Gods and Mortals: Fourteen Free Urban Fantasy & Paranormal Novels Featuring Thor, Loki, Greek Gods, Native American Spirits, Vampires, Werewolves, & More (51 page)

“Better?” he asked.

“A little,” I admitted.

“Then come and sit down.”

Not bothering to protest, I followed him back into the living room. Luke didn’t attempt to sit next to me on the couch. Instead, he took a seat in the wing chair that was located to the right of the sofa and which formed an L-shape around the coffee table.

“By way of correction,” he said in an off-hand tone, “I’m not omniscient. There is only One who can claim that particular ability.”

“Well, that’s a relief,” I remarked. A few more swallows of the wine, and I began to feel a little less wild. “But you obviously know enough.”

“True.” He leaned back in the chair; a glass identical to the one I held appeared in his left hand. “This news about your father and his wife upsets you. Why?”

“Why?” I echoed. “Because — because — ” And I broke off, wondering what it was that really
had
set me off so badly. Well, besides the fact that it’s mildly freaky to acknowledge your father is doing the horizontal mambo with his second wife. I mean, I knew that in an intellectual way, but it was a lot more difficult to ignore that sort of thing when the fruits of their nocturnal activities were about to become very obvious in the next few months. So, all right, icky and all that, but I was a big girl; I could handle the idea that my father was still a sexual creature.

No, if I took a real hard look at the situation, what upset me so much was the realization that now there was no way my parents would ever get back together. If you’d ever asked me that point-blank, I probably would have laughed out loud, but somewhere in the back of my mind there was this little niggling hope that the whole thing with Traci had been a horrible mistake and that one day he’d dump her and go back to my mother. With a baby on the way, however, that tiny little hope had melted away like ice hitting a hot skillet.

“Because I was stupid and thought that maybe my parents would decide the divorce was a bad idea and that they really should be with one another,” I said at last, my tone hard, brittle, full of scorn for my self-delusion.

“That’s not stupid,” Luke replied. “That’s just being human.”

Frowning, I helped myself to another gulp of pinot grigio and then shot him a suspicious look. “Are you sure you’re the Devil?” I asked. “You’re starting to sound more like Jesus to me.”

He laughed. “I assure you, I’m not He.”

No, I supposed not. There was something dark and complicated in Luke’s face, even during relaxed moments such as these, that I somehow doubted would have shown itself in the visage of the son of God.

“You assume,” he went on, “as most people do, that because I’m the Devil I’m somehow the source of all evil.”

“So you’re telling me you’re not?”

“Hardly.”

I straightened and set my wine glass down on a coaster on the coffee table. “So where does evil come from?”

Tilting his head to one side, he regarded me intently. “From you.”

With a nervous laugh, I replied, “So I’m the source of all evil?”

“I meant that as the general ‘you.’” Luke sat up as well, then leaned forward and rested the wine glass on one knee. Tonight he wore all black — trousers, V-neck sweater, black T-shirt underneath. He managed to look casual and elegant at the same time, and I found myself wondering what my family’s reaction would have been if I’d appeared this evening with him in tow. I guessed they all probably would agree that I had traded up. He added, “After all, God is a big believer in something called free will.”

“So all the horrible things that happen in the world are our fault,” I said slowly.

“Not all. Some are simply natural disasters. People may throw up their hands and cry, ‘Why would God let such a thing happen?’ But no one stops to wonder what would happen if God put His finger on the fault to keep the quake from happening, or lifted His hand to push the hurricane aside. The consequences of intervention sometimes can be much worse than what would have happened if the original event had been allowed to occur unimpeded.”

I had to admit that I’d never really thought about it that way. Then again, I didn’t quite have Luke’s perspective.

“But so much of the rest of it — the murders, the rapes, the abuse, the wholesale slaughter of innocents — all that comes from the demons within.” A sardonic light entered his eyes. “Not from the Devil without.”

“So what
is
your role, then?” I asked. “Was there really no war in Heaven? What about ‘it’s better to reign in Hell’ and all that?”

Luke’s lip curled slightly. “Actually, of all my portrayals, I have to say I am rather partial to Milton’s. I’m almost sympathetic there.”

Since my knowledge of
Paradise Lost
was pretty much limited to that one quote, I really couldn’t comment. Instead I reached down, picked up my wine glass, and took another sip, waiting.

The wry set of his mouth never changed. “‘Prison warden’ is the closest approximation, I think.”

That almost sounded plausible, but I still got the feeling he wasn’t telling me the whole story. Was it possible that humankind had gotten the tale completely twisted around?

“So you’re saying you never challenged God,” I said.

“No, I’m not saying that at all,” Luke replied coolly. “I did mention that we’d had differences of opinion on occasion.”

“And you ended up running Hell.”

“Precisely.” He lifted his shoulders and then added, “Someone had to do it.”

Feeling more than a little overwhelmed, I drained the last of my wine and set the glass back on its coaster. Not for the first time, I wished I weren’t so completely ignorant of Christian mythology and belief. Some random stolen minutes with Wikipedia weren’t exactly adequate to get me up to speed enough that I would be able to know if he were telling me anything close to the truth...and whether I was even asking the right questions.

“I guess running Hell isn’t a full-time job,” I commented.

“What makes you say that?”

“Well, if it were, I doubt you’d be spending quite so much time hanging around me.”

“Like any other manager, I have subordinates who can look after things in my absence.”

And who’s that?
I thought.
Beelzebub? Asmodeus?
I couldn’t recall any of the other demons’ names from my Internet studies, but I supposed it didn’t really matter.

I suddenly realized we had wandered far off the topic of my miserable evening and the fallout from my father’s and Traci’s announcement, but maybe that had been Luke’s intention all along. It was sort of hard to feel sorry for yourself when you were getting distracted by big concepts like good and evil and the origins of Hell. Still, I figured it was worth trying to steer the conversation back toward its original focus.

“So I suppose you’re going to tell me that I should exercise my free will and not let Traci and her impending special delivery get to me?”

Luke had a sort of faraway look in his eyes, but after I asked him that question, he immediately seemed to snap back into the present. “I think you should do whatever helps you to cope with the situation,” he replied. “Just know that your feelings on the matter won’t change the course of events that have been set in motion.”

Geez, he was starting to sound just like my father. It was always, “Well, how does that make you feel?” or “Feelings aren’t good or bad — they just are.” I suppose those were valid comments, but when you’re feeling as if your life is slowly circling the drain, sometimes it’s nice to have someone say, “I agree — they’re wrong, and you’re right, and it basically all sucks.”

I launched a hostile glare in Luke’s direction and replied, “You know, your psycho-babble doesn’t change the fact that I’m seriously irritated by the whole thing. It’s just not fair — ”

At that statement he gave a short laugh and shook his head. “Please don’t get started on the whole ‘fair’ argument. Nothing is fair, Christa. It just is.”

“How very Zen of you,” I snapped, then stopped before I said anything more. If someone else had handed me that line, I probably would have told them to shove it. But I realized that Luke had a perspective on the situation I couldn’t possibly begin to comprehend.

For a moment he remained silent, watching me carefully. It had been a long day, and I hadn’t bothered to reapply any lip color after leaving the restaurant, but I didn’t think he was paying attention to any of that. He was looking at
me
, not my exterior. Somehow I got the feeling that even with all his long years of observing human beings, he hadn’t spent much time thinking about our individual problems or concerns.

At the moment, however, I didn’t want any more metaphysical discussions or lectures about how this latest spike strip in the highway of my life wasn’t of any real import compared to the grand sweep of human history. Okay, I couldn’t really argue that point. I knew that eventually I’d get over it, and I’d probably even think the little bugger was cute if it ended up taking more after my dad than Traci. Right now, though, I just wanted someone to tell me that yeah, this pretty much stank — and not just for me, but for Lisa and Jeff particularly. How my mother would take the news, I wasn’t sure. Very likely she’d just light another incense stick, go into a lotus position, and meditate on the cycle of life and birth. Or she could fly into a rage and get one of her buddies from her croning circle to put a hex on my father’s private parts, although I somehow doubted that.

“You aren’t particularly close to your sister.” Luke’s voice sounded calm, barely questioning.

“No,” I said.

“She’s very upset,” he went on. “She and her husband have been trying to conceive for almost two years now. She kept telling everyone she wasn’t interested in starting a family yet because she didn’t want people to know they had been unsuccessful so far.”

I stared at him. His face held almost no expression, but those dark blue eyes were narrowed, intent upon my face.

It hurt. It hurt more than I thought it would, since I’d spent a lot of time over the years discounting my sister. Our temperaments were worlds apart, and I’d mocked the things that were important to her — money and the big house and the successful husband — partly because I didn’t seem to have any expectation of attaining them myself. Of course, I wouldn’t have minded a husband somewhere down the line. But I hoped when the right guy came along, I’d know he was the one for me because our personalities suited, not because I was impressed by the size of his bank account. Apart from that, though, Lisa was still my sister, and to have her infertility thrown in her face by Traci and my father, of all people, must have been both humiliating and painful.

“I didn’t know,” I said slowly, feeling like an idiot. Shouldn’t a sister have known these things?

“Lisa is not one to confide in others,” Luke replied. “Her world is composed of surfaces, and when something moves beneath that surface, she has a difficult time understanding or dealing with it.”

“Still — ”

“She hasn’t even spoken to your mother of these things. Why, then, would you think she’d discuss them with you?”

He was right, I knew, but I still felt even more like a failure as a human being. Oh, families spent years not speaking to one another, but we weren’t that bad. We could be civil and friendly and even loving. But we all had fences around ourselves, lines in the sand we never crossed.

“I don’t know,” I said, after an uncomfortable pause. “I guess because it’s what I think sisters should do.”

Luke set his own empty glass down on the coffee table. I wondered briefly whether those wine glasses, which he had conjured into existence just a while earlier, would continue to sit there after he had gone, or whether they would simply evaporate.

An uncomfortable tightness began to build in my chest. Part of me wanted to just break down and start crying then, but I didn’t want to do that in front of him. I had no idea how many private moments of pain he might have observed over the years. Mine, however, I wanted to keep to myself.

I rose. “I think maybe you should go now. Thanks for the insight and everything, but — ”

He stood as well, a graceful unbending of his tall frame from the wing chair’s confines. “If that’s what you want.”

Was it? Crazy as it sounded, all of a sudden what I really wanted was for him to hold me, to take me in his arms and reassure me that everything was going to be fine. Even I knew that wasn’t necessarily true, but sometimes it’s the human contact we need, not the words we say.

“Could you do me a favor?” I asked abruptly, a little amazed at my own audacity.

“What?” His expression never changed.

Maybe it was the wine hitting my bloodstream that gave me the courage to ask, “Could you just — just hold me for a minute?”

He didn’t say anything. Instead, he took a few steps toward me, then reached out and wrapped his arms around me, pulling me close to his chest. I’d known he was some inches taller than I, but it wasn’t until I stood there with the top of my head barely reaching his chin that I really noticed the difference in our heights.

I could hear his heart beating as I laid my head against his chest, slow and strong and steady. His sweater felt almost indescribably soft against my cheek.

Cashmere
, I thought irrelevantly, then let myself relax into his embrace. It felt good. Maybe it was anti-feminist or reactionary or just plain old unevolved, but right then I thought there was nothing better than letting a man hold you, having him make you feel safe and protected. For a second I thought I felt something brush against the top of my head. Maybe he had touched his lips to my hair. I couldn’t be sure.

All I did know was that I could have stood there forever, listening to the healthy, human heartbeat and feeling the warmth of his embrace. Did it even matter that he was the Devil?

That was dangerous territory, though, and as much as I had needed the physical contact at that moment, I knew I should pull away, stop things before they could progress any further.

I lifted my head from his chest and stepped back. My face felt flushed, but maybe he wouldn’t notice. “Thank you,” I said, hoping my voice sounded steady. His heart rate might have been slow and undisturbed, but mine was racing like a Ferrari let loose on an open highway.