But then, he found himself smiling. Riona was angry. No, Riona was pissed. And while that might not be a good thing for most situations, pissed was not overwhelmed, distraught, or depressed. Pissed was an actionable emotion. Somehow, getting shafted on the quest for knowledge rekindled Riona’s chutzpah.
The witch had spent the several weeks since Marc’s death and Jerry’s own return in a perpetual demonstration of “going through the motions.” She moved, but only in circles. Mostly, he let her stay there, because who was he to come out and tell her that she of all people shouldn’t grieve? She damn well knew that Marc wasn’t really gone, he was only deterred, and that she better get her shit together in a hurry because when that priest came back, he wasn’t going to be her friend. She was going to have to toast his ass, because Marc would be the Devil’s quickest route to twisting her soul into a pretzel before throwing it into Hell’s stoves to bake.
Fucking, hell yes. “That’s my girl!” he exclaimed to no one in particular, fist pumping the empty air.
Jerry caught himself only a moment later. His girl. She wasn’t, and despite what Ramiel and Dee thought, Jerry didn’t jump on to the ‘Jerry must be the risen soul of which prophecy bespoke’ bandwagon. Oh, sure, he might tease and flirt. And hell yeah, if she happened to give him a ‘come hither’ stare, was so going to have her ‘coming hither’ in about two minutes flat. But reality and he still broke bread in the morning. He loved Riona enough to know that, after the way he had betrayed her, he would never deserve her. What’s more, she’d never want him.
“Taxi!”
The blue car that pulled up to the curb drew Jerry’s attention away from his cup of Tart n’ Cherry with lychee and rainbow sprinkles. Riona paired her exclamation with a fervent shaking of her hand in the air. The train station was just a few blocks away, why was she taking a cab? What was the whole point of sabotaging her Miata’s transmission if she was just going to so suddenly ditch public transit and patronize the Eastern Massachusetts’s taxi driver community?
He pitched the pint cup in the trash and dashed out of the Mo’FroYo at a speed that would have made a Jamaican jealous. The cab door was already swinging shut, and where it would speed his witch away to, he hadn’t a clue. Panic seized him, and drove him to do something incredibly stupid.
And this from a “man” who had bought stock in 1998 in every company with a name ending in dot-com.
“What the hell are you doing here, Jerry?”
Riona looked more disappointed than surprised as he slammed the door behind him and made for the seatbelt, as though his being in her cab had been pre-arranged.
He looked at the two options before him: insincere and cheesy excuse or …
“I followed you.”
Honesty was the best policy. Despite that fact, he still chose it.
“Do you do that often?”
“Um … no. Well, yes. Sometimes. As often as I’m able to get out of the responsibilities I am due to uphold as part of this whole charade, anyways.”
“You’ve called in sick for almost every service for the three weeks since you got back.”
He considered her words for a moment, then gave a reluctant nod. “So, yeah, pretty much always for the last three weeks. Except one day when I found out Cats was playing downtown. I don’t let anything come between me and the Magical Mister Mistopheles.”
“How dare you?”
“Proudly and without hesitation, thank you very much.” You could have balanced a pencil on the low arch of her brow. “Seriously, have you ever seen Cats?”
“We actually going somewhere?” the driver chimed in. “We can stay here and talk if you want, but you should know my couple’s counseling license expired last week.”
Crossing her arms over her chest, she fixed her eyes out the passenger side window. “Don’t suppose you’d be willing to get the hell out and leave me alone?”
“Nope, not really. Too many questionable types scouting around in Salem these days to let you run willy nilly about town. Rogue witches, fae, tourists with bright orange fanny packs …”
Riona huffed with an intensity generally displayed only by charging bulls and feminist authors taking on conservative pundits. “Fine. But don’t expect me to be all hospitable or talkative or anything.” She leaned over, toward the front seat, catching the driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror. “Hanaford House. You know where that is?”
“That place over across the river?” the cabbie asked.
A single nod of her head, and the taxi took off down the street. For several moments, Riona brooded while Jerry stifled his laughter. She was so cute when she looked like she wanted to castrate him. He could see a flame behind her expression burning him in mental effigy.
“Oh, just get it over with,” Jerry suddenly found himself saying, after working a small charm beneath his breath to block the sounds of their conversation from the cabbie.
“Are you really the reason that poor woman has no eye?”
Jerry clicked his tongue. “Undoing the audibilious curse was her choice. As was being saddled with it, I’ll have you know.”
Saddled perhaps being a crass word, given the history, but meh …
“She knew I was a gnosis demon when she strapped me to her bed, and I made it perfectly clear what the consequences would be. It might have been my modis operendi to take advantage of the gullible, but I respected a wiccan enough to give them a head’s up. There’s always a consequence to laying down with the Devil, sweetheart. Even if the act itself is only by proxy. Besides, gnosis demons are intelligence gatherers, so mind reading is a huge bene. And the whole sleeping with a demon thing can have other consequences, too, depending on the demon in question.”
“Really?” He could see her mulling that over before she asked, “Like what?”
He glanced at her askew, but she only shrugged.
“The guys spent so much time trying to build up my defensive skills, they didn’t have much time to lecture me in Hell’s family tree and everyone’s quirks. I’m a little gray in some areas, as your ex-girlfriend just so snippily reminded me.”
“Bunny was never my girlfriend, Riona. Just a girl.” The taxi stopped at a red light. He took the opportunity to pull a cigarette from his pocket and light up. Of course the cab driver would have told him to snub it, but luckily Mr. Beep Beep was too busy yelling at some confused tourist standing in the middle of the street, snapping pictures like they’d just seen Elvis. “A lust demon, Asmodeus for example, are the only demons who can impregnate. And you remember Hermosa, right? He cultured and fed off human guilt. A roll between the sheets with one of those types of demons would drive a person to suicide. A good way to off an enemy, if you’re able to seduce them.”
“Why is it always sex? After eons of trial and error, can’t y’all figure out something a little more efficient? Doesn’t anyone from Hell know how to get a girl drunk or frame a guy for embezzlement?”
Jerry knew where his allegiances lie. He hadn’t hesitated since his resurrection to become a total Lenny and squeal on almost all the secrets of Hell to which he was privy. But this wasn’t exactly knowledge; it was only an unsubstantiated tip he had from a particularly unreliable source.
“There’s a demon that is designed to seduce only the heart. He makes his victim love him so completely, that it causes the mortal woman to curse God in sincerity. Big Boss will put up with a lot of crappy moves, but being told to go screw himself ain’t one. I don’t know if those demons really exist. I hope they don’t.”
“Why?”
He left his concerns unspoken. Instead, he backed up the subject. “You know, about Bunny … She could have just lived with it; it wasn’t like I was after her for anything more than a lay. Every ten-cent witch thinks that she’s something special and that Lucifer wants to seduce her into some sinister web of evil. Ain’t always so. It’s like Freud said: sometimes a fuck is just a fuck.”
“I’m pretty sure that’s not what Freud said.”
“I can’t believe you slept with her.”
Really, that’s what upset her? “Darling, I’ve slept with a lot of people during my illustrious career. Thousands, tens of thousands maybe. I was a demon for almost two thousand years. If I was the notches in the belt type of guy, I’d need that leather monstrosity to be so big to fit them all, it would even still fall down around Rosie O’Donell’s ankles. It doesn’t mean it meant anything to me.”
“So you admit that being with me meant nothing to you. That you were just playing me from the start.” Even from her side profile, he could see her roll her eyes as she huffed. “Figures.”
Oh, she was the last person who should have the nerve to call him out on his sexual diversity. “What do you want me to say, some sort of romance novel shit? That the moment I met you my world flipped on its head and it was love at first sight? That I instantly became a new person and repented?”
“Lying to me now would be something so unique?”
The mortal body he now had on lease couldn’t growl the way his demon one could. Still, he gave it his best effort. “Look, you believe what you want about that time. No, it wasn’t personal to me at the beginning. You were just an assignment. And, what can I say, I enjoyed my work immensely. You want me to feel sorry for the things I made you feel? First tell me that you didn’t enjoy every minute of it, too. And I don’t mean just the sex.”
If she thought she was doing a good job of hiding the welling of tears, she was sorely mistaken. “The ends didn’t justify the means. Don’t try playing mind games on me. If you had really loved me, you wouldn’t have gone through with pushing me into a meat locker and trying to get me to kill an innocent.”
“After all this time, you still think that’s what that was all about? Goddess in grief, maybe you aren’t as smart as I thought you were.”
She rounded on him like a rabid animal. “Fuck you.”
“No, fuck you, Riona.”
She actually recoiled at his snap, but she needed to hear this.
“That guy was attacking you. Even if you had killed him, it would have been self-defense. That whole event and the purpose of my embedding with you, if you’ll pardon the pun, was recon. I was supposed to read your thoughts to see what your rationales were, learn where your moral limits lie, so that we could plan the best way to fell you. But ask yourself, if all I wanted was to read your mind, why wouldn’t I have left you after the first time I slept with you? A relationship wasn’t part of the assignment.”
She glared at him with the professionalism of a shushing librarian. “You want me to believe it was because you had actual feelings?”
“My actions speak louder than your words. Don’t forget all the Hell I went through to protect you.” He added in a hushed whisper, “Like, literally.”
“Your swan dive doesn’t amount to a hill of beans. Marc is still dead. May the Lord have mercy on your soul.”
He double checked the cabbie, making sure the greasy-haired man wasn’t showing any hints of listening in. “He did. He sent me back to you.”
She looked away. “That little move has me actually doubting His infallibility.”
Perhaps it was still part of his nature, carried over from his demon incarnation, not to hesitate when an impulse fired. Riona’s eyes went wide when Jerry struck out his hand across the way and turned her chin in his direction. He held her there, at arm’s length, fueling all his desire in to his expression. “The only insane thing in all this is how much I loved you, even when I was damned. And how much I still love you now. And how we’re not doing anything about it, for the sole reason that you’re not ready.”
Through lips pursed from pressure, she answered, “You can’t love when you’re a demon. Ramiel said so.”
“Yeah?” He released her but kept her gaze. “Try it sometime.”
Jerry wanted to speak, wanted to keep trying to prove his point, but he was scared where that might lead. The choice of whether or not to brave it was also made for him when the cab pulled up outside a large Victorian house in a quiet residential district on the outskirts of town.
“Twelve-fifty.”
The cabbie held out a hand as Riona placed a ten and a five in his palm. “Keep the change.”
“You want that I should wait, lady?”
Riona shook her head. “No, thanks. Don’t know how long this will be. And if I leave a body behind, it would be unfair to have you pinned as an accomplice.”
Jerry followed her, if for no other reason than she hadn’t said not to. A white sign with faded gold letters hung on hooks from the lip of the porch and read “Hanaford House Senior Residence.”
“Speaking of Bunny, did she give you anything useful?” he asked as they meandered through the gate and past dead flowers—they may have been marigolds before winter had killed them—lining the path.
“Only that the dagger has a curse on it, but that’s kind of obvious, isn’t it? After all, I don’t think Lucifer or any angel, even a fallen one, would have gone down from just a little poke in the rib cage, right?”
“No, probably not.”
“Beyond that,” she continued, “nothing I couldn’t really figure out before. Made me think a bit, though.”
“About what, early retirement?”
She gave a little half smile. What a thrill seeing her happy did for him, even if it proved to be temporary. The next moment, the expression evidenced her resentment. Dourly, she held out her hand and opened the door.
“No, inheritances, actually.” Riona’s cryptic comment was made only more strange when she followed it with, “When we were together, you never met my mom.”
He was thoroughly confused. “You said you two really didn’t get along, and I kind of knew our relationship wasn’t really heading toward a let’s-meet-each-other’s-families-and-look-at-baby-pictures milestone. Why?”
“I know you’ve lived in Hell, Jerry. I only hope that’s prepared you for the likes of Molly Dade.”
Chapter 8
Chipper’s standard-issue Ray-Bans measured the width of the cracking door. The glare of the midday sun bounced off the polished lenses and would have made Ramiel wince, if angels’ eyes weren’t immune to the sting of such things. What was solar reflection when your optic capacity could behold Big Boss’s radiance and barely blink? Even though the club had closed hours ago, the faint stench of stale beer, sweat, and smoke emanated from the interior, drifting on the breeze as it mixed with the chilly November air. Add to that the hint of eau d’bouncer, and the taste that landed on Ramiel’s palate was enough to make one wish for a passing skunk to chance by and relieve him of the suffering.
The muscularly-blessed employee of the goddess was just north of the hangover border and the bed sheets. Oily residue slicked over his five-o’clock shadow. His shaved head glistened like salmon eyes at the fish market.
“You live here?”
Chipper smacked his lips a few times and inhaled deeply. “It’s part of the job description.”
“She pay you enough for that?”
“You think my sorry ass would be five-to-ninin’ it in a converted storage room if she didn’t?” His hand rose to his face, pushing his sunglasses up the arch of his nose as he cleared the sleep from his eyes. “What do you want?”
“She in?”
“Yeah. Didn’t say she was expecting anyone this morning, though, or I’d have put on a kettle for tea.”
“Do I of all people need to be penciled in?” Ramiel raised his hand to the door, tapping it with his fingertips. “Now let me in, or I’ll huff and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your whole bar down.”
“A canine reference. Cute. I never
hear those.”
Ramiel inhaled deep and quick, puffing his cheeks to their full flesh-limited capacity.
“Whoa, okay.” A shudder passed through the bouncer. Not much rattled Chipper’s cage, but when an archangel connected with the destruction of Jericho did something like that, you gave it more than a few grains of salt. You gave it a whole carton of Morton’s. “I didn’t think you’d actually do something. You’re not going to, are you?”
“I only meant it as a figure of speech, but it depends on your letting me in or not. Pretty please, puppy?”
The Grotto wore the same clothes in the day as it did in the night. The only difference was the body, or bodies, within. While the local frat boys and scholastic betties packed it from beams to barstools after dark, the midday residents only included Chipper and a few other employees, running vacuums or restocking bottles behind the bar.
The bouncer turned his chin back over his shoulder as he guided the pair around tables on which peg-legged chairs rested overturned. “You want anything? Kitchen’s not open yet, but I could see if we got anything left over from last night.”
“You know I don’t need to eat, right?”
“Yeah, but I figured I’d take a stab at being all hospitable and shit.”
“Yeah, you killed it. Just want to see the owner, thanks.”
“Yup.”
At the top of the stairs, leading up to Persephone’s vulture’s perch of an office, Chipper punched a series of numbers in to a keypad. The door sprang open, and Persephone looked up only long enough to register their faces. She scowled, but it wasn’t clear who caused her disdain, Ramiel, Chipper, or the poor sap who she was yelling a la long distance.
Once You Go Demon (Pure Souls) Page 5
