Playing With Fire (2 page)

Of course she didn’t. Well, she wanted to think that she didn’t, but she couldn’t seem to come up with a single example supporting that conclusion. Hastily she gathered up her purse and half-empty glass of wine. It was one thing to talk big about breaking rules and quite another to be deliberately rude; if she and Sam didn’t move on, then this new couple wouldn't have anyplace to sit.
 

She shouldered her purse, then turned back to him.

Rather, the spot where he had stood. He was gone, apparently disappearing into the crowd so quickly she hadn’t even seen him leave.

Guess he’s not into good girls
, she thought, even as she fought back a wave of disappointment so acute she actually felt it as an ache in the pit of her stomach. Since there didn’t seem to be anything else for her to do, she made her way to the next station, where yet another wholly uninteresting candidate waited for her. Great.

She took her seat and mumbled a pleasantry, but she couldn’t help looking past the table where she had just been sitting. Some poor woman was going to be upset when she realized she didn’t have a partner for this particular segment.
 

But that table was occupied by a couple who seemed to be speaking with some animation. Frowning, Felicia scanned the rest of the circle. Sam was nowhere to be seen. If he’d left in the middle of the session, shouldn’t his absence have caused a gap in the circle of men? Every table was full, however, with no sign that he had ever been there.

What the hell?

• • •

He let himself walk down the street, eschewing the speedier ways his kind used to move around the city. Sometimes he found it beneficial to surround himself with humanity, with their endless variations and petty concerns and cheap vitality. If he didn’t allow himself to think, he could almost pretend that he was one of them. Odd fantasy, and one his fellow demons didn’t appear to share. None of them could see the appeal in being human, apart from the evanescent pleasures this world provided. And since demons could avail themselves of those pleasures without all the pesky inconveniences of being mortal, why would they want to bother with being real humans?

Why, indeed.

Perhaps he had taken his leave of Felicia too abruptly, but that mattered little to him. Nothing wrong with tantalizing her, leaving her wanting more.
 

He knew he wanted more of her.

Throughout the ages he had taken human lovers as the mood struck. Not indiscriminately, of course, but with human form came human desires as well. Those desires could be ignored or sublimated as need be, but there had never been any prohibition against fraternizing, as long as a demon’s lover wasn’t someone intended for Hell.

No worries on that score with Felicia McGovern, of course. If anything, she seemed almost too proper for his tastes. He liked a woman with a bit of the wanton about her. On the other hand, he was willing to put up with quite a bit for a chance at seeing those glorious copper curls of hers spread across a pillow.
 

The mental image sent a flood of heat through his loins. But he was no mortal man, ruled only by his flesh. He ignored the wave of desire and moved on. After all, he had gone some time without physical release. He could wait.

But first, he wanted to make her wait for him.

• • •

At first Felicia wasn’t sure she’d heard the host correctly. “Excuse me?”

He sent her a look that was half-annoyed, half-pitying. “As I said, we have no record of anyone with a first name of Sam participating tonight. Are you sure you heard him correctly?”

If it had been a difficult or complex name, that might have worked as an excuse. But “Sam” was pretty hard to misunderstand. On the other hand, hadn’t he said, “
call me
Sam”? That seemed to imply his name wasn’t really Sam. But why would he show such an obvious interest in her, only to give her a false name and then disappear into the night?

The beginnings of a headache started to throb at the base of her neck. Felicia knew she should just admit to herself that she’d struck out, then take herself home, make some herbal tea, and call it a night.
 

Some part of her refused to give up, however. “I might have gotten his name wrong,” she told the host. “But he was pretty recognizable. Tall guy, longish black hair, black leather jacket, and an earring?”

He gave her a stare that made her want to reach up and feel the top of her head in case she’d suddenly sprouted a pair of horns. “No one like that. Maybe it was someone from the restaurant who came here into the bar by accident or something, but he wasn’t signed up for the event.”
 

Her encounter with Sam felt anything but accidental, but she didn’t think she could come up with a way to tell the host that without him handing her another one of those horn-spouting stares. Better to cut her losses and get out of here before she did anything else to make herself look like a complete idiot.

She said, “Okay, sorry. My mistake.” She wasn’t sorry, and she didn’t think she’d made a mistake, but she did know she’d already wasted enough time here. Sam was obviously long gone. No point in pursuing the matter any further.

Cool night air surrounded her as she stepped outside. She felt better almost immediately, even though the evening breeze was dry, all moisture stolen by the bluster of Southern California’s Santa Ana winds. At least she couldn’t smell the fires; the smoke had been driven out to sea by the harsh gales. It was beginning to get chilly, despite the day’s heat, and she wished she had thought to bring a jacket.
 

Her loft was only a few blocks from the restaurant/bar where the speed-dating event had been held, so she didn’t bother with a taxi. Friends told her she was crazy for roaming around downtown by herself, but she’d never felt unsafe. The local news broadcast far more stories of people going nuts in suburbia than of mayhem in L.A.’s center. A few miles away, down in the sprawl of South Central, things were different, but the people here in the heart of the city tended to leave one another alone.

She’d purchased the loft a few years back before gentrification had really taken hold. At the time she’d had to drive miles to get to a supermarket, but now a gleaming new Ralph’s was within walking distance. Her newer neighbors were just as likely to be lawyers or Internet entrepreneurs as artists and musicians, but that was all right. She liked the variety, and the fact that, while everyone in her building tended to keep an eye on everyone else, people mostly stayed out of her business.

Not that Felicia had much business to stay out of. Between making sure her mother was doing all right in the managed-care facility where she now lived and keeping an eye on her younger sister Carrie, now a junior at UCLA, men had been pretty low on Felicia’s priority list for some time. Her agent Lauren had poked and prodded until Felicia finally agreed to the speed-dating event, mostly to get her off her back.

And see how well that turned out
, she thought, as she turned her key in the lock and let herself into the loft. She dropped her purse on the kitchen counter and went to put the kettle on the stove. What she really needed was some peppermint tea to bring much-needed moisture back to her throat, followed by a good night’s sleep. She knew better than to paint when she felt like this; the deadline for her latest commission was coming up quickly, but she knew she’d make it. What she couldn’t afford was any mistakes brought on by exhaustion…

…or preoccupation with a certain black-haired stranger. Despite her best efforts to put the brief encounter behind her, his face kept swimming up in her mind. Those eyes like pools of ink, the clean, sculpted lines of his jaw. She’d always been a sucker for a good chin.

Or maybe just a sucker, period. She needed to stop making the mistake of dating creative types; they invariably left her high and dry when things got the least bit difficult. On the other hand, she couldn’t think what she’d have in common with someone in a supposedly stable career, like an accountant or a banker or a high school principal. Carrie kept hinting darkly about trying to fix her up with a certain eligible anthropology professor, but that was more of a running joke between them than anything serious.

The loft was well over two thousand square feet. Normally, Felicia enjoyed the feeling of space it gave and the warm, natural light that poured through its high windows, but tonight it felt oddly hollow, cavernous. The whistle from the kettle echoed off wood floors and exposed brick.

A shadow moved outside one window, and she started. Then she realized it was only her next-door neighbor’s cat Dempsey, making his usual nightly rounds. Shaking her head at herself, she went to the kitchen and turned down the burner, then dropped a tea bag into a mug and poured hot water over it. The reassuring smell of peppermint drifted up to her nose.

Really, was one encounter with an interesting stranger enough to make her this jumpy? Better to chalk it up to the Santa Anas and their well-publicized effects, including short tempers and all-around jitteriness. Hadn’t someone once tried to use the hot, dry winds as part of an insanity defense?

Her windows looked east, toward Boyle Heights and the hills of Mount Washington and the Arroyo Seco. A gibbous moon had just begun to rise beyond their dark shapes, its face tinged yellow-orange from the dust and smoke in the air. Felicia wrapped her fingers around her mug and stared out into the night sky. She wondered if Sam was looking at the moon as well.

• • •

He found Abigor in one of his favorite haunts, at the base of the first “O” in the Hollywood sign. From this vantage point one could see the entire city spread out below. Tonight the air was almost achingly clear, save for the smudge of smoke that hung off the coast. Despite his form, Samael’s eyes weren’t quite human; no mortal could have differentiated between the haze from the fires and the equally black blur of the Pacific Ocean.

“Slow night?” he asked.
 

A beer bottle glinted as Abigor raised it to his mouth. He swallowed, then said, “Slower than the 405 at rush hour.”
 

“I had no idea L.A. was such a hotbed of virtue.”

“It’s not. I guess all the baddies just decided they didn’t want to check out on a Friday night.” He extracted a bottle from the six-pack next to him and offered it to Samael.
 

Since it was something drinkable this time — a Belgian ale — Samael took the offering and neatly popped off the cap. His nails looked human, but they were stronger. Far stronger.

“Weren’t you the one catching hell for drinking on the job last time?”

Abigor shrugged. “Technically, I’m not on the job right now. I’m just taking a break. Capturing souls with a Corona in one hand — yeah, they didn’t like that too much.”

Rules got bent all the time, Samael knew. After all, what could Lucifer or his lieutenants Beelzebub and Asmodeus do, except bust their minions back to Hell? Samael would prefer to stay topside, but he’d done guard duty in the Pit and survived to tell the tale. At least he wasn’t one of the souls stuck upside-down in a lake of boiling blood for all eternity.

He took a meditative swallow of ale. No beer in Hell, though. No steaks or air-conditioned movie theaters or the smell of wet earth after the rain.

No redheads with laughing hazel eyes and distracting dimples, either.

He was silent for awhile, his gaze fixed on the glittering carpet of light beneath him.

“You look like a demon with something on his mind,” Abigor remarked, just before he cracked open another beer. “Or someone, that is. The last time I saw you this moony, you’d just met that brunette up at the Observatory. Or was it the blonde down on Melrose?” He shot a glance at his watch and grinned. “It’s been what, five years since the last one? I guess it’s about time for you to be scratching that itch again.”

Samael raised an eyebrow but didn’t bother to reply. Sometimes it could be downright annoying to have someone around who’d known you for an eternity or two.
 

“I still don’t see the point,” Abigor added. “Seems like too much work to me. Hookers are so much easier. They don’t give a shit as long as you pay them what they’re asking. No weeping and wailing if you’re not there when they wake up in the morning — unless crying’s your kink, of course.”

“You’re pure class, Abbie,” Samael drawled. Abigor hated that nickname.

His companion scowled. His mortal form was that of a large black man with a shaved head, and the frown only made him look more forbidding. Forbidding to mortals, of course. Samael had worked with Abigor for several centuries by now. He was used to the other demon’s frowns.

And the ribbing. Samael sometimes wondered if he went so long between liaisons because he didn’t want to deal with the inevitable ration of shit Abigor gave him.

“Not much use for class in our line of work,” the demon said. “But hey — you want your class and your ‘relationships’ and your amusing house wines? Go for it. I know they — ” and Abigor jerked a significant thumb downward — “don’t give a fuck as long as the job gets done.”

True enough. Abigor’s choice remarks were the only feedback Samael had ever received in regard to his relationships with mortal women. If those liaisons didn’t interfere with his real reason for being topside, then no one seemed to care.

Why, then, did he feel a most un-demon-like trickle of disquiet down his spine when he thought of Felicia McGovern? He wanted her, but this went beyond that. It was one thing to want more of her flesh than the creamy throat he’d spied above her loose-fitting shirt. It was quite another to desire the sound of her voice or the flash of a dimple next to her mouth.
 

It had been a long time. That was all. Had he gone this long before? A year here, a year there, but five? He couldn’t recall. Days and nights blended together and became one long, flashing kaleidoscope of memory when time had no true meaning.

“The job will get done,” Samael said. “It always does.”

Abigor clapped a hand on his shoulder and offered him another beer. “I know, brother. I know.”