One Handsome Devil (37 page)

Sara started to shrug her shoulders again, then giggled. “Well, it might be better than pigging out which was my other alternative."

"Come on. Let's go pig and let me talk some sense into you.” Katra grabbed her friend and practically dragged her out of her apartment. “Pizza is calling to me."

"Ten zillion fat grams."

"Don't worry about it. If you just do what you have to, neither of us will ever have to worry about fat again. Demon liposuction to the rescue."

Sara nibbled on her third piece of pizza while Katra loaded her plate with Bavarian cream dessert pizza.

"I can't eat all of that."

"You eat. I'll talk."

"I don't want to hear what you have to say."

"Tough. I bought your lunch, you have to listen to me."

"I'll pay you back your three ninety-nine."

Katra laughed. “Too late. Anyway, I've been thinking about your plan to get Jack back."

"I don't have a plan."

"That's a problem but I knew that. So I asked Mona for help."

"What does Mona know about demons?"

"Would you just eat and let me talk?"

Surprised by her friend's serious tone, Sara nodded, then stuck one of the Bavarian cream deserts into her mouth. It was good and she was hungry. Had she eaten at all since Jack had left?

"Mona doesn't know squat about demons, but she knows a lot about scheming and getting her man. Now that she weighs a hundred and thirty pounds instead of a hundred and eighty, she's having a lot better luck keeping them, too."

"But—"

"Don't talk with your mouth full. And keep it full. Part of her plan is that you've got to look good. I mean, if you look like a scarecrow, how big a hurry is he going to be in to get back to you?"

Since Jack wasn't coming back, Sara didn't see the point of this conversation, but obviously it was important to Katra. She nodded and took another bite of the dessert.

"Since I'm on summer vacation and since you've got nothing to do but spend money, I thought we'd work out together. After this pizza orgy, we'll start to eat healthy too. Except you eat about five hundred more calories than I do. We've got to give you some muscle."

"Guys don't like muscle on girls."

"Jack does."

Sara looked at her suspiciously. “How do you know that?"

"I shared his brain for about an hour, that's how. I know a lot about what makes that boyfriend of yours tick and we're going to fight dirty and take advantage of it."

"Oh. But I'm afraid.” She put her hand over her mouth. That hadn't been what she wanted to say. Surely she wasn't afraid. She was just smart enough to know that a demon isn't healthy for women no matter how bad they might want him.

"I can't get into your brain the way Jack got into mine, but you're a lot more motivated than I was. We're going to cure you."

"There's nothing wrong with me."

"When we asked for your perfect mate, you came up with a demon. What do you suppose that meant?"

"I guess it meant that I'm supposed to stay single."

"It meant that, right then, you weren't ready for a man. Remember how evil he was?"

Sara remembered Jack's face when he'd checked out that waitress at the burger joint. “Yeah."

"Well, both of you needed to change. So far, he's changed and become someone else. Now it's your turn."

Sara felt a headache coming on. “Why don't we just stick to the exercise program?"

"Because that's not what it's about. Jack and you were growing together, then you panicked. I know how that feels. I panicked too, when I felt Jack in my brain. That's why I screamed my head off."

"You weren't in pain?"

Katra nodded grimly. “Oh, yeah. I picked up a fraction of what Jack lived with every day in Hell. Trust me, you'd rather pound your fingers with a hammer."

Sara sipped the Coke Katra had forced on her. She hadn't had anything but diet for so long, it tasted funny, but sinful. She couldn't go along with Katra, but she was interested in the scheme. “So what's the big plan? Besides working out."

"Mona has some ideas about clothes too. We'll get you looking hot. But we're also going to work on this fear thing."

"I'm not afraid."

"Don't lie. You're afraid of being abandoned because your parents abandoned you when you were a baby. You're afraid of sharing because you never had anything of your own when you were growing up. By the way, can I have a sip of your Coke?"

Sara narrowed her eyes. “You've got your own."

"See what I mean."

Sara nodded glumly into her drink. “All right, I'm a mess. Maybe Jack is better off without me."

Katra shook her head definitively. “Remember those imps? Without you, Jack is going to dry up and become one of them. The only way to save him is to get him to fall back in love with you.

Sara flinched at the idea. Those imps had been so horrible, so hungry. “He said he had his own universe now. He said he'd be happy there."

"The only person Jack can lie to is himself,” Katra reminded her.

Sara couldn't deny the temptation, at least not to herself. What would it be like to wake up next to Jack every morning? They could fly over Dallas every night, seen only by a few crazies who might just create legends of the Dallas demon.

"I'll get old and he'll still be young and beautiful,” she complained.

"So? Do you think Jack cares about that?"

Jack thought she was beautiful, Sara knew that. She'd seen herself through his eyes, if only for a moment. To him, she was something more than just female flesh. It was her soul he found so compelling, not her body. “You're right."

"So stop making up objections and let's figure out how to get him back."

"I need to be alone.” Sara fled into the rest room and closed the door locking her best friend on the other side of the wall.

"That isn't what you need,” Katra shouted through the thin door.

But what did Sara need? She'd thought she needed money and she'd gotten that. She thought she needed some good sex and she'd certainly gotten that. She'd never thought she needed a demon, but she'd gotten that too, for a little while. Of all of those, what was important?

"Get your head straight, then do your magic and bring him back,” Katra called.

Katra would trust him, did trust him. But Katra hadn't seen how she looked when Jack had taken over her body.

Sara unlatched the bathroom door. “I have an idea. Let's go camping."

Katra's mouth dropped open. “Don't you remember? Girl Scouts. I was the one who failed tent-building because I spent too long putting on my makeup."

"Bring Mona and you guys can do your makeup together."

Katra glared at her like she was wondering if she needed to call the men with the white coats, then nodded. “All right, you're on."

Katra glanced at her gas gauge and tried to remember the last time she'd bought gas. Before Jack had worked on her car, the Corsica hadn't managed much more than ten miles a gallon, and that was on a downhill coast. Now, two hours from Dallas, the needle hadn't shifted from ‘F'.

"Jack won't be any closer out here,” she reminded her friend.

"I know."

"So how come you guys never told me Sara was dating a demon?” Mona demanded. “That is so cool."

Once, the three of them had been inseparable, hanging out together, hitting the malls, and roller skating for hours while they checked out the boys. Then Mona had rebelled, making a point to go all the way with any boy either Katra or Sara showed any interest in. Now the old Mona seemed back.

Or maybe she'd been wanting to come back for a long time and Katra simply hadn't been able to let her. When Jack had straightened her up, he'd done a lot more than help her with her math. Her car, demon liposuction and head-shrinking in one way-cute package. Jack had turned into the ultimate Mr. Fix-it. Now they needed to make Sara understand.

"It isn't cool,” Sara argued. “How is it that neither of you understand this? He's a tortured demon. He doesn't have any morals at all. He'd just as soon kill someone as look at them. He can take over your body and rip your heart out without even breaking a sweat."

"Or he can gently remove fifty pounds of flab without leaving a stretch mark,” Mona countered. “I wonder if I should have asked him to make my boobs even bigger."

"Mona.” Sara's protest matched Katra's exactly in pitch and volume.

"I'd be happy to eat all the ice cream it would take to give him the raw material to work with,” Mona continued as if oblivious to their protest.

Katra turned her car into the camp grounds at Possum Kingdom Lake. Their pre-teen scouting camps had been near here and even Katra's negative memories were tempered by the recollection of how beautiful and wild the countryside was in that part of Texas where the green prairies of the east met the arid desert of the west.

"How about we stay in a motel,” Mona suggested. “I'll pay my share."

Mona hadn't offered to pay her share since the day they'd gone to the movies and she'd suckered Jimmy from her eighth grade homeroom into paying for her ticket.

"I need to see the sky,” Sara answered.

Sara had been eating and taking care of herself, Katra noticed, but she still seemed to carry around a big hole where her heart used to be.

"Then we'll camp under the sky.” Katra tried to be cheerful about the idea but she wasn't. No matter how much fix-up Jack had done for her, she and her sister were still city girls.

Sara pointed and Katra navigated her car into a secluded part of the park set up for hikers rather than the more usual trailer campers.

"Are there bears?” Mona demanded.

"Killer armadillos,” Katra answered.

Sara said nothing.

Two hours later, Katra felt a little better about things. They'd managed a charcoal fire, cooked some steaks, and now watched the stars come out.

A streak crossed the sky plunging to the earth.

"Make a wish,” Mona cried closing her eyes. “Shooting star."

Katra kept her eyes open, looking at her friend. Would she make a wish?

A tear, silver in the crescent moon's reflection, trickled down Sara's cheek.

"I think somewhere in the Bible, there's a line about Lucifer being thrown from the heavens,” Sara whispered, her voice so soft Katra could hardly hear it. “If people had been alive then, do you think it would have looked like that?"

Another meteor fired its blazing path to destruction consumed by Earth's atmosphere.

Katra stood, walked over, and wordlessly hugged her friend.

They crawled into their sleeping bags soon after that. Katra was exhausted from the drive, from her concern for Sara, and from eating more red meat than she'd eaten in years.

A huge crash awakened her.

Katra struggled with the confining bag trying to remember where in the world she could be.

A flash of light gave her the answer to that question but posed another question completely. Where was her car?

The thunder followed less than a second after the lightning, and the skies of Texas opened up.

"Huh?” Sara sounded as groggy as Katra felt.

Katra fumbled for the zipper in her sleeping bag but couldn't get her hands from inside the tight mummy shape.

Sara, who had refused to sleep in anything so confining, stepped over and tugged the sticky zipper down.

"Where's my car?"

"Mona couldn't sleep. I told her you wouldn't mind if she borrowed it for a while."

Oddly, she didn't. Except that meant they had nowhere to hide from the driving rain.

The thunder crashed again and something hard and sharp drove itself into Katra's foot. She glanced down in time to see a quickly melting, but golf-ball sized hail stone rolling away.

"I think we're in trouble."

"Big surprise."

Ignoring their Girl Scout training, they huddled under a live oak tree, partially protected from the hail by its spreading branches and risking the lightning.

"It's beautiful,” Sara breathed as another bold of lightning split the sky.

Huge thunder boomers, their edges glistening from the moon's pale light, rolled in from the south. To the north, stars still shined.

"Dangerous,” Katra argued.

Sara glared at her. “Are you going to make me say you told me so?"

Hope blazed as bright as any lightning bolt. “You're going to do it."

"I know I'm crazy, but I can't live without him. Let's see if we can get him back."

Chapter 23

Jack reached through the membrane between worlds and deposited his manuscript into a mailbox just within his reach. Even with his demonic skills, near-infinite patience learned by spending an eternity in Hell, and no need to sleep, completing his philosophy dissertation had taken him weeks. Now he could merely wait for a response from his faculty advisor, a man who thought Jack was an off-campus graduate student but had no idea just how far off-campus Jack actually resided.

He tried to pull back into his private world, but something held him, dragging him into the earth plane.

He fought the pull. For him, there was nothing but pain left in the human plane.

A few months before, he would simply have sent out a tendril of power to destroy whoever was compelling him, leaving him free to roam the Human plane on his own. To his surprise, he could not do so. His brief experience in Sara's mind had created within him new limitations, new weaknesses.

His grip on his home dimension slipped and he hurled through the human plane, crossing the thousands of miles between his remote mailbox and the deserts of Texas.

He recognized the voices compelling them. Those women were doing it again.

Sara lit the last candle, her voice hoarse from days of chanting. “It isn't working."

"Keep trying. I felt something,” Katra said. Her friend had lent her strength through this entire ordeal.

"I don't feel—"

The lights surged, then dropped into darkness and the air conditioner moaned to a stop.

A strong odor of brimstone permeated the air.

"If you called the wrong demon, we're in big trouble,” Mona said. “You did say you knew what you were doing."