Luck of the Devil (4 page)

“Who knows? Maybe you’ll get lucky and a class-action discrimination suit will uncover major political scandal resulting from sexual harassment? Stranger things have happened.”

“I think I’d rather go without an assistant and avoid the cameras. Besides, I don’t believe in luck. Especially when it comes at the expense of others.”

“You don’t believe in luck?”

“Nope, luck is nothing more than someone being modest about how much work they put into something and how prepared they were for the right moment to strike.”

“So you’re saying luck favors the prepared?”

“No, I’m saying luck is made by being prepared. There’s a difference. You can’t just be prepared for something to happen. You’ve got to go out and make things happen for yourself. No one is going to hand you the things you want in life just because you asked. You’ve got to go out and get them for yourself.”

“Nothing beats ambition is what you’re saying?” We turned onto our street and I finished my coffee.

“No, I’m saying it’s important to go after what you want. No matter how unreachable it might seem. And you have to make sure it’s important enough to give up everything you’ve known to get it.” He let his finger trail down the length of my arm. “You know what I mean?”

“Yeah.” I licked my lips and slowed down slightly. At least I thought I knew what he was talking about. Because it seemed to me, he might be suggesting I stop fantasizing and start sampling. Which would be a horrible idea in the long term, but it definitely had its merits in the here and now.

“So,” he said when we reached the building’s front steps.

“So?”

“So, I was wondering if you’d like to maybe go—”

“Faith!” Tolliver stepped out of a black Lexus SUV that had driven up beside us. He left the door open and I watched an impossibly long leg descend.

“Surprise!” My impeccably dressed older sister threw her arms wide and beamed at me like she was my own specially ordered ray of demonic sunshine. Well, now I knew why Tolliver had set my alarm.

“Hope, what are you doing here?” I asked.

“She decided to surprise you with a visit. Isn’t that wonderful?” Tolliver stepped to the back of the SUV and popped the hatch.

She was decked out in a black, minimalist Stella McCartney dress, with a quilted red Chanel bag clutched over her arm and her sleek blonde hair pulled into a sophisticated twist.

I instantly felt dowdy.

Her husband, Boris, stepped out from the driver’s side and adjusted the jacket of his black Ermengeldo Zegna suit before absentmindedly nodding at me and walking inside.

“You.” Tolliver snapped his fingers, using his dark powers to compel Matt into blind obedience. It wouldn’t hurt him. Hell, he wouldn’t even remember it. But it was still a degrading thing to do to someone. Especially when Tolliver did it. Just ask the parking authority officer he once made cluck like a chicken as she did a striptease in Times Square. “Get these bags and take them inside.”

“Tolliver!” I snapped.

All three of them turned to look at me, surprised.

“What?” he said.

“Matt is our neighbor, not the doorman.”

“I can’t haul this luggage myself,” Hope said. “What do you take me for? A mortal?”

“Get Boris back down here to haul his own bags,” I said. “You know at least six of those suitcases are filled with his identical black suits and those silk shirts he’s so fond of.”

If I had to put up with my sister and her idiot husband for even a day—and I was in for a lot longer than a day by the size of her luggage pile—rules had to be in place. And the first rule was going to be No Enslaving the Neighbors. It was always a bitch to deal with later.

“Boris is simply well dressed. And you can’t expect an incubus of his stature to do something as menial as handling his own bags,” Hope said, turning her gaze on Matt.

“He looks like he escaped from a disco lost in the Seventies,” I said.

“Shut up.” Her blue eyes flashed bright red before she returned her full attention to Matt. She slunk toward him, emitting a sound like a low purr, and ran her manicured red fingernail up his bicep. “Who are you?”

“I’m Matt.”

“And what do you do?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“And how are you going to be useful to me?”

His gaze fixed on hers. She was enchanting him. His mouth fell open as he hung on her every word. If he was far enough under her spell, she’d be able to get him to do anything she asked without a second thought. He would kill his own mother without flinching if she told him to. “I have no idea. Is there someone you want me to sue?”

Hope twined herself around his chest and blew in his ear. “No, I don’t need the courts to handle the people who don’t treat me with the respect I deserve. Go get my bags. You used to be a lawyer, but now you’re my servant. You live to serve at my beck and call.”

“I live to serve,” Matt said, and took a step toward the back of the SUV.

I grabbed his arm. No way would I allow her to enslave the cute guy next door. I’d already put dibs on him if it came to that.

I snapped my fingers in front of his eyes, breaking her spell, and stepped between them so she couldn’t try to exert dominance over him again. “Nope.”

“But it would be so convenient.”

“Shut it, Psycho Barbie, before I call Dad.”

“Is someone going to help me with these bags?” Tolliver asked.

I wanted to hit him with a bolt of hellfire. He wouldn’t feel it, but it would make me feel better.

“Yes, the pet will be there momentarily,” Hope said.

“No, he won’t. Haul them yourself,” I said.

Tolliver glared. “Well, how am I supposed to get them upstairs? I can barely pick up the small bag on my own. I mean really, Hope, how many pairs of shoes did you bring with you?”

“Don’t.” I faced off with Tolliver. “Throw them back in the car and take her to your place.”

“But—” Hope eyed me warily. She and I both knew Tolliver still lived with Dad, and the idea of another family reunion in Hell was more than either of us wanted to contemplate. It was the perfect go-to threat. “But I came to visit you!”

I raised my eyebrows in challenge, letting my usually moss-green eyes flare red like hers. “So, haul your own bags.”

Her eyes flashed again before she scowled and stomped to the SUV to retrieve her first Louis Vuitton suitcase, dragging the heavy leather bag onto the sidewalk.

“And no enchanting my neighbors. Or I’m calling Dad.”

“Tattletale.” She hauled her bag up the front stairs.

“Bitch.” I turned to where Matt still stood, staring into space. I snapped my fingers underneath his nose. She must have him under good if he was this unresponsive. “Matt?”

“Huh?” He blinked twice and looked down at me, stunned. If I weren’t so annoyed at my sister right now, I’d have been impressed at her technique. Putting someone under like she’d done to Matt took a lot of effort, and she’d managed it with barely a second thought.

“You okay?”

“Yeah, I must have blanked there for a moment. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. You said you were up late last night filling out your billing paperwork.”

“I did?”

“Yeah.” The idea would take a moment to root in his head. It wouldn’t matter if he’d been in bed at 10:00 p.m. From now until the day he died, Matt would swear, completely convinced of his honesty, he had been up all night working. “So why don’t you take a nap? You must be exhausted.”

“Yeah.” His shoulders slumped as the suggestion took hold of his subconscious. “I just got the coffee because I was dragging so badly on my jog. Maybe I’ll spend the day in bed? Want to tuck me in?”

“Tempting, but not today. Not with the siblings here to visit. You were asking me something, though?”

“I was?”

“Something about going somewhere?” I’d kick Hope’s ass for enchanting him if she’d managed to wipe his last coherent thoughts from his head. That was always one of the downsides of enchantment spells.

His frown deepened. “It must not have been important, huh?”

“Are you sure?” We walked up the front steps, following my sister, who kept looking over her shoulder to shoot me glares that bordered on murderous.

“I’m sure.” He nodded and patted me on the shoulder. “If I remember I’ll come ask you later. Okay?”

“Okay.” Disappointed, I smiled when he opened the door and followed me upstairs. I stepped inside my apartment and scowled at my sister.

“What?” She stretched out on the loveseat, kicking her feet onto the coffee table.

“You’re such a bitch, you know that, don’t you?”

“It’s a gift.”

Chapter Four

“You made me haul baggage.” Tolliver’s eyes flared red in displeasure and he waved his hands, stalking around the room. “Like some sort of a baggage-handler person. A manual laborer. A common mortal.”

Instead of answering him, I put the bakery bag on the island and sat on one of the barstools. I should have ignored the alarm and slept in this morning. It would’ve been so much easier than dealing with this crap.

Lisa stumbled into the living room in her pajamas, scratching the side of her head. “What’s all the yelling for? Are you watching E! again? You know you’ll spend the whole week glued to the sofa if you start watching that stuff, and then you’ll complain about wasting your vacation… Hey, what’s everyone doing here? Are you having some sort of family reunion?”

“Why is your pet speaking to me?” Hope said. Her dislike of mortals and those beneath her on the demonic food chain was legendary.

“Lisa is not a pet. She’s my roommate.”

“And my succubus love,” Tolliver added. “Or she will be, once she quits making things explode every time we try to… You know what? Never mind.”

“Is there coffee?” Lisa ignored my crazy siblings. Not like I blamed her. I handed her the second, still-full cup of coffee before I threw my empty cup away. I grabbed the only remaining Danish and handed it to her as well. I thought about eating the
pain de chocolate
I’d bought on impulse, but decided to stash it in the fridge instead. There was no way I’d manage to eat it in peace, and I wasn’t in the mood to share with Hope and Tolliver. Ever. Especially not when it came to chocolate.

“Thanks.” She smiled and took a big bite of what should have been my Danish. “You’re the best.”

“The best,” Hope repeated. “My sister, high demon and youngest child of Satan, is the best? Running errands for a fourth-class succubus. Consorting with humans. Living in reduced circumstances. What would our father say about how you’re acting?”

“Actually, he liked the apartment.” I turned my back on Hope and started a pot of coffee. If my sister was in this sort of mood, I was going to need a lot of caffeine and possibly vodka just to make it through the day. “He gave me the blue vase on the windowsill as a housewarming gift.”

Hope barely acknowledged Boris when he strolled into the apartment, and fixed her rage on me. He must have been used to being ignored, though—he was married to Hope, after all—and instead of saying anything, he sat beside her on the couch and grabbed the remote. He flipped on Cartoon Network and acted like the rest of us weren’t there. “Our father gave you a housewarming gift?”

I kept silent and let her mull over the implications of that statement. Dad had never even gone to visit her in Idaho, claiming all that nature was too much for him, much less showed up with a housewarming gift.

“He gave us a couple,” Lisa said.

“A couple?” Tolliver asked. “A couple of vases?”

“No, silly.” She giggled, slapping Tolliver on the shoulder, and took a sip of her coffee.

I let my head drop onto the counter. Shit. This wasn’t going to be good.

“He only bought us the blue vase,” she said. “How many vases do you really need?”

“So what else did he give you?”

“Oh, it’s not important,” I said. “Just a few other odds and ends I needed around the place.”

“Lisa.” Tolliver stared directly into her eyes. “What did my father give you and my sister?”

“Like she said, just a few odds and ends.”

I braced for a fight with my siblings about who daddy loved best. Boris hit the mute button and shifted so he could stare at me, too, obviously speculating about whether or not he’d tethered himself to the wrong bandwagon in his attempts to sleep his way to the top.

“What, specific, odds and ends?” Tolliver said.

Lisa glimpsed at me, helpless, and my shoulders slumped. He had asked her a direct question, and there was no way she could deny answering. As her maker, she had to follow any order he gave her without question unless my father intervened. “Some furniture, dishes, free cable, and he worked out an arrangement so we don’t have any utilities. Oh, and the building.”

“What building?” Hope asked.

“This building.”

Tolliver looked at me, horrified. “Our father bought your apartment building?”

“Dad thought it would be a good investment. I don’t see what the big deal is.”

“The big deal is, Daddy never bought me an apartment building,” Hope said with a sniff, playing hurt by her lack of real estate.

Poor pitiful baby, how could she survive after being deprived so? “No, he gave you a Satanic cult, armed to the teeth for Armageddon, to run. How very stingy of him.”

“True, but he made me earn my way up through the ranks. Do you know how difficult it was for me and Boris?” She waved toward him, casting him the nastiest scowl as he sat on the couch engrossed in a cartoon. Personally, I was sort of surprised—I’d have thought “Johnny Test” was above Boris’s mental abilities. “Acting like dumb sheep? Pretending to believe the drivel they spouted about past lives and celestial love so we could get closer to the power structure and take over?”

“And now you have, and all Hell rejoices at your conquest,” I said.

“Oh, do shut up. The point is, the rest of us had to work for our places. We weren’t rewarded just because we asked for them.”

“Neither was I,” I shouted.

“Oh? And what did you do to deserve a luxury apartment building?” Tolliver asked.

“A
luxury
apartment building? Just last night you were calling it a dump.” What the Hell? I loved our little apartment, but even with all the work Lisa and I had put into the place, it was still a long way from being luxurious.

“That was before I knew Dad bought it for you.”

“Oh, please, he buys you everything you ask for.” How dare he act like he was some deprived little kid? Every time Hope and I had been given something, Tolliver received two. And he’d gotten to see Dad every day. I never could figure out how he managed to get guilt gifts.

“He’s never bought the building I was living in for me.”

The coffeepot clicked to warm and I reached for a cup to pour myself some. “You don’t live in apartment buildings.”

“That doesn’t matter. I could have.”

“You hate the mortal plane.” I added a heaping spoonful of refined white sugar to my coffee and took a big drink. I’d need all the help I could get dealing with my siblings this morning. And it wasn’t like I had to worry about my waistline, after all.

“I do not.”

“You do hate the mortal plane, Tolliver,” Hope said, coming to my defense. Which was odd, since Hope never came to anyone’s defense. Her preferred method of dealing with family fights was to sit back and let us eviscerate each other, then step over our bleeding carcasses to get what she wanted all along.

“That’s not the point.” A circle of blue-black hellfire flared around his ears. Oh, crap. If he was this far into his sulk, he’d be unbearable soon.

“And the point would be?”

“Dad bought you an apartment building for no reason. The rest of us have to work for our rewards. We only get presents when we think up something evil to do.”

“I did do something evil. In fact, I’d say it was probably some of my most sublime work.”

Hope’s eyes narrowed. “What? Did you not smile and let the little children snot all over you while you gave them their shots?”

“No, when I worked for the nursing temp service, before I got on at Rogers.”

“Back when you were doing the short-term admin work for those nursing homes?” She nodded. “And?”

“Well, I convinced the owner of the home he could buy a database and then outsource all of his record-keeping and administration to the temp firm’s offshore-services department. I even offered to set up his database.”

Tolliver scowled, and crossed his arms. “So?”

“I set the database up so it randomly deletes files, the password changes every third time you enter it, files are routinely rerouted to the junk-mail filter of one of the minor demons working out of Greenland, and if anyone tries to remove the program, it crashes their entire computer system. So now they have no support staff, a temperamental database that only works part of the time, and constant hassles every time they need to access a file because they never know if it’s actually going to be there.”

“Minor magical mischief.” Hope stood and wandered into the kitchen for her own cup of coffee. “I don’t see why that should get you any special favors.”

“Then I arranged for them to be audited by the State Commission on Geriatric Health. Fifty-thousand dollars in fines later, the administrator sold us his soul in return for another demon to come in and fix the problem.”

“And?”

“Demons never provide tech support. We own his soul and they’re still dealing with the chaos.”

“Okay,” Tolliver said. He slinked to the armchair to sit with Lisa. “I guess that’s funny and a bit clever, but I still don’t think it was worth an apartment building.”

“Enough with the apartment building already.”

“Yeah.” Lisa nodded. “I mean, it’s not nearly as handy as the unlimited, never-needs-to-be-paid, emergency Visa he gave us.”

I closed my eyes and squeezed my temples, shaking my head. When would she learn the art of
not
over-sharing? “Lisa?”

She scooted away from Tolliver, bumping against the arm of the chair when he tried to sling his arm over her shoulder. He scooted closer and wrapped an arm around her. “Yeah?”

“So very much not helping right now.”

“Sorry.”

“How did you score a no-limit Visa?” Hope’s voice was flat. “I got a cult in Idaho and you got an open credit limit to buy shoes?”

“There weren’t any cults available?” I gave Tolliver a quick wink and he buried his face in Lisa’s hair, shaking with silent laughter.

“Oh, cry me a river of blood for the bodies of the damned to float down,” Hope snapped. Something wasn’t right about her. I mean, besides the fact she was one of the most inherently evil beings on the planet who used her looks and unholy charms to lure others into doing whatever she asked.

“Hope?”

“Yeah?”

“Why are you here?”

“I came to visit my kid sister.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“Yes, I did. So how’s work?”

Way to change the subject. “A pain in the ass. Well, except for Lisa eating the head of pediatric surgery yesterday. That was actually kind of funny, now that it’s over. Except he was haunting us for a bit until Dad got his paperwork straightened out. I’m sure it’s handled, though, so no harm, no foul. Now what’s up?”

“Who said anything was up? You let Lisa eat a doctor? Good job.”

“Enough of the evasive, innocent, older sister bit. You hate flying, you’re not a morning person, and not once in our lives have you ever suggested we ‘visit’ unless there was something up. Last time it was to hunt for souls so you could take control over your group. What is it this time?”

“Nothing.” She looked at Boris and shifted slightly. “Boris, you will not hear a word of this conversation until I let you hear it. Got it?”

His pupils blacked out his brown eyes. “Yes, Hope.”

The Queen of Haughty sighed with Oscar-worthy drama. “We were ousted, all right?”

“Ousted?” I tried to come to grips with that. How the Hell did they get ousted from a cult?

“Yes, ousted. As in, they threw us out and seized all our assets.”

I blinked. No way. “So how did you get here?”

Her blonde curls fell over her face when she ducked her head, and if I wasn’t mistaken, her cheeks had turned a lovely shade of crimson. “Mom loaned me the money to fly coach.”

“Coach? You? You flew coach?” If she was flying on a public airline this was serious, especially if she was flying coach with the common mortals.

“Let’s not dwell on it. I didn’t have much choice. We’re destitute.”

“Why haven’t you harvested the souls?” They had lost everything? Absolutely everything? “I mean, you’ve been out there for years. Surely, you’ve got something to show for it.”

She whispered her next confession: “They’ve been saved.”

“Saved? As in
saved
saved?”

Her eyes met mine, pleading for sympathy. “Don’t ask me how. One day everything is fine, and the next this new follower is moving up the ranks, offering ideas, making suggestions. Before you know it, everything we’ve put in place is gone.”

“And?”

“And, before I knew what hit me, this new nutbag was standing at the right ear of the Reverend Leader, and we found ourselves out of a con. They found all of it, every little bit of money we’d managed to fritter away. I would have been surprised, except for the worst part.”

“What’s the worst part?” Tolliver asked.

The look she shot her husband could’ve made him wither up and die. “Boris was the one who told them.”

My attention shifted to Boris, who seemed completely oblivious to the conversation going on around him. “Boris?”

Tolliver’s jaw dropped, but he quickly regained his composure. “You’re shitting me.”

Hope smirked, her eyes brightening, daring him to challenge her little bombshell. “He found Jesus.”

“Excuse me?” She’d told some crazy stories before to get what she wanted, but surely, this was the strangest one yet.

“Boris went to one of the meetings where this little bastard was sharing his revelations, and he found Jesus.”

“At a revival meeting? In Idaho? Last I heard Jesus was—”

“He didn’t find the actual Jesus, idiot. He found religion.”

“Can he do that?” I asked Tolliver. “I mean, I know Hope and I can because we were born half-human and we have souls and all that good business, but Boris is a full demon.”

“Well, technically, it is a bit difficult.” Tolliver studied our brother-in-law. “But it is possible.”

“What’s possible?” Malachi formed behind my brother’s head and floated through him, making Tolliver shiver.

“Boris found Jesus,” I said. And people wondered why I never bothered to get married. Well, besides the whole
Ex-Fiancé Ending Up in a Mental Institution and Crying at the Mention of My Name
thing. That ended well.