A Devil in the Dark

Chapter 1 - Blane

"Go to hell."

"At times like this, it's tempting."

"Don't you know who I am?"

"Unfortunately."

Taylee M, hawker of diet pills, false eyelashes, and butt-enhancing "wunderwear," so my assistant reliably informed me. I glanced down out of curiosity as the doorman hustled her out of the VIP area. Well, she wasn't wearing the wunderwear tonight. One of her stilettos fell off, and the resulting shriek was audible over the thumping bass from the live band downstairs.

"You'll pay for this! Your stupid club's boring anyway. The service sucks, and the music's trashy, and..."

I turned away and surveyed the damage. A waitress was cleaning up the glass Taylee had broken, and the man she'd come in with was studiously pretending he didn't know her. A few people were filming the scene, which she'd probably love. No publicity was bad publicity, after all.

"Life's too short to put up with a hellion like that," I muttered to a smirking Joseph.

"You're immortal."

"It's a figure of speech."

Plus there were plenty of humans in the club, and they shouldn't have to deal with Taylee M either. She'd been obnoxious enough before she began taking drugs, but snorting a line of coke had been the final straw. Or, in her case, the final rolled-up ten-dollar bill. Club Dead had a strict "no drugs" policy, and she'd broken the rules.

My rules.

I'd never had this problem in my former home. In Plane Three, my word was law. Plane Five was full of rebellious souls, and yes, that was one of the reasons why I liked it, but as my mother always said, every positive was balanced by a negative. Good and evil, light and dark, yin and yang, orange juice and vodka. Cecily Shepherd and Taylee M.

Cecily was in the VIP area now, sitting with her husband and a young singer she was trying to woo into performing at the charity benefit she was organising. For either starving puppies or sick children—I forgot which. Shep, her husband, kept one eye on the crowd as his wife spoke. Even though he'd left his gun at home, he never stopped being a cop. Six months ago, the sight of him on the mezzanine would have left me twitchy, especially when Taylee M had lined up half a gram of Colombian finest on the mirrored table. But Detective Shepherd's partner had become a friend, and both men understood that I had no tolerance for narcotics.

"Why didn't Shep arrest her?" Joseph asked. "Don't cops have quotas to meet?"

"Cece doesn't like it when he mixes business with pleasure, and besides, Taylee inhaled the evidence. I'm going back upstairs."

The main room of the cavernous nightclub had a double-height ceiling, and my apartment sprawled above it, accessible via my private office suite on the second floor. Outside the office, a balcony spanned the width of the club, giving me a bird's-eye view of the bar, the tables, and the dance floor. The VIP mezzanine stretched off to my right, bringing our special guests closer to my personal fiefdom, but not close enough to touch. If the VIPs thought they were lording over the peons, they only had to glance up to see that they weren't quite as high in the pecking order as they might wish.

And thanks to my twenty-twenty vision—being the son of earth's overlord did afford me certain advantages—I'd been able to witness Taylee's indiscretions from the shadows and deal with the problem before she cost the club its licence.

Club Dead had been my first purchase here in Plane Five, otherwise known as earth. Okay, my second—it turned out that Vegas really was hotter than hell, tar-burning pits and lava craters excepted, and if one was going to spend much time outside in Nevada, shorts were a necessity. Beauregard had nearly expired in his leather pants. On the whole, being a nightclub owner was satisfactory, but there were rare occasions when I missed my old home. Tonight was one of them.