If he was embarrassed, he was damned good at hiding it. Clyde threw his shoulders back, sauntering toward her.
Her eyes met his when he approached her, refusing to stray beyond the dark blue of them for fear she’d catch another glimpse of his man-tool. “Use my demonic powers.”
Her chest puffed outward—defensive and at the ready. “Are you threatening me? Me?”
Gone was the confused man she’d met yesterday. Gone was that look of innocent displacement. In its stead was a jagged resolve of flashing blue eyes behind the glimmer of his square frames and teeth, clamped and on edge. “Yep.”
Hoo boy.
It was, apparently, on.
“Do you have any idea the shit I could stir up? I know people from the other side—people who’ll whip your satanic ass into a frenzy, noob.”
Clyde rolled his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “I hate to be the one to burst your bubble, but if you’re talking about that OD’d-on-too-much-nail-polish-remover Marcella, she’s probably as much of a joke downstairs in Hell as I am. And I don’t want to point out the obvious, but I will because I’m all about fair warning. If you had someone who could help you, you’d have called them by now.”
In Clyde’s favor, that would be game, set, match.
Because she really didn’t know anyone with heavy-duty Hell powers, that was fo sho.
But her pride wouldn’t allow him to threaten her—the frig he’d threaten her—and to hell with his reasons for being here. She didn’t care anymore why he was here, just that he wouldn’t be as soon as she could make that possible. “You picked the wrong medium to tango with, brotha.” Delaney waved a finger under his nose when he drew closer, ignoring the pure maleness of him. And while she was at it, she’d ignore that waist that tapered to lean hips, and the scent of his aftershave.
His breath fanned her face when he let out a raspy sigh. “I didn’t pick anything. But I’d suggest you listen to me before things get out of hand.”
Okay, so maybe she was getting a little nervous now, but in the interest of never let ’em see you sweat, she threw her head back and laughed. “He with the duct tape glue residue all over his body said.”
Clyde let the blanket drop to his chest, securing it by tucking the ends in. “You were warned.”
Uh-huh. She’d been warned. Now she was going to take that warning and keep it ever so close to her heart as she swept the floor. Turning from Clyde, big, muscular, and okay, dweebishly hot, she went in search of her broom, ducking behind the counter to see if her dustpan was still on the shelf.
A sizzling crackle made her head snap up.
Stop.
He didn’t.
Oh, but he had.
If the roar of flames was any indication.
five
“Omigod! You feeb! You set my grandmother’s chair on fiiire!” Delaney ran for the broom, waving it in the air to slap at the flames before the smoke alarm went off.
Clyde appeared out of nowhere again with a soggy, wet towel. He handed it to her with a casual pass, then took a step back, crossing his arms over his chest. “I did,” was the cool response. “But I was actually aiming for the bookcase behind it. So, oops.”
Delaney swatted the chair with the towel, tamping out the flames shooting from the arm while large drops of water splattered over the fabric. He’d only managed to torch the one arm of it, but she was no less hacked off about it. “Oops? Like oops, my bad? This—was—an—antique—you—fucktard! Look at it!” she yelped. “You’ve ruined it. You can’t just order fabric like this anymore. Arghhhh!”
He yanked the towel from her, pressing it into the cushiony material with firm hands. “I told you I would do what it took. I’m sorry it took this, but you have this way about you that demands proof by action.”
Using the back of her hand, she pushed her hair from her forehead before nudging him out of the way, yanking the towel from his grip. Clyde’s hand grazed hers while he held strong. “Give me that, firestarter,” she huffed, pulling it from his grip. “This wasn’t just my grandmother’s chair, it was my story time chair.”
Now he looked remorseful. Good. Very good. After the fact was hugely helpful. “She read you stories in it?”
Delaney grunted with the effort to blot the now sopping wet fabric. “No. I mean, yes—when I was little. But I also hold a story time for kids once a month here at the store with sugarless wheat cookies and soy milk. How do you feel about fucking up some poor kids’ night out, you jackass?”
Clyde looked doubtful. “What kind of kid eats sugarless wheat cookies and soy milk and actually likes it?”
All right, so the sugarless cookies weren’t always a score with the kids. Point. “The kind who have parents who’re trying to keep toxic chemicals out of their offspring’s bodies. Preservatives and additives and all the junk that clogs your pipes up. What difference does it make now? I have no chair to read to them from. That means you’ve not only ruined my cherished memory, but crapped on a bunch of kids who’ll be very sad they can’t sit by this very chair and hear the story of how Mr. Herb goes to Washington.”
“Mr. Herb? Whatever happened to some good old-fashioned Dr. Seuss?”
“Well, we’ll never know, now, will we? Even if I could have read Dr. Seuss to the little beasts, I can’t do it now because you burned the goddamned chair!”
Clyde’s he-man, take-no-prisoners posture slumped; his expression grew somber. “I had no idea. I think we should just have a running apology from here on out in our relationship. I’ll always just be sorry and you can always be angry that I had to be sorry for whatever reason I’m sorry. Deal?”
Delaney threw the lumpy towel right at his not so lumpy abs, winking decadently at her from beneath the blanket. “No deal, Howie. We don’t have a relationship, you inheritance wrecker.”
Clyde caught it with a grunt and a sidelong glance. “We will. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you, but you keep ignoring me—brushing me off.”
Duh. “In the hopes that you’ll fade to black. Yes, I’m ignoring you—or at least I was trying to. Nobody threatens me, you Purgatory pimp. Especially not a pathetic demon like you.”
Clyde planted a big hand on the back of the chair. “I had to find a way to make you listen and I’m not done yet. There’s still more.”
Delaney sucked her cheeks in, assessing the singed chair. “If you thought this was the way to get a woman to pay attention to you, a playa you ain’t.”
Nodding an agreement, he flexed his fingers. “Established—and not just by you. I’m not here to play you. I just want your cooperation. I just want you to relax and listen to me.”
Her wide eyes and raised eyebrows said it all. “By setting fire to my stuff? I don’t think I’m being too ballsy when I say you’re not endearing yourself to me, Clyde the demon.”
“I don’t want to endear myself to you, Delaney the ghost lady. I want to find out why I’m in Hell and, if you’ll let me, help you in the process.”
Her hands went to her hips as she took in his tall form. She let her head tilt back on her shoulders to gaze up at him. Way up at him. Delaney was short by today’s standards at five foot one, but right now she felt dwarfed, eaten up by his looming, darkly handsome bulk. “Oh, I’m all atwitter. Help me? How do you suppose you can help me?”
Mirroring her stance, he placed his hands on his own lean hips.
“Because I have information about you.” He returned her shocked gaze with a cocky, all-knowing one.
“Reaaaallly?”
“Reaaaallly,” he drawled, dropping his head to his chest to roll it on his shoulders.
The problem was, would that information be true? But she’d play, because she had some doubts she had to address about Clyde. Delaney sensed she was giving poor old Clyde a run for his money by the set of his tense shoulders and the way he twisted his neck back and forth. “Okay. Hit me with your best shot.” Whiner.
“Pat Benatar, 1980, off the Crimes of Passion
album.” Clyde’s lean fingers began to massage his temples in absent circles.
And now we had the crazy. Maybe he was more confused about how he’d landed here than he was letting on. “Uh, you just crossed the threshold from creepy and annoying to crazy. Repeat?”
His head popped up, and he gave a push with two fingers to settle his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Forget it. It’s just a habit. I have a lot of useless trivia in my head. Sometimes words—songs trigger it. It just flies out of my mouth before I can stop it. Especially when I’m stressed, and getting you to give me your ear for more than the time it takes you to make my eyeballs feel like they’re being grilled on hot coals is damned stressful, lady.”
Delaney forced away the smile she almost let happen from hitting her face. “Okay, so how about we leave the era of leg warmers and Madonna, and you tell me what information you have about me from, of all places, Hell.”
Clyde scowled. “Madonna didn’t happen until more like ’82.”
“Right. Like a—a—”
“Virgin. From her Like a Virgin album, circa 1984, if I remember correctly.”
“I’ll be sure to make a mental note. Now spew, demon.”
Now he frowned, the vein in his temple pulsing. “I hesitate to say this, but I’m guessing you won’t believe me.”
“And that’s stopped you from yakking my ear off before? You set my chair on fire to get me to pay attention to you. Whatever it is, it must be serious—so tell me what the frig you want from me, and let me decide if I believe you.” Which she probably wouldn’t, but who didn’t want to hear the gossip they’d evoked straight from Hell? If she was all the rage down there, she wanted every juicy detail.
“All right. So it’s just like I told you. I don’t know how I ended up in Hell. I’d swear that on the Bibles that crazy woman offered me. A stack of them. I’ve been there for three months—in the file room.”
A snicker escaped her throat. “Hell has files?”
Clyde’s face grew strained, almost as if what he claimed to have seen in these files really did trouble him. “A shitload of them,” he said with a gruff note to his tone. “On everyone—the incoming, the due to be incoming, potential visitors, the easily corrupted, the want to corrupt but haven’t decided what road to take to the land of corruption—plus, mission assignments for all the demons in Hell, et cetera.”
Mayhem, madness, and chaos—all in one neat little filing system. Very clean. “So what does that have to do with me? I can’t be corrupted, believe me. I know.” And know she did. She’d been offered wealth and power once before by the very definition of evil. It’d been ugly, ugly. That warning shiver ran along her arms again with just the hint of the long-ago memory.
Clyde’s jaw shifted. “You weren’t in those files, Delaney. You were in the files for ‘vengeance—long overdue.’ ”
Her bravado slipped from her hands like sand in an hourglass. Her breath wheezed out of her lungs, leaving a heavy pressure in its wake. “Meaning?”
The pained expression left his eyes and they took on a solemn, direct stare. “Meaning, someone was assigned to come here and taunt you, to torment you in whatever way they had to, to get you to give in and follow Satan. From what little I read, your file was flagged. It’s the kind of file that’s in the equivalent of the urgent basket, which means a demon given the assignment is supposed to do whatever it takes to bend you to his will—make a contract with you—because, as Marcella said, demons can’t literally kill anyone. They can only coerce you into doing something that will land your soul in Hell upon your death—make you see your worst fears by creating illusions. I gather they were going to try and make you so crazy that you might end your . . . commit . . . suicide,” he said with graveness so gravelly deep, she couldn’t ignore it.
Huh. Surely the devil, after his run-in with her fifteen years ago, knew that just wasn’t gonna happen. Hadn’t he already tried, indirectly anyway, to corrupt her and found out he was SOL? But suicide . . . that was playing some serious hardball. Fighting to find her calm, Delaney popped her lips. “Well, if you were sent here to make me want to end it all, you’re doing a phenomenally shitty job, my friend. Though, if you hang around much longer, temptation might not be as mighty an effort to resist.”
For the first time, Clyde laughed, but it wasn’t the kind that dripped with sarcasm. It was hearty, rich, deep. It left something warm in her belly, right in the deepest depth of it, stealing another gasp of air from her she had to hide. “But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t belong in Hell and I’m damned sure not going to participate in helping you take . . . well, you know. When I realized no one was doing anything but laughing at me behind my back, and sometimes boldly to my face when I told them I’d been gypped, I decided to figure out a way to get out of Dodge without doing anything too heinous to anyone. Especially after I found out what those beginners’ demon classes were. When I refused to participate in learning how to create mayhem, or study ‘Possession—Your Guide to Rebirth,’ I was sent to the file room, and for someone like me, all that paperwork really is Hell—a punishment I can’t quite describe, and my level boss knew it. I was eventually labeled difficult, but not untrainable. So I lay low, learned a thing or two. Learned newbie demons are granted day-, week-, even month-long passes all the time. But, some of the things I’ve learned—seen—I’d like to forget. So there it is.”
Her lips pursed. “Still doesn’t explain why Lucifer sent you to do this particular deed. You’re a noob. Unless he thought you had some innate ability. Like driving mediums crazy with a demon’s constant yapping.”
His sigh expelled from his chest, making it expand and push at the throw she’d given him. “You’re right, I am a noob, painfully so. But Lucifer doesn’t do much more than leave the assignments up to his level bosses—most times. Though your file had his handwriting all over it. But here’s the clincher on this whole mess. I wasn’t really assigned to you.”
Now that made her pause. “So who was?”
Clyde’s eyes held guilt in the way they flitted from her face and focused on something behind her. “Some guy named Clyve Atwell. It was easy enough to change the letters in the name on the file from a v to a d. Like I said, I wasn’t totally above using these demonic powers, mediocre as they might be, to get me the frig out of there. I can’t think of much that would be worse than the punishment I was due for my refusal to attend classes. I’m also not proud of what I did—but this Clyve was a total waste of skin in life. He deserved what he got when I pulled that off.”
“Well, now I’m really dying here, Clyde. What kind of assignment did poor Clyve get that you were supposed to get?”
His next sigh represented a man truly torn—or really good at faking it. “Keep in mind, my original assignment was meant to debase me, humiliate me for not joining the freak show down there,” he hedged.
“And?”
“He’s Paris Hilton’s newest Chihuahua . . . well, he’s possessing it, anyway—for a year. I have a feeling he’ll be wearing diamond-encrusted collars and having his renal glands milked on a regular basis until the punishment is up.”
Laughter bubbled in her throat and spilled out in a burst of snorting giggles. “I can see how that’d be a sentence worse than death. But this also begs the question: did this Clyve with a v deserve what he got? The word according to you, of course.”
Disgust was written all over his sleekly chiseled face. “He was a pig, one of the worst humans to roam planet Earth,” he spat with a flex of his big fist. “A bastard. A vile bastard. Clyve with a v deserved to rot in the pit for eternity. He had a laundry list of criminal activity. A rap sheet so long I’d still be reading it if I wasn’t worried I’d get caught. But the worst of it is, he was responsible for a hit-and-run that killed a kid. A seven-year-old kid.”
Clyde shook his dark head, clearly because of the senselessness of something so tragic. “Never even looked back, the drunk ass. He knew he did it, too, and to
this day, no one knows who killed Katie Martin. Except Clyve. He knew he’d snuffed a kid. He made a comment about it that I can’t repeat without the threat of losing my lunch.” Clyde’s last words were riddled with such repulsion even she paused.
A somber moment lingered between them. Delaney reached for her grandmother’s chair behind her, sitting down and gripping the arm that wasn’t charred beyond recognition. If Clyde wasn’t telling the truth, he was damned good at spinning some smack, because a tale like that was . . . vile, unimaginable. “Jesus Christ Superstar,” she muttered. A sharp pain clutched at her heart for little Katie Martin and a family that would never have justice.
“Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1970, I believe.”
She raised a bewildered stare at him.
“You said Jesus Christ Superstar,” he offered reasonably, the sudden directional change in conversation appearing completely normal to him. “It was an album, then a musical—”
This demon . . . “Yeah, yeah. Broadway. I got it. Okay, how about we move on? Because if I linger over what you just told me, I’ll never sleep again.”
Clyde cupped his jaw, then ran his hand up and over the planes of his face to scratch his dark head. “Right. Anyway, I switched the files because I knew it meant coming back to this plane or whatever you call it if I did. I need to find out what happened the day I died, Delaney. I was a chemical consultant doing freelance research, for God’s sake. I was about as tame as the Dalai Lama. I wouldn’t hurt someone physically or otherwise. Ever.”
Said the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Maybe. “And how did you die again?”
Everything about his demeanor changed with one sheepish grin. “I wasn’t the most coordinated man . . . I had an accident . . .”
“Clearly. But there’s more . . .” she coaxed. Because there always was with Clyde.
“Uh, I blew myself up.” He held up a hand to stop her from what he must have known was coming next. “I know, I know. The particulars of what I was researching are probably far more detailed than you’d care to hear and about as evil as a newborn kitten. Just know I did something unbelievably stupid, and I should have known better. I was always careful, if not about my paperwork, that’s what Tia was for, anyway, then definitely about my surroundings and my chemicals. But I sure didn’t intend to end up dead—so forget the suicide theory I just know is milling around in that pretty head of yours, and nothing about what I was doing for research was diabolical or important to anyone of importance, if that’s where you’re headed next. So I took this mission because it put me back here on Earth, first and foremost, but I also took it because there’s no way I’m living out an eternity down there. I don’t know that in life I was much of a believer in Heaven and Hell and everything they teach you in catechism because it just isn’t logical to me, but in death, I believe.”
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