Continue with Jonny

Johnny used his bird form to glide effortlessly and gracefully down from the high-rise window over the darkened city streets. The windows of the buildings gave a bit of light here and there as a janitor worked the night shift or somebody stayed late at the office, but it was nearly 10 PM, and much of the city had begun to slumber, or at least left work. Johnny floated about as he fluttered his wings in search of a place to stop and, looking around, he saw an upscale restaurant or bar of some kind. The restaurant was next to a big office building filled with accounting firms and law practices. Those were high-stress jobs that bred many sleepless nights and broken relationships, and this restaurant, called “The Warehouse” according to the big but tasteful neon sign out front, was the place many who worked in that office building went to blow off steam. Johnny glided down to street level and, as he landed, he shifted back into the form of Jack, the unlucky (or perhaps really lucky) lad whose body he had stolen.

Johnny stood on the street in Jack’s body and looked around as he heard a bit of noise coming from inside. Suddenly, he herd glass shatter and looked in the direction of the noise. An older, disheveled homeless man lay sprawled out in an alley looking at Johnny with his eyes widened with terror. He’d apparently seen Johnny shape-shift and, of course, was in shock over it. He had dropped his whiskey bottle, hence the sound of breaking glass. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Johnny said, his voice dripping with annoyance as though he barely tolerated this mortal’s existence. The man wobbled his way to his feet and ran off as quickly as his drunken body could manage. “The nerve of some people,” Johnny mused as the man fled in horror.

Johnny slowly walked up to one of the shop windows and beheld his reflection. There he beheld Jack’s body. Jack was a fit young man but not very big. He had toned arms and a flat stomach but a height of only perhaps five foot seven or so, and he had pretty green eyes with glasses, and also short dark hair. His fit and handsome but somewhat boyish and meek appearance probably contributed to his being shy. Johnny looked down at his body as he took it in, and he rubbed his hand over Jack’s chin and noted that the young man’s face was smooth. Despite being eighteen, Jack wasn’t able to grow a particularly impressive amount of facial hair; Johnny wondered if he even had to shave often at all. “Kid must be a pretty late bloomer,” Johnny mused as he looked upon a body that seemed subject to a certain measure of arrested development.

Johnny concentrated for a moment, and black smoke engulfed his borrowed boy, swirling about all over him. When the smoke dissipated, the body’s college bar clothes were replaced with a nice black suit and a white dress shirt plus a nice tie. Shining black shoes adorned Johnny’s feet. “Looking good kid,” the demon said to his reflection, the one he had at least for now. “I should fit right in at this fancy joint,” he said as he turned and walked toward the door of the restaurant and into it.

Opening the door, Johnny was assaulted by a plethora of obvious class and elegance. Looking about, he saw that the room was filled with men in expensive suits and women in wonderful evening gowns, often dripping with jewelry. A man played piano quietly off in the corner but somehow didn’t overwhelm the whole room with his music. Even the waiters wore nice suits, and the waitresses, without fail, wore thin white blouses that had a few buttons undone at the top. Rich, fat, older men held up their hands, and the young well-endowed waitresses would come running. This place had class, but the suits and fancy jewelry masked other less noble, shall we say, arrangements between the wealthy men and their waitresses that would be consummated later.

“My kind of place,” Johnny mused as he made his way through the room. The room itself had walls of exposed brick and a very high ceiling; the room gave off a certain feeling of industries and a time gone by. This upscale building had an apt name, as it seemed it had actually been a warehouse at some point, probably housing various industrial goods when the economy still needed them instead of laptops and iPhones.

Johnny walked through the dimly lit room and took in the clientele. Overweight older men with money to burn and middle-aged women starved of time and companionship by their careers filled the expensive leather seats as pseudo-romantic things were uttered across dimly lit candles. “Holy shit a demon could make his retirement in a place like this . . . so many souls ripe for the taking, love-starved divorcees and men who want nothing more than to make partner or sleep with their hot secretaries,” Johnny pondered as his eyes canvassed the place.