He returned with four items: a nightgown and three dresses. Clara considered them with a grudging acceptance. "These are actually from the 50s, aren't they?" She rubbed the lace coverlet on the lemon gingham dress. "They're like brand new."
"It is only myself here, so it's rare that they get worn." However she read into that, Locke didn't worry. The only consistency in his tastes were inconsistency—and fudge rounds, of course. In the 50s, he liked housewives.
Occasionally, he still did.
She took the nightgown and slipped into it. "It's a bit skimpy," she said as she struggled with getting the hem where she wanted it, "but it'll do."
Locke nodded, allowing himself a single glance to appreciate the way the silk melted into her curves and lament the way her bra refused to let her breasts fill the cups properly. Then again, he'd already given up on getting anywhere with her tonight. He'd hunger for another day, but he hungered a lot. "Let me turn the bed down for you, I'm sure you're exhausted—devil’s asshat!" he cursed as he grabbed his skull.
Clara perked right up. "Is it Ellie?" She waved at him. "Eloise, are you there?"
He shook his head. "No, this is someone far more irritating. Sleep well, Clara. I'll be back by morning."
Chapter 9
Locke found himself impaled on the other side of his portal.
He groaned and stretched back, no point fighting the metal skewer that had entered next to his tail and exited between his second and third ribs. He stared up at the ceiling of the cavern, exactly the sort of thing a demon was expected to live in, but goddamn it was disgusting. And covered with bat-like things, scourge transformed into disgusting, wormy, leathery nits flying around the ceiling of the cave.
Somewhere in the darker recesses of the tunnels, a female screamed. Two, perhaps. He couldn't tell if the screams were of pain or pleasure. Knowing this place, both.
The voice behind him that growled, "Locke," was too raw and feral and wet to be mistaken for a human.
Locke craned his neck back further to smile as best as he could. "Hey, Boss!" he said as pleasantly as he could. "What's the haps?"
The nine-foot, green skinned, long-snouted beast scowled at him. Maybe. Boss's happy faces and sad faces were pretty much the same face. "Where were you today?" he snarled.
Locke kept his groan internal. Boss was mad that he'd ditched after a fight. Technically only Druxel had to report on battles, but Boss wanted everyone there to inspect them. It wasn't the first time Locke had ditched, and it wasn't the first time he'd been run through upon his arrival at the cave.
"Just getting some lemon bars," Locke said. "Or, trying to get lemon bars. But don't worry, I'm going to get them."
Boss swung his fist so hard Locke's spine detached at the neck, causing his head to flop all the way back as his body swiveled around on the spike. If it was anyone else, he'd have had a good laugh about that.
Would Clara laugh about this if he told her? He doubted it, but he could always test the waters with some stories that were less violent but still funny and see what happened. He had loads of exploding body stories.
"I don't give a shit about your lemon bars, asshole!" Boss bellowed. So, he wasn't amused by this, either. Boss and Clara were pretty much polar opposites, so maybe this would be funny. "You've been gone all day. There are reports."
Locke didn't have the ability to respond to that, not with the catastrophic damage to his head, but he was able to give Boss a skeptical look as he thought about it. He'd killed a few cherubim, sure, but who hadn't? And he hadn't killed the seraph. The douchebag had even popped up again to ruin whatever groove Locke might have mustered back up if he'd talked the dolls into leaving.
"You've been interfering in angel activity."
Absurd. He tried to say how absurd it was that he got impaled for that, but all he accomplished was gargling sounds as he chewed on his tongue.
"They're seriously pissed this time. You can't be going on some rogue mission to save a damned human. What the hell were you thinking?"
Lemon bars, he gargled. Not the most reasonable answer, but he hadn't thought about much else when he'd killed that first cherubim. And it didn't matter if he was thinking about anything else later, either.
"Fucking idiot," Boss growled and snapped Locke's head back into place. It only took a second for sinew to form—painfully—over the broken section.
"Lemon bars," Locke repeated when he could speak again. "The human makes lemon bars. I'm going to get them."
"Fucking…idiot," Boss repeated more pointedly this time. "I don't give a shit about them, and Heaven certainly doesn't. And you brought her here? You're harboring a goddamn criminal against Heaven—who is human—in your home this very second?"
"I wouldn't say harboring," Locke mumbled. "I just didn't want the angel to kill Clara before I got my lemon bars. I don't care what happens after that."
His words rang slightly false, which made him grimace, but Boss didn't quite have the lie detector Locke had.
"Clara?" Boss repeated. He took a step back and scratched one of his horns. It was a ridiculous gesture when the demon had horns like a ram curling forward from his forehead. Boss was not attractive, even by demon standards, but he was terrifying and, Locke hated to admit, well skilled with his tongue. He'd have gotten Clara into his bed in under five minutes.
Which made Locke angry just to think about. He may not have long-term intentions with Clara, but he wanted her happy with whatever they did. Boss wouldn't think about that with her. He took women once and got rid of them.
"Clara's the lemon bar baker," Locke said when Boss spent too long thinking about it.
"What is her crime?"
"She talks to ghosts. Still haven't figured out how that's a crime."
Boss didn't seem to be listening. His skin started to glow, getting hotter and hotter, brighter and brighter, before he tore Locke right off the pike—not even lifting him off but ripping it right out his side. "Why did you bring her here?" he roared in Locke's face.
"Okay, whoa. You need to chill the fuck out. The angel showed up at her place, I brought her here so he couldn't track her. That's it, man."
"And you only want her to bake the…whatever fucking thing you keep going on about?"
"Lemon bars. And I figured we'd bang a few times before I brought her back. She's smoking hot—" His words were cut off by Boss slamming him into a wall. There went the skull, again, and the entire left half of his rib cage.
And his hip.
He wasn't getting back to Clara anytime soon at this pace.
"You won't touch the human! You will take her to Druxel and leave me to deal with Heaven. This is not your business."
Locke lay there on the rocks until his jaw pushed back into place. His vision was fucked and he couldn't walk—or breathe—but he could talk.
Rasp.
"Not gonna work. Druxel doesn't have a kitchen she can work in, and he can't transport everything to her bakery. It's gotta be this way, or she and her sisters will raise Hell."
Boss paced, his heavy boots clomping back and forth, digging into the gravel that was more bones than rocks. Each step crunched and scattered debris, a good amount of it pinging Locke in the face.
"Does she have any defenses against seraphim on Earth?"
Locke attempted to laugh, but the sound escaped between his ribs. "She was fighting with ghosts. Her sister had more sense than that."
"Yeah?"
"One did, at least. Plowed right into him, bashed him up with a frying pan. Clara…Clara is gentle."
"Too gentle for you," Boss said with a pointed glare, his implication plain enough.
"I don't hurt women, not unless they want it. I won't hurt Clara." He wisely left off unless she wants it. Honestly, it didn't matter whether he wanted to hurt her or not, he would do so if she asked him to.
He'd do anything she asked him to. No woman had ever resisted him like this. If letting Clara take the
reins was what he needed to do to get inside her, he was good with that.
"You are smiling," Boss growled. "You are broken from asshole to eyeball, and you are smiling."
"It's nothing," Locke muttered, but it was impossible to squelch the bit of spirit he could muster in his voice. He wanted those lemon bars, and he wasn't going to stop pushing for them, but he wanted Clara first.
And last, at least for a while.
"You will host the girl until I have the angel issue dealt with you. You will do nothing to ruin her."
Ruin her? What an absurd thing for a man who literally ate females when the mood struck him to say. Locke had heard of the messes that he left behind when he got a hair up his ass. "You're one to talk," Locke snorted. "Clara will be begging for me by the time you get the angels off her, and I'll gladly—"
Boss's boot was the last thing Locke saw before his skull exploded under the demon's foot.
Clara woke to an empty bed. A shame, she decided—but only because the room was cold and she'd been too scared to explore for more blankets.
In the daylight, whatever that was in Hell, she could see the room better. Elegant yet minimal, lots of metal and straight lines, a subtle art in silver and blue tones. Her favorite colors.
Winter colors. Christmas colors, if one was shirking the typical red and green for something cleaner. She knew how gaudy her room was, and she wasn't surprised at how Locke had recoiled at it, but that was all guilty pleasure. When she planned events, she went for these cool, classy tones. Very much not hellish, either.
She picked a wool dress in sapphire with a peter pan collar and a white sash at the waist. The blue was too bright for her, but she swished the fluffy A-line skirt back and forth in front of Locke's mirror and decided that yes, this was meant to be her dress. She was taking this one home, whenever that was.
She told herself to look forward to that as she walked down the empty halls of Locke's home, but she wasn't going to feel guilty over appreciating her time here. Everything about her life back on Earth was so loud. It was weird that she'd found some measure of peace in Hell, but she wouldn't deny it or regret it.
"Locke?" she called, her voice low but projecting through the high ceilings. She repeated herself several times, but he never responded. Sleeping, then. She didn't know what kind of life he had. He might have stayed out late and come home only an hour or two ago. Clara typically awoke before dawn. They might end up passing each other as his day ended and hers began.
That sounded lonely.
She dug out all the supplies she needed in the kitchen, taking inventory of pots and pans, writing a list of things Locke would need to pick up. She went through the pantry as well and found it to be stocked with all the essentials and pretty much everything beyond.
Two hundred boxes of something called Fudge Rounds. She opened one and inspected the contents, but neither the taste nor the appearance was to her liking.
"No matter, just batter," she told herself as she donned an apron and fired up the ovens.
Locke's kitchen was a dream to work in. Everything was shiny and new and top of the line, so well stocked she even got to make recipes she normally had to take out of rotation in the winter months. Not the proper lemons, though, and she told herself she'd have to act very sad about that when she informed Locke of the situation. No lemon bars, but I made you a kiwi berry tart to soothe your pain.
Stereo, she added to the list after she put a pan of mini apple cobblers in the oven. The utter silence was perhaps too much, but at least she had a whole repertoire of Christmas carols in her brain to cycle through. The lyrics weren't always right, but the tune was close enough.
Music and decorations. That would make it much easier to work here. Locke would have to handle the music, but she’d skipped out on scones for now in favor of mixing up a batch of gingerbread. She could have Locke pick up her set of dyes and, if nothing else, they'd have a pretty gingerbread house that night. Something to work on. Locke could help her, if he wanted. It was always nice having help.
The gingerbread went into the oven above the cobblers, and then it was time for macarons. They sold like crazy this time of year with the right flavors, and it was Clara's lucky day. Chocolate, peppermint, cherries, fig preserves, and plums were all there for her.
A second mixer, too. This place really was a dream. The dishes were piling up—the more dishes owned, the more dishes to wash—but she'd take care of that when everything was done. Five flavors of meringues, five flavors of filling, bags and bags and bags to pipe from. Work for apprentices, but there was no counter to watch, no errands to run. Clara would gladly assemble these puppies. After the apple cobblers came out of the oven.
She turned to the oven, only to let out a weak shriek at the sight of Locke standing behind her, covered in blood, his tux shredded. "Oh, my goodness!" she cried out as she rushed to his aid, grabbing him and searching for the source of the blood but finding nothing.
He turned his head to the side and spit a wad of blood into the sink, as though he'd done this sort of thing before. "How's…" he started, his voice whistling like air was leaking somewhere, but Clara had only found bruises on him, and one of his horns was dangling by a…whatever horns were made of. A mote of horn material held it to his head. "How's…your ankle?"
"What? Sweet sugar, what in Kansas happened to you?"
He laughed, a single rough bark of air, and spit more blood. "The things you say…they're really…funny." He put his hands on the counter to brace himself, but the counter was so full of baking supplies and he was so drippy that he ended up in an awkward position. "Look at…this. You're…you're motivated."
Clara muffled another flutter of panic. His pants were shredded enough that she could see one of his calves—and the bone in front of one, snapped and pushing at the skin. "You need to lay down. Oh…tell me how I can help, please?"
He shook his head. The horn snapped off and landed with a clink on the floor. "Damn. That's gonna…gonna suck to grow back. Is something burning in the…in the oven?"
For a wild second she couldn't figure out why he was talking about ovens, but then she caught the scent. Her cobblers were baked just to the edge of burning, a delicate balance. This batch would be ruined if she didn't pull them now. "It's nothing. I can make them again."
"I want them." There was a gruff bit to his rasp there, and he turned his head just enough for her to see the flare of magenta fire in his eyes.
"Well, okay," she huffed. "Just don't bleed on my macarons," she joked as she grabbed the mitts and pulled the cobblers from the oven.
"It's old blood."
That wasn't the point, but there were bigger issues. "You're still injured. Badly. What happened? You said you were a warrior, that you fight scourge. Is that what happened?"
Locke shot an angry look at her, one that she thought was completely uncalled for, but she kept her expression level and open.
His glare faded quickly. "No, they could never hurt me like this. They can overrun an area quickly, and if they ever escaped to Earth…well, let's not worry about that. It's my job to keep that from happening. Put those down before you burn your hands."
She sat the pan on a cooling rack. "At least tell me how I can help. You can't even walk."
"I'm fine, I just—woo, maybe not." He grabbed the counter more tightly as his broken leg crumpled under his weight. "Ratmouth!" he bellowed.
Clara nearly yelled at him for the odd insult, but then a scrawny little man, no more than three feet tall, pot-bellied, swathed in only a loin cloth came scuttling out of the utility closet. She held back from insulting the man accidentally, thinking through her words before she said, "Who is that?" instead of her initial impulse of what is that?
"Ratmouth, mum," the man said. The name was harsh but fair once Clara saw his teeth and tongue.
"Have you been here the whole time?"
"Didn't want to disturb you. Master doesn't like me about when he
has females over."
That rubbed the Clara the wrong way, but she shook the icky feeling away and squatted down to his level. "Well, I'm not a female. Or, it doesn't matter that I am. It would be no different if I was a man."
Ratmouth looked up to Locke. Something silent passed between them in the look they shared. "Yes, mum. I'll only be taking care of Master and then be back to my closet."
Did he live in a closet? Clara had a lot to learn of the demon world. "No need for that. I don't want to disrupt your, err, business."
"Thank you, mum."
"Ratmouth," Locke growled. "Help me to the bath."
"Oh, but he's so small!"
Only, he wasn't. The creature grew to her size, his entire body stretched, turning him from an almost cherubim-shaped lump to a weedy man. "It's my job, mum."
"And it's your job to get all this baked so I can take it to your sisters. It's past 9 on Earth. I'm sure they'll be wanting it soon."
"You're in no shape to travel. You'll have to let me go back, if only for—"
"No," he said roughly. "I'll be healed by the time you've gotten this packed up."
Clara dug her hand into her hip to give him the most doubtful, sinister look she could muster, but he only laughed and allowed Ratmouth to tuck up under him as a crutch.
Men. Clara hadn't spent a lot of time with them, her father dying when she was young and her mom and sisters keeping mostly to themselves, but this was absolutely a man thing.
Chapter 10
Aches riddled Locke's body, but it wasn't anything he couldn't handle. His doors made it easier, too. Now that the Jubilee sisters knew what he was and he had a good idea of the layout of the bakery, it wasn't anything for him to pop right into a storeroom with baked goods.
The dozen macarons he ate in that storeroom he accepted as payment for his ferrying service. And damn, the fluffy, crunchy morsels were good. If he hadn't known about that Yelp review, he probably would have been satisfied on the macarons alone. But he wanted that lemon bar.
A Christmas Demon for Clara Page 6