Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (44 page)

“So do you know everything about me?” I asked, hoping I sounded casual. “I mean, powers of heaven and hell and all that?”

“No,” he replied. “I know no more of you than what anyone else observing you might have seen. Well, that, and what others know and think about you. But you, the real you” — and he tapped a finger against his temple as if to indicate one’s mind or thoughts — “I don’t know any more about that than anyone else.”

“Ah,” I said. “Let me guess. The rules?”

“Precisely.” His eyes met mine then, and I made myself return his gaze for a moment before I looked down. I hadn’t been expecting to see such approval.

Blood rushed to my cheeks, and I hoped the dim lighting in the restaurant hid my blush. It would have been so easy to let myself fall prey to his charm, and I knew I couldn’t do that. Not until I knew what he was really up to.

“Well, that’s a relief,” I said lightly. “No girl likes to have all her mystery taken away.”

“God forbid,” he said.

“Did He?” I asked, and this time the Devil’s laugh sounded a little forced.

“How’s your prime rib?” he returned, and I knew I had scored a point.

The conversation wandered to commonplaces after that — for some reason he wanted to know about my job, about how I liked living in Los Angeles — all the typical things a man might ask on a first date. He continued to expertly steer the conversation away from anything involving him, and I let him do that for the time being. It was fairly obvious he didn’t look on this evening as a one-time affair, and for now I was willing to go along with that. If nothing else, trying to discover his real purpose in seeking me out sounded like a challenge.

After dinner he began to head toward my apartment, and I protested that we had to go back to The Grove so I could retrieve my car from the parking structure. He shook his head and said, “Your car is already safely tucked away in the garage at your home.”

“It — what?” I shifted in my seat so I could see his profile. “How could you do that?”

“The same way I do everything else.” The laugh lines at the corner of the one eye I could see crinkled slightly in amusement. “It would have been tedious to have to retrieve your vehicle, so I…moved it.”

Damn. Nice trick to have, especially in L.A. I was very lucky to even have the garage; there were more apartments than garages in my complex, and getting one involved seniority in the building. Well, technically, that was how it was supposed to work. But one came vacant at the same time the apartment I occupied did, and although Lucille downstairs was next in line to get the garage, Rudy, the apartment manager, had been waging guerrilla warfare with her over her many cats even though the building was supposed to be pet-free. So his revenge was giving me the garage. I needed it more, anyway; my Mercedes deserved the protection a lot more than her ancient Taurus, which looked as if it should have been recalled years ago.

At any rate, after the Devil parked the Bentley at the curb in front of the building, I had to go around to the back to make sure my car really was safely inside the garage. Sure enough, after I had undone the padlock and lifted the door, I saw the Mercedes gleaming inside.

“Satisfied?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And mildly freaked. But I suppose I’ll get over it.”

“I hope so.”

My apartment was on the second floor, and he followed me up the stairs and waited as I fumbled in my purse for my keys. I had to remove the Victoria’s Secret shopping bag and tuck it under one arm before my fingers finally found the key ring at the bottom of my purse.

Then I took a breath, looked up at him, and said, “By the way, I don’t kiss on the first date.”

“Very old-fashioned of you.”

“Guess that’s the Orange County in me,” I replied.

He smiled, but I could see his glance lingering on my lips. “Good night, then, Christa.”

“Good night.” I faced the door and inserted the key in the lock. It turned, and I had one foot inside when I heard him say,

“By the way — ”

I looked over my shoulder. “What?”

For some reason he was staring at the Victoria’s Secret shopping bag I still had clenched under one arm. “Red’s my favorite color.”

And with that he strolled off down the staircase. I could hear him whistling as he descended the steps and made his way to his car.

I shut the door behind me, then leaned my head against it, heart pounding.

Damn….

A
n empty gray plain
, so featureless it was difficult to tell where the ground ended and the sky began. A strong wind, neither hot nor cold, blew from an indeterminate direction, and smelled of sulfur and ash. Nothing grew. Nothing changed.

Beelzebub fought the urge to look at his watch. What was the point, in a place that had no notion of time?

But then Asmodeus was there, his dark suit and perfectly groomed hair incongruous notes in that soulless place. Well, Asmodeus always was a bit of a peacock.

“I’ve been hearing things,” Beelzebub said.

“Maybe you should get that checked.”

Beelzebub chose to ignore his compatriot’s snarky comment and went on, “
He
has been indulging in some questionable behavior.”

Asmodeus stopped fiddling with his cufflinks. “Questionable?”

“I’m fairly certain
he
’s trying to make an end run.”

“How do you mean?”

Sometimes Asmodeus’ obtuseness could be downright annoying. On the other hand, at least he was trustworthy. Most of the time. “
He
’s gone off and done some independent negotiations with Him.” Beelzebub cast a significant glance upward.

After a second or two Asmodeus nodded, then frowned. “You think
he
’s trying to make a break for it?”

“Yes.”

“Without us?”

“Yes.”

Asmodeus appeared to digest that information for a little while. “Well, that’s not very…sporting, is it?”

“No.”

A small silence fell. Beelzebub held his tongue, knowing the best thing to do was simply wait until the other demon came to the same conclusion Beelzebub already had formulated some time before.

“So what are we going to do about it?”

Beelzebub would not allow himself to smile at the use of the word “we.” He replied, “Put a stop to it, of course.”

“How?”

“
He
has been spending time in the company of a mortal woman. She must be part of the deal, whatever the details may be. So the most reasonable thing to do is somehow keep the two of them apart.”

Asmodeus tapped a finger against his chin. “Possession?” he asked.

Beelzebub shook his head. “No. At least, not of her. It’s too risky —
he
would probably be able to tell right away, and then we’d have a lot of explaining to do, wouldn’t we?”

“I suppose so. Then who?”

Luckily, Beelzebub had had some time to figure this out. Once he’d zeroed in on Christa Simms as the unlikely target of
his
attentions, it had taken little effort to make a quick study of her acquaintances, of those who could do the most good — or ill, depending on how one looked at it — in foiling this underhanded plan. “She has a boyfriend,” he said.

“So which one of us gets to possess the boyfriend?”

“Neither.”

Asmodeus frowned. “Excuse me?”

Allowing himself a small smile, Beelzebub replied, “Too risky. The woman involved might notice something odd about his behavior, and might say something to
him
. We can’t risk that. However, the boyfriend has two roommates.”

This time it only took an instant for comprehension to flare in Asmodeus’ eyes. “So we possess the roommates — ”

“ — and use them to manipulate the situation.”

“It might work.”

“Oh, it will work. The boyfriend is very close to these two, and tends to take their advice. It shouldn’t be difficult at all to get him to do whatever we say.”

“So who are these two?”

“A couple of computer geeks.”

Asmodeus looked pained. “Geeks with substandard wardrobes, no doubt.”

“Is there any other kind?”

“I suppose not. If there is no other way — ”

“There isn’t.”

Asmodeus muttered something that sounded like,
The things I do for you
, but since it was obvious the words weren’t meant to be heard, Beelzebub chose to ignore them.

“Very well, then,” he said briskly. “I’ll contact you when it’s time to go.”

“And
he
won’t notice that we’re gone?”

“I think
he
’s sufficiently distracted by this woman that we have some room in which to maneuver.”

With a nod, Asmodeus said, “I’ll be hearing from you,” and then disappeared as precipitously as he had arrived.

Excellent. Just a few more things to set in place, and then it would be off to Los Angeles to take over the hearts and minds of his intended victims. Beelzebub hoped the endeavor wouldn’t require more than a few days; lengthy possessions tended to be an exhausting proposition at best. Still, he was willing to make the sacrifice.

Because he was damned if he was going to allow Lucifer to regain the Kingdom of Heaven if the rest of the angels who’d suffered the Fall had to stay down here in Hell….

I
was still feeling
a bit disoriented — to say the least — when I went in to work the next morning. It actually hadn’t been all much past ten when the Devil dropped me off the night before, but I hadn’t been able to sleep for hours. I even wrote an entry about my experiences in my private blog, hoping it might help me to set down the evening’s events.

To say I just had the craziest birthday ever is probably an understatement, but it was. I’m still trying to process what happened, to understand how someone like me, Christa Simms, Ms. Ordinary, could have had dinner with the Devil.

Wow, that looks even worse written out. I wanted to not believe him at first. But that trick of transporting us halfway across town in the blink of an eye? Not something I could easily ignore. And when I tried to come up with “plausible” explanations for what had occurred, they just didn’t work. When your explanations are so convoluted that they start to sound crazy, too, then it’s generally easier to take something at face value, even if your brain really doesn’t want to.

The really insane thing, though, is that I enjoyed myself. Maybe I shouldn’t have, but who would have thought the Devil could be such a gentleman? And fun. And amazingly good-looking, and…

Uh-oh.

I have a feeling this is going to get complicated.

Then I went to bed and stared at the ceiling for what seemed like half the night before I finally dozed off.

It didn’t help matters much when I got into my car the next morning and stared at the fuel gauge in bewilderment. I could have sworn that it was getting close to empty; in fact, I’d made a mental note a few days earlier that I’d probably have to get gas on Wednesday. But there it was, the needle just a hair past full.

Trying to win my affections with free gas?
I thought, then shook my head and carefully backed the car out of the garage. There wasn’t a lot of room between it and the building, so even though I’d been doing the same thing for almost two years now, I still took it easy. Then I climbed out of my car, and shut the garage door and locked it.

I was running a few minutes late, since my sleeplessness of the night before had led to some definite sluggishness this morning, but I doubted anyone would notice. Most of the magazine’s staff tended to be late-morning people. I got in around eight-thirty most days, and the only one who arrived before me on a regular basis was Marta, the receptionist, who had to be there so she could answer the phones. It was a good morning if anyone else showed up much before nine o’clock.

I liked having that time to myself at the start of the day; it allowed me to attack whatever bits and pieces might have come in after I left the afternoon before. Besides, the one good thing about getting to work before my boss was that she didn’t have a clue about what time I actually showed up.

The art department had produced a few layouts late in the day — they were waiting in my in-basket after I let myself into my office. Michael, the art director, and Jesus, his assistant, rarely appeared before 10 a.m., but they also usually stayed until at least six or seven, depending on what sorts of deadlines they had breathing down their necks.

Yeah, I know — Jesus — very funny. But I didn’t name the guy.

Anyway, I logged the layouts as being turned in and then went to put them in the feature editor’s inbox. As I was walking back from his office, Marta called out to me.

“Hey, Christa! Delivery for you!”

Mystified, I turned and made my way over to the receptionist’s desk. An enormous bouquet of roses in a cut-crystal vase sat there, almost obscuring Marta’s bright-red hair.

“These just came,” she said.

Of course the roses were my favorites — the creamy ivory type with deep red edging along the petals. There had to be two dozen of them — no lightweight baby’s breath helping to fill the vase here. Just glorious roses, so many I could smell them from a few feet away.

Marta was looking at me with a mixture of envy and curiosity. Certainly no one in my dating past had ever shown any evidence of being this extravagant.

I saw a cream-colored card almost obscured in the masses of flowers. I didn’t want to open it in front of Marta — not when I was fairly certain who had sent the flowers — so I only smiled and said, “Thanks, Marta. I’ll just get these back to my office.” And I scooped up the vase and hurried away before she could start asking any questions.

Once I was safe within the confines of my own office, I plucked the card off the little plastic holder and sat down in my chair. With fingers that trembled just a little I ran a fingernail under the envelope’s flap and opened it. The card inside was the same plain ivory stock, so the black writing on it stood out plainly.

Thank you for a wonderful evening. I’ll call you soon.

The only signature was a scrawled “L.” For Lucifer?

My phone rang. I jumped and dropped the card. Heart beating a little more quickly, I leaned over and looked at the display on the phone. All it said was that it was a wireless caller, with no number shown. Still, I had a pretty good idea of who it might be.

Strange how I could identify his voice right away after only one evening spent in his company. “Do you like the flowers?”

“They’re — they’re gorgeous.” All the normal questions, such as “how did you know those were my favorites?” or “how did you get this number?” seemed superfluous. Instead I asked, “How did you find a florist that was open this early?”

“You have such a practical mind, Christa. I like that.” He paused, and then said, sounding amused, “There’s a place up on Crescent Heights that opens at eight.”

“Oh.”

Of course I couldn’t see his face, but somehow I got the impression he was smiling. “I wanted to know if you were available this evening.”

Well, he was persistent. I’d give him that. “I can’t go out with you tonight,” I said.

“Why not?”

Because you’re the Devil
, I thought, but I only replied, “I can’t go out every single weeknight — ”

“What about this weekend?”

“I’m going down to Orange County to see my mother on Saturday.”

“Friday, then?”

Resistance was obviously futile. “Oh, all right,” I said. Besides, it wasn’t as if I had anything else going on.

“I’ll pick you up at seven. Enjoy the flowers.” And he hung up.

I sat there for a minute, holding the handset and looking at it blankly, then replaced it in the receiver. It figured that my social life required the Devil’s intervention to bring it back from the dead.

Trying to force him out of my mind — and not succeeding very well, with those amazing roses staring me in the face — I booted up my computer, then checked my email for any articles that might have come in the evening before. Several of our contributing editors worked freelance and just emailed their Word files from home. I’d been expecting three and had only gotten one. Typical.

Still, it gave me something to work on. I opened the Internet radio client on my Mac and chose a classical music station; I needed something to calm my nerves. After a while, I got back into the rhythm of things, tightening the prose, fixing some egregious run-on sentences. Seriously, you’d think some people never paid attention during their high school English classes.

Then I heard the voice of Jacqui, my managing editor, inquire in disbelieving tones, “Do
not
tell me those came from Danny!”

“Um, no,” I replied.

She came around the corner of the desk and looked from the roses to me and back again. “Spill,” she said.

“Um….” I hedged. Luckily, I’d already hidden the card in my desk drawer, but still it was fairly obvious that Mr. On-Again, Off-Again Koslowski wouldn’t have sent me anything so amazingly beautiful. Or expensive. “I sort of met someone.”

“Oh, thank God!”

I wasn’t sure that was who she should be thanking, but I managed a smile.

Jacqui was about fifteen years my senior and generally treated me less as an employee than as the long-lost little sister she never had. Most of the time I didn’t mind — in a lot of ways we were closer than I was with my own sister. But it also made for some awkwardness in the workplace. For one thing, she’d never approved of me seeing Danny. It wasn’t just that we were on the borderline of the whole “employees shouldn’t date other employees” policy. The magazine I worked for didn’t have a big enough staff to justify a full-time on-site IT person, so we contracted with an outside company to handle our computing issues. That’s how I met Danny in the first place — he’d come in to handle the upgrade of my older-generation iMac to a dual-processor machine with a cinema display.

Maybe I was starry-eyed over my fancy new computer, and that was the reason I’d agreed to go out with Danny in the first place. But as time dragged on and it became patently obvious this was a relationship that was going nowhere fast, Jacqui had become more impatient with the situation.

“Dump him,” she told me a few weeks earlier, after he’d blown off yet another date. “I’ll just have IT Solutions send someone else over here when we need service.”

I pondered the surreality of getting dating advice from my boss, then shook my head. “I don’t mind,” I said. “We always knew it was going to be casual.”

She gave me a dubious look. “If I were you, I’d stop wasting my time,” she said. “You think you have all the time in the world, and then boom! You’re thirty-five and wondering where all the good men went.”

Harsh experience motivated her, I knew; she’d spent almost ten years in one relationship, always thinking that eventually they were going to get married, and then one day he’d come home and told her he thought it wasn’t working out.

Maybe Nina had the right idea. On the surface, women did seem to be a lot more reliable.

“So now you can dump Danny,” Jacqui said, sounding very pleased with the universe.

“I don’t know about that,” I protested. “I’ve only been out on one date with this guy.”

“One date, which just
happened
to be on your birthday?”

I didn’t bother to reply. I knew she was going to read whatever significance she wanted into that particular fact.

“And he sends you flowers the next day?” She pushed her glasses back up on her head and gave me a piercing look. “Where did he take you?”

“Campanile,” I said with a sigh.

“A-ha!” She looked like the cat that had swallowed the canary. “So what’s this guy’s name?”

“L-Luke,” I replied. After all, he told me to call him that, even though I was having a hard time thinking of him as anything except the Devil.

“Luke what?”

Well, that was a good question. He’d never given me a last name. “I’d rather just leave it at Luke for now,” I said.

For a minute I thought she was going to keep prying, but maybe something in my expression told her she wasn’t going to have any luck. “That’s all right — you can keep your secrets if you want. But he sounds like a keeper to me.”

Her comment made me want to burst out laughing. Somehow I managed to maintain a straight face, though. “He’s very thoughtful,” I said after a brief hesitation. That much was the truth, at least.

Jacqui gave me another penetrating look, and shrugged. “Kick Mr. Koslowski to the curb,” she said, then departed, leaving me to stare at the roses and wonder exactly what I’d gotten myself into.

I
t never rains
but it pours. Well, that isn’t exactly true in Los Angeles, where we get lots of drizzly, misty stuff and not a lot of downpours. But in terms of my personal life, the saying pretty much hit the nail on the head.

That afternoon, one of the sales guy’s PCs went blooey. The editorial staff and art department used Macs, of course — they’re pretty much the industry standard for anything on the creative side. But the sales and operations people used regular PCs, and they tended to crap out on a much more regular basis than the Macs did.

So who shows up to fix the temperamental PC? Why, the absent Mr. Koslowski, naturally.

After he was done with his business on the second floor, he slouched his way down to my office, where I was poring over a layout covering the opening of a new art gallery on the Westside.

“Where the hell did you get those?” he demanded from the safety of my door frame.

I looked up from the color laser printout occupying my attention. “Oh, hi, Danny. Anything leap to mind about yesterday?”

“It was Tuesday. Who sent you those flowers?”

“Tuesday — very good.” I took off my glasses and rubbed the bridge of my nose. The glasses were just for close-up work; I had a mild astigmatism in my left eye and started to strain after a few hours of looking at ten-point type. “A Tuesday which just happened to be my birthday.”

For a few seconds he didn’t say anything. Then he muttered, “Oh.”

“Exactly. Thanks for the call, by the way.”

His sandy eyebrows drew together. “What call?”

“The one you were supposed to make wishing me a happy birthday.”

“Okay — Okay, I’m sorry. I blew it. I should have written it down in my phone.”

God forbid he should have to think or remember anything on his own. I wondered if he needed the iPhone to tell him to wipe his ass.

Then his frown deepened, and he said, “That doesn’t explain where the flowers came from.”

“Well, actually, it does. It was my birthday, and someone sent me flowers. Mystery solved.”

“Who sent them?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” I replied, my tone a little snottier than I intended. But the contrast between Danny’s adolescent behavior and Luke’s — okay, the
Devil’s
— was almost overwhelming, and I could feel myself rapidly losing my patience. I was sure Jacqui would have approved.

“But — but — we’re dating!” Danny spluttered. “I thought you said we were exclusive!”

“Maybe I made a mistake,” I said coolly. “I mean, what kind of a person in an ‘exclusive’ relationship forgets his girlfriend’s birthday?”

“What kind of girl in an exclusive relationship goes out with someone else on her birthday?” he shot back.

“The kind who doesn’t want to sit home alone,” I said.