Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (41 page)

I
first saw
the Devil when I was six years old.

Of course, at the time I didn’t actually know he was the Devil. When you’re six, if you notice adults at all, it’s mostly to make sure they’re not about to tell you to stop doing whatever it is that you’re doing. Or maybe you’re reassuring yourself that the adult off on the sidelines isn’t the Evil Stranger in the trench coat who does horrible but unexplained things to small children — you know, the ones who aren’t smart enough to remember that they’re not supposed to talk to anyone outside a small, well-defined circle of family and friends.

The strange man stood quietly off to one side of the park, watching as I played with Ashley, my then–best friend. I didn’t notice anything particular about him, except that he wasn’t any of my friends’ fathers, as far as I could tell. Ashley and I were playing on the swings, taunting each other to see who could go the highest, and when I was able to focus on the ground once again, he was gone.

At the time, I didn’t think anything much of it.

But then he turned up again seven years later. I was at my junior high school’s graduation and had just picked up the fake little diploma they gave out to all the eighth-graders. After I took the piece of paper from the principal’s hand and turned to walk off the platform, I saw the Devil again. I didn’t know who he was then, either, just that he looked vaguely familiar, a dark-haired man, tall, whose features nagged at my memory. By then I’d become aware enough of the opposite sex that I was able to decide I thought he was sort of cute — for an old guy.

Of course, I had no idea how very, very old he actually was.

By the time I turned twenty-one, I’d almost forgotten about those two odd little encounters. I’d managed to escape what I saw as the smothering suburbia of Orange County (although UCLA wasn’t exactly Outer Mongolia or anything), and it was on the campus at UCLA that I saw the Devil for the last time. Let me rephrase that — it was the last time I saw him as just an observer.

I was hurrying to class, late because I’d stayed up most of the night finishing a paper on German Expressionism. Exactly how an in-depth analysis of Murnau’s
Faust
was supposed to help me with my future as a productive member of society hadn’t been fully explained to me, but at the time getting a good grade on that paper seemed like the most important thing in my world. I almost didn’t see the stranger as I staggered toward the Humanities building, lugging a bulging backpack that was destined to send me to the chiropractor.

But there the man was, a flicker at the corner of my peripheral vision. I paused — I think I told myself it was to hitch the pack a little farther up on my shoulder before it slid down and dislocated my elbow. Really, though, I stopped so I could get a closer look at him.

He hadn’t changed. Now, I know there are people in the world who age extraordinarily well. In fact, my mother still looks pretty damn good for her age. But she still looks older than she did when I was six, or thirteen, or even twenty-one. This man looked exactly the same that day at UCLA as the first time I’d seen him some fifteen years earlier.

My brain churned away at the improbability and then did the most logical thing it could: It told me I was mistaken.
He just looks like the person you saw when you were a kid
, it told me.
How could it possibly be the same man?

How indeed?

So I re-shouldered my backpack and continued on my way. Right before I ducked inside the building, I glanced back at the spot where he had been standing, just to prove to myself that my eyes had been playing tricks on me. By then he was gone.

I felt a little shiver touch the back of my neck, despite the warm spring day. But I had a class to get to and was late, and so I shook my head at myself and hurried on. I didn’t have the time to deal with impossible conundrums.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I’d gone up and spoken to him then.

F
ast-forward another seven years
. During my senior year of college my parents went through a typically messy divorce, and rather than deal with the fallout of the situation, I decided to stay up in L.A. and look for work there. I was lucky enough to land a job as an editorial assistant at a glossy regional magazine. A few years later, the magazine’s copyeditor got an offer he couldn’t refuse from a big-time investment firm downtown that needed someone to oversee the company’s publications and website. So I got promoted to copyeditor and actually had my own office. I was also finally making enough money that I could bail out on my less-than-optimal roommate situation and find an apartment of my own.

Contrary to popular belief, working at a magazine isn’t all that glamorous. All right, maybe some magazines are glamorous. My editor does get some pretty good perks, but believe me, when the invites come in for movie premieres or store openings, it’s not the copyeditor who gets to walk down the red carpet. No, sir. The copyeditor gets to wait for the editorial staff to write about their glam evenings and then make sure all the commas are in the right place.

Still, it wasn’t a bad life. My apartment wasn’t anything special, but I liked it because, unlike a lot of places in Southern California (and especially in Irvine, where I’d grown up), it had a bit of history. It was built sometime in the ’40s and had a cute little faux fireplace with a molded plaster mantel, actual crown moldings in the living room, and even a tiny laundry area that allowed me to have my own stackable washer and dryer so I wouldn’t have to suffer the indignity of dragging my unmentionables to the laundromat. Unlike most other Angelenos, I didn’t have much of a commute; I’d chosen this apartment partially because it was exactly 2.3 miles from the office, which meant I could get to work in five minutes most days, barring the unforeseen accident or unscheduled “street improvement.” (Which I think is Caltrans code for shutting down lanes on random streets because they feel like it.)

My love life, on the other hand — well, let’s just say the 500-thread-count sheets I’d bought on clearance the previous summer hadn’t been getting much action.

I’d been dating this one guy, Danny Koslowski, on and off for about six months. He didn’t seem that interested in having things progress any further, and I didn’t know if I even cared all that much. For one thing, I had a problem with a guy who was staring down the barrel of the big 3-0 but who still went by “Danny.” It made him sound like a five-year-old who should be calling me about play dates, not real dates. Also, he was a computer geek. Now, I don’t have a problem with geeks, per se. I mean, I’d rather have that than a guy who’s sports-obsessed. But after the third or fourth date canceled because he got wrapped up in playing Warcrack — excuse me, War
craft
— I’d begun to seriously reconsider where our relationship was going. If we even had a relationship.

Unfortunately, I didn’t have much of an alternative, and he was so obsessively casual about the whole thing that he made it almost impossible for me to break up with him. Go two weeks without a phone call? No problem. Inquire innocently whether our relationship was “exclusive”? His only answer was a shrug and, “I don’t know — do you want it to be?”

I think I answered yes. But what immediately depressed me was that I didn’t have anyone to be non-exclusive with, even if I had told him I wanted to see other people. I almost signed up for an online dating service in a fit of pique, but I came to my senses after recalling some of my friends’ horror stories on that subject.

“You should do what I did,” my friend Nina told me at lunch one day. We were roommates during college, and we still saw each other a good deal on the weekends. She’d moved back to Brentwood, where she was living in her parents’ guest house rent-free. It was a pretty cushy setup that allowed her to use her salary for important things, like shopping. Also, Nina’s father was a plastic surgeon. It wasn’t as if he needed her rent money to make his mortgage.

And Nina, irony of ironies, sure as hell didn’t need any plastic surgery. She was part Irish, part African-American, part Japanese, and all gorgeous. I considered myself a moderately attractive person, but if I entered a room with Nina I might as well be invisible for all the attention I got. Despite this, I really did like her.

“So what did you do?” I asked her, pushing a crouton off to one side of my plate. Damn those carbs anyway.

“I went bi,” she replied blithely.

I almost choked on a piece of arugula. “You what?”

She shrugged. “Hey, it doubles the size of the playing field.”

But — but — I stared at her for a few seconds, then asked, “So when did this momentous change take place? I mean, I don’t remember you being into anyone except guys during college.”

“Oh, a few months ago.” Her green eyes, startling against their surrounding milk-and-coffee skin, laughed at me. “I met someone.”

She met someone? I had to infer that someone was female, or there wouldn’t have been any reason for this sudden switch to the Dark Side. Feeling more than a little uncomfortable, I said, “So all that time we were roommates….” I let the words trail off, not knowing exactly what I had meant to say.

Nina burst out laughing at that comment. “Oh, don’t worry, Christa. I wasn’t attracted to
you
.”

“Gee, thanks.”

“I didn’t mean it that way.” She took a bite of her burger; besides being gorgeous, she had one of those metabolisms where she could eat anything she wanted and never gain an ounce. I wasn’t quite as fanatical about my weight as a lot of people I knew, but more than two or three cheeseburgers in a month, and my pants started to get a little tight. “I hadn’t really started to explore that side of my sexuality back then, and besides, you’re my friend. I just wouldn’t look at you that way.”

If you say so
, I thought, but somehow Nina’s words depressed me even more. I mean, I’d certainly never been interested in women and wouldn’t go that route no matter how desperate I got, but still it would have been nice to know that at least she found me attractive. “Well, I’m pretty sure your solution isn’t an option for me,” I said, setting down my salad fork. The field greens and vinaigrette had suddenly lost their charms. “Do your parents know?”

“Are you kidding? The doctor would freak. Gina and I get together at her place off Montana Avenue.”

“What? You tell your parents you’re going over there to help her with her homework?”

“They think Gina’s an artist we represent who needs a lot of hand-holding,” she said with a smirk.

Was she serious? Nina and Gina? I could just see them getting matching Juicy Couture track suits with their names embroidered across their butts. I shook my head to rid it of that frightening image. “My father would probably say you were just going through a phase.”

She snorted. “Like he would know. How’s your stepmom? Has she gone through all the Botox in Newport Beach yet?”

“I think they had to send out to Beverly Hills for a restock,” I replied.

If it hadn’t all happened to me, it would have been funny, in a clichéd sort of way. Successful psychologist has midlife crisis, dumps his wife, and trades up for a newer model. At least my stepmother wasn’t younger than I — I’d been spared that indignity — but Traci was still almost twenty years younger than my mother. Of course, that didn’t stop her from exploiting every cosmeceutical means necessary to prolong her late-thirties status for as long as possible. Maybe she was worried that my father would end up doing the same thing to her that he’d done to my mother. I think I read somewhere that off-loading wives got progressively easier as you moved up the food chain.

At any rate, I’d tried to play nice as much as I could. Luckily I was already out of the house when my parents split up for good; my younger brother didn’t fare so well, since he was almost eight years younger than I am. I had to say this for my father, though: He never tried to get out of paying alimony, and he kept on sending my mother child support even though Jeff was twenty-one at that point and well past dependent age as far as the courts were concerned. My father said he’d pay for Jeff as long as he was in school. Since my younger brother seemed to be on the ten-year plan at Irvine Valley College, I wasn’t going to hold my breath on the child support going away any time soon.

Lisa, my older sister, claimed that Jeff was just having a tough time because of the divorce, but seriously, when she made that remark it had been almost seven years since the final papers were signed, and five since Traci officially became our stepmother. After a while things stop being reasons and start becoming excuses.

Then again, Lisa had always babied Jeff because he was the youngest and the only boy. She and I squabbled a lot as kids, probably because we were barely two years apart, but as we got older we didn’t so much make up and become friends as we just got on with our own lives. We never had much in common, since she was this uber-organized mega-sales real estate agent in south Orange County, and I’d always done all right for myself but never accomplished anything that extraordinary.

Frankly, I was the stereotypical middle child — never causing much trouble, never wanting to make waves. Pretty, but not the sort who would stop a guy in his tracks. Straight brown hair, brown eyes, a shade taller than average, slender but not thin, the girl next door.
Boring
, I thought for the millionth time, as I looked across the table and took in Nina’s perfect curls and five-foot-ten-inch frame. Even the damned busboy was loitering as he cleared the table next to ours so he could get an eyeful.

“Children of shrinks are always messed up,” Nina said. “You’re lucky you got out with just a few minor neuroses.”

“Lucky,” I repeated, thinking of Danny, who seemed to care more about his computer and his online gaming than he did me, of my bleached stepmother and my stoner brother and especially my mother. The breakup with my father had made her go all New Age-y and spiritual as some sort of Zen coping mechanism, and lately it had been driving me nuts.

Giving me a stern look, Nina reached for her water glass. “I smell a pity party coming on,” she said, after taking a drink. “Which I definitely will not allow. Especially with your birthday coming up next week. What do you want to do, anyway?”