The child instantly stopped crying. "All right, all right," he said in a petulant voice that would have sounded more at home in Brooklyn than on the streets of Cairo.

Spike was intrigued. He watched with fascination as the child's body began to undulate as if made of something other than flesh and bone. He opened his mouth then and it grew wider and wider until the jaw popped from its alignment.

"This is interesting," Spike said with a grin, as he folded his arms and watched.

A noisy expulsion of foul smelling gas and a thick viscous fluid erupted from the darkness within the child's body. Something crawled around in there. Thin spindly arms appeared first, followed by a strange, bullet-shaped head. The creature pulled its long, slug-like body from out of the boy's mouth and dropped to the hotel floor.

"That has to be one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen," Spike said.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah," said the slug demon as it brushed thick dark, slime from its stick-like arms, "like sucking blood from somebody's throat is the freakin' ballet. We're monsters. Disgusting is what we're about."

"Azz is a Trehadji demon," Malik said, his voice a low rumble. "They inhabit the bodies of dead children and use them to lure their prey. This one happens to be privy to some information that could help us."

Spike puffed on his smoke, eyeing the foul little creature squirming around in brownish liquid that seemed to exude from its thick, muscular trunk of a body. "That so? On with it, then. Not getting any younger. 'Course, I'm not getting any older, either."