Under Attack

Chapter Nine

“This is Heaven?”

I yanked open the door, immediately wrinkling my nose and rubbing my greasy palm on my jeans.

“Yeah,” Alex returned. “What did you expect? Clouds and harpsichords?”

Heaven was a dive bar at the mouth of Hayes Valley and nothing about the place reflected its name except for a chipping depiction of God giving life to Adam painted on the wall just in front of the illuminated restrooms sign.

I immediately felt a nervous blush wash over me. “Geez. Why is it that otherworldly information never comes from a stodgy man in a suit at the Burlingame Hilton?”

Though I wasn’t a teetotaler by any means, my last bar experience was trying my bloody best to fit in at the vampire bar, Dirt. It didn’t seem like I was doing any better at Heaven, where every face swung to scrutinize us once we stepped into the dimly lit place. Alex got the interested once-over from the ladies sipping brightly colored martinis at the table in the corner; Nina was being admired by a drag queen drinking a Sam Adams, and everyone else was focused on me.

“Blend in,” Alex ordered.

“With what?” I asked, my eyes sweeping the half-human, half-demon, half-other clientele.

I tried to paste on Paris Hilton’s patented too-bored-for-this-planet look, but I was having a hard time tearing my eyes from the gentleman at the end of the bar. His amber eyes were almond shaped and deeply focused; he took long, slow pulls from his beer without steering his gaze from me. There was something vaguely familiar about his ash-blond hair, something recognizable about the slope of his nose, his thin lips. My mind reeled as I tried to place him. I was still working on it when Alex nudged me.

“That’s Piri,” Alex said, gesturing to the man behind the bar.

“That’s the pixie you were telling us about?” Nina asked, incredulous.

On our drive to Heaven, Alex had filled us in on Piri, a local pixie who spent most of his time in the “upper world” (that’s ours), and was the go-to guy for finding out the seedy goings-ons of human-angel-demon dealings.

Alex looked at Piri, nodded his head. “Yeah, that’s him. Why?”

While it’s true that very few demons reflect their Dis-neyized /Wes Craven/Hollywoodized images, pixies were generally fairly well depicted.

Except for this one.

Though he had the same fine-boned features and porcelain skin I was used to with other fairy folk, the stern set of his jaw and his narrowed, beer-bottle brown eyes—eyes that raked over us as we stood in the doorway—generally didn’t give off that cutesy Tinkerbelle vibe.

Piri stood behind the bar, his huge mitt-like hands set on the hardwood top, his fingers tapping in a slow, bored rhythm that made the tattooed coiled snake on his forearm jump. His bare, bulging biceps were littered with images of thorny roses and screaming eagles, their talons arched and sharp.

“You know, in the sixteenth century, rose tattoos were given to prisoners sentenced to death,” Nina said matter-of-factly.

I studied the burgeoning bush spewing rose blossoms out from under Piri’s leather vest and gulped. “Good to know.”

Piri’s thick eyebrows rose and he eyed our trio with an unwelcome glare. Nina paused when her cell phone trilled a jaunty out-of-place tune.

“I need to get this,” she said, pointing to the spastically vibrating jeweled device. “It’s Dixon.”

“This is Nina,” she trilled into the phone.

Nina disappeared out the front door and Alex and I shared a look. I shrugged, pasted on my most welcoming smile, and sauntered over to the bar. I seated myself directly in front of Piri and hopped up onto the cracked Naugahyde stool. “Hi there,” I said, all smiles and normalcy. “Can I get a cosmo?”

Piri said nothing; he just blinked, revealing a spiderweb tattoo that started at his inner eye and blossomed out toward his temple. I felt myself involuntarily wince.

Alex sat down next to me and faced ol’ baldy. “Scotch. Neat. You Piri?”

The bartender lined up two smudged highball glasses and upturned a scotch bottle over each one. He slid the half-full glasses across the bar to us. “Who wants to know?” was his response.

I looked at the amber liquid in my glass and dropped my voice. “Actually, sir, I ordered a—” I gazed up into unforgiving eyes. “Never mind.”

I caught a hint of movement from the corner of my eye and I noticed the guy with the ash-blond hair had moved one stool closer to me. I gave him a closed-lipped smile as he grinned at me and raised his half-full glass in one of those “Hey, how ya doin’?” bar salutes. He inched a small bit closer and opened his mouth to speak, but my whole body was on high alert, focused on Piri and finding my father.

“I’m with someone,” I said to the blond-haired stranger.

“Brilliant. I’d like to be with the peanuts if you’d hand them down.”

My cheeks burned with embarrassment as I slipped the bowl of peanuts to the guy. He didn’t take his eyes off me as he shook a handful of peanuts in his palms, tossed them into his mouth.

“Very smooth,” Alex whispered in my ear.

I clutched my glass and narrowed my eyes at him. “Are we just here visiting, or did we actually come for a reason?”

Alex cleared his throat, threw back his entire glass of scotch. He seemed to savor it a minute before swallowing.

Piri raised his eyebrows when Alex slapped the empty glass on the bar. “’Nother?”

Alex nodded and Piri’s eyes grazed me and my still-full glass. “I’m good,” I said, bringing it to my lips. The wafting scent of the amber liquid burned my nostrils and I worked hard not to cough. “Smells good,” I said in a scotch-induced hoarse whisper.

I sipped my drink and tried not to wince as the scotch burned my throat and Alex got Piri to talk.

“I don’t recognize you—either of you,” Piri said as he worked a bar rag. “Where you from?”

“Not important,” Alex said. “You know a Lucas Szabo?”

Piri stopped wiping the bar. “Maybe.”

“Well, would you know, maybe, where someone could find him?”

Piri jutted his chin toward me. “Who’s the girl?”

“Lucas Szabo,” Alex repeated.

I looked around nonchalantly but could feel Piri’s dark eyes boring into me, studying me.

“I asked you a question.”

I thrust out a hand. “I’m Sophie.”

Piri ignored my offer to shake. I watched his lip twitch and I saw that he was fighting a smile.

I heard the tinkle of ice against glass down the bar. “Can I get another?” the blond-haired guy was asking.

Piri regarded his customer disdainfully but still filled his drink.

“You know him?” Alex asked again once Piri returned to us.

“Please?” I asked Piri. “It’s important that we find Lucas Szabo.”

“Because?” asked Piri—but I had the feeling he already knew.

“Because he’s my father,” I supplied.

Piri crossed his arms in front of his chest, and I worked not to stare at the troop of scorpions that were tattooed down the front of his arm. “I can help you find him,” Piri said finally. He leaned forward, his elbow gently tapping Alex’s glass of scotch. Alex watched the glass as it wobbled to the lip of the bar and then dropped gracefully, shattering on the floor. Alex leaned down and Piri bounded over him, clearing the bar in a single smooth motion. A pair of gossamer wings tore through Piri’s leather vest and caught the stolid, beer-soaked stench of the bar and then his hands were around my neck, his thumbs pressing against my windpipe. I hurtled to the floor, Piri on top of me, choking me, and I felt the breath leave my body, but I opened my mouth anyway, gasping, working. The first scrapings of a severe headache blossomed from the back of my head where I hit the ground.

Piri groaned when Alex’s body made contact with his; I felt Piri’s nails rake across my neck, scrape at the skin on my cheek as Alex dragged him off me. Piri landed with a thud and howled as his head mashed against the shards of broken glass on the floor. Alex had his knee pressed against Piri’s chest, his hand on Piri’s throat. Piri’s short legs and arms flailed under Alex’s weight. I gaped at Alex, who wore an expression so fierce, so angry that it startled me.

“Don’t you touch her, demon,” Alex spat between gritted teeth.

Piri’s chest rose and Alex’s knee drifted up an inch. Piri cut his eyes to me and they were hard, cold. “She’s not even human. She’s a thing, a prize—and you want her as badly as I do.”

I shuddered at the sound of Alex’s knuckles connecting with Piri’s jaw.

“Alex!” I shouted.

“He doesn’t have anything worthwhile to say.”

I stood up, mildly surprised that my shaky legs held me up. “Let’s just go.”

Alex looked at me and then down at Piri. “If I let him up, he’s just going to come after you again.”

Piri tried to nod his head, his lips arching into a horrible, grimacing smile. I scrambled behind the bar and pried the pour spout off two bottles of coconut rum. I upended the bottles over Piri, who howled and writhed.

“You can get up now,” I told Alex.

Alex looked down, incredulous. “Coconut rum kills pixies? Who knew?”

“It’s not the rum,” I said, shrugging at Piri, his wings soaked and stuck to the floor. “It’s the liquid. Sticks ’em down. And the coconut is just ... festive.”

Alex nodded, carefully stepping off Piri and brushing his palms on his jeans. “I will ... keep that in mind.”

We crossed the bar and left Piri on the floor behind us, wings pinned to the ground, legs and arms floundering wildly. His bald head was red with effort and when I looked back at him he growled, “Your days are numbered, girl. A prize like you isn’t safe anywhere.”

We stepped out the door, letting it snap shut behind us. Nina clicked her phone off and grinned at us, dropping it into her enormous purse. “What’d I miss?” she asked.

“Nothing,” Alex said, his jaw tight.

I used my index fingers to rub little circles on my suddenly pounding temples. “This is just getting weirder and weirder. I’m a prize? A pixie wants to kill me?”

Nina stamped her foot. “Someone wants to kill you? You said I didn’t miss anything!”

“Like someone doesn’t try to kill me every day,” I said. “It gets old.”

“Surprisingly, it doesn’t,” Nina said with a smug grin.

The streets were deserted as we walked back to the car. As I pulled open the door I glanced behind me, the eerie sensation of being watched pressing against my chest. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I saw a clutch of ash-blond hair disappear behind an SUV parked a few spaces behind us. My stomach warbled and I swallowed hard, slinking into the car.

“Everything okay?” Alex asked, his hand on mine.

“I’ve just been attacked by a pixie. You tell me.” I tried to force a smile. As the engine revved I chanced a glance behind me and caught him standing on the sidewalk, hazel eyes fixed, blond hair catching the glint from the streetlight. I shuddered. He got smaller as we drove away, standing, unmoving, and I tried to push the eerie feeling out of my head. There could, after all, be the mild possibility that not everyone wanted to kill me, right? Maybe he was just a regular guy interested in what he thought was a regular girl. It could happen.

Right?

We drove home in complete silence. As we pulled up to the light at Van Ness I blew out a sigh and leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the passenger-side window. “Well, that was a total waste,” I said. “We didn’t learn anything.”

“That’s not true,” Alex said.

“Right,” Nina finished. “We learned that Piri wants to kill you.”

I forced a smile. “You’re right. I feel so much better now.”

We let the elephant stand in the car for a full moment before I started again. “What do you think Piri meant when he said I wasn’t human?”

“He doesn’t think you’re human?” Nina asked, maneuvering her car around a double-parked cab.

“He probably just thought you weren’t human because you were with me,” Alex said. “He probably knew I wasn’t”—a hint of sadness flitted across his chiseled features—“real.”

“No,” I said. “Humans don’t always recognize demons. It’s different in reverse. Demons know... .”

“We can smell life force. Can’t you?” Nina asked Alex, as though it were the most natural thing on earth.

“Uh ... no.”

There was another beat of silence, pregnant with the statement no one wanted to make: If I really was Satan’s daughter, Piri was right—I wouldn’t be human. Would I?

I gulped.

“I’m sure it was nothing,” Alex said, breaking the silence. “Just the nonsensical ramblings of a rogue pixie.” As he said it, he avoided my gaze, his eyes solid and set straight ahead. I watched the muscle in his jaw jump as he stared out the windshield—the muscle in his jaw that only jumped when he was considering something huge. He glanced at me for a quick second and then focused back on the road in front of him. “You should put something on the scrape.”