the chorus when Rohan spun, breaking into moves worthy of Queen B’s backup dancers. Shimmying, he wriggled closer until, keeping out of touching range, he canted his hips up in a long slow roll, running his hand down along the hard planes of his stomach. His shirt rode up, exposing a stretch of brown skin I wanted to lick. Lower and lower, his hand slid dangerously along his waistline, then lower still.

I sat there, gaping.

Rohan jumped onto the bench, feet planted on either side of me. He tossed his head, flicked off each shoulder, grinning. Clutching the burnished gold railing behind me with one hand, he twerked his a*s lower and lower, his falsetto singing note-perfect.

Fuck. Me. Where had he been hiding this?

Rohan ground against me once, twice, and I lunged for him, our mouths crashing together. He tasted of anise seed and gin, his mouth cool from the ice he’d been crunching all night.

I opened my eyes, seeking a deeper connection. Seeking affirmation that he was here and this was real and that the voices trumpeting disbelief that we were a we could go screw themselves.

A flash of something caught the light from the club area below and I stilled.

Rohan’s eyes fluttered open. “Hey,” he murmured.

I craned my neck, twisting around him to peer down at the bar.

The bartender wrestled a bottle away from Naomi. One of Naomi’s hands was curled like a claw, and her expression was frozen in a snarl. She relaxed for a second, her shoulders slumping. The bartender eased up too, which was when she swiped the bottle and cracked him upside the head. He stumbled back against the bar, a few bottles cascading over his shoulder and shattering on the floor in bursts of light.

Pushing Ro off of me, I scrambled to my feet and shot down the stairs.

Most of the patrons were still caught up in their own dealings. They hadn’t had my eagle-eyed view of the club and the press of bodies was too thick for anyone not in the immediate vicinity of the bar to have witnessed the attack. I impatiently shoved my way through the chatting, flirting masses until I broke through to the bar.

The clean-cut bartender pressed a b****y rag to one temple, his body angled as far away as possible from Naomi. Shards of glass speckled his shoulders and alcohol ran down his shirt in sticky rivers.

Naomi sat on the bar top, legs crossed, swinging one slender ankle. She tipped a bottle of Bombay Sapphire back, its blue glass streaked with neon, one side smeared with the bartender’s blood. After a single disturbingly long swig, she shook the final drops into her mouth with a couple of violent jerks.

Then, to my horror, she bit into the glass, l*****g off whatever remaining gin coated its insides, oblivious to the blood streaming out of her mouth along her psychotic smile.

I stood there frozen, heart racing. Clueless how to process this f****d-up tableau. Naomi’s smirk was loaded with memories of every time she’d ever made me feel inadequate. I’d dealt with s**t way worse than this, but there was such a cutting intimacy in her look, like she knew exactly who I was and that I’d never gotten over my weaknesses, that my past self had taken control of my brain. I froze up.

Somebody screamed right as the music cut out, breaking the spell and sending the dance floor into chaos. I ran for Naomi, but my friend Max, one of the bouncers here at the club, reached her first.

Naomi wore a matter-of-fact expression on her face as she calmly explained to Max, curling her b****y tongue around a razor sharp part of the bottle’s neck to catch an errant drop of booze, that the bartender had tried to cut her off and that wasn’t very “Full Tilt.”

Max had never been anything other than an ocean of calm, even when breaking up a stabbing outside the front door. So when this 6’4” brick wall of a man drained of all color, clutching his phone so hard he cracked the screen, my blood ran cold.

But if he couldn’t handle it, who could? My spine straightened. The past was just that, the past. I was Rasha and a hell of a lot stronger now on every level. I gave myself a mental shake and snapped into action. I pried the cell from Max’s death-grip, and called 911. Then I tossed him the phone back with a barked, “Talk to them.”

Light glinted off the jagged bottle neck as Naomi ran her thumb over it, her eyes not leaving mine, blood and gin dripping from her chin and meandering down her collarbone to stain her camisole in a gruesomely pretty bloom. “Nava, Nava, Nava. Always killing my good mood.”

I couldn’t use my magic. There were too many people around. I swallowed, hyping myself up to step closer. “Naomi, put the bottle down.”

She wrinkled her nose at me, waving the broken glass. I stepped back out of neck slashing range. She took another sip, but finding it empty, dropped the bottle on the floor where it shattered.

Shards flew. One stung my ankle and I cursed.

Undeterred, Naomi picked up someone’s abandoned pint of beer and chugged some back.

I reached out for the glass, my body turned somewhat, so she wouldn’t see the new bouncer slowly approaching from her right. Max, still on the phone, kept a wary eye on us all. “Okay, fine. Then how about you share?”

Her expression hardened. “Always gotta steal something, don’t you?”

Screw this. I rushed her, jumping back as she vomited blood, swayed, and went down like a sack of rocks.

The second bouncer caught her before she hit the ground, the beer mug rolling out of her hand onto the floor. “What. The. f**k?” His pupils were dilated to the point of practically disappearing.

I was willing to bet the answer to that was “demons,” because even with the fentanyl crisis ravaging my beloved Vancouver, this was too insidious to be human evil, but I needed proof.

I left Naomi in Max and this other bouncer’s care and sprinted to the bathroom.

Grimacing, I plunged my hand into the mound of wet paper towels in the overflowing garbage, praying that their sogginess was water-based versus something requiring a tetanus shot. I was fumbling in there shoulder-deep before my fingers closed on the vial. I pulled it out, relieved that despite it being uncorked there was still some of the d**g inside. I twisted up some dry paper towel to use as a stopper and sealed the d**g in.

Laying it carefully on the bathroom counter, I disinfected my arm with scalding water and a s**t-ton of soap. By the time I hit the main part of the club again, the house lights were up and employees were directing confused patrons toward the front door, doing their best to keep them from rubbernecking.

Two paramedics strapped Naomi’s prone form onto a gurney.

Christina stood beside them, the orange shock blanket around her shoulders sliding half-off under the force of her hysteria. Rohan had his arm around her, his head close to hers, speaking. She clutched at his shirt front.

I ran over, insides icy. Christina had taken the same d**g Naomi had. The d**g that had made her chew through glass and slice people. And Rohan was right next to her.

When I reached her, I felt like an i***t. Christina’s eyes were hollow and wide, possessing none of the mania that Naomi’s had. She was just terrified and at the touch of my hand on her shoulder, she fell into my arms, sobbing and repeating, “I’m sorry,” over and over.

“I’ll see if a paramedic will give her a sedative,” Rohan said into my ear.

I gripped his hand. “Tell them she did Sweet Tooth. Let them know she can’t have anything that conflicts with it.” He nodded and I laced my fingers with his, giving him a quick squeeze. He gave me a sympathetic smile and left.

Smoothing Christina’s hair, I absently registered him crossing the room to catch up with the first responders as they sped the gurney out. The gurney that had Naomi strapped to it. Naomi, who just an hour ago had been calling me mean names in the bathroom, who shouldn’t be lying there like this, motionless. “It’s not your fault.”

It was both our faults. Lead twisted my gut. Bad enough that I’d encouraged Naomi to take the night off because I’d implied she had a stick up her a*s, but to have mocked her for her past and driven her to do something she wasn’t sure of? I’d taunted the universe and the universe had kicked my a*s.

Christina turned her tear-streaked face to mine. “Why did it affect her and not me? What did I do to her?”

Fine questions I didn’t have answers to. Yet. The one thing I was absolutely certain of? If this was some f****d up demon product, then I’d hunt it down and destroy the evil spawn with my bare hands. Cold comfort, but I’d take it where I could find it.