A sharp whistle sounded from down below. Drio stood at the bottom of the stairs, throwing a thumbs up.
Ro and I kept our attention on the sugar, bodies relaxed as we clomped down the stairs, pretending we couldn’t feel the weight of the demon’s tawny-eyed stare on our backs.
As soon as we hit the street, I pulled off my hard hat, scratching the top of my head in relief. According to the tracker, the hoc was still in the sugar shack, completing its sugar synthesis process, so we waited in my car.
Drio sprawled in the back seat, fidgeting and tapping his feet. Every few seconds he let out an annoyed huff.
“Quit it before I fry you,” I said.
Another huff. “Your witch friend going to train you to fully use your magic?” he said.
“I hope so, but I’m not sure when that’s going to happen.” I twisted around and ruffled his hair. “Worried about me?”
He pushed my hand off his head and sank back against the seat. “Leonie is worried. Call her.”
I hid my smile because that wasn’t actually a denial on his part.
“You’re growing on him,” Ro said, his eyes trained on the tracking screen in his hand.
Drio kicked the back of his seat.
Ro shot him the finger, then held up the tracker. “Brace yourself, kids. It’s recalibrating.”
The screen buffered for a second and redrew the map. We hightailed it to the next location. The hoc had set up shop in an empty storefront a few blocks away, its windows papered over, and a faded To Let sign on the outside wall.
We parked in the alley around back, next to a stack of pallets, and exchanged our cloth employee overalls for brand new chemical protective suits and facemasks in case the oshk showed up, wriggling into them as best we could in the car.
Ro picked the lock on the back door and I stepped through, magic on, ready to short-circuit any alarm panel. Good thing there wasn’t one, because in light of what I found in this back room, disarming any system went clear out of my head.
One of the matryoshka, this one with a blood-encrusted female human torso, was bound to a metal folding chair with thick iron chains. The fat iron vise gripping her chest was overkill.
Oozing sores dotted the raw red skin along the top of the chains and her tiny head was missing a chunk, like it had been bitten off. The demon had lost all blobbiness, her body more a teardrop than a water balloon. Ribs protruded from her human torso and she’d shrunk to about a third of her size, though slumped over unconscious as she was, her exact height was hard to determine.
Clear plastic tubing was attached to her nipples with metal clamps. The other ends of the tube fastened on to a still, like the one we’d found at Candyman’s previous residence. That still was some kind of fucked-up mad science, with a humming box dispensing corn starch into the glass beaker collecting the oshk’s dripped secretions.
The person-sized cartoon cake doughnut painted on the wall from the previous tenant, smiling merrily at us with the words “Add some YUM to your day!” floating in the clouds around it, really added that je ne sais quoi to the tableau.
With a mechanical rumble, the vise clamped down, squeezing the oshk. Bloody liquid glugged out of her nipples and into the plastic tubing. The oshk was being milked, emitting a hot gush of cotton candy-scented stank with each spasm.
I gagged, covering my own boobs in sympathy. Rohan put his hand on my shoulder to steady me.
Wind whispered against my face. Drio was gone.
Whistling in the front of the store cut off with a strangled shriek. Drio dragged Candyman through the doorway, into the back room. The hoc flickered between his human glamor of unremarkable brown-haired, white guy and his wrinkly hairless cat form. He fought hard, but Drio had skewered him through the shoulder on the end of a short iron spear. With the iron coursing through his system, the hoc was unable to portal.
The hoc finally managed to lock into his demon form, sinking his fangs into Drio’s arm. Trying, anyway. His teeth snapped together with a sharp click, closing on thin air.
I backed up against the wall, one eye on the back door and one on the exit to the front office. Chances were if the mate showed up, she’d portal in, but I didn’t want to be taken off guard because she used a door.
“Here kitty, kitty.” Drio crooked a finger at him.
The hoc leaped for Drio. Another miss. He bellowed a roar and pounced on me, knocking me to the ground with all four paws, but immediately bounced off with a yelp when he got the electric shock of his life.
Snarling, the cat swung his head at Snowflake.
“Where’s your mate?” Rohan casually flicked out all his blades.
The hoc growled and charged him, knocking Ro off his feet. My idiot boyfriend was grinning as he wrestled with the demon cat. The hoc snapped his fangs at him, barely missing Ro’s nose.
Ro sliced the demon’s belly open. Liquid gooshed over his gloved hand and when Ro jerked away, it glistened, stretching like taffy.
Candyman was coated in a fine sheen of sweat, his skin streaked with black from the iron now poisoning his system thanks to both Ro’s blades and the spear. Leaping away from Rohan, the demon changed back to his human form and tore the spear out with a wet plop. The iron tip splintered, leaving part of it embedded in him. It was designed to do that, but the demon didn’t know it.
The sugar syrup that made up his blood streamed from both his shoulder and his gut. He was grayer as a human than his natural demon skin color.
I grabbed the broken spear. One good tight grip and a little magic elbow grease and my current heated the broken tip until it glowed white hot. “Hold him, boys.”
They pinned the hoc to the floor and I jammed the tip in a fraction of an inch away from the kill spot in his stomach. His flesh seared like a good steak, though the smell was more fetid flesh than delicious BBQ. I kept up the heat and soon he was bubbling, charred human hair falling to the ground.
The demon mewled.
I crouched down so I was eye level with him. “This is a new trick for me, and I’m happy to spend the next three hours practicing increasing the heat on all the parts of your body. Or you can answer our questions and I’ll put you out of your misery. Where’s your mate and how did you capture the oshk?”
The demon lasted another fifteen minutes before he cracked and admitted that he’d trapped this oshk after it had eaten his mate. There were no other Sweet Tooth production centers. It was kind of hard to understand him because half of his head was a ruined, blackened mess, but we got the gist.
I drove my fist into his gut, firing my magic through my gloves into his kill spot. There may have been justice for Naomi and Jake and that poor couple, but there was no satisfaction. Soon as he’d disappeared, dead, I tore off my protective head gear and fired it at the wall, snarling at the single whisker left of the demon, beyond done with this entire mission.