Dance with the Devil

by Megan Hart

  26

  So.

  There was love. She had fallen into it a second time with the same man, and for the second time had felt it end. Everything part of the circle, everyone playing their parts.

  Yet one lesson Kathleen had learned from doing the devil's work would not leave her. Choices made ripples, and ripples made waves, and you could ride them or you could let them tumble you over and under and drag you along the rocky bottom until you were tossed up onto the shore battered and bloody.

  She chose to ride.

  She knew just where to find him. On the sand, facing the water. Night had almost fallen and the pale pink and gold of sunset spread across the sea, though the sun was no longer visible. A breeze fluttered the hem of her dress. She dragged her bare toes through the sand still warm from the sun.

  "I wrote Ride with the Devil because of you," she said without preamble, without looking at him. They both stared out over the water. "I didn’t remember it at the time, but it would never have been the book it was if I hadn't met you. If I had not fallen in love with you. And it would not have been the book it became if you had not broken my heart."

  He half-turned, but she shook her head and held up a hand so he would stay quiet.

  "Loving you broke me, but I built something from the pieces. And look what it turned into. The career I'd dreamed of. More books. Success. Fame."

  "And a lot of grief," Jake said at last.

  She smiled a little. "You can't harvest the honey if you don't risk the stings."

  "I was wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was a coward."

  "It doesn't matter now." She looked out again to the water, both of them silent for another few minutes before she held out her hand for him to take.

  Their fingers linked. She moved to stand beside him, hip to hip, still without speaking. They stayed that way for some time, watching the water.

  "If I could take it back from you, Kathleen, I would. I would do whatever he asked of me, if it meant you didn't have to."

  She kissed him then, soft and sweet and slow. They danced there on the sand, moving in a slow circle. She ran her fingers through his hair and tipped his face so she could kiss him again and again until both of them had to stop and take a breath.

  Then, without rushing, she explained the truth about the devil's tasks. What that meant for both of them. How neither of them were bound anymore.

  "All that time," Jake said, brow furrowed, expression grim. "Everything we did, and it was all for nothing?"

  "Everything a piece of the circle," she told him. "All of us playing a part. None of it was for nothing, Jake. After all, it brought us together, didn't it?"

  “Do you think it’s over?”

  “I don’t know. The devil says he doesn’t lie, but…” she shrugged. “That’s probably a lie. He might come back around. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Jake nodded, eyes narrowed. “Yeah. But you know, Kathleen, if he asks us to do something for him again, this time we can say no.”

  “We can,” she agreed. “But what if we don’t want to?”

  That was a truth she had to throw out there. Both of them had done the devil’s bidding, and not all of the things they’d done had been bad. Jake nodded again. He looked out to the water for a second before looking back at her.

  “Someone else will, if we don’t.”

  She let her fingers link at the back of his neck. She pushed onto her toes to kiss his mouth. She whispered into his ear.

  “Yes. Someone else always will.”

  So.

  There was love.

  Neither of them said it aloud. She saw it in his eyes, when he looked at her as though she were a treasure, and she gave it to him in her kiss and the way she cupped his face to stroke her thumbs along the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. They looked at each other and they needed to say nothing, because both of them already knew.

  Ride with the Devil

  If you enjoyed Dance with the Devil, check out the original story, Ride With the Devil, available now!

  * * *

  Ride With the Devil Excerpt

  * * *

  If you take enough rides with the devil, pretty soon he’ll drive.

  The devil had been grabbing for the wheel since before Jake Harron had been born, but he wasn’t quite ready to give it up to the bastard. Not yet. The time was coming, he knew that much. When Old Scratch would demand too much, ask him for more than he could give. And even when that time came, Jake thought as he fingered the set of lock picks in his pocket, he’d do his best to go down shouting out “fuck you.”

  This time, what the devil had asked him to do didn’t seem so bad. Breaking and entering might rank higher on the police list of crimes than drowning a basket of kittens, but Jake still sometimes woke in a cold sweat, his sheets a tangled horror around him, from dreams of the way the kittens had cried.

  “Break in. Find the jewelry and money. Will you take it?” The devil always asked. Never demanded. The deal was, Jake was free to decline any request, at any time. The trick was that if he did, the devil got to keep his soul.

  “Yes.” Jake had said this time. It was what he always said. “Do I have to keep it?”

  “No. Dump it in the river. Unless,” the devil had said with a grin showing what seemed to be every single picket in the whitewashed fence of his teeth, “you want to profit from your ill-gotten gains.”

  That would be one more brick on the already well-paved road to Hell Jake couldn’t stop walking. He’d shaken his head. “No.”

  The devil, who hardly ever looked the same way twice, had that day been favoring a three-piece suit and an Al Pacino mien. “You sure? The lady’s filthy with dough. Think about it, Jacob. You could live like a king.”

  “I’ll live like I’m not about to rob an old lady’s wedding rings,” Jake had said. “And, by the way, fuck you.”

  “Any time,” the devil answered with a grin and a slide of his tongue over those white, white teeth. “Any time, kiddo.”

  Now Jake stood on the front porch of a modest bungalow that needed some fresh paint and someone to mow the grass. Flowers drooped in the beds around the front steps. Roses, mostly. He thought they were red, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Plus, they were long dead. An overgrown hydrangea bush pressed against the porch. Blooms the size of his head, almost. His mom had always liked hydrangeas. She’d scattered the ground beneath them with iron spikes to keep the color deep and dark and blue.

  Jake hated hydrangeas.

  He’d picked up the lock picks from an estate sale. They’d been laid out on a table along with a bunch of miscellaneous metal junk. Old keys. Mismatched forks and knives. He hadn’t known what they were — at the time the devil hadn’t yet started asking him to steal things that required the use of lock picks. Yet the moment he saw them, a frisson of delight had trickled up and down his spine. All the way to fingers and toes. That tingle often gave him a semi, which under most circumstances would be kind of pleasant, if occasionally awkward, but Jake fucking hated the fact that doing what the devil wanted him to do ever felt good. He wanted everything he did for Old Mr. Splitfoot to feel terrible, and it hardly ever did.

  Most of the time, it felt fantastic, even when he was hating himself for it.

  He’d stolen the picks, of course. Paying for them would’ve been the right thing to do, and though the devil hadn’t outright asked Jake to steal them he figured the theft might count toward his debt in some way. It didn’t work that way, of course. It wasn’t a checklist. Just like the good he did never counteracted the bad; his soul’s worth couldn’t be weighed on any scale. The only way to keep himself from losing it was to do what the devil asked. Everything he asked. At least until Jake couldn’t do it any longer, and then the devil would own his soul forever.

  Now Jake pulled out the picks and sorted through them. It was an art, this business of opening locked doors without a key. He didn’t want to take pride in the skill, which had co
me to him as easily as most everything else he’d ever tried in his life. Didn’t want to, but did. Sometimes he tossed and turned at night, wondering how many of his blessings were the devil’s doing, but mostly he tried not to dwell on it too much. It could drive a man insane, trying to figure that out, and Jake wasn’t about to give the devil any leverage.

  A jiggle here. A shift. Easing metal on metal, Jake worked the tumblers of that lock like it was the thighs of a recalcitrant virgin, until at last he got it open. He sighed when the knob turned and looked side to side to see if anyone had noticed him here on the front porch, acting so suspiciously at two in the morning. Of course nobody did. When he was on the devil’s work, nobody ever did. He pushed open the door. Inside he found a narrow entryway with a hall leading to a kitchen and a room on either side of him. In front of him, the stairs.

  El Diablo never told Jake exactly how the deed was to be done. He merely presented opportunity and made his requests. It was always up to Jake the method by which the madness should be made.

  Up the stairs, he figured. That was the most likely place an old lady would keep her jewelry, anyway. Cash might be hidden all around the house, in jars and inside the pages of books or under a mattress.

  He’d once found a stash of hundred dollar bills inside a block of ice in a freezer in a basement — the money had been underneath a couple of frozen cats and some ground meat that he wasn’t sure was beef. That time, Old Scratch hadn’t asked him to steal anything. Instead, Jake had been asked to set the house on fire. It had burned to the ground, revealing a series of shallow graves that had led to the arrest, trial and set of consecutive life sentences for a serial killer with a penchant for children. Times like that, Jake understood completely how once the devil could’ve been God’s favorite.

  Upstairs, Jake found several closed-off bedrooms, musty with hanging dust and full of old furniture. At the end of the hall, another closed door led him into a bedroom only slightly better smelling. The double bed in the middle of the room was empty, the blankets pulled up tight and neat. His shadow moved in the mirror’s reflection, but Jake avoided looking at it as he rifled through the jewelry box on top of the dresser. His light, bright but pinpointed, shone on plenty of costume jewelry, bright with color. Gold owls with emerald eyes, oversized cocktail rings. That sort of thing. Most of it was worth something, if only for the vintage chic, but there, in the middle was a set of diamond rings that glittered in the light. A loop of pearls. A pair of ruby earrings. Like the skill with the picks, his knack for being able to tell the difference between real and fake was something he didn’t want to think about.

  Jake scooped up the entire lot, box and all, and put it in the backpack he’d brought along. Easing the top drawer open, he expected scarves or pajamas or maybe mentally disturbing old-lady lingerie. Instead, he found rolls and rolls of dollar bills tucked into a honeycomb of plastic, the sort most people used to keep socks paired and sorted. He flipped through one of them. All ones. The next, the same. There might be a couple thousand dollars here, all singles. Who knew, maybe the old lady used to be a stripper.

  He plucked handfuls of rubber-banded dollar bills and stuffed them in the backpack. Turning, he kept the light hidden against his palm. Just because the house seemed empty didn’t mean it was. The coffee he’d sucked down earlier while trying to keep himself awake enough for this night’s adventures was donkey punching him in both kidneys.

  Down the hall, there was a bathroom. Two things happened when he opened the door. The first was that he registered, too late, that the light was already on and the room occupied. The second was that Jake very nearly pissed his pants.

  “Holy fucking shit,” he barked.

  The woman in the bathtub, naked but for a nightgown gone sheer from the wet, blinked at him slowly. She wasn’t old. Maybe in her forties, far from the crone he’d imagined he was robbing. Not that it mattered.

  “Who the hell are you?”

  Her voice slurred. Her eyes drooped. Lined up along the side of the tub was a bottle of whiskey — empty — and a dozen prescription pill bottles. Balanced on the tub’s edge was a straight razor blade.

  “Shit,” Jake said. “I’ll be out of here in a minute or two. Out of your way.”

  The woman in the tub laughed. Under other circumstances it might’ve been sexy, her voice low and throaty, her nightgown transparent enough to show the dark circles of her nipples and the shadow between her thighs. “Oh, honey. Don’t you never mind about that. Sit and stay a while. Are you him?”

  “Him, who?”

  “Azrael. The Angel of Death. Come to spirit me away. Funny, I thought maybe you’d be a girl. Then again, I haven’t had much luck with girls.”

  He was tempted to say yes, if only to keep her quiet. But though the devil had made him a thief and a killer of kittens, among other bad things, Jake never lied if he didn’t have to. “No. I’m not an angel.”

  “Figures.” She snorted softly, reached unsteadily for the liquor bottle, and knocked it to the floor. “Well. Fuck-a-doodle-doo.”

  Jake sidestepped the scatter of breaking glass. The backpack jingled and shuffled, heavy with loot. The woman turned a red-rimmed and unfocused gaze toward it.

  “Huh.”

  “I’ll just get out of your way,” Jake said.

  The woman in the tub sloshed some water over the edge. It knocked over the pill bottles. They were empty and bounced around his feet. “What’s your name?”

  “Jake.”

  “So tell me, Jake. Have you ever been in love?”

  He should just get the hell out of Dodge, but he knew better than that. If the devil had sent him here, tonight, it was for a reason and maybe not really to steal cocktail rings and dollar bills. Carefully, he set the backpack on the sink, then leaned a hip against it. Crossed his arms over his chest. “Maybe.”

  “I don’t recommend it.” The woman gave another of those low, rasping laughs. She picked up the razor with surprising grace, considering her earlier clumsiness. She held it up to him. “This is what love is. A fucking razor blade. Only instead of your wrists —” here, she demonstrated, slicing herself in a long, deep line from wrist to elbow. “It’s your fucking heart.”

  Blood welled up, jetting, turning the water quickly crimson. The smell of it hit him like a fist. Jake had acquired a strong stomach over the years — some of the things the devil asked of him had definitely been repulsive. But this was a smell of agony and desperation and grief and loss, and it forced a tsunami of bile to surge into his throat.

  “Well, damn, honey,” the woman said sadly, the razor still gripped in her fingers, though loosely. “Seems I can’t quite hold this with my other hand. Would you be a dear, help a girl out.”

  No sane man would’ve agreed to this, but like it or not, Jake was in the service of Satan. If God worked in mysterious ways, His first and fallen favorite did the same. Kneeling next to the tub, the knees of his jeans soaking through from the water she’d spilled, Jake gently took the razor from her fingers.

  “Would you…” her voice trembled. Her eyes closed for a moment before, blinking, she forced them all the way open. “I don’t supposed you’d say a little prayer for me, would you, honey?”

  “I don’t think any prayer I say would reach the right ears,” he said regretfully.

  The woman smiled and closed her eyes again as Jake put the blade to her other wrist. “That’s okay, then. That’s all ok.”

  It only took a second or so to finish what she’d started, and Jake let the blade fall into the water. He thought for a moment if something would link him to this, if he’d be caught for murder instead of burglary. And then, he thought, would it really matter?

  Still kneeling on the hard tile, Jake held her hand despite the slickness of the blood. She hummed a little, right at the end. Something tuneless and breathy, but there was no final word, no “rosebud.” No advice. She simply died.

  Later, at the bridge where he was dumping everything he’d stolen from
her, he had time to think that he wished he’d at least asked her name. That’s when the devil showed up, still looking like a gangster, still with that white, white grin. Jake grimaced. Tired and aching for sleep, all he wanted was to go home and get to bed, grab a few hours of oblivion before he woke up and had to do shit like this all over again.

  “Whatever you want me to do, it can’t really be much worse than what I just did,” Jake said.

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, kiddo,” the devil said. “Tell me, Jake. Have you ever been in love?”

  The Resurrected

  available now

  * * *

  When a series of freak storms sweep across the world, they leave behind something more than devastation. First come the swift-growing flowers, smelling like heaven and dying as quickly as they bloom. Next comes the infestation as the flowers breed and multiply inside their hosts. After that, chaos, mayhem and death.

  And after that…resurrection.

  * * *

  They slept.

  Abbie dreamed, as she often did, in full color and stereo surround sound. At first her dreamscape was a jumbled mess of faces and places she hadn’t seen for a long time. And then, as in the way of dreams, it all changed.

  She was on a train. Going fast. Too fast. She looked out her window at the scenery passing outside, trees and farms and small towns lit up in the night. The train clattered on the rails, too high above everything to be a real train, she knew that even in the dream, but even as she got to her feet and gripped the back of the seat to keep herself steady, she was unable to force herself to wake. And she wanted to, because though this wasn’t yet a nightmare, it felt well on its way to becoming one.

  The chug-chugging got louder. The train hissed and steamed. She was riding in a dragon.