“No dinner?” Slumped, Pike held his middle. Blood leaked from between his fingers. Jenks’s first aid was good, but there were limits. His face was starting to swell, too.
But Dali was right. If we couldn’t fit the restaurant’s current motif of ancient Mesopotamia, we couldn’t come in. Still, there were ways around that, and I looked behind me at the bales of sheep fleeces wrapped and stacked like a waiting area. “Sit down before you fall over,” I said to Pike. “I’ll be right back.”
“I haven’t been asked to wait outside a restaurant since I was five and on a field trip,” Pike muttered, wincing as he sat. “And never on anything that smelled like this,” he added as he wiped his hand off on his bloody slacks.
Dali settled more firmly before me. “Is that toilet water dripping from you?”
“I’ll change the theme so we do fit in,” I insisted, and Dali shook his head. “I’ve got to have coin on account,” I said, sure of it when Dali’s expression went empty. “I know you’ve been using that picnic tulpa I made,” I added, and he cringed.
Yes! I thought exuberantly. It had been ages since I’d made my memory of the hot, Arizona sun real to prove that I was a demon. Every time one of them “replayed” the tulpa on Dali’s jukebox, I was supposed to get a royalty. Al had helped me make it, because, though only a female demon had the mental stamina to coalesce a memory into a solid form, it took a male demon to successfully disentangle a tulpa from her mind and “code” it into a curse so anyone could access it. The experience had humbled both him and me. I’d trusted him to keep me alive and forgive me for what lay in my deepest thoughts, laid bare to him.
And now he wouldn’t talk to me because I wouldn’t condemn his brother.
“You can float me a coin for the machine until I can make Al cough up my percentage,” I said, and Dali’s expression twisted into a sneer. The easygoing babysitter was nowhere to be seen, and I wondered if things were going badly on the student/teacher front.
“You have credit,” Dali admitted. “But it’s no good here or in the collective if you are still taking study from Hodin.” He reached out and I lurched backward, warming when I realized that all he was after was one of those flowers still in my hair. “He’s elven filth,” he said, apparently knowing what it was. “And it’s beginning to cling to you,” he added, flicking the dilapidated, blue-stained flower to the sand.
“Hodin isn’t teaching me squat,” I said, the hair on the back of my neck pricking as I felt the demons behind him listening. “And you need to get off his case. He knows things you don’t.”
Dali laughed. “Oh, trust me, Rachel. I know how to use my genitals to gain food, and that’s all he is good for. You will cease talking to him or you will find he’s the only one who will talk to you.” Dali spat, the heavy wad making a dark splat atop the flower. “Elf magic.”
“Which you know I practice . . .” My words trailed off when two demons pushed past me, halting to stand over Pike, wicked grins on their faces. “Ah, I mean elf magic, not the other thing,” I added, surprised when Pike looked up and they shifted to silk suits, their hair slicked and smelling of musk. Eyes narrowed, Pike stiffened in a wary threat as they sat beside him, talking smack about him as if he wasn’t there. They looked like living vampires, and I grimaced, unable to help him at the moment. God! Demons are such bullies.
“You didn’t sit out the war eating raspberries and wearing silk,” Dali said, and I turned back.
“So you admit you’re angry about how he survived, not the elf-magic issue?”
“He did not survive the war,” Dali said. “He relished it. Leave.”
“Because I talked to Hodin?” Ticked, I stood toe to toe with him, refusing to back down. It was more than not getting a table, now. “You think you can sling me out of here? I made this,” I said, gesturing. “All of it!”
Dali’s eyes flicked to Pike, then returned to me. “Tell me true, Rachel,” he said, a new wariness in his voice. “Is Hodin helping you best Constance, or are you here on your own?”
“Hodin is not helping me.” I stepped back, knowing this was important by his sudden lack of bluster. “He is not helping me!” I said again when Dali’s eyes narrowed. “He made a cloche to cover the lily I’m using to stink up Piscary’s. Big whoop. That was between him and Jenks. And he helped me bury Nash. Again, more of a sanitation issue than anything else. But other than that, no. He’s not much good with anything but passive stuff,” I admitted, and Dali eyed me.
“You only angered her with that lily,” he said.
“Yeah? I drove a master vampire from her day quarters with a joke curse!” I said proudly. “Forced her and her camarilla to bunk at the I.S. I humiliated her,” I said, then winced when Pike pointedly cleared his throat. Flustered, I tugged the hem of my soggy skirt. “And just so we’re clear, I’m standing up for Hodin because out of all of you, he’s the only one trying to help me recover Bis.” My voice began to rise, and I let it. I was mad at them, and I didn’t care if they, or Pike, knew it. “Out of all of you,” I shouted, “he’s the only one willing to concede that reconciling with the Goddess might be the only way to survive the rebirth of the elves!”
Dali’s face screwed up in an ugly expression. “The rebirth that you engendered.”
“Damn right.” I pushed forward until I could’ve bumped forehead to chin with him. “I worked with a Kalamack elf to save them. And then I stood up against the elven dewar and saved each and every one of your asses. I don’t know why.” I retreated, gaze going past him to the rest. “None of you like me. Come to think of it, the elves aren’t that fond of me, either.”
My gaze hot on Dali, I put out a blue-tinted hand. “Float me. A coin. For the jukebox. I am not leaving.”
“Crazy. Batshit crazy,” Pike muttered from the bales of fleece, and I shot him a quick look. The two demons to either side of him smiled with their long teeth as they arranged his hair, laughing when Pike slapped their hands away. They were playing with him, but it was only play. Apparently he was scared of his brothers. No doubt if they were trying to kill him.
Dali shifted from foot to foot. His eyes went to Pike, then back to me. He owed me big for introducing him to baby Keric. I hadn’t seen the need to remind him of it. He knew.
And finally . . . Dali slumped. “We’re at a limited selection right now due to a lack of materials,” he said, and I snatched from his fingers the flat, dented coin that appeared.
“Stay here,” I shot over my shoulder at Pike as I strode past Dali. Sometimes I thought the demon liked being a few pounds overweight because he’d known a bone-aching hunger for too long. And maybe he found respite from his thoughts in cooking for others for the same reason. . . .