He turned back to us as he waited for Cookie to answer the door. I winked at him. Barry was an old friend from college. We’d had a couple classes together, including one on jazz appreciation. We’d bonded over the fact that going in, neither one of us was particularly fond of jazz, but we’d learned to love it. Especially the history.
I stepped to my door and turned the knob slowly, taking my time, waiting for Cookie to answer hers. When she didn’t answer immediately, I began to get a little worried. But when she did answer, all my fears dissipated. She looked fantastic. She wore a dark burgundy pantsuit with a cream-colored throw around her shoulders. If that didn’t get Uncle Bob’s attention, I didn’t know what would.
Uncle Bob made a point of speaking to me in a louder-than-necessary voice. He asked me once again if I was hungry.
I chuckled and said just as loudly, “Why, yes, I am, Uncle Bob. Like I said before. But thanks for the recap.”
“Oh, hey, Cookie,” he said, pretending to just notice her. As if his eyes didn’t almost pop out of his head the minute they landed on her. He was so bad at this flirting gig.
Cookie offered him a brilliant smile as she shook Barry’s hand. “Hello there yourself, Robert. I see you brought dinner. I’m sorry I’ll miss it.”
Uncle Bob followed me inside, almost stumbling when I paused at the threshold of my apartment to give him more time. He cleared his throat in embarrassment and said, “I’m sorry, too.”
Barry led her to the stairs, taking her hand as they descended them. Uncle Bob noticed. I thought he would break his neck, trying to watch them walk all the way to the next landing.
“So, what do you know about Dad that I don’t?”
He pulled out two trays from the bag: one with spaghetti and one with lasagna. I dived for the spaghetti before he could get to it.
He shrugged, took his lasagna, and headed for my kitchen table. “I probably don’t know much more than you do. But I’ve noticed a distinct change in his behavior.”
At first I just kind of stared at Uncle Bob, not sure what he was doing. Then I realized he was using a kitchen table for its intended purpose. Weird. “Well, duh. I could have told you that. His bout with cancer and his sudden remission made his telling me he was going on a trip plausible. He said he was going to learn to sail. But Denise seems to think otherwise. What could he possibly be up to?”
I sat beside Ubie at the table. It felt strange. I’d never eaten at my kitchen table. This was an experience for me.
“I hate to make assumptions,” Uncle Bob said as he stabbed at his lasagna. “But if I were to guess, I’d say it had something to do with you.”
“Me? Why me?” I twirled spaghetti around my fork.
“Didn’t you notice how, after going to all the trouble of having you arrested just to try to get you out of the PI business, he seemed to give up pretty easily?”
“I noticed him trying to shoot me. The rest is kind of a blur.”
“I’m just finding everything he’s done lately pretty suspicious. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was investigating something. He’d get like that in the old days. When he was on the scent of something big, he’d get secretive. Defensive. I haven’t seen him like that in a long time.”
“But what kind of case can he be working? What can he possibly investigate? He’s not even a detective anymore.”
He put down his fork and extended me his full attention. That meant he was about to tell me something I probably didn’t want to know. “Let’s just say he’s been asking a lot of questions about your boyfriend.”
I put down my fork, too. “Reyes? Why would he be investigating Reyes?”
“I don’t know, pumpkin. I’m probably wrong. So, Cookie has a date?”
At last. I was wondering when he would bring her up. “Yeah. I think she joined some kind of online dating service. From what I understand, she’s very popular. She has a date every day this week.”
“With a different guy?” he asked, appalled.
“With a different guy.”
After that, Uncle Bob seemed to lose his appetite. He barely touched his lasagna and left with a grim expression on his face. We definitely got him thinking, contemplating what his lax attitude toward a delicious creature like Cookie was costing him. Now I just had to worry about one thing: Uncle Bob’s penchant for investigating. If he figured out what we were doing, he’d disown me. And possibly sell me to a Romanian count.
6
Sometimes I wrestle my demons.
Sometimes we just snuggle.
—BUMPER STICKER
Duff finally showed after Uncle Bob left. He seemed embarrassed, and I wondered if he’d heard what Reyes said about him. That he was bad. But how bad could he possibly be? The way I understood it, if someone was very bad, they went straight to hell when they died. So, no matter what Reyes said, Duff couldn’t have been that bad of a person.
“S-sorry about that,” he said, hanging his head in shame. “I didn’t m-mean to r-run out on you. Reyes and I don’t r-really get along.”
“Reyes and a lot of people don’t really get along,” I said.
I’d made another pot of coffee and was in the middle of pouring when he popped in. I’d need all the energy I could muster to face this Dealer guy. Which was a cool name. Any demon living off the hard-earned souls of humans didn’t deserve a cool name. It was like when the media gave cool names to serial killers and terrorists. They didn’t have the right to anything cool, in my opinion. Of which I had many.
“Reyes told me you used to visit him in prison.”
If I didn’t know that Duff had exactly zero blood pumping through his body, I would’ve sworn he’d blushed. “Oh, th-that. I was just k-keeping an eye on him.”
“Why?” I asked, sitting back at my kitchen table. It was nice there. Homey.
He drew his shoulders in, unable to look at me. “B-because. H-he kept going to s-see you.”
That baffled me more than a little. Flummoxed, I asked, “You mean, incorporeally?”
“Y-yes. He shouldn’t have.”
“Why’s that?”
“B-because he’s n-not a nice person.”
Interesting. “That’s funny. He said the same thing about you.”
His gaze shot up in surprise. “He d-doesn’t know me. He w-wasn’t there.”
This was getting more intriguing by the moment. “He wasn’t where?”
“At my h-house. Where it h-happened. But because of it, they took me away and th-that’s how I m-met Rey’aziel. I didn’t know he was the d-devil’s son when I m-met him, though. He was j-just an inmate. Like me.”
“You were in prison?” I asked, more than a little taken aback.
I could tell by his expression he was waiting, no hoping, that the world would swallow him. His shoulders concaved even more. His chin tucked in shame. “Y-yes, Charley, I was in p-prison. I knew Rey’aziel w-wasn’t like the rest of us, but I d-didn’t know how different until I died.”
I wanted to ask him why he’d gone to prison, exactly what happened, but if Duff had wanted me to know, he would have told me. I didn’t want to push him, but I did want one thing. “Did you die in prison, Duff?”
“Y-yes. Kind of. I had b-been paroled and was j-just about to leave when it happened.”
That explained why he was in civilian clothes when he passed. “Do you want to talk about it?”
“N-no. It won’t change what happened. B-but you were l-looking for me?”
“Yes, I was. I wanted to ask you about Mr. Wong.” I pointed to the new subject of our conversation as he hovered in the corner. “When you first saw him, when you showed up a couple of weeks ago, you seemed to recognize him.”
“N-no, I don’t know him.” He took a step back like he was going to leave.
I stood and put an arm on his shoulder. It was a show of encouragement, but that’s all it was. A show. I really did it to keep him there. I’d recently learned that as long as I had physical contact with a departed, he or she couldn’t vanish. It was great. But the moment I lost contact, they could disappear before my eyes and I had no way of getting them back. Or so I thought. Angel swears I can summon any departed I want to at any time. It was an interesting concept. One I’d try someday, but today, I just wanted to know more about Mr. Wong. No idea why the urge suddenly hit me. It just seemed important. His story seemed important.
“Duff, I’m not trying to make you uncomfortable. I just want to know what you know about him.”
He glanced over his shoulder toward my roomie, then shrugged at me. “I don’t know anything except what I see.”
“What do you see?”
He drew in a deep breath and let it out slowly as he studied him. “I see a f-force, like a thick shield around him. It’s powerful. I c-can see that, too. Power. Strength. Like he’s m-made of it.”
Man, I needed to learn that trick.
“Can’t you see it?” he asked.
“I wish. I’ve tried. I’m just not sure what to do.”
“I—I could help you,” he said, stepping closer.
Maybe Reyes was right. Maybe he had a crush on me. Then again, maybe he really could help me.
“Then,” he continued, his expression full of hope, “you could see what Reyes is.”
I felt Reyes’s heat flare to life around us. Duff jumped back in surprise.
“Duff,” Reyes said as he materialized in the doorframe, “are you trying to get me in trouble?” He was doing his menacing bit again.
Duff didn’t say anything. He dropped his gaze to the floor in submission. Or fear. I wasn’t quite certain which.
“Reyes,” I said, my tone warning, “I’m just asking him about Mr. Wong. No one seems to know anything about him except he has a power or a force around him.”
Reyes glanced over, barely interested. “I didn’t notice before, but, yeah, I guess he does.”
Duff laughed.
“You have something to share with the class?” Reyes asked.
I was just about to warn him again to be nice when Duff said, “That was a mistake.”
“What was?” Reyes asked.
“You not noticing.”
Reyes frowned. He seemed confused when he looked back at Mr. Wong. Then even more so when he turned back to Duff. He suddenly wore a mask of suspicion. Wariness.
I began wondering a lot of things, not the least of which was why Duff had suddenly lost his stutter.
* * *
I had a lot on my plate: A naked dead man riding shotgun everywhere I went. A mysterious Asian man hovering in my corner who was made of something powerful, whatever that meant. Another man who sold his soul to a demon who was indifferent to the fact that it was for a good cause. A demon who was going around tricking people out of their souls so he could eat them. Which, ew. A rascally neighbor who’d proposed to me and was expecting an answer sometime this century. And an ongoing child-abduction case that had led me to believe that my man might have a brother he either does or doesn’t know about. I was so not good at tying up loose ends. And to top it all off, I was one step closer to getting my BFF slash receptionist laid by my uncle.
That was so wrong. No matter. Life was good.
Until I lost seventeen million dollars in a card game.
I looked across a table set in the middle of a dark, smoky back room of a warehouse and studied the Dealer. The demon who supped on souls in his spare time. He was not what I’d expected at all. Then again, what did one expect when meeting a demon? This guy was terribly handsome, if a little too Goth for my tastes, and much younger than I’d imagined. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen or twenty, and he looked like he came straight out of a vampire novel, with shoulder-length black hair, a white ruffled shirt; and a six-inch top hat that he never took off. There was something horridly attractive about him. Maybe it was his confidence. His perfect skin. His long, pale fingers. Or his penetrating bronze eyes—a color so rich, so vividly chromatic, I’d never seen anything quite like it. I’d found myself caught in his mesmerizing gaze on several occasions throughout the evening.
But I had to remember, this wasn’t really the demon. This was the unfortunate human the demon had chosen to possess. So the beauty that encased him was stolen, just like the souls from which he took nourishment.
He seemed just as fascinated by me. He’d focused all his attention on me the moment I arrived, and rarely looked away. At any other time, that kind of constant inspection would be unnerving. Tonight it was intriguing.
The only thing that broke the spell was a darkness that even I could see. It escaped him when he turned his head too quickly or leaned forward too abruptly. The darkness, the demon inside him, would hesitate a microsecond too long and leave a smoky trail of its essence, like a child coloring, unable to stay in the lines. I had to keep one thing in mind at all times: Underneath all that charisma and spellbinding charm lay the heart of a demon who stole people’s souls.
Reyes didn’t exactly like the plan I’d come up with, but I didn’t give him much say in the matter. I was here for the soul of my client, Mr. Joyce. Not for Reyes. And as far as I knew, Reyes’s soul was fine. But I did as he’d asked. I’d dropped my hand beside my chair the moment I sat across from the Dealer and summoned Artemis, my guardian Rottweiler who liked nothing more than ripping out the throats of demons. She rose up out of the floor until her head lifted my hand. Normally she’d roll over for a belly rub, but she sensed the demon in the room instantly and had been keeping an eye on him ever since, waiting for my command.
I patted my boot to make sure Zeus was still in there. I’d brought the knife Garrett Swopes hunted down, the one that could supposedly kill any demon on Earth. Including Reyes, which explained why Garrett had hunted it down in the first place. I felt better knowing it was close. I knew what a demon was capable of. I’d felt the slice of their needle-like teeth as they slid across my skin. I’d felt the stab of their razor-sharp claws as they dug into my flesh. I’d felt the icy chill of their breath as they readied to rip me to shreds. Zeus was definitely nice to have around.
I patted my boot again.
Three other players joined us—all men, all desperate, all searching for something they couldn’t get at a card game. Did they know what the Dealer was? What he could do for them? Did they know how much it would cost them in the long run? It was one thing to die. It was another to lose one’s soul. To come to a complete end. To exist no longer.