Page 6 of Generally Hospitable
“Point to Pandora,” I whispered.
“He’s stupid,” Pandora whispered under her breath.
“Duh,” I shot back.
She shot me a quick glare that should have burned me alive. It did not. Her lips didn’t move as she continued to speak. It appeared she’d been a ventriloquist at some point in her life. It was a nifty trick and one I would learn if I didn’t get offed in the next half hour or so.
“I am serious,” she said. “He’s not smart.”
To me, that sounded like we were in more danger than we had been only seconds ago. “Define not smart,” I pressed, not looking at her while trying to keep my lip movement to a minimum. It was freaking hard.
“Intimated by big words. Whole ass man child. Confused very easily,” she shared. “Smart women deflate his erection.”
Stupid, powerful and murderous. Awesome. Even so, I wasn’t sure knowing about his bedroom habits would help.
“I played the idiot to bed him,” she continued. “So did Lilith.”
“Dude, that thing is not a prize,” I muttered.
“Hindsight is 20/20 and wildly embarrassing as you well know,” she countered. “He won’t buy it from me, but he has no clue how smart you are.”
I wasn’t following, but her compliment was nice. “Unclear.”
“He knows I’m smart now,” she explained, keeping her eyes on the freak show. “I can’t play dumb anymore. You can. You can mess with his tiny mind.”
“Won’t that just get us killed faster?” I pressed. “Not really looking forward to eating poo.”
“It will buy us time,” she insisted tersely. “My magic is low as is yours. With time, it might come back.”
The point was excellent. Far better than anything I’d come up with. “Was he this powerful back when you banged him?”
“No.”
Sucking my bottom lip into my mouth, I tried to make sense of how he was so strong now. I supposed it didn’t really matter. He was. Period.
I eyed Chub Chub Wang as he paced the dais and explained in great detail all of the lovely things he was going to do to me before taking a dump in my mouth then chopping my head off. My demise was horrifying and he hadn’t even gotten to the method of how he was going to end Pandora. If he was saving the best for last, he’d set the death bar high.
“Half-breed false Goddess,” he sneered. “Do you happen to know what ling chi involves?”
I blew out an audible breath. If I was going down, I was doing it without fear—or at the very least, without discernible fear. “Can’t say I do, Chub Chub,” I replied high-pitched squeal.
His eyes narrowed to slits and spat red flames. I gulped. Again, I had a hard time believing that both Lilith and Pandora had gone for this freak.
“What did you say? What did you call me?” he ground out.
I was forty. Chub Chub Wang was older than dirt. He might not be tops in the brains department, but he’d been savvy enough to have gotten a large number of Demons to follow his insanity. Underestimating him would be a mistake. Calling him Chub Chub was not the way to go. Not to mention, he’d stolen our power and glued us to the floor. I reached deep and centered myself. There was no script, but I had great motivation. Potentially eating shit could do that to a person.
I smiled. I’d been a child star. Roles written for kids back in the day were vapid and embarrassing. I’d been living down my stint onCamp Bitefor decades. The sitcom had run for eight years. Sean had played my brother. We were vampire siblings who glowed in the dark. We went to human school by day and solved the wild and wacky woes of the mystical Underworld by night. Of course, we’d had help from Scotty, the eight-foot gargoyle who lived under our bunkbeds and could only be summoned when Sean and I gnashed our fangs together and hula-hooped in unison. It might have been cringy, butCamp Bitehad paid for my house and was about to help pay for my life… I hoped.
Pandora gave me a sharp glance, indicating that the show was about to begin. I was the star, and this would be a performance of a lifetime. I had to make it Oscar-worthy...our lives were literally depending on it. I gave the woman a quick nod. With a giggle that would have gotten me a voiceover for a kid hopped up on a vat of sugar, I went for it. “I said that I have no clue what ling chi is.”
Decatalain’s smile made my skin crawl. “Would you like to know, half breed?”
He was going to tell me whether I wanted him to or not. I’d play. “Sure!”
“Delightful,” he said. “Ling chi is also called slow slicing or more endearingly, death by a thousand cuts.”
Dude was whack. But two could participate in that game. “Kind of like a BBL?” I questioned innocently.
