Grabbing onto the door frame, I leaned as far as I could into Doris’s living room. Immediately, the crosscurrents between Heaven and Hell buffeted me. Magazines flapped their pages, and cobwebs trembled. The whirlwind flung bits of tissue and candy wrappers at Doris who shrieked and clutched her mattress.
“Doris! This way!” I shouted above the wind. “Over here!”
Doris squeezed her eyes shut and hung on. The stacks of garbage surrounding her trembled ominously in the increasing wind.
I stretched further into the room, but still couldn’t reach her. My fingers clinging to the doorframe cramped, and my shoulder felt like it would pop from its socket. “Doris!” I frantically waved my hand at her, but she continued to ignore me.
My demon, horrified by the ruckus, dug her claws into my brain. The pain blinded me. Let go! I demanded. But as the suction from Heaven continued to yank us forward, she hung on even tighter. If I didn’t reach Tommy’s mother soon, my succubus would shred my brain.
“Doris!” I screamed at the top of my lungs.
Doris clamped her hands over her ears. “Go away! Leave me alone!”
The storm intensified. A paperback bounced from a pile and ricocheted off her head. A lid from a plastic bowl whirled like a Frisbee. The gale drove a steak knife into the drywall.
My demon redoubled her effort to hang onto me, and I grit my teeth against the pain. I stretched even farther, my wrist and shoulder screaming in protest. When my fingertips finally touched Doris’s hand, she howled and scrambled, crab like, out of the living room.
Something small and sharp hit me in the forehead. My hand slipped from the doorway, and I tumbled headlong into the maelstrom. The rushing air was a solid wall crushing my ribs and driving the breath from my body. I was drowning in air. My eyes bulging, I struggled to inhale.
As I tried to crawl back into Hell, an immense gust of wind blew through the house with a sound like a rushing locomotive. It pinned me flat against the filthy mattress. A shower of paperbacks thumped against my neck and shoulders. An immense, wooden bookcase teetered ominously. I closed my eyes and braced myself for its fall, hoping I wouldn’t end up in the casket wearing my string of akoya pearls after all.
A moment before the bookcase toppled, I was yanked backwards into the quiet safety of Hell where I landed with a grunt.
“Didn’t I tell you to stay away from there?” William demanded. “What the hell were you doing?”
I gently touched my forehead. My fingers came away bloody. “I’m trying to rescue Doris. What are you doing here?”
He crouched next to me and dabbed at the cut above my eye with his handkerchief. “I sensed that you were in danger.”
Annoyed, I pushed his hand away and got to my feet. I had thought those intuitions only came when a loved one was in trouble, not a she-demon coworker. “What do you mean you sensed that I was in danger?”
“My incubus told me that you were in trouble.” Then he glared at me. “And it’s a good thing he did! I thought I told you to stay away from the nexus!”
“I had to rescue Tommy’s mother,” I said, “and if I’d been a few inches taller, I could have done it.” I rubbed my shoulder. “The next time I try this…”
William’s jaw muscles bulged. “Get this through your head, Lil. There won’t be any next time!”
I put my hands on my hips. “Oh, really?”
“Really! I never thought I’d say this, but let the human authorities deal with it. Call the police or whomever you need to and let them tackle the situation. Face it. You’ve done everything you could.”
I touched the cut on my forehead again, wincing at the pain, and glanced into the junk heap that was Doris’s living room. William was right. As much as I wanted to, I couldn’t help Tommy’s mother. I sagged against the wall. Once again, I’d failed.
William’s voice softened. “Don’t feel too badly,” he said. “You tried your best.”
My face tightened as I struggled not to cry. For once, I wanted ‘trying my best’ not to feel so much like failure. “But what good has trying done? Doris is still in her rat hole, and I’m still bound to my damned contract! I thought for sure that, this time, I had found a way out of it.” I put my hands to my face to cover my tears.
William pulled me into his arms. I resisted for a moment before laying my head on his chest. I cried until his shirt was damp, and my face was hot. He rested his cheek against my head and rubbed my back.
When I finally quieted, he asked, “Do you feel better?”
I pulled away and wiped my face on my sleeve. “I won’t feel better until I’m free of Helen.” Especially now that she was demanding that I get pregnant.
“How long do you think I have?” I asked. “Before Helen comes after me, that is?”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean how much time do I have to get pregnant before Helen orders someone to do the job?” The worry had been lying heavily on my mind for days. “How long did she give Carrie?”
William frowned. “Wait. Helen told you to have a child or…” His eyes widened in horror.
“Or, yes, she’ll find a way to get the job done. With or without my consent.” I glared at him. “Why did you think my mother was so focused on finding a sperm donor?”
His face paled, and he stared at me in stunned disbelief. “I’ve been in Hell so long that I sometimes forget how depraved it is. I’ve actually grown accustomed to its horror.” He had the look of a man who’s discovered the lump on his neck was really end-stage cancer. “I should have realized Helen would be that monstrous.”
“Yes, you should have,” I said.
I started back towards home, and he hurried after me. “Lil, wait.”
I kept walking.
“Lilith! I’m sorry. I had it all wrong.”
“I’ll say you did.” I turned and glared at him. “But you know what really hurts? The fact that you didn’t trust me.”
His eyes were full of pain. “You’re right. I should have trusted you.” He reached out as if to touch my cheek, but then thought better of it. “You have so much courage,” he said. “Not once in over a hundred years have I had the strength to stand up to Helen.”
“Not that it matters, of course. She still won.” I looked away. “Just like she always will.”
“Come with me,” William said. “I want to show you something.”
“Not now.”
“Please? It will only take a minute, and I think it will do you some good.”
With a sigh, I followed him down the hallway and around a few corners.
“It’s been my plan to show you all my favorite places in the world. That mountaintop we visited together was one of them, but this place is even more special. I was saving it for last, but I believe you could use it right now.”
He stopped in front of a door with an Employees Only sign mounted on it. Above it was a red light bulb in a cage. Although my succubus told me this wasn’t the same door that I’d tried to enter when I was looking for Patrick, she began to fret and warned me that we were not to enter it. I hung back, afraid to go closer. “What’s in there?”
He winked. “Come see for yourself.”
When he put his hand on the knob, my heart skipped a beat. Even with William leading the way, I didn’t want to face what lay on the other side. “I don’t think so.”
He let go of the doorknob. “You want to know what I really do in my spare time, Lil?”
“You mean besides tying fishing flies and learning how to brew beer?”
His eyes twinkled. “I investigate these forbidden doorways. And what I’ve discovered is that Helen puts up these signs to keep us away from the dangerous parts of Hell.”
I laughed shrilly. “Are there any un-dangerous parts of Hell?”
He smiled. “These doorways are dangerous to her. Not to us.” He held out his hand. “Do you trust me?”
I swallowed, took his hand, and followed him across the threshold.
T
o my relief, there were no steps leading into the bowels of Hell. Instead, we stepped out onto a small hill overlooking a junk-strewn backyard. Scraggly bushes that hadn’t been trimmed in years surrounded a field filled with trash that had been baking all day in the summertime sun. A stagnant pool of water too big to be a puddle, but too small to be a pond, squatted in one corner. The gassy smell rising from it made my stomach lurch. When I saw a tumbledown house beyond the water, I knew exactly where we were.
“This is what Helen is afraid of? A hill behind Doris’s house?”
“Yes.”
“And this is your favorite place in all the world?”
His smiled widened. “That’s right.”
It was disappointing to say the least. I surveyed the area, mystified. “I don’t get it.”
“Forget about the house and the trash for a moment. What else do you notice?”
“Otherworld doorways.”
“Okay. What else?”
I strained my senses, trying to pick up anything beyond the garbage and the supernatural shine, but it was hopeless. “Nothing.”
“You’re trying too hard. Relax.”
I looked again, but still nothing happened. “William, I don’t have time for games. I want to go home.”
“Relax,” he repeated softly. “Don’t force your vision. Let it come slowly.”
I did as he suggested, and finally caught a glimmer in the corner of my eye. Once I’d seen it, I started to notice other flickers and shifting images. They blinked on and off, floating around the property like lightening bugs. I gasped. “What are they?”
“Here’s a hint.” Putting his hands on my shoulders, William turned me around. We were standing in the middle of a cemetery.
“I believe those wisps are souls,” William said. “Lost souls caught between the great divide. They either don’t want to leave the human realm, or they aren’t sure where to go.”
Not only did I see the flickering dots, I heard them as well. They played a beautiful, eerie music, like whale songs. “They’re trapped?”
“Exactly.” William let go of my shoulders. “Ordinarily, when a human dies, the soul is up for grabs. He,” William raised his eyes skyward, “gets first pick, and He gathers every soul willing to come into Heaven. Helen gets the leftovers. A lot of times, it’s people like Delilah who end up in Hell because they don’t feel deserving of Heaven. But sometimes, the souls get lost or are simply afraid to move on. They remain trapped.”
“There’s so many!” Now that I’d started seeing them, I couldn’t stop. They were everywhere, drifting through the air like the white bits of fluff the cottonwood trees shed every year. The miraculous, little lights danced and pirouetted above the ground. I wanted to walk among them, but worried if I got too close to the nexus, the strong wind would destroy them. “They’re beautiful!”
“I believe the dead have their own passages, like we have ours,” William said. “The cemetery probably connects to others all over the world, allowing the souls to travel from place to place.” His enthusiasm made him appear far younger and more innocent, like a little boy fascinated by a spider spinning a web.
“This really is your favorite place in the world, isn’t it?” I asked.
He shrugged, embarrassed. “Hell can be boring, remember? It’s nice to have something unusual to study.”
For a long time, William and I watched the drifting souls. Finally, he said, “I’m sorry, Lil. You have no idea how much I regret those things I said to you.”
I glanced at him from the corner of my eye. “You were a beast.”
He lowered his head. “You’ve gotten into my head, and you’ve tied all my thoughts into knots. When I imagined you being with other men, I went crazy.” His eyes pleaded with me. “Can you forgive me?”
I watched the little lights hover above the ground. By telling me about his obsession with the forbidden doorways and bringing me to his favorite spot, William had admitted me into the secret places of his heart. I was pretty sure I was the first woman in over a hundred years who had gotten this close to him which is why he’d been so jealous. “Yes,” I said finally. “I forgive you.”
He closed his eyes and sighed. If I hadn’t known him better, I might have thought he was saying a prayer of thanks.
He slipped his arm around my waist, and I leaned my head on his shoulder. Some lights floated skyward, but just when I hoped they’d continue on, they drifted back down as if defeated. Others hovered near the ground without ever sinking completely.
“Why does Helen find this place so dangerous?” I asked.
Instead of answering, William nudged me, and I saw one particularly bright soul glowing like a spark from a campfire. As it soared higher and higher, William’s arm tightened around my waist. Neither of us spoke. When the bright speck climbed further, I held my breath, inwardly cheering it on. Keep going, I told it. C’mon, you’re almost there!
It suddenly dove, its light streaking straight behind like the tail of a comet. It picked up speed, and a moment later, slammed through a heavenly doorway.
“What happened to it?” I asked.
“It went into Heaven,” he said quietly. “It’s safe from Helen now.”
I relaxed. Safe from Helen. What a beautiful thought.
“Helen is terrified of this place because it represents hope.” William laid his cheek against my head. “She may crush your spirit a thousand times, Lilith, but unless you give up completely, she hasn’t won.”
Maybe there were some things Helen couldn’t ruin after all.
Chapter Eighteen
When I returned home, I read the next name on my list. Andrea. She had been one of the waitresses. I groaned. Of all the people at the party, the waitresses were the ones who least deserved to be tempted. After all, the women hadn’t made rude comments at me while I lay covered in sushi. I promised myself that Andrea’s temptation would be very mild.
My demon, of course, had other ideas.
We caught up with our target at the mall. She was a large young woman whose baggy t-shirt and stretchy shorts might have come from her mother’s closet. She held half a sticky, cinnamon bun in one hand, and a large cup of Coke in the other. As she wandered dispiritedly from store to store, she gazed sadly at the size four clothing displayed in the windows. My succubus doesn’t read minds, but she sensed Andrea’s self loathing.
When my client reached Macy’s, she headed for the juniors’ department and quickly picked out several items of clothing in sizes far too small for her. She disappeared into the dressing room and emerged a few minutes later to check her reflection in the three-way mirrors. I grimaced. The poor girl had shoved her upper body into a skimpy top that made her breasts look like torpedoes and showed every bulge in her midsection. Her lower body was encased in a pair of skinny jeans that turned her butt into a blimp. Patrick Clerk would have been horrified.
My succubus gleefully rubbed her hands. She wanted me to convince Andrea to buy the dreadful outfit. As temptations went, this was fairly low-key, but still, it was cruel, and I balked.
I reviewed Delilah’s instructions in my head. Helen wanted me to tempt people into doing something they didn’t want to. So why not tempt Andrea into doing something she really didn’t want to do. Like diet, for example?
My succubus agreed. A starvation diet, she told me. No, better yet, an eating disorder!
I immediately put the brakes on that. Okay, forget dieting. Andrea continued to study herself in the mirror. Her eyes were sad; her mouth turned down. She realized how awful she looked.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
I bustled up to her, pretending to be a sales clerk. “Here, dear. Let me help you pick out some more flattering clothing.”
She glanced at her reflection. “No thank you. I think my style is okay the way it is.”
Something was making her resist my offer. Pride, my succubus reported. “No, it’s not,” I insisted. “You need help.”
Andrea ignored me, displ
aying not only pride but stubbornness, too. Why is it that the people with the worst fashion sense always defend their choices so persistently?
Although I didn’t want to, I cranked up my succubus’s charm. “Really, my dear, you can do better.”
Finally, my otherworldly glamour softened her. She tilted her head as she considered my offer. “Are you sure?”
“Absolutely. But you have to promise to follow my instructions to the letter.”
Hope kindled in her eyes. “Okay.”
I’d never had so much fun being a succubus. Andrea and I went through the store, and I picked out clothing for her. I chose a short-sleeved blazer that tucked in at the waist, and some terrific jeans that made her booty appear luscious not bloated. She surprised me by finding a pair of fabulous heels in the shoe department.
“I’ve never had a store clerk be so helpful,” Andrea said.
“It’s our new personal shopper program,” I said.
“Well, I like it!”
When we passed the store’s salon, I dragged her inside. “You won a free haircut!” I told her, figuring that I could cover the cost of a new do. When the stylist finished and turned Andrea around to see her reflection, my client glowed.
I hugged her when she stood up. “You look amazing!”
She grinned. “I feel amazing! Really, I can’t thank you enough.”
When I spotted an otherworld doorway behind a display of winter coats, I passed the shopping bags off to her. “I’ve got to go help someone else. But remember – you’re fabulous, so act like it.”
She grinned and walked away with her head held high.
The moment I returned home, someone knocked at the front door. The shimmer of otherworldly allure told me who it was. Before I answered, I fetched the grail since hiding it was pointless.
Harmony stood in the doorway, her arms crossed over her chest. “You stole from Heaven?” Fuming, she followed me into the living room. “Jed was furious! He made that lamp himself.” Jed was a guardian angel who had once been assigned to protect Ariel. He and I didn’t get along very well. “And you set a fire and broke the angels’ ping pong ball? That was just mean.”
3 Straight by the Rules Page 17
