Unless you’ve got a better suggestion, I thought at Lugh, keep your comments to yourself. Yeah, I was getting a bit testy, but I was beginning to think the odds of Cooper surviving this interview were very low. If he lived, he could make a lot of trouble for us—particularly for Adam. If he died … Well, if he died, and we did a good job of disposing of the body, then it was possible we could get away with it.

“I can’t believe what I’m thinking,” I muttered under my breath. Surely I drew the line at cold-blooded murder. Didn’t I?

I let out a hiss of breath. Yeah, maybe I drew the line at murder, but I knew for a fact Adam didn’t. He’d do whatever was necessary to protect Lugh, and even though Cooper didn’t know I had Lugh, Adam would see him as an indirect threat.

Dithering over my moral qualms had caused me to slow down. I had my hand on the front doorknob when I heard a muffled bang from within, followed by a cry of pain.

Holding the Taser at the ready, I rushed through the door, not knowing what I was about to find. My heart hammered in my chest, and adrenaline surged through my system.

The sound I’d heard had to be a gunshot, and I assumed that meant Cooper had tried something. I also assumed it meant either Cooper was dead, or Adam was in deep trouble. Neither assumption turned out to be correct.

The first thing I saw when I burst through the door was Adam standing calmly in the foyer, his gun in his right hand, pointed at the floor, the pillow in his left. Then I saw Cooper.

He was crumpled on the floor halfway between where I’d last seen him and where Adam stood. He was rocking slightly, a soft moan escaping his throat, and his hands were clamped over a bleeding wound in his thigh. Based on the sounds Cooper was making, his demon wasn’t a big fan of pain, but a nonfatal gunshot wound on a demon would heal completely in a matter of hours, and might only keep Cooper incapacitated for a few minutes.

“What happened?” I asked.

Adam looked grim. “He decided to call my bluff. I thought he might still be useful, so I went for the leg instead of the head shot.”

Cooper’s voice was gaining strength, and I was pretty sure the moan would soon turn into a scream. I didn’t think the neighbors would have heard that gunshot—or realized what it was even if they heard it—but we’d be in even deeper shit than we were already in if Cooper started screaming. We’d made enough noise as it was. It felt a little less than sportsmanlike, but I pointed the Taser and pulled the trigger.

Electricity mucks with a demon’s ability to control its host body. So much so that they can’t even talk, much less move. Cooper might feel like screaming, but he wouldn’t be able to control his voice enough to get the sound out.

“In for a penny …” I muttered. “Now what?” I asked out loud.

“Now we call in reinforcements,” Adam said, and he tucked the gun back into its holster, dropped the pillow, and grabbed his cell phone.

ADAM’S IDEA OF “REINFORCEMENTS” DIDN’T EXACTLY make my day, but we needed another demon to help us keep Cooper contained. We could have called Saul, but Barbie pointed out that her presence—more specifically, her injury—might distract Saul too much to make him useful. Which is how we ended up stuck with Raphael.

Raphael lived in Center City, so it took him more than twenty minutes to drive out to Cooper’s house outside the Main Line. We’d had to juice Cooper a second time to keep him down, and the Taser’s battery was starting to run low. If Raphael had gotten stuck in traffic, we would have been in trouble.

I guess Raphael didn’t feel the same need for subtlety that the rest of us did, because he drove his car straight up the driveway, parking in front of the house in full view of anyone who drove by or who was watching from across the street. No, there was no reason for anyone to be suspicious of the car, but my paranoia instincts were on high alert, and I was tempted to tell Raphael to park elsewhere. I finally convinced myself that time was of the essence, and Raphael’s car was fine where it was.

One of the side effects of the Taser was that Cooper hadn’t been able to heal the bullet wound. I’d never thought of it before, but since the electricity ruined the demon’s control over the host body, it ruined the supernatural healing ability as well.

The wound was still bleeding, though not as badly as before. The bright red puddle of blood on the floor and the coating of blood on Cooper’s hands made my stomach turn, but ugly as the wound was, it wouldn’t be fatal—not unless we kept Cooper incapacitated for a long, long time.

Raphael—whom we would all have to remember to call “Tommy,” to keep his true identity secret—

circled Cooper’s limp body while Adam kept a watch on him, ready to pounce if Cooper made a sudden move. Not that he was making any moves, sudden or not, under the circumstances.

“You need to exorcize the demon,” Raphael said to me after a moment’s thought.

I shook my head in confusion. “What? Why?”

“So that Adam can do his special interrogation technique on Cooper. I can probably make the demon talk, but these aren’t ideal circumstances for it. There’s not enough privacy for me to get terribly creative, and, of course, information obtained under duress isn’t always accurate.”

As usual with Raphael, I looked for hidden ulterior motives behind his rather merciful-sounding suggestion. Raphael wasn’t big on mercy. “Do you know this demon?” I asked him suspiciously.

Raphael shrugged. “You know we can’t recognize one another on the Mortal Plain.” He scowled at me. I guess he’d finally figured out why I’d asked him that question. “I don’t know if I know this demon, and I don’t give a shit. I’m making a practical recommendation, but if you’d like me to try to torture some information out of him, I’d be happy to oblige.”

He grinned at me—a feral, angry expression. I could have apologized for my implications, but why should I? Raphael was a devious bastard, and he knew it. He shouldn’t be surprised when people—

especially me—suspected his motives.

“What do you think, Adam?” I asked, and Raphael’s scowl darkened.

Adam looked grim. “I think he’s right. If we keep Cooper Tasered, he won’t be able to tell us anything, and if we don’t, he’s liable to kick up enough of a fuss to have the neighbors calling the police. We’ve got a sticky enough situation on our hands already.”

It would have been nice if Raphael had mentioned his plan on the phone. I could have had Cooper exorcized by now. But Adam had given Raphael a very abbreviated account on the phone and had stressed the need to hurry. Maybe Raphael just hadn’t fully appreciated the situation until he’d seen it himself. Giving Raphael the benefit of the doubt ran contrary to my nature, but I tried.

Cooper was starting to twitch, the first sign that his muscles were coming back under control. I wasn’t sure how well I was going to do at getting into the trance state under the circumstances—I hadn’t thought to bring anything vanilla-scented with me—but I sat cross-legged on the floor beside Cooper anyway, ready to begin the ritual.

“Not yet,” Raphael said, grabbing me and unceremoniously pulling me to my feet.

“Get your hands off me!” I snapped, and he let go with gratifying speed.

I hadn’t even noticed him taking the Taser away from me until he gave Cooper another jolt. He looked at me with a sneer. “You’re supposed to be a pro. Don’t you know better than to get that close to a demon who’s not restrained? If he were more recovered than we thought, he could have grabbed you and transferred before you even blinked.”

I had to bite my tongue hard to keep any number of snappy comebacks from leaping out of my mouth. I would have looked pretty stupid saying them, though, since Raphael was right. If I were a normal, nonpossessed human, I’d have been much more cautious around an unrestrained demon who might be starting to regain control of his body. In my arrogance, I hadn’t thought of Cooper as a threat, since Raphael and Adam were here to jump on him if he made a hostile move. But if Cooper had tried to transfer to me and found me already occupied … I was getting careless.