Devil May Care

by Patricia Eimer

  “I really don’t want to contemplate what sex with Brenda would be like, thanks.” He shuddered and then lifted me to sit on the vanity, standing between my knees. “She’s not my type. But even if she was I don’t want you to worry that something’s going on that’s not.”

  “I really doubt she’s going to make a play for you. Not to hurt your ego or anything but I think she’s got more important things than your ass on her mind.”

  “I don’t know.” Matt wrapped his arms around my waist and rested his head against mine. “She’s always been persistent. If she were a normal girl we’d call it stalking.”

  “But she’s not normal. None of us are. Besides, she smelled like she was telling the truth. I mean, it’s always hard to tell the first time you meet someone…” I waited for him to confirm that she’d smelled truthful to him as well.

  “I don’t know.” He dropped his head down to rest on my shoulder. “Nephilim don’t smell emotions like you do. If you say she smells like she’s telling the truth, I’ll trust you.”

  “So that means she didn’t come here to stalk you. She came here because she’s alone and desperate. Think about how hard it was for you the first time you set foot in the outside world—and you had been preparing to run. She did it on the spur of the moment. Cut her some slack, huh?”

  “All right.” He nuzzled his head against my neck and I combed my fingers through his hair, trying to comfort him. “But I still don’t like the idea of it just being the two of us alone in that apartment together.”

  Good point. “Fine. She can sleep at your apartment and you can stay here until we find a place for her. We can manage some kind of temporary sleepover thing for a few days.”

  “She has to be gone by your parents’ wedding this weekend. There are too many dangers related to having her here with a large group of demons. It would be too much of a temptation for my mother not to attack if she has the chance.”

  “I know another demon in Philadelphia who can put Brenda up. She works with battered and abused women for a living. If anyone can help her acclimate to life outside the compound it would be Deidre. Lisa and I can drive her there on Thursday and be back before Mom and Dad’s rehearsal. Is that soon enough?”

  “It’s going to have to be. Now let’s go tell her the news.”

  “But I don’t want to go to some other city where I don’t have anyone to take care of me,” Brenda said five minutes later, after I’d explained my plan—which I’d thought was entirely logical—to her. “I can’t live in a shelter. That’s where fallen women go. What would people say if I was in one of those places?”

  “They’d say you needed somewhere to go until you could get back on your feet and find a place of your own,” Matt argued. “But we can worry about what people will say on Thursday when you get to Philadelphia. For right now, let’s get your stuff moved into my place and try to get you settled.”

  “But if I’m staying with you why do I have to leave Thursday and go to a shelter?” Brenda persisted. “You know I can’t survive on my own.”

  “Brenda, I can’t take care of you like you want, and you’re not with me,” Matt said gently. “You’re staying in my apartment, alone, until Thursday. I’m staying with Faith. My girlfriend.”

  “Oh.” Her voice came out flat. “I see. So by staying here I’m putting you out of a bed and forcing you to live in sin with a demoness?”

  “Well if you want to get technical about—” I stopped myself. “But it’s not like we mind or anything.”

  “I mind.” Brenda gave me a tight smile. “I don’t want to inconvenience Matt any more than I already have by showing up here. So I’ll stay here with Faith and Matt can keep his apartment until we figure out exactly what I’m going to do. Alone. Unloved. Vulnerable to the evils of this world.”

  “That would be…” I swallowed and looked first at Matt and then at the tiny woman standing between us. “Great. I mean really, really swell.”

  Brenda sighed and gave me a stare that I’m sure was meant to be one of long suffering patience. “Good. So what room is mine?”

  “Well, this is it.” I opened my arms to encompass the living room. “I only have a two-bedroom apartment.”

  “So why can’t I stay in the guest room?”

  “That’s my roommate’s. She and my brother are moving into the apartment right beneath this one, but the room is still hers until she gets her stuff out.”

  “Oh.” Brenda’s eyes were questioning, and she bit her lower lip. “Where will I be sleeping, then?”

  I patted the sofa. “It folds out into a bed.”

  “Wonderful.” Her smile faltered. Obviously, whatever she’d been expecting when she showed up here today wasn’t what had happened.

  Sounded a lot like my life.

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s only for a few days. Then we’ll take you to Deidre’s and you’ll have your own room.”

  “A few days.” Her eyes welled up with tears and her shoulders trembled. Being independent in the real world was probably a lot scarier than she’d expected. Not that I blamed her. Who doesn’t deal with a little bit of shock the first time they’re completely on their own and the shit hits the fan?

  The last thing the girl needed right now, after getting metaphorically gut punched by the guy she’d been expecting to help her, was for the same guy to watch her break down. Talk about adding insult to injury. I took pity on Brenda. If she was going to break down, the least I could do was arrange for her to have some privacy to lose her shit in peace.

  “Hey, Matt,” I said. “Don’t you need to get back to work?”

  “Huh?”

  I raised my eyebrows before looking blatantly at Brenda. His eyes followed mine and he nodded, catching the hint I was lobbing at him like a bowling ball. “Oh right, work. Are you sure you can handle it here without me?”

  “No problem.” Following him to the front door, I reached down to snag his shirt and then wrapped my arms around his waist before giving Matt a quick kiss. He brushed his lips against mine and then stepped away, his hands lingering for just a second. After he left I turned to face my new guest.

  Evil save me, I wanted to hate her just because she was my boyfriend’s needy ex. But there was this stupid, little voice in the back of my head that kept telling me that I needed to be nice to someone who was definitely less fortunate than I was right now. I thought it might be my conscience, and cursed my mother for the crappy altruistic genes she’d passed onto me. Couldn’t she have come up with something more useful? Like another three inches of height or some sort of recessive superpower?

  “So I’m going to go”—I pointed at the hallway toward my bedroom—“organize my socks or something. Make yourself at home.”

  “Thank you for letting me stay here, Faith.” Brenda sat on the couch and wrapped her arms around her waist. “I know this is hard for everyone but I hope you understand that I didn’t have a choice.”

  “Yeah well, families will do that to you.” I tried to sound noncommittal.

  “I had to come for Matt’s sake,” Brenda persisted, her eyes glowing golden. “He needed me here. He’s my fiancé. He’s living in denial right now and eventually he’ll come back to me. When he does, he’ll need me to help him pick up the pieces that you’ve left his life in, and help him to find his way back to the path of the right.”

  I took a deep breath and tried not to snap at her. She was just like most of my patients in the Pediatric Intensive Care. She was hurt. She was scared. She was lashing out. I wasn’t going to let her get to me. I was going to be the bigger woman until Thursday. No matter how much it killed me.

  “Either way…” I motioned toward the couch. “Make yourself at home.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You let your boyfriend’s former girlfriend move in with you?” A few hours later Harold’s voice echoed around the staff changing rooms at the hospital while I put my purse in my work locker. I should have known he’d have an opinion on
the whole affair. I peered into the cover of the romance novel sitting at the top shelf of the locker and found that my pet ghost had superimposed himself onto the male model’s face. Even with all those muscles he still wasn’t a hunk.

  “You thought this was a good idea why?” I stared at the cover of The Virgin Pirate’s Ravisher and tried not to gag as Harold—now sporting a flowing blond mullet—somehow managed to move the book in a way that it made the cover model Harold’s pecs dance.

  “Because she needed a place to go, and I didn’t want Matt stressing out any more than he already was about the whole thing. If she’s staying with me I can keep an eye on her.”

  “It’s a bad idea. Trust me. I’ve been there, done that. No man with any brains lets two women who’ve seen him naked anywhere near each other. It’s like asking to be tasered in the testicles, only more emasculating.”

  “He didn’t ask me to let her stay and for the record I don’t think she’s ever seen him naked.” I grabbed the book and shook it before tossing it into my locker hard enough to bounce off the back, and slammed the door shut.

  “Then who did? Let her stay, I mean, not see Matt naked. I don’t want to know about anyone else getting an eyeful of naked nephilim.” Harold floated out of the metal door and stood in front of me, six inches above the ground. Now dressed in his golf clothes and a white lab coat instead of an open-to-the-navel white shirt and tight black pirate pants, he crossed his arms and pretended to tap one of his toes on the empty air beneath him.

  “I invited her to stay with me. He didn’t like the idea, but it seemed like the only way keep the peace.” I pulled my name badge out of my pocket and headed to the time clock.

  “You should have listened to Matt.”

  “That’s what I said.” Malachi, the dread demon who was supposed to be my personal bodyguard, popped out of the time clock like a demented jack-in-the-box. He was a three-foot-tall vision of the grim reaper—without the scythe—and the hood of his cowl was pushed back to show off the newest artwork tattooed on his bare skull. Personally, I’d have expected a Demon Lord to go with something a bit more dangerous looking than a group of butterflies, but what did I know? Maybe he was trying to get in touch with his softer side?

  “Demonesses never listen. Especially Faith,” Malachi continued. I quit focusing on his uber-feminine tats and instead glared at the tip of where his nose should have been. “No, they always have a better way of doing things. Then it blows up in their faces and someone has to fix it for them. This will all lead to tears and then you and I, my ghostly friend, will have to save the day.”

  “Enough, you two,” I said. “It was either let Brenda stay until we could arrange to put her in a shelter, or throw her out onto the street. Then what would she have done? You haven’t seen this girl. No survival skills. She’d have died on her own before lunch was over. So get off my back already.”

  “Sure, no problem,” a familiar voice said.

  My stomach immediately twisted into one solid lump and plummeted to my toes. Oh damn it. It couldn’t be him. Not today of all days. I spun around and my knees weakened. This was so typical. Of course Dan was here. Because I needed this one last thing to take my day to new and inspired levels of shit. And an ex-fiancé with a fragile hold on reality—thanks to a Celestial intervention to wipe out his memories of me and our life together—was exactly the level of crap I had been reduced to.

  Dan looked exactly the same as the last morning I’d seen him in Chicago. He still had the neatly trimmed blond hair, cornflower blue eyes, broad shoulders, and dimples that could cause a saint to sin. He was even wearing the same shirt he’d worn on our last day together.

  I tried not to grimace. He’d been sitting in the kitchen at our townhouse, eating Cheerios and commenting on the font I’d chosen for our wedding invitations. For a brief, spectacularly normal moment, I’d believed we could have a future. Of course the big old hand of Fate had intervened, in the form of my father, and shattered Dan’s mind into tiny fragments before we could get our happily ever after.

  Not that he’d remember any of that after the Alpha’s version of a mindwipe last month. Nope, masochist that I was I’d let the Alpha tinker with his memories while saving mine. Which put me at a bit of a disadvantage right now since I could remember what should have never been and he couldn’t.

  “I was just talking to myself.” I tried not to stare at him while I regained my composure. Like all the other mortals he couldn’t see Harold or Malachi, which was good on the Not Scaring Regular People on the Street When Creatures Out of Horror Stories Appear plan, but lousy when someone catches you having an argument with the time clock.

  He was clearly trying not to laugh. “I can see that. It seemed pretty intense. Anything I can help with? Would you like me to call some of the staff to help you out? It’s a big hospital. I’m sure patients get lost all the time. Although you do seem to be a bit old for a pediatrics patient.”

  “I work here.” What a great way to make a first impression—okay, a second first impression—on the man I’d once loved. With shaking fingers, I lifted up the pink lanyard from around my neck and flashed him my badge. “Faith Bettincourt.”

  “Dan Cheswick, software engineer for MEDTECH Technologies. I’m doing some upgrades and running the staff training for the new medical supply system.” He stepped forward, sticking his hand out for me to shake.

  “Don’t touch him!” Malachi floated between the two of us, his arms up to stop me. “Claim it’s a contamination hazard or something.”

  “What the hell is your problem?” Harold asked. “I mean sure he’s an engineer, but besides that, he doesn’t seem like too bad of a guy.”

  “This is Dan,” Malachi said. “The Dan.”

  “You mean human ex-fiancé Dan?” Harold tilted his head and scrutinized Dan. “The guy who’s complete mental break led to Faith’s dry spell and her lack of trust in Angel Boy?”

  “One and the same.” Malachi nodded grimly and pulled the cowl of his robe lower, to cover his face.

  I narrowed my eyes at him. He had been a vocal opponent of my dating Dan in the first place and his disapproval had turned into an unspoken I told you so when the relationship had so spectacularly fell apart.

  “Oh shit,” Harold said. “Mal’s right, Faith. Don’t touch him. Back away from the mortal and run for your life.”

  I sliced my hand through the middle of Mal’s liver, making him shudder at the intrusion, and shook Dan’s hand instead. The last thing I needed right now was to trigger a memory of me that might cause the Alpha’s mind wipe to fail. We couldn’t risk it. So Ghost Boy and his sidekick, the Three Foot Demon Wonder, were just going to have to deal.

  “Nice to meet you, Dan.” Smart, Faith. I dropped my hand and stuck my hands in the pockets of my scrub top. This was…surreal. And that was saying something coming from me.

  “So you said you were here to do MEDTECH software updates?” I tried to sound nonchalant and polite. It wouldn’t do for me to run away but I needed to find a way to be basically unmemorable at the same time. And asking about the updates would be boringly common. Normal curiosity. But not asking? That might send up a red flag. Especially considering how much trouble the last MEDTECH system failure had caused.

  A few months ago, we had a systems failure that lead to missing morphine in the pediatric ICU. Which led to my filing a report with Harold, who’d still been alive at that point. That report had led Lisa upstairs to Harold’s office, where she used my former boss for a quick—and very unhealthy—succubus snack. Which led to Harold dying and the whole Haunting Me at Work thing he had going on now.

  Now, it appeared that MEDTECH had sent the man I was supposed to have married to fix the problem. Great. To think, usually my Tuesday midnight shifts were slow. What could I expect when I got upstairs? A dozen patients with projectile vomiting?

  “Why are you talking to him?” Mal floated closer to him, peering into his face. “Don’t you think you might trigger a
memory? Cause another mental break?”

  “His eyes aren’t dilated,” Harold said, floating closer. “Respirations are normal. Color seems fine. I hate to burst your bubble, Mal, but he doesn’t exhibit any signs of mental distress.”

  “So,” Dan said. “I’ll just leave you and the time clock to your argument and get going.”

  “Right.” I nodded and quickly swiped my badge at the time clock, trying to keep my hands from shaking. I started out of the otherwise empty locker room and into the hall. “I have to go on shift. But I’m sure I’ll see you around at some point. Or one of your assistants. Whichever.”

  “What floor are you on?” Dan asked. Damn it. Normally the locker room was packed before shift and I could have fobbed him off on someone else. But I’d come in twenty minutes earlier than usual today and the normal change of shift crowd wasn’t here yet. Which meant I was now stuck talking to my Chatty Cathy ex-fiancée who couldn’t remember having ever met me in the first place.

  “Fifth.” I opened the door to the locker room and then looked back at him. “Pediatric ICU. Why?”

  “Really?” He gave me a bright smile.

  “Yeah. Why?” I tried to keep my voice from sounding too wary. It wouldn’t be good for Dan to think I specifically didn’t want to talk to him. That would make me stick out. Instead I needed to persuade him that I was a total bore. An absolute nonentity on the personality scale so that he forgot I existed.

  “That’s the very first group I want to scan. That’s where the MEDTECH problem started so that’s where I’m going to open up shop. Trace the problem from the source if I can.”

  “Great.” My voice wavered. “Come on. Let me show you upstairs so you can get started.”