“The things going wrong with the wedding are also more the purview of a mischief demon. Cancellations and fender-benders. If it were a malice demon, there would have been a casualty by now.”
“What about the nice ones? Why aren’t they over here fixing things?”
“In order for a demon to enter our world, for lack of a better word, they have to be summoned. Or find a fissure between this plane and the demonic one. Most people summoning demons aren’t doing it for good reasons, so the demons they summon tend to be of the negative variety.”
“Like those women summoning demons into their kids and household appliances?”
“Most of those were actually ambivalents. They tend to be passive, the weakest strain of demons. Non-verbal. Only capable of taking over their host for short bursts—especially if the host is sentient and has a will to counteract the demon’s. My mentor called them day-trippers. He used to joke that they came to this plane to sightsee and our job was to send them home when their passport expired.”
“So the ambivalents are weak. Okay.”
He shook his head. “No, sorry. I explained that badly. The ambivalents are a type of demon. Passive is a class. A strength. There’s passive, active, and corporeal. A passive demon can’t really control the host much. An active, or verbal, demon tends to rule their host—and if a subject is possessed by an active demon for too long, their soul can actually separate from their body, leaving it to the demon.”
“And corporeal?”
“That’s what I think you saw,” Rodriguez explained. “A corporeal demon brings its demonic form over from the demonic plane. It takes an enormous amount of energy and control to bring them over, so they tend to be fairly rare. They possess a glamour that prevents the average person from being able to tell them apart from humans, but the glamour can slip—which is probably what you saw.”
Brittany nodded sharply. “Mischief, corporeal. Got it.” She realized she’d completely forgotten about rummaging through the clearance dresses. She turned back to the rack and froze.
Right there in front of her was
the dress
. Midnight blue, cocktail-length chiffon. Off the shoulder and simply, classically elegant. Brittany grabbed it and peered at the tag. Jo’s size. And as soon as she pulled it off the rack, she noticed another identical dress behind it. In Kim’s size.
Her heart began to drum in her chest. There had to be a third one. There just had to. The world was not so unfair as to taunt her with such perfection and take it away. She flipped frantically.
“Brittany?” She heard Rodriguez get up, but didn’t turn, frantically sliding hangers.
It has to be here. It just has to
.
And there it was. Bethie’s size. She snatched up the third dress, searching them for flaws. They were perfect. The right dress, the right sizes, marked down sixty percent.
“Jo! Lucy!”
Jo popped out of the dressing room wearing a brownish-green sheath that made her look like the guest of honor at a funeral. Brittany flung the midnight dresses at her. “Try those! That’s the dress.”
Jo caught the dresses as a reflex, her eyebrows arching appreciatively as she considered the midnight fabric. “I love the color. If they even halfway fit, we’re buying them. Back in five.”
Brittany spun in a circle, doing a victory dance. When she stopped, she found Rodriguez watching her with a puzzled frown on his face. “Oh, don’t pretend you’re not happy. If those dresses fit, we all get to go home.” She grabbed his arm and shoved him back onto the waiting-area chair, perching on the edge of the couch next to it. “Now, tell me more about demons.”
He frowned. “You really want to keep talking about demons? You don’t think it’s too weird?”
“I like weird. I’ve always loved learning new things. Who better to teach me about demons than an exorcist?”
He shook his head, his lips quirking in a bemused smile. “I’ll bet you were a star pupil in school.”
“I
loved
school,” she confessed, leaning toward him. “I wanted to learn
everything
. My parents worried about sending me to a normal school, but when they finally let me go, it was wonderful.” She didn’t even care that she had spilled a little more than she meant to with her normal school comment. She was too giddy over finding
the
dresses.
“I hated school,” he admitted. “I think I spent half my life in detention for some stupid shit or other.”
“I thought you would have been virtuous, as a future priest.”
He laughed. “Hell, no. I wanted to try every sin on for size.”
Brittany could certainly understand wanting to experience everything in life, but she’d never really given much thought to delving into the sins. It sounded deliciously wicked. “You swear a lot for someone who was going to be a priest.”
He leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, “I would have been a shitty priest.”
Brittany giggled. It felt like he’d called that laugh up from her toes and she felt it bubbling up through every inch of her body before it reached her mouth. “I bet you would have been a great priest,” she said, after the laughter faded into a friendly silence. “You’re patient and loving and loyal.”
He arched his eyebrows skeptically.
She ticked her points off on her fingers. “You obviously love your sisters. You’ve been extremely patient with us tonight on this endless shopping marathon. And you’re here, looking after me, just because Karma asked you to—loyal.”
He grinned wickedly. “If only I hadn’t been so bad at the celibacy part.”
“Celibacy is overrated.” Brittany blushed as she said it, but she said it. She felt deliciously daring. She grinned back at him, though she couldn’t match the wicked glimmer in his eyes.
He laughed. “Definitely.”
They lapsed into silence and another of those warm, lovely moments settled around them.
His eyes were black, rather than the preferred green, but they weren’t a void of color. It seemed instead they were wells of endless possibility. Deep and rich. The blackness that had seemed so intimidating before now held a dark spark just for her.
“Five minutes flat. The dresses fit perfectly, we’re all in agreement and no blood was shed, so I’m calling it a victory.”
Jo, Lucy, and the other two bridesmaids appeared, each bearing an armful of fabric, shattering the lovely companionship of her moment with Rodriguez.
Brittany popped out of her chair and smiled a little too brightly at the bridal party. “Wonderful! I think the checkstands are that way.” She waved vaguely in the direction of the exits, as if she had been spending the last three hours scouting cash registers rather than drooling over an exorcist.
Lucy and her attendants headed off in search of one of the clerks they had scared off hours ago. Brittany knew she should go with them. Any good wedding planner would. Of course, any good wedding planner probably would have been in the trenches with them, fetching alternate sizes and doing up zippers. Instead, she’d been out here. With Rodriguez.
He’d been marvelous. He hadn’t complained once the entire time. Surely that deserved a reward of some kind?
Brittany was rationalizing. She knew she was rationalizing. The truth of the matter was she just wanted to kiss him. She’d wanted to kiss him for hours, ever since that first warm, delicious moment earlier at Karmic Consultants. Heck, if she was perfectly honest with herself, she’d started thinking about kissing him the second she’d laid eyes on him. But she hadn’t started
needing
to kiss him until this very second. She needed to kiss him like her heart needed to keep beating.
He was still sprawled lazily in the chair he’d been parked in all evening, waiting to get up until there was some assurance that they were actually going to get out of the store.
Brittany turned to him and inhaled a giant gulp of air, gathering her nerve. “Thank you.” She ran through a thousand things she could say next, specific reasons why she was thanking him, but none of them seemed enough, so she just left it at that, just
thank you
, and bent to drop a kiss on his lips.
She quickly pressed her lips to his, then just as quickly pulled back and gave him a smile, as if to say,
that wasn’t a
real
kiss, just a friendly little peck, a buss between friends, nothing special
. She turned and rushed after the bridal party before he could say anything.
It had been a light, chaste kiss. She wasn’t so inexperienced that she hadn’t had some steamy kisses in her lifetime. This one had been…sweet. Soft. It wasn’t meant as an invitation, just a thank you. And if he wanted it to be the beginning of something more…
“Brittany.”
Her heart stutter-stepped in her chest and Brittany pressed a hand over it. “Yes, Rodriguez?”
He fell into step beside her, shortening his longer stride to match hers. “Do you want me to drive you home? That demon could come back at any time. I really should have been seeing you home all week.”
The demon. Of course. It was good to be reminded why he was hanging around. It wasn’t that he wanted to be near her. “No. That isn’t necessary.”
“Are you sure? Karma’d have my ass if anything happened to you. You’re the best secretary Karmic has ever had.”
And yet another reason to stay away. She didn’t want to lose her job. The job. The One.
No office dating.
Brittany cleared a throat that suddenly felt thick, for some reason. “I’m sure I’ll be fine. Thanks anyway.”
“At least let me give you my cell number. It’s my personal number. I always have it with me. You can call me any time, day or night.” He dug into his pockets until he found an old receipt, snagged a pen off a nearby register and scribbled a number onto the paper. He extended the paper to Brittany with a small, crooked smile. “If the demon comes back.”
Brittany took the slip of paper. Did he mean to let his fingers brush along hers that way? Did he know that little caress set off showers of sparks from her hair to her toes?
Maybe not.
As she tucked the paper into her purse, Jo walked up with an enormous shopping bag. “What’s taking you two so long?” she grumbled. “We’re ready to make our escape.”
Rodriguez waved toward the exit. “I’m so sorry to have delayed you,” he said dryly. When Jo turned to lead the way, Rodriguez tossed Brittany a wink behind Jo’s back.
With that wink, the sparks inside her transformed into a cascade of tingles.
Maybe he didn’t know what he did to her. But maybe he did…
And really, what could be the harm in a little office romance? She’d never had a secret fling before. And Brittany did so love new experiences.
Chapter Twelve—Love and House Arrest
Dawn sunlight poured through the high arched windows in the two-story foyer, covering the wide, curved staircase in light. Brittany bounded up the stairs two at a time—the fact that she
could
leap up the stairs never stopped delighting her, but today her joy was more than that.
This morning there were a thousand possibilities, all due to a chaste middle-school kiss and a naughty wink. Really, did the world get any more divine?
She was barely breathless when she reached the top. A far cry from the time when half as many stairs would have sent her to the emergency room.
She skipped down the hallway toward the breakfast room in her parents’ suite. It was the time of day her mother called unforgivably early, but Brittany knew both her parents would be awake and this was the best time to catch them before her father went to his office and her mother disappeared to look after whichever charity she had deemed worthy this week—Heart-to-Heart, The Children’s Heart Foundation, Tiny Tickers, Donate Life America, Make-a-Wish, there was a rotating list, but the theme was the same.
Brittany knocked and the door to the upstairs breakfast room was whisked open almost instantly. She winked at Martha, the upstairs maid serving this morning, and moved past her to drop a kiss on her mother’s cheek.
“Brittany!” her mother exclaimed, pleasure and concern warring for supremacy on her face. Concern won, as it always did. “What are you doing up here? If you required your father or me, you should have sent for us and we would have come to the downstairs suite.”
“I’m perfectly capable of climbing the stairs, Mother,” Brittany reminded her, as she moved to hug her father.
“Your mother’s right,” he said, patting her back gently—always gently, mustn’t jostle the new heart, after all. “You shouldn’t overexert yourself.”
“I’m not overexerted,” Brittany insisted. “If anything, I’m underexerted. Exertion is good for me. Even the doctors say so.”
“Exertion within reason,” her father cautioned. “Are you dizzy at all? Dr. Meckner said dizziness could be a possible side effect of the new medication.”
“No dizziness. So far the side effects have been much milder than with the Tacrolimus.” The immunosuppressive drugs were necessary to keep her body from rejecting the donor heart, but they were not without side effects. Sometimes the side effects could be downright nasty. A fact her parents seemed to think meant she was still as sickly as she had been when she’d still had the bum heart she was born with.
“You’re so pale, dear.” Her mother peered at her complexion as if it held the secrets of the Sphinx. “Did you overtax yourself yesterday? You were out for so long. Even spa days can be so tiring. Are you feeling faint?”
Brittany forced her smile brighter, trying to look as healthy as a horse. She hadn’t fainted once since she got her new heart ten years ago, but her parents were stuck in the groove of worry they had plowed for themselves during the first fifteen years of her life.
During those years, her survival had been a miracle. Fainting spells meant arrhythmias and immediate trips to the emergency room, and exertion had been the enemy.
She had waited, after the surgery, for them to wake up to the fact that she wasn’t going to die on them. Her body had accepted the donor heart. She was healthy. For the first time in her life she was normal.
She could
live
, rather than just survive. But her parents were still in survival mode.
Convincing them to let her go to a real high school had been a battle. College was allowed only if she lived at home and was escorted to her classes by a chauffeur who was also EMT trained. When she left home to get her master’s, her independence had lasted less than a month. Her mother had made herself physically ill with worry—so Brittany had come home. And become the first person in her master’s program to get her degree via online correspondence courses.
Whenever she suggested getting a job—or doing anything other than sleeping in, shopping, and going to a spa for recuperation from the exertion of shopping—her parents would go into emotional-lockdown mode.
But she couldn’t waste this new life she had been given. She had to live it, with every ounce of joy she could drag out of it.
Brittany couldn’t worry. She had never been very good at it, but now, there just didn’t seem to be any room for worry in her new heart. When you’d lived with Death as your next-door neighbor for most of your life, it was hard to be bothered by the little things.
“Brittany? Please sit down, dear. You’re so pale.”
She was naturally pale—as most people of Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian descent were, but she didn’t bother to point that out. Brittany obediently dropped into one of the open chairs around the breakfast table and plucked a croissant off the tray in front of her. She pulled the pastry apart, wondering when, if ever, she would be able to tell her parents about her new job.
“You need your rest, pet. What are you doing up so early? Have you been having trouble sleeping?” Her father’s voice was gentle, like he couldn’t speak too loudly or she would shatter.
Was it possible to be
too
loved? If her parents loved her a little less, would she have more freedom?
“Brittany?” her mother asked gently.
Across the table, she heard her father whisper, “The doctors did say mental lapses might be a side effect, Claudia.”
Brittany upped her smile to maximum wattage. “I’m not having a mental lapse,” she said, wrapping warmth around the words so her father wouldn’t be embarrassed that she’d heard him and would know he hadn’t offended her by implying she was losing her mind, thanks to the drugs saving her life. “I’m just thinking. I’ve been thinking about making some changes to the gardens. Adding some new flowers.”
Her mother smiled, visibly relieved she wasn’t having a
mental lapse
. “Of course, dear. I’ll schedule an appointment for the landscaper to visit you in your suite. She’ll bring along photos of some new flowers you might want to consider.”
Her parents had converted a suite of rooms downstairs into a sort of apartment for her. That seemed to be all the independence they believed her capable of.
Brittany knew she could handle so much more adventure than that. Since she’d gotten her new heart at fifteen, she’d felt like she could fly, but her parents were still afraid she would fall if she so much as jumped.
Rodriguez didn’t treat her like she was made of glass. He was an adventure in and of himself. And even though she suspected he’d seen her scar that first day in the parking lot, he had never once treated her like an invalid.
“No, I want to go look at the flowers myself. Do you know of any particular florists I ought to visit, Mother?”
Preferably florists who didn’t attend the flower market and hadn’t ever heard of the Cartwright-Cox cursed wedding. Brittany was still having no luck whatsoever locating a florist for the wedding. It was time to bring out the big guns. Claudia Hylton-VanDeere could plan a wedding with her eyes closed and one hand tied behind her back. But if Brittany admitted she was planning a wedding, it would come out that she was working for Karmic Consultants and her parents would worry themselves into hysterics.
“Oh! Well, Gianni’s is nice. I’m sure I can arrange for a sampling to be brought to you, dear.”
Heaven forbid she should have to leave the house.
“No, Mother. I’ll just go by there myself. Gianni’s, you said?”
“Well, yes. But Floral Expressions is much closer. Just down the road, if you’re looking for something you want to see yourself.”
“Thank you, Mother,” Brittany said. “That’s very helpful.”
But that didn’t mean she was going to go to the closer one just because her mother was afraid to let her wander a few miles farther from home.
Brittany was beginning a new phase in her life. A phase in which she actually
lived
. Where she had real friends and real experiences and real lovers. A delicious shiver snaked down her spine at the thought of that last
real
addition to her life.
“Are you cold, dear? I do wish you would wear a sweater. Those sundress are so thin.” Her mother frowned at the scarf covering her cleavage, where the thick scar from her surgery hid. “And so low-cut.”
Brittany flashed another bright smile. “There’s no reason to shun fashion just because I have a ten-inch scar on my chest,” she said cheerfully. “I like sundresses.”
“I know, dear,” her mother said soothingly—everything was soothing and gentle and concerned. It was enough to drive a girl to wildness. “We just worry.”
“I know, Mother.”
She’d spent a lot of years living her life according to her parents’ worries.
She couldn’t go through the motions of life anymore. She had done that for too long already in an attempt to show her parents she was okay. She couldn’t do it anymore. It was too much of a betrayal of the second chance she had been given.
Brittany was alive. Someone else wasn’t. Lots of someone elses, actually. People born with bum hearts who couldn’t afford the expensive surgeries and experimental treatments that had kept her alive until it was her turn for a new heart. People who didn’t have her connections, or her luck.
She couldn’t honor them by being safe, by surviving. She had to honor them by
living
.