The Living End (Daniel Faust #3)(16)

The kid on the couch was maybe twenty. His Call of Duty T-shirt stretched over his bloated belly, and his cheeks bristled with a few days of rough blond stubble. He looked over, saw us, and waved.

“Hey,” he said listlessly. “I’m Pete.”

Most demons can’t do what Caitlin can, creating their own bodies out of raw power. They need to hijack a human or an animal’s skin to stay in our world for very long. Pete was a hijacker. My second sight showed me a web of veins under the kid’s skin, pulsing black and red, mapping the infestation’s trail.

I rubbed my forehead. The closer I got, the more tired I felt. I couldn’t concentrate, could barely remember why we’d come here.

“We’re here to help,” I finally managed to blurt out. “Came to get you out.”

Pete shrugged. “That’s cool. Whatever. You wanna watch TV?”

A king-size bag of Cheetos nestled on his lap. He grubbed around inside the bag and mashed a handful between his cheese-dust-stained lips.

“No, Pete,” Caitlin said, walking around the living room and poking her head in an open doorway. “We don’t want to watch television.”

She waved me over. My feet felt like lead bricks. Even so, the smell coming from the doorway almost knocked me flat. A dead man lay stretched out in a bed, his rotting corpse half-buried under a wool comforter. Fat black flies clung to his eyeless face, laying their eggs.

“I keep telling him he needs to get up,” Pete said. “Dude’s gonna be late for work.”

I stumbled back. “He’s dead, Pete.”

“He is?” Pete said. “Bummer. I liked that guy.”

I groped for a spell, something to ward off whatever was leeching my strength away, but my mind slipped around the edges. I didn’t forget my magic; it just seemed like way too much effort.

Next thing I knew, I’d dropped onto the couch next to Pete’s. I needed to rest, just for a second. It was such a long walk to the front door, and I just needed to rest first.

“You’re not with the Choir of Envy,” I said. “Are you?”

“Huh? Me? I’ve got everything I want right here. Just chillin’.”

Caitlin made a heroic effort, but it got her as far as I did. The couch, sitting right next to me.

“Choir of Sloth,” she breathed. “Damn it. And he’s no fledgling, not with this kind of power. Naavarasi lied to us.”

I shook my head. It was the most I could manage.

“No, she didn’t. Her exact words were, ‘Prince Malphas told me that he’s a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’ Know how that happened? ‘Hey, prince, tell me that this guy is a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’ ‘Okay, he’s a fledgling of the Choir of Envy.’”

“She lies without lying,” Caitlin said. “And he’s not bound here. He just doesn’t feel like leaving.”

“Everything she told us was true. It was just enough truth to f*ck us over. I’m stuck, Cait. I can’t get any juice.”

She closed her eyes and leaned her head back. “My kind don’t mesh well with sloth. This is bad. I think the man in the other room starved to death. He starved instead of getting out of bed.”

“I offered him Cheetos,” Pete said. He held up the bag and shook it at us. “Want some?”

“No, Pete,” I said. “We don’t want Cheetos. We want you to turn your powers down so we can get off this couch.”

He shrugged, not quite getting it. “So get off the couch. I’m not stopping you. Hey, Judge Judy is on! She’s the coolest.”

We watched fifteen minutes of “Judge Judy.” It seemed like the best thing to do. Everything else was too much work.

“I don’t know what she’s getting out of this,” Caitlin murmured. She looked paler than usual. “Even if Naavarasi could get away with murdering us by proxy, why do it at all?”

I shook my head. “She’s not. Remember how she wanted to recruit me for her little army? The collar she gave me, the ‘get out of death free’ card?”

“You mean the utter insult to me she gave you? Yes. Of course.”

“Naavarasi will come by in about a week, give or take a few days,” I said. “When I’m dehydrated, half starved to death, and delirious. Then it’ll be an offer I can’t refuse. She’ll claim my soul, banish Pete here, and set you free. I’ll be bound to her service, and you’ll be embarrassed in front of your court. It’s a win-win for her.”

“C’mon, guys!” Pete whined from his sofa. “Save it for the commercials, will ya? I haven’t seen this one yet.”

While the television droned on, I gnawed at the problem, struggling to think through the layers of gauze wrapped around my brain. We needed something to overpower the aura of sloth, something to counter it, to motivate us to move.

The show cut to commercials. I watched listlessly as a parade of women rubbed a new invigorating shampoo into their scalps, the camera lingering on as much of their wet bodies as it could get away with on daytime TV. One of the models gasped at the camera, her expression almost orgasmic as her shampoo’s thirteen essential vitamin supplements gave her hair new life and shine.

I got an idea.

“Hey, Cait.”