Time Jacker by Aaron Crash (nonfiction book recommendations .TXT) 📕

worried. Don’t worry. This is Jasmine. I mean, her real name is Elizabeth, but she calls herself Jasmine. We’ve partied. She wouldn’t mind me licking her. She hasn’t before!” Bailey giggled.

They kept on going.

Upstairs, there was a big room down to the left and lots of small rooms to the right. Bailey hurried to a door and threw it open. Her hands went to her face. “Come and look at this shit!”

Gabby shook her head. “No. I can only imagine...”

Jack wasn’t so shy. He stood behind Bailey, peering over her shoulder into the room. Two women, presumably prostitutes, were dressed up as animals. Both were on a bed, one as a cat, the other as a dog, as a fat man fucked the dog and had his hand on the cat’s ass.

Bailey pooched out her lips in a pout. “That pretty kitty is going to get the dick next. Lucky girl. And I think he might stick his dick in her cat-girl ass.”

A voice came from the main room, a growl, a whine maybe.

Gabby hurried down to where Jack and Bailey stood in the doorway. The angel pulled them away. “Come on, you two. I hate this place—it’s all mostly Ijjinaya and Decaysia. There is some soul here, but it feels sad. And the humans think it makes them happy.”

“If you think you’re happy, you’re fucking happy,” Bailey said and moved past them. “Carpitia! Gudzu! Hey, I have some questions for your funky asses!”

Gabby took a fresh grip on her glowing sword. “I hope Bailey knows what she’s doing. She pretends to, but just because she thinks she’s competent doesn’t make her competent. I’m right about that at least.”

Jack and Gabby hurried after the sex demon.

The second floor’s main room had richly polished wooden floors, lush carpets, and another bar, only this one also had a mixture of drugs—cocaine in vials standing on a mirror, joints on a silver tray, and some glass pipes on a stand. A basket of Hellfire Club matchboxes lay nearby.

The woman behind the bar was tall, black-skinned, and beautiful. She wore a red-and-black teddy and had muscled arms. On the other side of the room, sitting on a stool in the corner, was a huge man without a neck. That would be the poker room’s security guy.

Green poker tables filled the right side of the room, where a sliding glass door led to a patio. Six men sat at a table, all holding cards. Piles of cash lay on the table—stacks of hundred-dollar bills. From the shape of their suits and the shadow of stubble, they’d played through the night, the morning, and were throwing down cards into the afternoon.

Behind one man was a flabby figure with a frog’s face. No hair, just gray-and-green skin, and folds of flesh. White mold filled some of the cracks in his skin. The vile thing was currently licking the throat of a rich guy, a guy Jack recognized as Preston Tarrington, Boy Rolex himself. Sitting next to him was an older man, the elder Tarrington it looked like—Tim Tarrington, Daddy Rolex.

Once again, seeing the Tarringtons made him think of the Malcolms, the richest family in Plum Creek and the people that had destroyed Jack’s life. He could totally see the Malcolm men coming to the Wycombe House—they could afford the hundred grand price tag, that was for sure.

Jack shook away that old hate. He had new hate to enjoy.

Behind Daddy Rolex stood a willowy brown thing, a troll-like woman with sagging breasts and green hair, and a face like the trunk of a tree. She had her cottonwood lips open, and she was sucking on the earlobe of the father.

Both things had blood-red eyes.

Jack grabbed a box of matches and then came forward, gun raised, with the angel and the demon right next to him. They converged on the poker table.

Froggy spoke first in a guttural toad voice. “Bitch of a sex demon come to eat the fuck. Bitch succubus needs to leave. This is our feasting table, for the death is rich here, and the desperate pleasure is our plate.”

The willow thing let out a whine. Her voice was high and reedy and just might break crystal. “But the bitch has brought a filthy pigeon woman with her. Heaven’s vile light is in her sword.”

Jack kept the revolver aimed at the demons. “Let me guess. Froggy is Gudzu and the willow lady is Carpitia.”

The demons looked at the gun and both their mouths dropped open.

At least Jack and his ladies had made a suitably dramatic entrance, and they had the attention of the demons.

That wasn’t all. The first of the little rat men wiggled up from the lap of one of the other gamblers. They’d been under the table.

“What in the fuck are those things?” Jack asked. “And what were they doing under the table?”

Bailey’s laughter wasn’t sane. “Well, this got a whole lot more interesting.”

Chapter Twenty-Eight

JACK WATCHED THE RAT things come up from the table—if anything, they were like a cross between a rat and a gnome, with matted black fur, bright pink hands, and dirty yellow claws. Big white whiskers sprouted from their rat noses, and their eyes were completely black. Black lips split to show jagged yellow teeth, gleaming with spit.

There were four of the things, and they leaked Kairos.

It was Bailey who recognized them. “Ratling Fugits sucking dick. So this little poker table is like a buffet table for the damned.”

“Not damned yet,” Gudzu croaked. “Death eats them, and we eat death, until their time is done. Then we shall have their Nefesh.”

Jack could see how that might be a symbiotic relationship. The Fugs ate the time from the men, and when they died, the death demons stole off with their Nefesh. However, there was a lot that Jack didn’t understand about the new reality he’d discovered. For one, could a Fug literally eat all the minutes of someone’s life? And how did that work?

Once they saved Annie, he’d