“Fine, you don’t want to be watched over like a horny pair of teenagers? Then prove to me that you aren’t in danger if left alone together. Look each other in the eyes and say honestly that you don’t care for each other.”
Marc nodded and gave a conciliatory wave of his hand. “Go ahead, my child,” he invited, pivoting in his chair and staring the witch head on.
The comment was the last spark she needed. Her cheeks flared. “I don’t care AT ALL for you.”
“Good, I believe that. Now, Marc?”
The priest stood, folding his hands in front of him, and spoke in the softest mumble. “I pray for your soul, my child.”
Dee reached across the table and slapped the priest in the arm, making the latter flinch. “That’s not what I said, ass.”
Wiping away the sting in his bicep, Marc refocused, and let out in a deflated huff, “Idon’tlove… Aw, fuck it.”
And with that, he was out the door before his words hit.
Riona watched the door close with amazement. Dee grimaced with frustration.
The priest couldn’t do it. It would have been a lie. And while Dee was certain that lying, while frowned upon by the church, was not a cardinal sin that would forsake his moral code, both Riona and he understood despite all that, Marc was unable to forsake his own heart.
“You win, Dee,” Riona conceded. “I won’t be alone with Marc again.”
Chapter 19
It wasn’t as though Jerry expected a suite at the Ritz-Carlton, but a place to sit down for a few weary moments would have been nice.
Too bad Hell hadn’t signed on to the Geneva Convention. Unless you were a really high-level bigwig — a fallen angel or former Enron executive, for example — all you could hope for was a spare piece of brimstone to sleep on once in a while. Except if you somehow found yourself in the underworld’s penal system. Then you were put in a cell where your feet were magically cemented into the floor, causing your tortured muscles to stiffen painfully, before they began to atrophy. That is, until a guard demon passes by with a charm every few days to magically heal them, thereby resetting the cycle of anguish. Leaning against the bars, which were about six inches in front of him, was really the only relief Jerry’s spine ever got, so he did it whenever there was no overseer in view. (The guards got off by gnawing any appendages that poked through the cell bars.)
And the depravation didn’t stop at muscular mayhem. While down under, demons didn’t have a need for regular bodily functions like humans, so there were no shitty jail cell meals to tolerate. Eating was a regulated form of pleasure, one of the few afforded. And damn, what Jerry wouldn’t give for a Zima and a bag of Funyuns.
Oh, and just a few more minutes with Riona soil-side-up wouldn’t suck either.
It had been no small feat to secure a passport out of damnation on such short notice, and without any corporeal shell of his own anymore to materialize in the human realm, at that. But Jerry was a player, a swinger and a shaker. As a gnosis demon, it was his job to know stuff. Stuff that certain other demons and more useful to his situation, lesser fallen angels, didn’t want anyone to know. So what if Lucifer, upon learning of his transgression, had given him a permanent address on Hell Block C? To taste her lips again, to have gotten a chance for just a moment to hold her… Even as unsuccessful as he was at warning the witch that she was Satan’s latest pet project, the trip had so been worth the hell he was paying now.
He’d been told early on in his damnation that a demon was unable to love. Evil wiped away tenderness, they said, and Satan’s kitchens made sure to roast all the compassion from a soul when it arrived in the underworld. For centuries, he had believed it. Humans became silly creatures for him to work through a process, hardly anything more than cattle. When he set about his assignment to seduce Riona, first in body, then in the spirit, he knew he’d been given a golden ticket to becoming demon legend. Sure, he’d been a pretty high card in the devil’s deck for a long time, but it was the first time he’d been sent after a Pure Soul. Which, frankly, was a little surprising, given his unique qualifications.
But Riona’s compassion, Riona’s spirit… It was the first time in centuries that Jerry felt like he might still have hope to believe that he hadn’t lost all of his humanity in his fall. His fits of rebellion through the centuries framed themselves in a larger context.
He straightened himself in a split second, listening to footfalls making their way up his desolate corridor with growing curiosity. When he made out the visage of the woman, her profile holding more curves than a one-lane road through the Alps, he didn’t believe it was possible, couldn’t believe it was true.
“Riona?”
The witch, wild-haired, weary-eyed, and breathless, managed a nod. With an utterance of something in Akkadian, she focused her magic on the gate of his cell. The iron-barred lattice groaned like an octogenarian at a Katy Perry concert as it swung open, leaving Jerry both confused, delighted, but more importantly, almost free.
If not for his feet.
“How did you… How did you get here?” Jerry gasped as Riona, without pause, went to work on liquefying the lava rocks surrounding his ankles. “Humans can’t descend into Hell while they’re alive. Unless you’re… Oh, no, Riona! You’re dead?”
“No, still alive.” Her dark eyes flashed up from the floor, brimming with tears. “I figured it out. You came to warn me. Thank God, too. I knew he wouldn’t let what you did go unpunished. I knew I had to free you.” She blushed fervently. “I think… I think I love you.”
Not in his craziest, most deviant nightmares had he thought that someone like Riona Dade would actually think a low-life, humanity-betraying piece of scum like him would be worthy. Holy hell, she loved him. And, God, in his forbidden heaven, he loved her too. More than just telling her, he wanted to show her the moment he was liberated from his rocky podiatric prison.
No sooner did his feet slip free than he took the witch in his arms, crushing her to him with all the joy and anguish his demon heart could muster in the divine damnation that was being in love. Her lips… Nothing in Hell could ever hope to be so heavenly as the feel of Riona’s lips on his. Her hands ran over the bumps that aspired to be horns, where hair would have grown if he’d still been human. He wanted this to be perfect, and didn’t want the ugliness of his cursed, Lucifer-fashioned, hell-bound corpus to disturb her. With an exhale, he reached for his magic, hoping it too was unbarred with his release from the cell, and willed his devilishly handsome glamour to come over him.
It, however, was unwilling.
Without letting her go, his eyes winced. Calling deeper into his being, he again willed the power forth. Again, nothing. A third attempt actually sent a magical migraine piercing a path straight through his brain and down his neck. He pulled his lips back from Riona and hissed.
“Jerry? Jerry, what’s the matter?”
The pain centered right between his eyes. “Can’t pull on a glamour. I don’t get it. You…” Another gasp of air. “The bars block the magic. I’m out. You got me out. I should be able to… Unless…”
The witch’s lips turned up in a devious smile as she backed away from his embrace, leaving him leaning against the bars of his open cage for support. “Unless what, Jerry dear?”
She never did answer the most important question, did she? Human tissue rotted in this place. The flesh boiled. Eyes turned to stone. Riona’s bitchin’ bod was still as bodacious as ever. Meaning, either she was the first human ever to find a path around a perfectly-crafted zombification charm, or…
“You’re not Riona, are you?”
The imposter held up the ruffled edges of a playful miniskirt-tutu and bowed. “No.”
There was only one being who would have the gumption to use him as a ghoulish guinea pig for such a well-constructed and convincing glamour.
“Lucifer.”
This time, she winked. “Yup.” She ran her hands over the delectable hip bone her inspirational model possessed. “Pretty canny knockoff, wouldn’t you say? Can’t blame you for being so attached, Jerry. Riona’s fucking hot, isn’t she? Almost can’t keep my hands off myself, looking like her.”
He felt his lip curl, the fangs of his demon dentures bearing ominously. “Don’t you dare.”
“Dare what?” She feigned innocence. “You mean, dare touch myself and see what it’s like to delight this body? Well, I admit, it’s not as good as doing it to the actual witch myself, but...” She huffed, sending her imposter red bangs flying. “You know, you only have yourself to blame for this. I hoped I was going to snag that bitch when you got her into bed. I didn’t count on you actually falling for her. But then, when you failed at getting her to murder an innocent, I saw I had to take matters into my own hands.”
Like he’d been punched in the stomach, Jerry doubled over, feeling himself dragging backward. Back, back into the prison cell, as his feet squished down into a molten floor before it hardened over, trapping him once more.
“You keep your fucking hooves off her!” he found himself bellowing. The rusty bars in his hand echoed with his shaking rattle that he forced unto them. “She’s never going to fall for whatever you’re planning. She’ll see it coming.”
The fake Riona’s finger reached through the bars and trailed a soft finger down Jerry’s nose and over his lips. “I don’t have to trick her at all, Jerry. Turns out, your precious, little Pure Soul has fallen for someone whose sins are much more easily coaxed. A man is born inches from sin. I’m pretty sure, if Riona’s given the choice between going with me of her own accord or taking his place in Hell, I’ll have a new prize on my mantel by tonight. And given that you suffer from that same lover’s delusion that he does, I’m sure my little disguise here will be just the recipe for getting the good father to give ‘Riona’ a good shag. Oh, they’ve made it too easy. If I had known they’d fall for each other, I wouldn’t have had to waste so much time topside with my little ploys.”
With a lunge forward, the imposter pulled Jerry hard against the bars and brought her lips down over his. Jerry struggled to keep his mouth closed, not to participate, but the devil’s forked tongue proved too strong. With a wave of nausea, he felt it force itself past his lips, into his mouth, and down into his throat, leaving a burning trail of acid. Jerry’s eyes sewed shut in disgust, until a few moments later her scent, a mixture of sulfur and jasmine, grew distant.
The imposter’s attention was turned back to a little, black box in her hand, and he heard her perfectly mimicked voice read out a text she was typing into the phone. Damn the devil for his heavy stock holdings in AT&T, and providing full bars in the farthest reaches of the underworld!
“MARC: MUST SPEAK TO YOU IN PRIVATE. PLEASE STOP BY MY PLACE AROUND 9-R,” she said in time and measure with her squirreling.
Suddenly, the whole devious plan played out in Jerry’s mind like it was something he came up with himself. If that priest felt for Riona one-fifth what he did, and unless Riona had managed to lose her alluring figure in the space of the last several days… “Fuck.”
The imposter’s eyes looked up at him teasingly. “And… SEND. Well, Jer-Bear, time for Daddy to go to work. You take care of yourself, ‘kay?”
With a flash of red light, Lucifer was gone.
Jerry’s hands wrapped around the iron bars and shook them like an enraged circus chimp. He had to find a way to get the heck out of Hell and to Riona in time. If he didn’t, she’d soon become the newest black diamond in Lucifer’s crown.
Fuck.
This whole thing was his fault. If only he’d refused to go along with Satan’s plan to do in the new Pure Soul before she was even aware of her powers. If only he’d warned Riona back during the time when they were a couple and he had his first pangs of doubt about contributing to her corruption. If only he’d gotten more to the point when he borrowed that guy’s body a few days ago and done something to communicate the eminent danger that was closing in on her. Instead, he let himself get carried away with the way her long, red hair swirled in the breeze and the way her bottom lip quivered when she was nervous…
Or, damn it, if he just had embraced his inner demon and not fucking cared for her at all. What was the point? Jerry had his shot at humanity. He messed it up in grand style. A soul invites its own damnation by the deeds that it works. He lost his chance to be good. He lost his purity. What the hell should he care if Riona Dade was damned to Hell and given a penthouse suite on the highest level? A real demon would revel in the excitement of bringing down another one of the Big Boss’s top human agents. A real demon would be eating this shit up like it was an ice cream sundae with rainbow sprinkles.
But Jerry? Jerry hated it, which meant that he even fell short when it came to being damned.
Which… must mean, in his soul, he actually wasn’t entirely demon…
The magic that came with being a hell-beast was awesome, if dark in nature. Problem was, it all flowed from the bad graces of Old Nick. If you were on his shit list, like Jerry was now, he’d cut you off like a whiny trust fund baby being relegated by tough love. It had been eons since Jerry dared to recollect that once, he was capable of another sort of magic, blessed with power that flowed, not from the fires of the underworld, but from the light of creation. If that little corner of his soul could bubble its way to the surface and let him fall in love after centuries of cruelty, could a mooring to ambient magic still be harbored in his soul?
Uttering in his native tongue, a human language, which long ago fell out of fashion, Jerry turned his eyes towards Heaven, and prayed that those who soared above would still heed his call.
“Angelus Bellator, videte vocatus!”
Hell’s prison stood silent. Following a sigh complete with a tearful chaser, Jerry’s forehead fell against the bars of the cage. It was hopeless. Lucifer rarely failed. If he were determined to get Riona Dade down below, he would find a way.
“Oh, fuck me! Seriously?”
The otherworldly voice shocked Jerry. His eyes shot open as he took in the sight of the white-winged, broad-shouldered, blonde-haired Adonis in front of him.
“You never used to curse.”
Ramiel scowled. “Different times, different measures. Seriously, fucking you called me here? What the hell? What the fuck do you think you’re doing, using a trick like that to get me to descend into Hell? Do you know how much Gabriel’s going to chap my ass when he finds out this happened?”
Panicked, Jerry’s hand lashed out between the bars and pulled the angel by the collar of his button-down, meeting him eyeball-to-eyeball. “You got to get me topside. I don’t need much time, twenty minutes should do it.”
“I have no authority here; letting you out would be illegal. Not to mention I still fucking hate your guts. Besides, you know I can’t arrange for a human host for someone like you. That would be aiding and abetting the enemy.”
“Come on, Ramiel.” Jerry put on the best impression of puppy dog eyes a demon could muster. “Surely, someone owes you a favor. And you don’t have to find me the body. Just ground my soul to Earth long enough and I’ll find someone myself.”
Ramiel cocked a suspicious eyebrow. “Even with my help, you’re not of the earth any more. You might get five, ten minutes at best, but your soul won’t stick to a host body for too long, so what’s the freaking point?”
“A human body, no, but I know a loophole. Please,” Jerry begged, “just get me out of here and past the gates, and I’ll handle the rest. She’s going to need my help. They all will.”
The angel, arms-crossed, leaning to the side, proved incredulous. “Who the hell would need you?”
“Riona, the other Pure Souls. He’s… She’s coming for them. Help me, Ramiel. I kn
ow his weaknesses, I know his methods. I can help them. You know Riona’s not ready to take on the big guy yet. Either we work together on this, or start picturing what she’s going to look like as a demon. I promise, afterwards I’ll return to Hell and never help Lucifer again.”
Studying Jerry’s features, Ramiel looked behind the demon, as though any plot he was conceiving lurked in the shadows. Finally, with a deep sigh, he pulled from his pocket the hilt of a sword, which materialized inch-by-inch as it was unsheathed. With a horrendous cry, the angel lashed, making the iron bars crash into pieces on the ground. “Okay, but I warn you, step one hangnail out of line, or hurt one innocent, and all you’ve endured in Hell will be the most pleasant memories of your life. I’m trusting you just this once, for old time’s sake. Don’t fuck it up.”
Chapter 20
Evening mass at St. John the Redeemer’s drew to a close as Marc felt his phone buzz in his pocket, nearly sending him to the rafters like a cartoon cat. The timing was just too creepy for his paranormally-sensitive understanding. Marc hadn’t had enough advance notice of his subbing for the ailing Father Brown to prepare a sermon from scratch, forcing him to grab his notes from a random file he kept in an old steamer trunk.
He didn’t even notice until he stood at the pulpit that its subject was avoiding the temptations of the flesh. Given what almost happened between Riona and him the night before, Marc was certain God was going to send a custom-made lightning bolt before he concluded. Big Boss hated hypocrites like the plague. The ping made him wonder if Heaven had somehow found a way to text message retribution.
You’ve been damned. Thank you, bah-bye.
His cell only weighed four ounces, but felt heavier by the minute. As did the stares of the few dozen attendees, mostly old ladies of the blue-haired variety who peppered the church pews. Finally, about seven-thirty, as he shook the frigid fingers of the slowest, but sweetest of his audience, he was free. He didn’t know how, or why he was so excited, or how any good would come of the anticipation he was feeling, but somehow, instinctively, he knew it was her.
Pure & Sinful (Pure Souls) Page 16
