by Megan Hart
“You have to see this.”
Cassie shook her head and bent back over the spreadsheets on her desk. “We need to increase the transportation budget,” she told her boss’s face on her computer screen. She was video-conferencing with the head of the Aquila Foundation between her office in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and his winter condo in Boca Raton. “Fuel costs have gone up again.”
“We’ll need to reduce something else,” he countered, his head bent over his own set of papers. He stopped writing and looked up with a frown. “Is that the television?”
“Beth, please,” Cassie hissed, then went still. “What is that?”
“That,” Beth said in a voice of doom, pointing the remote at the television, “is the rest of your life.”
“Sir, may we please resume this later?”
Her boss must have seen something in her face because he didn’t argue. “We can trim from the advertising and media relations budgets and find additional no-cost avenues for those. Then I think that will do it. I’ll contact you on Friday.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Cassie clicked the button to close the video screen and stood, her eyes still on the scene on TV. “Tell me that’s Justin Timberlake.”
“That’s not Justin Timberlake.”
“Maybe it’s Fitty Cent.”
Beth snorted. “Not unless Fitty has grown green bangs.”
Cassie stepped closer to the TV, still attempting denial.
“They could be imposters.”
“You mean impersonators?”
“Yeah, that.” But she didn’t bother waiting for Beth’s answer. She knew damned well who that was on the screen, holding a woman in each arm and kissing one on the cheek while the other stroked her hand across his shiny, electric-blue shirt.
But Julian Manchester, keyboardist and notorious ladies’ man for the re-formed pop-rock band Blue Silver, wasn’t the problem. His best mate, Blue Silver’s lead singer Seth Graham, was.
Cassie wasn’t ready to address her fiancé’s similar arm-drapery, or the tongue that was in his ear. “Does Georgie know about this?”
Beth shrugged. “I don’t work for Georgie.” She turned up the volume. The entertainment network’s reporter said, in voice-over, “Silverettes are back in style, as Blue Silver returns to the stage. After the success of their new album and last year’s club tour, the neo-retro musicians have rediscovered their core audience.”
Cassie grabbed the phone headset off her desk and sank onto the arm of the battered sofa in front of the television. “Georgie Davis,” she said, and the phone automatically dialed.
“Led by Julian Manchester, the boys-cum-men have been out on the town in London this evening, and appear to have returned to their previous lifestyle.”
Cassie realized now that the footage was in front of a nightclub. Julian lifted an arm to open the door of a long black limo, while Seth turned his head to talk to someone behind him—Brad, she saw, who at least had his girlfriend Marci wrapped around him.
“Hello?”
“Georgie. It’s Cassie. Turn on that entertainment network we both hate.”
“Uh, oh.”
A second later she heard an echo of the show behind Georgie’s voice. “What am I not going to—oh.”
“Yeah.”
They watched in silence as one of the blondies clinging to Seth bit his neck. Marci swatted at her and looked like she would rather have slugged her if not for the cameras.
“Aren’t they in London?” Georgie asked. “It’s midnight over there, right?”
“About that, yeah.”
“When did Marci go over?”
“Last week. She can work from anywhere, you know. Brad called, she went.” On screen, Marci sneered at the woman who’d bitten Seth. “She’s going to tear that bitch apart.”
“You sound so bloodthirsty,” Georgie teased. “Don’t you trust your rock star fiancé?”
Cassie ground her teeth. She did trust Seth. He’d been and done a lot of things in their first short, disastrous marriage. Adultery hadn’t been one of them. “Seth’s not the problem.”
“What is?”
The phone rang in the outer office. “That is.”
“What?”
“Hang on.”
Beth tapped her own headset to answer the call. “Cassie Bryant’s office, Aquila Foundation.” She listened for three seconds. “I’m sorry, Ms. Bryant has no comment, and she does not take personal calls at work.” She clicked off, her expression unmarred by emotion. Her unshakable calm was part of what Cassie had loved about her even before she reconciled with Seth.
“Reporters,” she told Georgie. “Seth isn’t going to do anything to harm our relationship, not after working so hard to get us back together.”
“Julian says he’s been completely clean, even with all the stress of the album sales and stuff.”
Cassie wasn’t worried about Seth’s addictions, either, but—
“Julian Manchester is clearly up to his old habits. One can only wonder if Seth Graham is, as well, and if those will prove to be deadly to his tender new relationship with ex-wife Cassie Bryant.”
The phone rang again.
“There. That’s the problem,” Cassie griped to her friend. “Seth’s not using, he’s not cheating, but every time he goes out of the house we have to contend with reporters making insinuations and other reporters calling me to get my reaction, like I’m going to pull a Sienna Miller or something.”
Georgie snorted. “That’s a dated reference. And the nanny was the one who blabbed to all the—”
“It doesn’t matter.”
Cassie was actually more worried about her friend. No matter how many times Georgie told her the thing between her and Jules was casual, Cassie wasn’t convinced. She saw the look in Julian’s eyes any time she mentioned Georgie, and she felt the sparks when they were in the same room. When a year passed and those sparks were still flying—and the parties involved still snuck off to have sex in the closet—the thing was more than casual.
“So what do you think?” Cassie asked.
“About what?”
Julian bent and planted one on the wide, ruby-red mouth of the woman he handed into the limo, patted the bare knee that was about two feet below the hem of her “skirt,” and straightened to mug for the cameras one more time before they cut to commercial.
“I told you, she’s not available…” Beth’s cold, clipped voice faded as she exited the office and closed the door.
Georgie still didn’t speak.
“Honey? You okay?”
When she answered, her voice was tight. “We don’t have an exclusive arrangement,” she said.
“I know, but…” But sleeping with women like that—not that Cassie could judge her by thirty seconds on TV—and then sleeping with Georgie, well, that was playing a dangerous game, whether emotions were involved or not. “You protect yourself.” Cassie wasn’t sure what else she could say. Georgie knew what she was doing. She always knew what she was doing, starting with the moment she decided they needed another chance at that lost night over sixteen years ago. They’d all gotten more than they bargained for, but Georgie had never wavered.
“You know what pisses me off most.” Georgie sounded normal again.
“That they called them Silverettes?”
“Fuck, yes.”
Cassie grinned. “Me, too.”
Ride with the Devil
Megan Hart
available now
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 hi
m 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 come 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 ag
ain, 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.