The Demon Always Wins: Touched by a Demon, Book 1

by Jeanne Oates Estridge

  This was why Dara had originally thought Lilith might be a demon. Dara’s eyes narrowed. She was suddenly wary again. She’d had a lot of fun with Lilith over the weekend, but that didn’t mean anything. It was the nature of demons that they were fun to be around. Lilith had passed the salt test, though, which Ben Lyle had flunked—twice. And Nana said the test was foolproof. Relax, she ordered herself. Not everyone is a demon out to get you.

  Lilith and Kelsey both said, “I’d love to.”

  And that was another thing. Kelsey seldom stayed past five unless a potential donor was coming in. Dara was pretty sure she knew why the grant-writer was still there, and it worried her. She could hardly discourage her from working late, though.

  “You’re coming, aren’t you, Dara?” asked Lilith. “And you, Ben?”

  When had he become Ben?

  “I don’t think Dr. Lyle can make it.” Dara felt like the world’s biggest wet blanket. “He mentioned that he had an early day tomorrow.”

  “Come on, Ben,” Jeremy said. “Just one drink.”

  Dr. Lyle looked at her with the beseeching eyes of a teenage boy grounded from the party every other kid in his class was attending. She pretended not to notice.

  “I should probably go home and turn in.” His shoulders drooped so low she had to stifle a snort.

  “You’re not coming?” If he was disappointed, Kelsey was devastated.

  Dara was glad she’d stood firm. He was a demon, a minion from Hell, here to cause mischief. The last thing she wanted was for Kelsey to spend time in his dangerous company, even if other people were around.

  “Not this time.” He straightened his shoulders and his tone was impersonal. The rebuff was gentle, but it was clear he wasn’t interested in her.

  He’d paid absolutely no attention to Lilith or to Kelsey all evening, and they were both younger and more attractive than Dara. When he wasn’t focused on his patients, all of his attention had been on her. A tiny part of her, ruled by ego, found satisfaction in that. But the bigger part, the part that answered to her logical brain, said there was a reason.

  Nana thought she was his target. If so, he would be very disappointed. She had no intention of succumbing to his wiles.

  The lights in the lobby went dark and the pharmacy’s overhead door rattled closed. A few moments later, Gabby, Javier and Chris, the clinic’s pharmacist, joined the group. As soon as they learned a group outing was planned, they were all in.

  “Really, Dr. Lyle,” Lilith said, “you should join us. All work and no play make Ben a dull boy.”

  It felt like there was a barb in her words, though Dara couldn’t imagine why. He must have heard it, too, because his jaw tightened.

  Lilith turned to her. “Tell Ben that he should reconsider. After all, this shindig was organized in his honor.”

  Dara was about to shrug that off when his earlier words, about Satan not liking it when he got too chummy on a mission, came back to her. Maybe she could get rid of him that way. She looked around the group, weighing the pros and cons. She didn’t like the idea of exposing Kelsey to his influence, but he’d displayed absolutely no interest in her. Lilith seemed intent on bringing him along, although Dara got the sense her new friend didn’t like him all that much. She finally decided it was better if she knew what the demon was doing than if she didn’t.

  “She’s right, Dr. Lyle. You should join us.”

  He eyed the pocket where she kept her pouch of demonweed. “Are you sure?”

  She spread her hands to show him she was holding no weapons. “Completely.”

  Belial looked out at the sand court next to Slyders’ patio, where a life-and-death game of volleyball was being played out. As soon as they ordered the first round, Lilith had shucked off her stilettos, declaring herself a captain. Chris captained the other team. Lilith selected Jeremy and Kelsey for her side, while Chris drew Javier and Gabby. Lilith and Chris pursued the game like lives were at stake, though the other players lacked their killer instincts.

  “You don’t play?” he asked Dara.

  “Not really an athlete.” Dara sipped from her glass of wine. “What about you?”

  As he reached for his beer, he brushed his hand against hers. She gasped, a sound she quickly smothered, and a bolt of pleasure seared its way straight to his groin. He wanted to stroke the back of her hand, to feel the smoothness of her scars beneath his fingertips.

  “I was instructed to stay away from your staff,” he said.

  “You can take instruction. Who knew?” Her tone was even more acerbic than normal.

  He grinned and let silence fall between them. Dara was a smart woman, a strong woman, but she was no match for ten thousand years of training in deceit. Once she capitulated to him sexually, she would be as enslaved to him as he was to Satan. It had been that way with every woman he’d ever seduced. Once that happened, it would take little to convince her to curse her maker.

  He took a sip of beer and stared out at the ocean. The tide was low, and the waves were almost sluggish beneath the silvery moon. Beyond the shoreline, stars winked against the blackness. He could make out the Big Dipper, Orion and Cassiopeia. They’d changed little in the past ten thousand years. They would change equally little over the next ten thousand.

  This bet, on the other hand, had the capacity to change his life. Once he had the CED job, he would be above every demon except Satan himself. When Satan was away, scouting for new populations to corrupt, Belial would become the de facto boss. And all he had to do to make it happen was seduce the woman sitting beside him in the darkness into damning the Enemy.

  He gave himself pretty good odds of success. Over the salt-and-seaweed smell of the ocean, he could detect a hint of camphor. She could smear on smelly salves, douse him with holy water and pepper him with demonweed, but she would still fall. He could already read it in the way her pulse accelerated when he came near. He admired her spirit, but she was fighting insurmountable odds.

  The holy water and the herbs gave her a false sense of security. Their effects were uncomfortable, but they were pinpricks compared to the torments awaiting him if he failed. Beside him, her eyes were on the others. Laughter and taunts streamed from the beach, along with the intermittent thud of a fist striking the ball. The quality of the play had gone downhill as the night grew darker and the blood alcohol levels rose, but it didn’t seem to inhibit their enjoyment.

  “Lilith is certainly an aggressive player.” Dara sounded surprised. She didn’t know the half of it.

  Sometime soon, he would need to figure out what Lilith was up to. Why had she come to the clinic tonight? She was pretending to be enamored of Jeremy. She had chosen him first for her tiny team, despite the clear indicators that he was no more an athlete than Dara. Jeremy was now playing the best volleyball game of his life, thanks, no doubt, to snares Lilith threw to spur him on. Out on the sand, he launched his rotund body at the ball like a pudgy javelin. If she didn’t let up soon, he’d have a massive heart attack and they’d forfeit the wager.

  “I have a couple of possible gastroenterologists for Viola.” Dara’s words pulled his thoughts away from the children playing in the sand. “I assume you’d prefer to approach a female?”

  It annoyed him that she thought his skills were limited to his sexual magnetism.

  “If you have a male doctor on your list, let’s go with him,” he said.

  “You think you can get anyone to do anything you like.”

  “Not at all. I present options and make those options look attractive. Ultimately, people have free will to make their own choices.”

  “So he could say no.”

  “He could,” Belial said. But he won’t. Less than one out of a thousand people refused demonically provided opportunities. It was the nature of snares that the prospect being presented looked beguiling, while any downside disappeared from people’s minds.

  “I only allowed you into the clinic because the only other choice was to close down.”

&n
bsp; In the darkness, he smiled at the defensive note in her voice. “You have an unusual ability to resist enticement.” There was even some truth to that.

  “And that’s why you had to spend so much money on the grant.”

  “Very perceptive.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Save your enticements for people who buy them.”

  He chuckled and they both fell silent again, watching the volleyball game.

  “They must seem like children to you,” she said after a moment.

  “You all seem like children to me.” The truth slipped from his lips without conscious intention. He thought she might take umbrage at that, but she nodded.

  “What has changed the most about people over time?” she asked.

  He was surprised to hear her echo his earlier thought. “There is nothing new under the sun.”

  “What about under the earth?”

  He wasn’t sure what she meant.

  “What is your life like, in Hell?” she asked.

  He stared across the flickering flame of the citronella candle at her face. In ten thousand years, no one had ever asked him such a question. The handful of individuals who had discovered his identity had either avoided his company or done their best to pretend it wasn’t true.

  “You seem to like being a doctor. Is that what you do down there?”

  He did like being a doctor. Even treating that cranky old bat Viola was satisfying.

  “We don’t need doctors,” he said. “Demons are immortal. The only pain we ever suffer is when we’re punished for some failure, and Satan wouldn’t permit anyone to intervene, even if they wanted to, which they wouldn’t.”

  “What about the—what do you call them?—inmates?”

  “Clients,” he said. “Everyone has their own terminology, but I call them clients.”

  “I imagine that feels better than inmates.” Her tone was wry. “What about the clients?”

  He stared at her, perplexed. “What about them?”

  “How do you interact with them? Do you poke them with your pitchfork?”

  “Don’t be absurd.” He wanted to tell her that such acts were much more in character for her new best friend, but outing another demon was forbidden. Not to mention counterproductive. If she thought there was an entire team targeting her, he’d never get any closer.

  “Then what do you do? Do you even have a pitchfork?”

  “Of course not.” He did, in a closet somewhere, left over from when the boss had first set up Hell, and they were trying to figure out what worked. Tridents definitely had not worked. Even the earliest clients of Hell, Neanderthals with their jutting brows and terrible breath, hadn’t taken them seriously. “I try to minimize my interactions with them.”

  The whole conversation had taken a bizarre turn. He was all too aware of the legions back in Hell, listening and laughing their tails off. It must amuse them no end to hear Hell’s soon-to-be second-in-command interrogated about his demonic duties by this woman who should have succumbed to his charms nine days ago.

  “Why is that?” she asked.

  “Why is what?”

  “Why do you avoid interacting with the clients?”

  “My role is more managerial.”

  “You’re a supervisor?”

  He wasn’t sure what irked him more—her surprise, or the fact that she chose the lowest-level managerial job.

  “Yes, I’m a manager. Why wouldn’t I be?”

  “Exactly what is your role?”

  He hesitated, but the need to impress her was too strong to resist. “I’m the equivalent of the chief executive officer in a human corporation.” It was a tiny lie. Once he was successful here, he would be.

  “You’re the CEO?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Then what are you doing here? Isn’t field work pretty far beneath you?”

  Dammit. He had allowed himself to grow too comfortable talking to her.

  “The boss thinks it’s important to stay hands-on,” he said.

  “You said you don’t interact with the clients.” She turned to look him in the face.

  Just his luck to get a target that actually listened.

  “The in-house stuff is one facet of what we do. Activities that occur Aboveworld are a lot more interesting.”

  She pounced on that. “‘Aboveworld’? Is that what you all call Earth? Or is that one of your terms again?”

  How had he let the conversation get so far out of control? “No, we all call it that.”

  “We all call what what?” Lilith flung herself into a chair, panting. The others trailed her to the patio.

  “Nothing,” Belial and Dara said simultaneously.

  Lilith looked from one to the other and smiled. “Sounds like something.”

  “Who won?” Dara said, trying to distract her.

  Good luck with that. Once Lilith had something between her teeth, Satan himself couldn’t shake it loose.

  “We did.” Lilith grabbed a mug from the table and held it aloft. “To us.”

  Kelsey and Jeremy, who had followed her up from the beach, picked up mugs and clinked them against Lilith’s glass.

  “To us.” Jeremy sounded exhausted.

  “We’ll take you next time,” Chris said. Sweat plastered his spiky hair to his head.

  “Not a chance,” Lilith said. They made plans for a rematch.

  Belial was content to let them talk. He’d had enough conversation for one evening. Dara’s questions, her curiosity about his life, had been surprisingly enjoyable. She was a good listener, with a genuine interest in other people’s circumstances. Even his. How very odd.

  He thought about her at the beginning of tonight’s clinic, organizing patients, nurses and doctors like an impresario conducting a finely tuned orchestra. Her little clinic thrived because she shared the music of her compassion with each person who walked through her door. When she was gone, it would close.

  The thought left him strangely disturbed, so he turned his focus to his own concern: the wager. That was a better topic to ruminate on. Success was within his reach. Despite her best intentions, she was succumbing to his allure. Her interest in his life proved it.

  It was the best of all possible outcomes. Not only would he win his coveted promotion, but her lush body, which had haunted more than a few of his dreams, would be his. It wouldn’t be much longer now.

  Chapter 21

  When Dara arrived at Mercy Care the next morning, she leaned over to kiss Nana on the cheek. Nana wrinkled her nose.

  “Is that demon I smell?”

  Dara didn’t see how. She’d showered and put on fresh scrubs that morning.

  “He worked in the clinic last night,” she said. “We all went out afterwards.”

  “To a tavern?” Nana’s expression said Dara was headed straight for Hell.

  “To Slyders.” Before Nana became so frail, they used to go there for the buckets of peel-and-eat shrimp. “We had some snacks and played volleyball.” Dara left out her glass of wine.

  “Hmmph.” Nana looked her over and evidently decided she wouldn’t burst into flames anytime soon.

  “I found out some things about him. He says he’s some kind of bigwig down there, second-in-command.”

  “They all say that,” Nana said.

  Dara nodded, though she thought he was more than a foot soldier. He carried himself like someone who was used to being in charge. “He told me Satan doesn’t like it when he gets too friendly with mortals.”

  “Anything he tells you is as like to be a lie as the truth. He’s here to spin a web. And that web is meant to trap you. Why are you so fascinated by him, when you know he’s a danger to you and everything you stand for?”

  “Beneath all the arrogance and the false charm, he feels broken,” Dara said.

  “He is broken,” said Nana. “He’s as broken as he can be. But you can’t heal him the way you healed Matt. He’s broken through his own choice. He had everything—the Lord’s love,
a celestial home, holy work—and he threw it all aside.”

  The drugs Matt took to get through his grueling residency had nearly cost him everything, too, but prayer had gotten him through that. The exact kind of prayer Dara couldn’t seem to pray anymore.

  “Why?” she asked. “Why would he do that?” He seemed too smart for that.

  “Ambition, arrogance, anger—take your pick.”

  The next time Dara got a chance to talk with him, she would ask.

  “Dara Perdue Strong,” Nana said, “I see that look on your face. You listen to me. Ben Lyle is a demon. You can’t heal him. Do you understand that?”

  “Of course,” Dara said. “But to fight my enemy, I need to know my enemy.”

  “Your granddaddy said the same.” Nana plucked at the afghan covering her legs. “He’d get one in the church and he’d stay up all night long debating with him. He called it ‘getting an alternative view of the scripture.’ I told him there’s plenty of folks from right here on this Earth will give you the other side of the scripture if you let them, but he said demons’ ways of looking at things was interesting.”

  Dara frowned. That didn’t sound like the upright grandfather she remembered.

  “That was back at the big church,” Nana said. “Do you remember the church in Atlanta?”

  Dara shook her head. She had no memory of ever living anywhere but Alexandria.

  “I didn’t think you would,” Nana said. “You were just a little thing when we left.”

  “Was that before or after my parents died?”

  “Right about the same time. You stayed with us while they went on that mission trip.”

  While they were in Africa, the little four-seater plane her parents used to get around in the bush went down. Dara was only four. She could barely remember them.

  “Our congregation had nigh onto three thousand people,” Nana continued. “That was when those 60 Minutes people came to interview your granddaddy.” She tapped an arthritic finger against her chin and seemed to come to a decision. She nodded toward the bureau. “Get in the bottom drawer and get out my green scrapbook.”