Sheesh, she sounded just like Gabriel. When had that happened?
“It’s for the greater good. I mean, yes, I’ve certainly benefitted, but the world will benefit, too. I’m trying to make it a safer place for all businesses — big and small. No one should find their company bankrupt because of these thieves.”
How had this conversation turned into a confessional? It wasn’t her place to judge this man or hand out forgiveness, and even if it was, she had more pressing matters on her plate right now.
“I remember you said she left you some of her things, and that you always have them with you.” Ugh. Worst transition ever. Could she be any more obvious? “What were they? Your grandfather’s pocket watch or lucky coin? Something like that?”
He shrugged. “She left me our old pack of playing cards, a picture, and a couple of other things. They’re a reminder of her when I’m far from home.”
What now? “I’d really like to see them if that offer is still open.” Carter gave her a quizzical look, and Asta realized just how terrible that had sounded. She’d made it clear she wasn’t interested in him, and now she wanted to go to his hotel room to see an old pack of playing cards. It sounded like a really stupid excuse to get—.
Oh. The angel struggled a bit with the ethics of what she was about to suggest. I’m so going to Hel.
“I mean. . . .” she laughed, peeking up at Carter from under her eyelashes like she’d seen a million human women do to various men. “I’ve enjoyed talking with you these last few days, and I know you have work to do, but maybe we could have dinner tonight? Up in your hotel room, where we could be alone and . . . talk?”
Yes, definitely going to Hel.
“But I thought you and Dar. . .?”
Her and Dar. Dinner, Karaoke, the little Polish bar, kissing him in the alley. “No, that was strictly business. He’s interested in more, but I’m not.”
Liar. She was very, very interested in more. Would the demon be angry at her for this date with Carter? Would he be jealous? A shiver of anticipation ran through her. She’d tasted his anger yesterday. What would he be like if he were really furious?
Probably very sexy.
“Eight o’clock then?” She took a napkin with a scribbled address on it from the human, realizing with a guilty start that he’d been speaking while she’d been lost in sinful fantasy.
She flashed him her most brilliant smile, feeling like a horrible deceiver. “I’m looking forward to it.”
“What are these?” Wyatt picked up one of the blue USB sticks, turning it over in his hand.
“Carter Phelps’s latest security software. Full-blown version, hasn’t even hit the market yet.” Dar let that sink in for a moment. “I broke into the convention center early this morning, fried all the security cameras, and stole the entire lot. I don’t know if he has more stashed away elsewhere, but this should bring a fortune on the black market. Take one.”
“Thanks. What will this cost me?” Wyatt tossed the blue stick from hand to hand, eyeing Dar with suspicion. Smart human. Demons never do anything without an ulterior motive, and they never give something away for free.
“I need your help. Phelps has a genie in a bottle in his hotel room, and I’m not sure if he’s unaware of it, or cleverly using the demon to his advantage. Call me cynical, but I’m wondering if his success in the IT security world is due to supernatural help.”
“That might explain it.” Wyatt pocketed the USB stick. “He kind of came out of nowhere five years ago and hit it out of the park with his first product. I’m sure the guy is bright, but I’m suspicious that his software is consistently in the right place at the right time.”
“So the innocent-and-honest routine is a ruse?” Dar frowned. “I can usually spot a con artist, but this guy just strikes me as dim. He might know his way around a computer, but he hardly seems ruthless enough to pull off that kind of success. Maybe there’s a silent partner doing the dirty work for the business?”
Wyatt pulled the USB stick out and looked closely at it. “Like a demon silent partner? I don’t really like the guy, but he doesn’t seem the type to be working hand-in-hand with a demon.”
“So let’s say the genie has nothing to do with his success. Do you think Phelps is somehow orchestrating the cyber attacks?”
“Either that or he’s the luckiest guy in the world. Or he’s got some way of telling the future.” Wyatt shrugged.
“Nobody is that lucky. I’m betting that Phelps is either the unwitting dupe of this genie, or his idiot routine fooled me and he’s cashing in his wishes for business success.”
“What kind of demon would have the expertise to rocket a cyber-security firm from nothing to top-of-the-line? Most I’ve met can barely work their smart phones.”
Dar nodded. “That’s got me stumped too. From the look of the bottle, the genie has been in there at least six-hundred years. That’s making me lean more towards the partners-in-cybercrime angle.”
Wyatt winced. “Six-hundred years? That’s a long time. If Phelps is cashing in his wishes, I hope he knows what he’s doing or that genie is going to shred him like a pulled-pork sandwich when he gets out.”
“That’s another problem. I don’t know if Phelps has the means or the know-how to banish the demon once the contract is complete.”
“Well, doesn’t this sort of thing always involve three wishes? Maybe he’s purposely holding back on one wish so the genie stays in the bottle.”
Humans, they always underestimated the cunning of a demon. “Then he really is a fool. If he lets one wish slip — say, on a falling star or something — then the genie is out of the bottle, and everyone in the blast radius is going to be pretty much fucked.”
Wyatt gave Dar a narrow-eyed glance. “You’re a rat. Steal the thing and bury it somewhere. I’m assuming Phelps has to have it in hand to cash in his wishes?”
Dar raised a shoulder. “Fucked if I know. Personally, I think we’re better off killing Phelps so the contract rebounds to the full three wishes then finding a human we can bribe or threaten to get the genie safely out of the bottle.”
“Let me guess: the angel you’re sniffing after has a problem with that approach?”
Yeah, she did. “So here’s the deal: in exchange for the software on the stick, I want you to dissect it and get an idea of what Phelps is planning.”
Wyatt nodded. “But you figured I was going to do that anyway. So, what’s the other part of the deal?”
“Dig hard into Carter Phelps’s background. If he’s got three wishes, I need to know what number he’s on.”
Wyatt pursed his lips, pocketing the stick. “Deal.”
“What do you mean he’s planning something?” Asta demanded. “Planning what? It’s a remembrance item from his grandmother. He’s got no idea what it is.”
“Don’t you find it a little convenient that a guy with no business background builds an internationally known company from scratch that’s worth tens of billions of dollars in less than five years?”
What was he talking about? “Humans have auspicious moments, and there have been companies in the past with similar stories. Yes, it’s rare, but it happens. Sometimes people win the luck lottery.”
Dar raised a skeptical eyebrow. “Yeah, if an angel is rigging the lottery. Or in this case, a genie.”
“Not always. He’s a smart man, and he has a quality product. People recognize that.”
“Maybe in a Lifetime movie, or a sappy chick-lit romance, but not in real life. I’ve got Wyatt looking into his background.”
“Wyatt? The ‘idiot’ you introduced me to yesterday?” Asta made little quotation marks with her fingers.
Dar looked sheepish. “Well, he’s not always an idiot, and he does have his uses. In the meantime, I say we steal the bottle and kill Phelps. Just to be on the safe side.”
“I can’t kill a human. And neither can you. No one is killing a human.” Asta took a deep breath, squirmed, and looked elsewhere — anywher
e but at Dar. Now was the time to come clean with her very questionable approach to getting the bottle. “I asked to have a dinner date with him tonight in his hotel room. He’ll show me the bottle, and I’ll convince him to give it to me.”
There was a long silence. She sneaked a glance at the demon, but he didn’t appear angry — at least not blustering, sexy angry. Dar stared at her, silver eyes sparking little lights of red. This was bad — very, very bad — and the uncomfortable guilt she’d had the moment she’d proposed the idea to Carter solidified into a hard knot in her chest.
“You basically propositioned him, you know.” Dar’s voice was cold, his face like chiseled stone. “He’s going to show you a whole lot more than the bottle in his bedroom. Do you plan to take this all the way? You gonna fuck him then run off in the night with his wallet and the bottle like a two-bit prostitute while he sleeps?”
Asta gasped. Now she was angry on top of feeling guilty. She’d been an idiot, but Dar’s words were like a slap in the face. “No! He’s not like that. This dinner is just for me to look at the bottle, and then I’ll talk him into giving it up.”
“Oh, he’ll give it up all right.” Dar made a growling noise. “If he so much as unbuttons his fly, I’m going to rip his cock off at the base and shove it down his throat.”
What was that about? Jealousy was understandable given what happened between them last night, but Dar’s violence seemed a bit over the top.
“There will be no cause for ripping cocks off, I promise you. I don’t have sex with humans. That would be a terrible violation of their trust. Plus the gross imbalance of power and skills between us . . . yuck, just yuck.”
That seemed to calm the demon down a bit. He was still a nine out of ten on the anger scale, but at least he wasn’t on the verge of emasculating any human males.
“Okay.” Dar’s voice was sharp, the red lights still in his gray eyes. “But if you don’t get him to give you the bottle, I’m stealing it. And I’m killing him. I may just kill him anyway, out of general principle.”
“No killing. Do you hear me? No killing.”
“Fine.”
Asta glared at the demon. ‘Fine’ sounded less like he agreed with her mandate and more like he was just pushing the conversation aside for later discussion.
“And if we can’t find a sorcerer or a human we trust to make the wishes? Then what? We can’t exactly babysit this bottle until the end of time.”
She drummed her fingers against her leg in thought. “Maybe we can just pitch the whole thing through the gate to Hel and be done with it.”
The genie was a demon, after all. Maybe the other demons in Hel had some way of getting him out of the bottle that wouldn’t result in worldwide death and destruction. And if it did . . . well, they were demons; they were better able to handle an enraged genie than the humans were.
Dar nodded. “You sure you’re not a demon? Fuck, everything I heard about the brutality of angels is true if you’d consider such a thing. Only a human can release the genie. You’d be condemning him to all eternity trapped in a bottle. There are humans in Hel, but they’re slaves, and an elven master would never allow one of his sorcerers to release a genie trapped for centuries. There’d be too much backlash.”
She hadn’t even considered that. Asta bit her lip, wondering the best action out of a whole list of horrible choices. “We’ll find a magic user. Somehow we’ll find one. I’ll get the bottle from Carter, we’ll find a magic user, and there will be no killing.”
Dar gave her a cool smile. “Okay, if you say so. But if your date tonight doesn’t go as planned, then it’s time to consider my ideas.”
Things were very tense at the Genus Micro booth.
“I haven’t sensed the genie at all,” Asta whispered. She’d been staking out Phelps’s hotel, figuring if the human activated his final wish, she’d be there to take out the newly released demon. “How are things here?”
“Well, Carter is ready to tear everyone a new asshole. They can’t find the software giveaways, and your boyfriend is pretty pissed. Makes me wonder what he had planned with those things. Do they have a virus hidden in them? Is he plotting world domination?”
“He’s not my boyfriend.” Asta ignored the rest of his statements regarding Carter’s plots. Dar was still, what was the word, pissed? Dar was still pissed about her dinner date tonight. She needed to excuse some snark or he’d wind up even angrier. His earlier threats regarding Carter’s genitals still lurked in the back of her mind. There was no sense giving him any excuse to act on them.
Dar made a ‘humpf’ sound. “Anyway, I haven’t sensed any demon energy. I think we’re safe. For now. Although I still vote we kill Phelps and steal the bottle — in that order.”
Her arm brushed against his, and she felt a brief touch of his spirit. “You don’t get a vote. But I’m curious; if you interfered with the term of service by stealing the software giveaways, what would that do to the contract?”
“It depends on the wording, but I’m confident that my theft wouldn’t matter. Usually once the demon performs the service, the results are out of his control and not part of the contract. If Phelps has made a wish, and I fuck it up, the demon won’t give a shit. Three wishes, and he’s free, regardless of how things work out.”
The angel shook her head in disbelief. “Why wouldn’t the sorcerer ask for guaranteed results as part of the contract? Seems foolish not to.”
Dar rested his arm lightly against hers. Was he doing this on purpose? It was driving her crazy. Darn it all, this demon was so distracting. “Demands for guarantees on results aren’t binding,” he explained. “There are too many outside factors that can interfere. The summoning is only for service.”
“Well that is a significant flaw in the magical system. Binding is much more effective. When we bind a demon, we can demand results. Humans have a long way to go in their evolution.”
“Yeah. Because positive evolution involves enslaving someone and forcing them to do your bidding.”
Well since he put it like that. . . . “We don’t do that anymore,” Asta hastily assured him. “And few angels have the power to bind. I certainly don’t. I’m not sure even all the archangels do.”
“How reassuring,” Dar drawled. “Well, if Phelps used one of his wishes for world domination through this Ouroborous giveaway, then no wonder he’s so angry this afternoon.”
“Maybe he didn’t get enough coffee.” Asta suggested.
‘I didn’t get enough coffee,” the demon grumbled. “And there’s a lot of things I’d rather be doing than hanging out here, watching a fucking human yell at his staff.”
Asta patted the demon on the back. She could sympathize. There were things she’d rather be doing, too. Ferris wheel. Steaming tub with a naked Dar. “Well, keep watching. And if you start having a pity party, remember I’m standing outside a hotel all day in the rain.”
Dar scowled. “Yeah, but at least you’re getting a decent dinner tonight and have a halfway decent chance of getting laid.”
Yep, still jealous. And still pissy. How funny that it really turned her on. “I promise you, I will not be ‘getting laid’ tonight. And if you really want, I’ll bring you a doggie bag of leftovers.”
Chapter 12
Asta placed a hand against the cool glass. “The view is breathtaking.”
It was, and staring out the window gave her a chance to avoid Carter’s obvious romantic intentions. The lights were dim, and artfully placed candles were scattered throughout the main room of the suite. The room-service staff had wheeled in several linen-draped carts full of silver-domed platters. Soft music came from the speakers, and the glass full of ruby wine in her hand was etched crystal.
“Yes, it is.” The man’s voice was smooth.
Ugh, he was referring to her. Dar was right; this was a bad idea — a very bad idea.
“I’m starving. Shall we eat?” Asta spun around, pinning a smile on her face. By all that was holy, he looked like a
worshipful puppy. How the heck was she supposed to ask him to show him the bottle in his bedroom? She should have just let Dar steal the darned thing.
Cut to the chase and tell him why she was there, and he’d be liable to throw her out. She’d look like she’d manipulated him into this with false interest — which she actually had. Or she could go through the whole dinner song and dance and lead him on enough to get into the bedroom, which would make her pretty close to being the prostitute Dar had accused her of. She’d gotten herself into one Hel of a corner with no good way out.
Dinner stretched on for an eternity. Asta grew increasingly tense watching the candles burn low and the plates empty as they made small talk. The only consolation was that Carter seemed just as anxious as she was.
“Please excuse me.” She rose and motioned toward the restroom.
Carter nearly knocked his chair backwards jumping to his feet. “Yes, of course. I’ll get some brandy for us.”
Asta strode down the hallway, determined to be gone before the brandy glass was empty. Bypassing the bathroom, she walked right into the bedroom. Hopefully he’d think she’d just gotten the wrong room, and not that she was trying to jump right to sexual activities. The very thought of it made her break into a cold sweat.
She felt the pulsating beacon of demon energy even before she turned the light on. Dar was right — it was a shrine. Everything on top of the dresser held precious memories; what a shame that one of those items also held death.
“Wrong room.”
Asta jumped, her heart pounding. Thankfully Carter only sounded amused as he pushed a brandy into her hand. “Look, you don’t seem like the femme fatal type, and I’m not . . . well, I’m not exactly the suave playboy. Let’s forget about the bedroom stuff, just enjoy the evening, and hopefully you’ll want to see me again before you leave. If things happen, then they happen.”
Thank the almighty Creator. Now that she didn’t have to worry about fighting off Carter’s advances, she might be able to salvage the situation. “Sounds perfect to me. Can I ask you something?”
Demons & Djinn: Nine Paranormal Romance and Urban Fantasy Novels Featuring Demons, Djinn, and other Bad Boys of the Underworld Page 40
