Taming Demons for Beginners (The Guild Codex: Demonized #1)(38)

“This is the end of my route,” he called back to us. “You’ll need to catch the next one.”

Amalia jumped up. I followed her out the door and we stepped onto a stained sidewalk. Skyscrapers towered all around us, and I eyed them warily as the bus doors closed. Amalia marched away from the bus stop, the skirt of her dress fluttering. I scrambled after her with my suitcase bumping along behind me.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“I’m going to find a hotel.” After a beat, she added, “You can come too, I guess.”

I tried to match my pace to her longer stride. “Do you know where we are?”

“No idea. You?”

“I’m from Burnaby. I’ve only been downtown a few times.” I half jogged beside her, then prompted cautiously, “What happens now?”

She plucked bobby pins out of her updo. “We hole up somewhere and wait for Dad to contact me. He and Kathy will set up in one of our safe houses and we can join them there.”

“Oh, okay.” That didn’t sound so bad. Once we reunited with Uncle Jack, I could get my mom’s grimoire. He would save it from the demon, I was sure. He was too greedy to let it be destroyed. And he, unlike us, wasn’t entirely helpless either. As I’d learned from The Summoner’s Handbook, to be a demon summoner, you had to become a demon contractor first. Uncle Jack had his own enslaved minion to protect him.

She dropped her arms and her blond hair unraveled from its bun, spilling down her back. “What the hell happened back there? Demons don’t just escape summoning circles. They can only pass through the barrier if they’re carried inside an infernus, which requires being contracted, or if the circle is physically damaged.”

Well, I knew which method Zylas had employed then.

“Who stole the demon from the library?” she growled. “Dad’s clients? But how did they get a completely unresponsive demon to take a contract?”

By feeding him cookies and cake for two weeks, I silently answered. Just thinking it caused hysterical laughter to bubble up in my throat. I gulped it down and cleared my throat.

“And where,” Amalia added, “is Travis? That dickwad better turn up soon.”

I made a noncommittal noise. Travis’s disappearance worked in my favor. He and Karlson—assuming they’d survived Zylas’s attack—were the only two people who could guess I was now contracted to the “stolen” demon.

A demon contractor. Me, Robin Page. A demon contractor.

There was so much wrong with that. Firstly, my contract with Zylas was completely ridiculous. He would protect me in return for cookies? I couldn’t believe such a flimsy pact even counted as a binding magical covenant.

Secondly, our contract was illegal as well as ludicrous. If anyone realized the truth, the MPD would put a bounty on my and Zylas’s heads. We wouldn’t last long. Bounty hunters knew how to kill demons.

Lastly, I didn’t practice magic. I avoided magic. Now I was bound to an extremely magical demon. Contractors were universally feared, with reputations as power-hungry bullies. After all, nice people didn’t sell their souls for a demon’s power.

I glanced around the dark street. “Uh, Amalia? Are we going the right way?”

“I told you I don’t know this area. My phone has eleven percent battery and I’m not wasting it on GPS.”

“But …” My gaze skipped from a graffitied wall to boarded-up windows. “I think we’re going the wrong way.”

“We just need to find a hotel. This is downtown. There are hotels everywhere.”

She strode onward, flipflops smacking her heels. I dug my phone out of my bag and ran to catch up with her. The streetlights buzzed in the hush of nightfall. A few cars sped past, their headlights flashing over us. A truck slowed on its way by and the passenger wolf-whistled.

Hunching my shoulders, I pulled up a GPS app and waited for it to load.

“We aren’t in the downtown core.” I squinted at the screen. “This is … the Downtown Eastside?”

Her steps hesitated and our eyes met in shared realization. The Downtown Eastside was the worst neighborhood in the city. And we—two girls, alone and on foot—were lost in the middle of it.





Chapter Sixteen





“We should go west,” I said urgently. “Toward the downtown core.”

“I’m not walking all the way back,” Amalia groused. She pointed at a glowing orange sign, the text partially obscured by a scraggy tree. “Look, there’s a Travelodge right there. We’ll get a room for the night and find a better place tomorrow.”

I squinted at the “LODGE” visible through tree branches. We hastened up the sidewalk, ducked under the tree’s lowest boughs, and stopped. My suitcase rolled into the back of my leg.

“Booty … Lodge,” I read, repulsed by the neon outline of a yellow butt under the letters. A lightbulb glowed above the business’s open door, and a dance beat trickled out. Smokers clustered around the entrance in hazy clouds.

Amalia swore under her breath. “A strip club, ugh.”

“Hey there, pretty ladies,” a heavyset man at the door called. “Coming inside?”

“Eat a dick,” Amalia snapped.

Another man whistled. “Got a firecracker here, boys.”