Chaos made a face. “Like a chicken coop?”
“Um…”
Chaos shook his head, clucking his tongue. “I can’t go around calling you Chicken Coop.”
“I didn’t ask you to?”
“I’ll have to think on it.” Chaos leaned forward, and then he was…sniffing Cooper? “Are you frightened of me?” he asked. And then said immediately, “Don’t lie. I can smell it on you.”
Then why did you even ask?Cooper wanted to say, but he held his tongue. He didn’t think this little menace his mind had created would take kindly to sass. “A little,” he admitted instead.
“Then maybe you are a little wise,” Chaos said, holding his thumb and forefinger slightly apart to show just howlittlehe thought Cooper’s wisdom was. He started swiveling his head, finally looking around the room instead of focusing all that intense attention on Cooper.
Well, that was enough of that, wasn’t it? Cooper dug his phone out of his pants pocket. He needed to call the hospital now. An ambulance might be overkill, but he wasn’t sure he could make it there on his own at the moment, given how vivid this hallucination was.
But before he could dial, his phone rang in his hand.
Chaos’s eyes darted to it immediately. “Your cellular telephone is yelling at you.”
“It’s ringing, yes.”
And it was Jace calling. Cooper’s stomach twisted. Jace was one of the more tolerable of Ivan’s lieutenants, but he didn’t usually just call Cooper up out of the blue. This wasn’t a good sign.
Or was this part of the hallucination?
Losing his mind was confusing.
Cooper picked up anyway. “Hello?”
“Cooper?” Jace sounded harried. “You at home?”
“Yeah.”
Jace let out what sounded like a sigh of relief. “Okay. Stay there. Boss has been shot at.”
Ivan had been shot? Cooper couldn’t imagine it. The guy was paranoid as all hell, never letting an enemy weapon within a hundred feet of him. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, it hit his new, um…assistant.”
The pretty man with the purple eyes.
“Nixwas shot?”
Chaos let out a strange little growl. When Cooper looked at him, his eyes were… Well, they had, like, flames dancing in them.
Holy fuck, that was unsettling.
Jace made a sound, and Cooper turned his attention back to his phone. He should focus on reality, not imaginary demons and their imaginary fire eyes. “Is Nix okay, then?”
“Yeah, just a graze. Stay put. If you see Sergei, shoot him in the head.” At the strangled noise Cooper made, Jace let out a laugh. “Kidding. No one expects you to shoot anyone. Don’t let him in though. If he shows up, he’s probably there to kill you.”
There was nothing to say to that except “Okay.”
“Good. Bye, Coop.”
Cooper lowered the phone to find he had Chaos’s full attention again. “Nix was injured with a human weapon?” the demon asked.
If he wasn’t a figment of Cooper’s imagination, Cooper would be questioning why Chaos even knew who Nix was. “Not seriously, it doesn’t sound like.”
