Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (45 page)

That sort of pulled the rug out from under him. He opened his mouth, then shut it, looking both angry and embarrassed.

“Sorry,” he mumbled, his tone sulky in the extreme. “Let me make it up to you. Let’s go out Friday night.”

“I can’t,” I said, a little surprised at how good it felt to say the next sentence. Hell hath no fury and all that. “I have a date.”

“With him?” Danny jerked a thumb toward the roses.

A little amazed at how calm I was, I replied, “Yes.”

He crossed his arms. I noticed, as if I were looking at a stranger, how the tie his company forced him to wear had been knotted off-center, how the name tag pinned to his pocket was a little crooked. He was still sort of cute, in a rumpled, geeky sort of way, but I really did wonder in that moment why I’d ever thought I was attracted to him in the first place.

“Are you dumping me?” he asked at last, as if it had taken a long time for the thought to occur to him.

“No,” I said. I reached up to adjust one rose slightly, felt the velvet-soft petal brush against my thumb and forefinger. “Let’s just say that we’re no longer exclusive.”

“Fine,” he retorted, and jammed his hands into his pockets. He turned to go, then tossed an angry glance back over his shoulder. “But don’t think I’m going to give up that easily.”

I lifted my shoulders. What, had he suddenly decided to become the gallant knight, jousting for his lady love? Yeah, right. He might be angry right now, but I seriously doubted his emotions had been engaged enough for him to be upset for very long. No, probably all he was really suffering at that point was a case of hurt pride.

“Good luck with that,” I said, then turned back to my layout.

“Right,” he snapped, and slammed my office door behind him.

T
he feeling
of elation I experienced after my emancipation proclamation lasted approximately thirty minutes. Then, as usual, guilt started to set in.

Maybe I’d been too hard on Danny. Some guys just couldn’t remember dates to save their lives. And what the hell had I been thinking, flaunting my next date with the Devil…Luke…whoever…with him? I’d talked as if that relationship actually had some kind of future. How could Luke possibly be doing anything except amusing himself with me for some reason I’d probably never discover?

The door opened. “Stop that,” Jacqui said.

“Stop what?”

She put her hands on her hips and raised an eyebrow. “I saw Mr. Koslowski storm out of here earlier, so I’m assuming you finally told him off.”

“I didn’t tell him off,” I said. “I just told him I couldn’t go out with him Friday night because I already had a date with someone else.”

“Close enough. I’m sure that was sufficient to bruise his poor tender little ego.”

Bruise, and possibly sprain. I didn’t know for sure, because Danny had always been very good at not showing much of what he was feeling (if anything). Certainly he’d gotten a lot more excited about advancing his character a level in Warcraft than he ever seemed to be about spending time with me.

“Anyhow,” she continued inexorably, “you putting him in his place is certainly no reason for you to be sitting in here and beating yourself up about it.”

“I wasn’t — ”

“Oh, yes, you were. I saw the look on your face.”

I began to wonder if I should start going around with a paper bag over my head. At least that way people wouldn’t be able to tell what I was thinking all the time. I reflected that it was a good thing I had never gotten into playing poker, then said, “All right. I guess I do feel a teeny bit bad about it. But I suppose I gave him enough chances to shape up.”

“More than enough,” she said. “So you already have another date lined up for Friday night? I’m impressed. Where’s he taking you this time?”

“I don’t know,” I confessed. “I think it’s supposed to be sort of a surprise.”

Jacqui pursed her lips. “That could be good or bad.”

You have no idea
, I thought, but I said only, “True, but at least I know it won’t be dull.”

“Thoughtful
and
interesting?” she replied. “Hang on to this one, kid.” She shot me a grin and disappeared down the hallway.

Somehow I doubted she’d be quite so encouraging if she knew who Luke really was. Then again, considering the way men had treated her and so many other women I knew, maybe she would have thought the Devil was an step up.

The funny thing was that I’d never really thought all that much about God and the Devil, Heaven and Hell. My parents both ditched Christianity (“too much guilt,” according to my father) during their hippie days, and Lisa, Jeff, and I were raised in a cheerfully agnostic family with some slight Buddhist overtones. My mother got more into the spiritual stuff (in a strictly nontraditional way) as she got older, but I’d never been brought up to believe in a fiery Hell or a fluffy Heaven with angels playing harps and all that. I didn’t believe in reincarnation, either, even though my mother swore she’d experienced past-life regression in several sessions with a hypnotherapist. If it made her happy, great, but I wasn’t buying into it.

But to go from that religiously neutral background to facing an entity who claimed he was the Devil and in fact exhibited all the powers that such a supernatural being might actually possess — well, that was enough for me to feel as if my world had been seriously upended. I spent a considerable amount of time when I should have been working that afternoon trying to read what I could on the Internet about Lucifer, Satan…whatever. Of course I got everything from nutcases who swore they’d been possessed by the Devil to scholarly discussions of the linguistic roots of his name, but most of what I read didn’t particularly paint him as a nice guy.

Full of pride, he had rebelled against God and been cast down from Heaven. But if the Devil was supposed to be stuck down in Hell, watching Adolf Hitler roast on a spit or whatever else the Lord of the Underworld did to occupy his spare time, what was he doing buying mansions in Hancock Park and driving me around in a car worth more than a quarter-million dollars? (I looked up that little fact, too…curiosity had compelled me to see just how extravagant that Bentley really was.)

A cold, sick feeling started to grow in my stomach. I’d already agreed to see him again, and even if I thought I could summon up the courage to call things off, I had no way of reaching him. At any rate, he didn’t strike me as the sort of person who would take no for an answer. He’d certainly maneuvered me easily enough into dinner and a promise to go out with him a second time.

All right, look at this logically
, I told myself.
So you’ve dug up some information about him that’s less than encouraging. It’s all secondhand data as far as you know. He could just be the victim of some really bad press.

Of course, that sort of thinking only made me sound as if I’d swung into serious Queen of Denial mode. Who was I to refute centuries — millennia, really — of folklore and religious beliefs? All I had to go on was the fact that he’d rescued me on my birthday, given me a much more pleasant evening than I could have expected, and then sent me flowers the next day. Not exactly the actions of the Ultimate Evil, but several of the entries I’d read about Lucifer mentioned that he was the father of deception. This could all just be a really big buildup to some kind of horrible fate.

Jesus — the art assistant — stuck his head in my office door. “Christa.”

I must have jumped about a foot.

“Geez, are you okay?”

“Fine,” I lied, forcing the air back into my lungs. “What’s up?”

He gave me a quizzical look. “You seem a little jumpy.”

“I guess I was thinking about something else.”

“Something a million miles away, it looked like.”

Maybe even farther than that
, I thought.
Who knows how far away Heaven and Hell really are?

“Michael wanted to know if you had the layout for the restaurant review in your office. He needs to swap out one of the images.”

I shook my head. “I haven’t gotten it back yet, so it must still be on Roger’s desk somewhere. Good luck finding it.”

Jesus sighed. “Great. If he’s lost another layout — ” And, still muttering to himself, he wandered off down the hallway toward Roger’s office.

Roger McKinley was the executive editor of the magazine. He knew his stuff, and he was a great writer, but he was probably the least organized person I had ever met. Filing systems lasted about five minutes in his office. Story envelopes, layouts, even complete contacts notebooks had been known to disappear into his domain, never to be seen again. The staff had started calling his office the “Bermuda Triangle.” Of course, since the workflow was mostly electronic, we could always print things out again if necessary. But that meant whatever markups the feature editors might have put on those layouts were lost and would have to be done all over again — not the sort of thing you want to be faced with at the end of the day when you’re just trying to get the hell out of Dodge. Still, somehow we managed to get the magazine out without killing Roger. If it weren’t that he was actually a fairly likable guy, he would have been marked for death after his first week on the job.

At least Jesus’ interruption had gotten my mind off whatever torments Luke might or might not have planned for me. In fact, somehow I managed to summon a sort of fatalistic approach to the whole thing. If he really had an inventive and cruel plot in place for my imminent demise, there probably wasn’t much I could do about it. Mortals tended to get the short end of the stick when going up against higher powers, no matter what the movies might say to the contrary.

On the other hand, I didn’t see anything wrong with trying to get a little divine help on my side….

D
on’t ask
me why I immediately thought of going to a Catholic church. Maybe it was just more influence from the movies; whenever you saw people fighting the Devil, they tended to be Catholic. I mean, the Exorcist sure wasn’t a Southern Baptist.

Danny happened to be a practicing Catholic, which was strike one against the Church in my book. In this day and age, he managed to be one of the few young men left on the planet who still believed that premarital sex was a quick ticket to Hell. That actually worked for me in a weird way, since if we’d gone to bed together I would have had an even tougher time writing him off. Frustrated libido or not, avoiding physical intimacy did keep a relationship on a certain level.

But because of Danny I knew there was a Catholic church not too far from where I worked, and also because of him I knew that it was open for confession between five and six on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I didn’t know if having the Devil buy me dinner was grounds for confession, but if nothing else it would give me direct contact with a priest without having to make an appointment.

I felt more than a little strange pulling into the parking lot. After all, the only times in my life I’d even been in a church were at weddings and funerals, and not many of those, either. My mother was born in Southern California, so her family all still lived here, but my dad was originally from Baltimore, and we didn’t have much interaction with that side of the family.

At any rate, the last time I’d actually been inside a church was for my cousin Marissa’s wedding, and that had been almost two years ago. Since she and I were the same age, I’d been the recipient of numerous pitying stares and the ever-popular “so when are you going to get married?” questions. I’d ended up drinking way too much champagne to blot out the ignominy of the whole situation and finally barfed in the women’s bathroom. Luckily, no one had seen me, and I managed to escape without anyone knowing what I’d done, but I’d taken a dim view of weddings — and churches — ever since.

At least this building’s architecture was beautiful; as with so many other churches in Southern California, it was constructed in the Mediterranean style, with a red tile roof and clean white stucco exterior. Since by that time of day the sun had long since set, I could see the stained-glass windows lit up from within, glowing blue and red and gold in the dark. I welcomed the coming of evening because it made distinguishing facial features that much more difficult. I didn’t really expect to see anyone I knew, but anything that reduced my risk of discovery was all right by me.

Trying to move as if I actually knew what I was doing, I walked from the parking lot into the main church building. One other woman entered just ahead of me and made her way to a set of three dark wood cubicles off to one side. I assumed those must be the confession booths, and hung back to watch as she pushed the curtain on the center one aside and went in.

All right. That seemed simple enough. I chose the one to the left and then sat down on the little bench inside. It was close and dark and smelled faintly of incense; good thing I wasn’t claustrophobic.

I thought I heard movement on the other side of the little carved grille that separated priest and penitent, but since I had absolutely no idea what to do, I just sat there, waiting, until someone cleared his throat and said, “Bless you, my child. Are you here to confess?” His voice sounded quiet and kind, with a faint accent I couldn’t place.

Well, there was a good question. What did I actually have to confess? That I’d spoken with the Devil, allowed him to buy me dinner and apparently fill my gas tank? Were those mortal sins? I knew there was some sort of ritual involved here, and I racked my brains, trying to recall what I’d seen or read about confessions in the various films and books I’d absorbed over the years.

“Um….” I hedged. Finally some bits and pieces started to come back to me. “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned….” I knew something else was supposed to come after that, but for the life of me I couldn’t recall what.

A few seconds of silence. Then the priest asked, “How long has it been since your last confession?”

Oh, right. I should have remembered that. The only problem was that of course I’d never been to confession before. Would he throw me out if I told him I wasn’t even Catholic? “I don’t remember,” I replied, feeling more and more as if this had been a really stupid idea. “I actually came here to ask a question — to get some spiritual guidance.”