* * *
Breakfast at the big rock house on the corner of Meljac Lane and Stillman Road consisted of toast and coffee. No one in the Meljac family was taking any chances on putting anything else in their stomach that might not stay there. Melanie had spent most of the early morning wishing the chef from the Lakeside Inn had died in childbirth.
The children had stumbled back to their beds, their time spent hanging over the toilet having exhausted them both. Emma hadn’t stirred since she’d gone upstairs the night before. The horrible smell still permeated the air, clinging to everything, and showed no signs of dissipating. Melanie doubted there was a full stomach left in the entire valley.
Quackrak, his scatterbrained crew of demons, and a much-chastened Dread, were stuck in the basement till something could be figured out as to what to do about them. As frightening as Dread was in appearance, not to mention attitude, he seemed to defer to Quackrak, and the little demon had promised to set the big fiend straight about messing with living people’s souls.
Melanie had taken the loss of her abilities in stride at first—just one more insane problem on top of all the rest. But now it was beginning to sink in, and she was feeling tendrils of panic. Claudia’s powers had also disappeared, but her staidness was helping Melanie keep it together. The older woman was confident there was an explanation, and a solution.
As far as Melanie was concerned, one thing was certain: Harry was a dead man. She was going to hunt him down and skin him alive, roast him over a slow fire, have a nice old fashioned town barbeque—baked beans and slow-roasted Harry. She was sure Amanda would go along with the idea. Obviously, the ex-devil hadn’t left them with the whole story when he went trotting off to Ft. Lauderdale. She could forgive Harry’s omission of the “oops-there’s-no-devil-to-blame-stuff-on” adjustment period—maybe he didn’t even know that would happen—but he had to have known that Hell wouldn’t continue to run merrily along all by itself forever. It occurred to her that Harry, the women, everyone involved, had taken Hell for granted for so long that they had lost sight of the fact that Hell was, to put it bluntly, “some serious shit,” and had to be run by a serious Devil, not a four and a half foot demon. Yep, Ole Harry skewered on a big barbeque spit. Might as well stick Dread on there while we’re at it: a few kegs of beer, fun for the whole town.
Goodbye Lucifer Page 31