“I sure do, and I plan on giving him an earful of how I’ve been treated here today.”
“Yeah? And I’ll tell him about the ostrich.”
I gasped. “That was one time. And she pulled through it just fine.”
“Mm-hm. Can I finish my dinner now?”
“Yes.” I turned and stalked off to show him how angry I was. Ostrich, my ass. She was fine once the vet removed the Tupperware.
As I made my way to Reyes’s apartment, hoping he’d be home from work, I called out to Duff. Darn him. One minute I can’t get the man out of my hair, and the next he’s impossible to find. Like a ghost.
Laughing at my own sense of humor, I knocked on Reyes’s door. Someone had to laugh, and I was pretty much the only one who got me. It was a lonely life.
The door opened, and a seemingly annoyed Reyes stood on the other side. What’d I do now?
“Hey,” I said, about half a second before the door slammed in my face. What the —? I knocked again, this time pounding.
The door opened wide as he leaned against the frame and crossed his arms at his chest. He really liked that pose. I really liked that he liked that pose.
“What was that for?” I asked.
“Why didn’t you use the key?”
“Because.” I’d thought about it, but I still had a hard time just barging in on him. I handed him the list. “I thought you were at work.”
“Was. I’m not now.”
“A man of few words. Well, I got a few words for you.” I pushed it into his hands. “I need working capital.”
He scanned the list. “What will you do for a new stove in Mrs. Allen’s apartment?”
“Jump around and sing ‘Oklahoma’? How do I know? It’s a stove.”
“I’m going to need some kind of incentive program if I’m going to fork out this kind of money.”
I held back a laugh. “Incentive program, huh? So what’s a stove worth these days?”
“Depends. Do you have a nurse’s uniform?”
I raised a mischievous brow. “No, but I have a Princess Leia slave costume.”
A deep hunger flashed in his irises. It caused a warmth to flood my abdomen, and only partly because he knew what a Princess Leia slave costume consisted of.
“That’ll do,” he said. “And this is already taken care of.” He handed me back the list. “Just give this to the management company.”
“They won’t give me the runaround?”
“Not if they want to remain your management company.” He had a point. “Are you still insisting on paying the Dealer a visit?”
As he spoke, a shadow nearby caught my attention. Sometimes ADD was a good thing. I turned in time to see Duff appear by my door, then disappear just as quickly.
“Hold that thought,” I said to Reyes as I spun around and scanned the hallway. “Duff!” I called out. “Show yourself this instant.”
He did, but he materialized at the other end of the hall.
“What are you doing?” I asked him.
“N-n-nothing. J-j-just s-standing here,” he said, his stutter more pronounced than usual. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was keeping his watchful gaze on Reyes and resembled a rabbit ready to bolt.
“Look,” I said, walking toward him, “I just have a few questions. I wanted to talk to you. Will you come here?”
“I-I’ll s-stay here, thank you v-very much.”
Aw, he was sweet. “You’re so welcome. But, really, I need to talk to you —”
I’d started to gesture to my door when I caught Reyes’s scowl in my periphery. I turned back to him. “What are you doing?”
“What?”
“You’re intimidating him.”
“I’m standing here.”
“Yes, intimidatingly.”
One corner of his mouth lifted playfully. “And just how should I stand?”
“For starters, you can stop scowling at him.”
He let his gaze travel back to Duff, slowly, menacingly, then said, “But it’s fun.”
“Reyes Alexander Farrow.” I marched back to him. “Can you be nice to the departed or not?”
He lowered his head, pretending to be repentant, then looked at me from underneath his long lashes and said, “But Duff here isn’t just any departed, are you, boy?” He leveled another cold stare on him, and Duff disappeared.
“Damn it,” I said, backhanding Reyes’s shoulder, albeit lightly. “How do you know him?”
“Duff and I are old friends. He used to come visit me in prison.”
“What?” I glanced over my shoulder, but he was still gone. “Why?”
“He was keeping an eye on me.” He reached out and let his fingers glide along my stomach.
“Why would he do that?” I asked. I was always out of the loop.
“He was worried about you. Seems he’s smitten.”
Oh, man. Seriously? “He’s a departed, Reyes. It’s not like we can actually have a relationship.”
“If any human could have a relationship with a departed, it’d be you. And he knows it.” He slid a finger into my belt loop and tugged.
“Reyes, he’s harmless. Be nice to him.”
He ran a hand around to the small of my back, the heat of him almost too much to bear. It soaked into my skin and my hair, and caused goose bumps to lace over me, it was so hot. “I love that about you,” he said, picking up a lock of my hair and rubbing it between the fingers of one hand while pulling me closer with the other. “Your inability to see the bad in people until it’s too late.” He was being awfully flirtatious, almost as though he were trying to change the subject.
“Are you saying Duff is a bad person?”
“I’m saying you’re too good for him.”
I finally molded to him, letting him press against me. “I’m too good for you, too,” I said, teasing. But he didn’t take the bait.
“Agreed,” he said instead, a second before he lowered his mouth to mine, fusing us together like an arc welder. He wrapped his arms around me, the hold viselike, unyielding. The heat was blistering and surreal at once, and I felt it all the way down to my toes. He broke off the kiss and nipped at my ear. “I guess it’s a good thing you can have a relationship with a departed,” he said.
“Why’s that?”
“We can still see each other after I die.”
I tried to lean back to look at him, but Reyes went from cruising at a solid twenty-five miles per hour to flying faster than the speed of sound. In an instant, he had me pinned against the wall, the long fingers of one hand bracing both wrists above my head while the other slipped beneath my sweater. His hand slid around my waist and up my spine, his fingertips tracing the hollow line of my vertebrae.
“Probing for a weak spot?” I asked him softly, well aware of his penchant for severing spines.
“I know exactly where your weak spots are,” he said, and he proved his point by slipping his hand underneath my bra and cradling Will Robinson, teasing her crest with a soft squeeze.
Arousal leapt inside me so fast, I felt the world spin.
“And I know exactly where to probe,” he continued. He pushed my legs apart with his hips and pushed against me, the friction of our jeans causing a nuclear heat to build in my abdomen.
I tore one wrist free of his grasp and planted my hand on a steely buttock to pull him closer. He let a husky growl escape him. The deep sound reverberated through my bones, crashing like spilled wine against them. And like wine, the effect was intoxicating.
Someone, a man, cleared his throat nearby.
It took me a moment to realize we had company. When I did, I broke our hold with a startled jump. “Uncle Bob,” I said, smoothing my clothes and straightening to face him. “You’re early.”
“I’m late, actually.” He stood there in a brown suit and loosened tie, looking both uncomfortable and cautious.
I glanced at my watch. It was 6:10. “Oh, wow, the time must’ve slipped away from me.”
“Mus
t have,” he said before raising the bag he was carrying. “Hungry?”
“Famished.” I looked back at Reyes, who was back to scowling, this time at Uncle Bob. “What about you?” I asked him. “Want to join us?”
“No, thank you,” he said, stepping back into his apartment. A burst of cool air rushed between us with his absence. “I ate at the bar.”
“Okay, well, we can discuss our business for tonight later?” The card game didn’t start until nine, so we had some time to come up with a brilliant plan that would keep us both alive. And hopefully one that would let us keep our souls as well.
I didn’t want a demon supping on my soul.
Uncle Bob’s timing could not have been more perfect. Right as we turned to go into my apartment, Cookie’s date rose in the stairwell beside us. He nodded to us and went straight to Cookie’s door to knock. Uncle Bob stopped in his tracks. He surveyed the man from the top of his neatly trimmed head to the tips of his wing tip toes. It was funny. Kind of. On one hand, I felt sorry for him. On the other, it was his own fault. Cookie wasn’t going to wait around forever. She needed snuggle time.
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 rreally 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.”