“How do you propose to do that? She told Lilith she wants nothing to do with you.”
Belial frowned. He’d had a plan. What was it? His head felt like a thousand anvils being struck by a thousand hammers. “I’ve made arrangements to start seeing patients at Mercy Care. That will put me in her path.”
“The smell of liniment and urine aren’t conducive to seduction.”
Before he could formulate a response, his phone buzzed. It was a text from Dara. Pleasure zinged through him.
I need to talk to you. Can you meet me?
She wanted to see him. Warmth that had nothing to do with his surroundings filled him.
“What have you got to smile about?” Satan growled.
Both his horns spouted smoke, bringing Belial’s attention back to the present. Bless you, woman, you just saved my ass. He showed the text to the boss, who pinched his lower lip and nodded.
Belial typed back: Sure. Slyders?
The response was almost immediate. Nowhere with alcohol or food.
Hallelujah, she’d finally wised up. Where?
Public parking lot, Alexandria Beach, 6 p.m.
He typed, See you then, and hit send.
“You can go back,” Satan said.
With Belial’s pounding head, it took a minute for that to sink in. Before Dara’s text arrived, the boss hadn’t planned to let him return Aboveworld. He dragged himself to his feet and trudged toward the door.
His hand was on the doorknob when the boss’s voice stopped him. “Demon?”
Belial turned around, trying to look sharp and like he was on top of things. All he could think about, though, was how much he wanted to drink a glass of ice water and crawl into bed. For a delirious moment, he imagined Dara applying a cooling cloth to his head.
“Don’t fuck this up,” Satan said.
It was less of a warning than a promise.
It took all the concentration Belial could muster to drive up the Rings without putting the Hyundai in a ditch. Like his front wheels, his mind kept wandering. He found himself thinking, for the first time in many centuries, about his life before the Fall.
Heaven was a place of sunlight and blue skies. Soft music from harps and wind chimes played in the background. And having wings had been amazing. He imagined he could feel them again, sprouting from his shoulder blades. If he’d had any idea that signing on with Sataniel would mean giving up his wings, he would never have done it.
He’d been a complete fool, buying the line of Sataniel. How devastated he’d been when he arrived in Hell and discovered the grand stories of the new organization were outright lies. The Enemy had staked out all the good territory. All that was left for Satan’s new empire was the bad.
For the first few centuries, Belial took out his disappointment on the mortals with whom he came into contact, both above and below. Every life he touched, he made miserable. But being evil grew stale. He switched to a model of doing his work with a maximum of efficiency and a minimum of carnage. His machinelike competence impressed the boss even more. So began his ascent through Hell’s hierarchy. Eventually he rose to where he was now, the level just below the boss that he shared with the demons of sloth, lust and greed. Where it now appeared he would end his days, if Satan’s threats were to be believed.
He pulled onto the exit ramp to Aboveworld and thought of Dara in the little sundress she’d worn Saturday night. Her beautiful scarred collarbones were on display above, her dynamite legs below.
He remembered the day she’d brought him to meet her grandmother. She’d stopped to help the old man down the hall. Not for any personal gain, but because she was made that way. He’d doubted it at the time, but her behavior since then—her affection for her staff, her visits to her grandmother, which couldn’t always be very pleasant, the sacrifices she made to keep her clinic open and available to the poor—proved she was sincere. Loving others as herself—no, loving others more than herself—was built into her as much as those shapely legs and elegant clavicles. She was the most amazing woman he’d ever met.
He got to the beach parking lot fifteen minutes early, so he made a side jaunt to a convenience store. There, he purchased two bottles of cold water, one to drink and the other to press against his forehead. He tried to drum up some anger at Bad for sabotaging his identity in order to steal his job, but he couldn’t come up with the energy. He just hoped Dara wouldn’t make him walk very far.
He had emptied the first bottle and broken the seal on the second when her rust bucket Corolla pulled in beside the Hyundai. He crawled out of the car. He had to lean against the door for a moment before drawing himself upright and giving her what he hoped was a devastating smile. She was wearing her usual flamingo-pink nursing scrubs. They offered a tantalizing glimpse of her collarbones.
When she saw him, her eyes narrowed, but she didn’t say anything. With a thrust of her jaw, she indicated she wanted to walk on the beach. Without a word, she set off across the asphalt toward the boardwalk. Stifling a groan, he followed her. At the bottom of the steps, she kicked off her clogs and stepped out onto the sand.
He slipped off his deck shoes and tried to follow, but the sand was like something out of Hell. The sun was low on the horizon, but the pulverized quartz was still hot as lava. It shifted beneath his bare feet at every step, making him fight to stay vertical. On about his fifth step, he lost his balance and fell flat.
It was even hotter on his face than it had been on his feet, but he couldn’t summon the energy to get back up. With effort, he rolled onto his back and stared at the sky. It was a clear cerulean blue, truly worthy to be the underside of Paradise. He was glad he’d gotten one last chance to see it before Satan executed him.
In the distance, Dara exclaimed, “Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Then she was there, looming over him, blocking his view of the celestial subfloor. “What are you doing?”
He didn’t have an answer for that, so he didn’t attempt one.
She bent to look at him more closely. Her eyes narrowed. She put her hand on his forehead.
“You’re burning up.”
The palm of her hand was cool and soft and smooth. For a moment, it felt like he was back in Heaven. He turned his head and coughed into his elbow.
Her jaw dropped. “Are you…sick?”
“Demons don’t get sick,” he mumbled.
“Then what do you call this?” She waved at his prostrate body.
He groaned. “I don’t know. I’ve never felt like this before. Is this what being sick feels like?”
Biting her lip, she studied him. “Tell me your symptoms.”
“My skin feels like I’m on fire. My head is pounding. And my muscles ache like I’ve been on the rack.” He coughed again.
She looked him up and down, frowning. Then she tilted her head and said, “Oh. My. God.”
Without asking permission, she lifted the hem of his shirt and looked at his belly. Then she laughed.
He wished Satan had just executed him and gotten it over with. “What’s so funny?”
“I think you’ve got chickenpox.”
He struggled up onto one elbow. “What?”
“You’ve got chickenpox. You must have contracted them from the Gonzales boy.”
“Demons don’t get chickenpox.” He tried for his usual hauteur, but it came out sounding more like a whine.
“This one did. And fast, too. It usually takes ten days to two weeks to develop.” She studied him again. “Did they equip your—what did you call it? identity?— with immunity to human diseases?”
“I don’t know.”
Dara helped him to a sitting position. “Let’s get you to the clinic and find out how bad your fever is.”
“I don’t want you to get sick, too.”
She stared at him, as though he’d said something odd. Then she said, “I’ve been vaccinated. I won’t get them.”
He stumbled to his feet. Leaning on her shoulder, he made his way back to the boardwalk, feeling worse
every minute. By the time they reached the foot of the stairs, the four steps to the walkway looked like Mt. Ararat.
Dara bent over to retrieve their shoes. “You can do it.”
Hand over hand on the rail, he dragged himself up the steps. With Dara’s support, he managed to navigate the quarter-mile boardwalk to the parking lot. At the end of the wooden walkway, he collapsed onto a built-in bench.
She knelt in front of him and lifted his foot, brushing the sand off. Her hands were cool and gentle. Then she slipped his shoe back on. From where he was sitting, he could see down the neckline of her scrubs to her scarred collarbones and round breasts, but he couldn’t even summon any lust.
“Why are you helping me?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I couldn’t tell you. I’m still furious about Saturday night.”
“Yeah, I’m sorry about that,” he said.
Her hand stilled on his foot. “What did you say?”
“I said I was sorry.”
She stared at him, frowning, her eyes searching his.
“What?” he asked.
She shook her head. “Let’s get you someplace and take your temp.”
Chapter 33
By the time Dara got Ben back to the car, she realized she couldn’t take him to the clinic. Even without a thermometer, she could tell that the amount of heat he was putting out didn’t fall within normal human ranges. However much his identity might look like a human body, it wasn’t one. For the same reason, she couldn’t take him to the hospital.
His beach house was less than a mile away, but she headed for her condo instead. The idea of caring for a sick demon, whose physiology she knew nothing about, was overwhelming enough without trying to work in an unfamiliar location. He sat in the passenger seat, his eyes closed and his head lolling against the headrest.
Why was she going to so much trouble? Throughout the drive, she kept asking herself that. There was no question that the world, especially her world, would be a safer, better place without him. But as she looked at him, slumped in the passenger seat, a five o’clock shadow shading his beautiful jaw, his eyelashes inscribing dark crescents against his flushed cheeks, she couldn’t do it.
And then there was his apology. Nana said demons couldn’t apologize, but he had. Twice. Could Nana have been wrong?
At her condo, she pulled into the garage and lowered the garage door so that none of the neighbors would see him get out of her car. Alexandria was a small town, and the last thing she needed was for the rumor mill to go crazy with stories of the Widow Strong bringing home the gorgeous doctor who gave her clinic two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.
He was so limp she had to support him as he stumbled into the house. It was like being draped with a huge, sweaty tarp. She led him to the couch, where he sat down and looked around. She would have suspected him of doing demon reconnaissance, but he didn’t seem to be taking in his surroundings.
“Go ahead and lie down,” she said. He toppled over sideways. She took off his shoes and lifted his feet onto the sofa. There were still grains of sand clinging to his soles.
She retrieved an oral thermometer from the bathroom medicine cabinet, poured rubbing alcohol over it and rinsed it under the tap.
When she got back to the living room, Milton had jumped up on the couch and was sniffing Ben’s breath. He must have liked what he smelled, because he kneaded the couch cushion in front of Ben’s head with his front paws and curled up there. Ben was so out of it that he didn’t even react.
She scooped Milton out of the way and set him on the floor. He gave an offended meow and stalked out of the room, tail in the air. She stuck the thermometer in Ben’s mouth. Three minutes later, when she took it out, it simply read “H.” He was off the scale.
He lay very still. He hadn’t even moved when Milton sniffed him. He seemed to be barely conscious. What should she do? She needed some way to measure the effects of any actions she took.
After a moment, she went into the kitchen and located her candy thermometer. She repeated the routine with the rubbing alcohol and tap water before putting the bulb under his tongue. When she pulled it back out, it read 120 degrees. His physiology was definitely one she knew nothing about.
What next? She could give him acetaminophen, but what if it poisoned him? She turned on the ceiling fan and sponged him down, but the water dried as soon as it touched his heated skin.
Then she remembered a method that worked with small children when they had high fevers: letting them play in a bathtub of lukewarm water. She went back into the bathroom and turned on the taps.
When the water got deep enough, she woke him. “Let’s get you into some cool water.”
He bolted to a sitting position. His eyes were wild. “Not the lake.”
She laid a comforting hand on his arm. “Of course not the lake.” What lake was he talking about? She tugged on his wrist.
He tried to crawl backward to get away from her.
“Just a bathtub,” she said, making her voice as soothing as possible. “A bathtub filled with cool water, to bring your fever down.”
He stopped trying to crabwalk away from her. “A bathtub?”
“It will help cool you.” She half led, half dragged him to the bathroom. There they encountered another issue. She didn’t want him to get into the water in his clothes, but she felt awkward about undressing him.
“Can you take your shirt off for me?”
He pulled his polo shirt over his head, swaying as he did so.
“That’s it,” she said. “Now your pants.”
He unbuttoned his khakis and dropped them to the floor. He was down to a pair of burgundy silk boxers like the black ones he’d worn Saturday morning, after he tried to seduce her.
If she’d ever entertained any idea of sleeping with him, the semi-nude body in front of her was enough to put an end to those fantasies. His torso was shaped like a funnel, with the emphasis on fun. Every inch of him rippled with muscles, and his skin, the parts that weren’t speckled with blisters, looked like satin. There was no way she would ever allow her own scarred body to be contrasted with this work of art. Then she realized he still had his shorts on.
“I’m a nurse,” she said. “I’ve seen men’s butts before.”
Turning away from her, he shucked off his boxers, standing on the fabric with one foot while he pulled the other free, holding on to the shower curtain for support. She drew in a breath. She’d seen men’s butts before, but never one as fine as this one. Her eyes traveled upward and she sucked in her breath. Both of his scapulae bore jagged scars. It looked as though a part of him had been torn away.
“My wings,” he said, bowing his head.
Her heart twisted with horror.
“Let’s get you into the water.” She took his elbow and helped him into the tub.
He sat down and relaxed against the slanted end of the tub. She tried to ignore his penis, bobbing in the water. She’d fantasized about seeing him naked more than once, but she’d never imagined it would be under these circumstances. She glanced up to find him watching her. Her cheeks flamed. A smile touched the corners of his lips, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, he closed his eyes and rolled his head back against the lip of the tub, as though he were exhausted.
After twenty minutes in the water, he seemed a little more alert. She checked his temp,
“You’re down to a hundred and six,” she said. “Unfortunately, I didn’t know what your normal temperature runs.”
“Hand me my phone. I’ll text Bad and find out.”
It was good to see him more aware, but… “Bad?”
“Abaddon—the demon in charge of mission identities.”
She debated refusing, but her medical training was too ingrained to let her fly blind as she attempted to treat a patient, demon though he might be.
“This is a one-time thing.” She fished his phone out of his pants pocket and handed him a towel to dry his hands. “It is not a precedent.”
/>
He nodded and tapped the screen. A moment later, he said, “Normal temp is ninety-eight point six.”
That made sense. An identity designed to be intimate with a human would need a human body temperature.
“He said not to worry about the fever—the identities are designed to withstand temperatures in Hell.”
“Can you take acetaminophen?”
He texted again. “I can take it, but it won’t do any good.”
“Thank goodness the tub works, then.”
But, of course, goodness had nothing to do with it.
After she got him out of the tub, she went back to straighten up the bathroom and saw his cell phone. She considered smashing it, as she had his last one, but what if she needed another medical consult? After a few minutes’ careful thought, she carried the cell phone to the kitchen and sealed it in a plastic baggie. After verifying Ben was asleep, she got in the car and drove the phone to his house, where she tucked it beneath a shrub.
She straightened and looked at the house. This was the place where Ben had come so close to seducing her. The memory was a little hazy, but what she did remember made her squeeze her thighs together and bite her lip. She almost wished he’d succeeded.
By the time the next morning rolled around, they’d gone through three more rounds of tub time, each of them a little less effective than the one before. During the most recent cycle, Dara dumped all the ice cubes from her freezer into the water. Ben shivered like he had ague, but the ice was almost melted before his temperature nudged downward.
Despite the tech demon’s lack of concern, Ben’s fever spikes worried her. He had no immunity to human maladies. When new diseases entered the biosphere, it wasn’t unusual for them to prove fatal to large numbers of humans.
He said he was immortal, but what if she, through her inept nursing, was the first person to ever kill a demon? What if she did it on purpose? Would God reward her? Or would it be a sin, like killing another human?
The thought of losing him disturbed her far more deeply than it should have. Nana would have viewed his death as a win over the demon hordes, but it didn’t feel that way to Dara. Over the past few weeks, she’d felt alive in a way she hadn’t in years. Despite her worries about the clinic, she’d come to look forward to their verbal jousting. His obvious desire for her had made her feel…desirable.
The Demon Always Wins: Touched by a Demon, Book 1 Page 21