Out of nowhere, Marcella hissed, “Delaney—get away from there. Get out of here now!” Clyde had begun to stir, pushing her forward again. Her face grew red from the effort it took to keep him at bay.
“You!” Lucifer roared, stabbing a finger in Marcella’s general direction. “Shut the bloody fuck up, hot pants. You’re next,” he threatened, letting his fingers take the shape of long, thorny claws.
Delaney couldn’t think, she only knew she had to stall the motherfucker while she tried to read the message Marcella was sending with her eyes, now nearly coal black, burning for Delaney to read the meaning in them. “Uh, question, O Horned One?”
He grinned again, innocent and boyish. “What’s that, Gan dhi?”
“Do you always wear that color? It’s so wrong for you. It says nothing about who you really are. I mean, you being the supreme-ness of evil, well, I guess I just thought you’d have a better grasp on the best color to convey that. Black is so trite and overdone, don’t you think? I’d so go red if I were you.”
Satan threw his head back and laughed. When he tilted it upward once more, he popped his lips. “Clyde’s right, Delaney. You’re a fucking riot. Now move. As in now.”
Delaney winced. “Wait! Just one more question, I mean, it isn’t every day you meet the devil, right? If I passed up the chance to ask you a couple of questions, I’d never forgive myself . . . I have a million, but I promise to limit them to just a couple if it’s not too much trou—”
“Ask!”
Ohhhhhh, if the twist of his mousy face was any indication, patience was wearing thin, and she still didn’t understand Marcella’s signals. “Um, who does your hair?”
He didn’t answer. Instead, he narrowed his gaze, focusing on a prone Clyde.
“Wait!” she yelped, pulling the hospital bed toward her. “I swear, just one more thing, and I just know you’re going to want to give me an answer because it’s all about your maniacal genius. Honest. Why did you assign someone to—to—” Shit, she’d fumbled.
His eyebrow rose to a pointy arch. “To make you go all emo?” He drew a finger over his wrist with a lascivious wink of his red eye.
Delaney waged a battle with her flaring temper and the bile rising in her throat. “Yeah. That.”
“Because you took something from me. On the off chance you didn’t notice, I’m a horrible team player.”
“Vincent?”
“Don’t be silly, Suzy Q. Aw, sure, at first I was a wee bit angry that you’d kept Vincent’s soul from me longer than necessary—I was sad because I made an extra effort to come and collect him personally. I don’t do it often—delegation is a must when overseeing my den of iniquity—but I happened to be in the area, and it’d been far too long since I’d collected a soul. Being a hands-on kind of guy, I figured I’d roll out the red carpet for Vincent. Imagine my dismay when I found you’d ruined my grand gesture. Naturally, because you did steal from me, I was obligated to do the whole dramatic display of typical deviltry that night. You know, the one where I roared threats about your loved ones while I lobbed fireballs and screeched in my scary, outdoor voice? What kind of evil ruler would I be if I didn’t? And look at what my crazy rant that night ended up doing to you—you have no human friends. No special someone to cuddle with while you eat grass and wheat germ. I took far greater pleasure knowing you’d turned into the Crazy Dog Lady all on your own than I ever could if I’d managed to expunge you that night personally. In fact, I was almost thankful it played out like it did, because it lightened my evil workload. You have no idea the pressure living up to a label like the Prince of Darkness has, honeybuns. But as for Vincent? You silly. I knew I’d have him back one day. It was just a matter of patience.”
All these years she’d lived with that ominous threat hanging over her head had been wasted energy. Quite frankly, that burned her butt. But Marcella was still pleading with her eyes, so she kept poking him with her imaginary stick. “Ah, then it was the souls. I stole souls from you and crossed them before you could get to them. Methinks you’re just a jealous weenie. Unattractive in a Hell lover, don’t you think?” she taunted, followed by a giggle that would surely turn hysterical if she didn’t figure out what in fuck Marcella was doing.
“I like you, Delaney. Nay—I’m enraptured by you. You’re saucccyyy,” he hissed the letter c. “I meant exactly what I said, cookie. I could give a rich man’s dick who you cross. Most of the souls you cross belong to weak, pathetic losers who’d spend all of their time crying and cowering on my turf—droll, very droll. Not one of them had a contract with me either. Except this one particular soul . . .”
He was toying with her, the fucktard. It was all about the game, and she’d just have to let him poke her back because she just didn’t get what Marcella wanted of her, and she needed time to figure it out. If she reached for that switch, Satan would fry her like so much chicken. Sweat trickled between her breasts and her mouth became so dry she almost couldn’t pry her tongue from the roof of it, but she persevered. “Really? Huh. And that was whose soul?” She forced herself to sound interested while her bladder squealed its protest.
Rocking back on his heels, he shoved his hands in his loose-fitting jeans and winked at her. “Remember how delighted you were to see Grease on Broadway two months ago? Spectacular show, by the way. You know, all those gushes and sighs because you finally got your cute backside out of the house and spent time with real live people instead of those slobbering creatures, with any number of ailments, you’ve befriended?”
“I do.”
“And do you remember what happened afterward when you used those backstage passes Miss Puerto Rico here so graciously gave you in honor of your friendship?”
Wee doggie—did she ever. There was nothing like crossing a diva actress who just didn’t want to exit stage left. What a goddamned hassle that’d been.
Talking.
It took a whole lot of talking, coaxing, begging, and pleading to get that lovely, albeit vacant of any reason, twit to see that you couldn’t just fix a broken neck, and really, you have to be more careful when you step on the slippery bathroom floor of your dressing room. The only place for her to go was up—and up she’d gone as Delaney beat feet out of that dressing room before anyone could see her. Harrowing indeed. “Yep. I crossed over the actress who played the lead role.” Just as that thought flitted through her memory, Delaney knew exactly what this was all about. She’d fucked up his plans again without even trying. Suh-weet.
“Yeahhhhhh,” he rasped. “Ya did. Tsk, tsk. Fool me once, shame on me; fool me twice, well, Hell ensues.”
Buy time, buy time, buy time was all she could think. “So? Big fucking deal. It’s just like you said. I do it all the time.”
“Welllll, this time that particular soul wasn’t so harmless. Don’t play stupid—you don’t wear it well. That soul got where she was on Broadway because she signed a contract with me. If you’d just left well enough alone, and the dim-witted demon I assigned the case to had shown up when he should have, she’d be greasing lighting downstairs—not up. You gave her a choice to go into the light—a choice she shouldn’t have been allowed to make, but at that point she hadn’t done anything so despicable she couldn’t be forgiven for it or been kept from crossing because of it. See where I’m going here? You stole from me once and it was painful”—he thumped dramatically at the place on his chest where his heart would be if he had one—“but I healed. I even therapied—I faced my fears. Like I said, Vincent never stood a chance of going anywhere but to Hell ’cause he was a bad, bad boy, and I’m a patient man. I was willing to wait it out until Clyde here bought it, freeing Vinny’s soul up. But surely you see, when you did it again, there was just no recovering. What would it say about me if I didn’t lead by example? And that brings us to Vincent here.” He cast a glowing, red glance at Clyde’s body. “You donated his heart, and that was a lovely humanitarian gesture. Bravo. But his debt is long overdue,” he remarked with offhanded dryness.
“Overdue . . .” Delaney knew exactly what was overdue, but the longer she could allow him center stage, the greater the chance she’d understand what the fuck Marcella was trying to convey to her. Jesus, Joseph, and Mary—what were her eyes burning holes in Delaney’s about? If she rolled them in the direction of Clyde’s lifeless form once more, they’d fall out of her fucking head.
“Indeed—his debt is handing over his soul. I so love souls. They’re like potato chips—you can never have just one. I never thought I’d say it, and if you repeat this in polite company, I’ll deny it, but the world is a better place without him in it. Vincent was an idiot who had no control. None. I’d have applauded the pig he was when he was alive if his living had done me any good. Was he off corrupting the government like he was supposed to—signing deals like all good demonic contractors do while he was dipping his wick in anything that moved? No, he was drinking himself into a stupor and chasing women. He was abusing my power, and I don’t dig that much. In fact, it makes me pretty damned angry.
“But all’s well that ends well because here I am. Just rarin’ to collect. Your Clyde here was verrry sly. He’s just not sly enough, and now I’ll have two souls for the price of one. Isn’t that a hoot? Oh, and there’s one other thing.”
Thing. There was a thing. “Thing?”
“Uh-huh. You might not have done something as dastardly as take your own life, but you do like my Clyde, don’t you? C’mon, you can tell me. It’ll be our little secret. He’s cuuute, huh? In fact, you like him so much that you’ll cry and cry when he’s gone. I imagine you’ll scurry back off into hiding in that pathetic store of yours and refuse to become involved with anyone again. If you don’t become involved, those children and that house you so want with every precious breath you take will become nothing more than what they are now. A dream. An unfulfilled one, at that.”
Satan leaned in close to her, laying a deathly cold hand on hers. “So maybe all that planning to torture you wasn’t for naught after all, eh? You’ve been powned, sweetheart. Wait, hang on while I pat myself on the back in honor of my genius.” A chuckle slithered from between his thin lips while he reached over his shoulder and patted his back.
She snatched her hand back, but just as she was about to call him the weak, spineless, fucktard motherfucker he was, she understood what Marcella was telling her without saying a word.
Pown this.
“Just one more question?” Delaney chirped, blinking her eyes, praying Marcella knew what had to come next. What she hoped Marcella had been signaling her to do.
“Just one more, sunshine, then it’s lights out for Clyde.”
“Why do you suppose you forgot?”
“Forgot what?”
“One really important detail.”
Lucifer cocked his head in thought. “Damn, ya think? I’ve been doing that a lot lately. Do tell, cookie.” He waved a slender, lightly veined hand for her to proceed.
God, please let her be right. I don’t ask a lot often, and I do send tons of biz your way. So help a team player out, would ya? “Thisssss!” Delaney screamed, tearing the breathing tube from Clyde’s throat with a roar—effectively cutting off his air supply.
In that precise, shared moment, Marcella yanked Clyde by the arm, swinging him forward and pushing him at his prone form, shoving him so hard, he fell face forward into his body, swallowed up like he’d been poured into a cup.
A black tendril wafted upward where Clyde lay on the bed, slinking, shrugging off the body it’d had been attached to.
With wild eyes, Delaney pinpointed Vincent’s soul erupting from Clyde in an explosion of vile, rippling ebony streams.
Her half brother had arrived.
The suck-up.
So now it was two against two.
Without thought, without a qualm, Marcella launched herself at Lucifer, tackling him with a bone-crunching slam to the floor. The hospital bed swerved sideways, yanking at the machines and cords Clyde had been attached to with a precarious jerk. Lights blinked, alarms blared with ear-splitting quality. Yet no one came.
And then it got butt ugly.
Shrieks of thunder crashed, booming off the walls of the ICU room until she was certain she’d be learning some Helen Keller moves if she survived this. Rain, like wet little pelting needles, pummeled her exposed skin, drenching her in seconds.
As if in a dream, she watched Marcella scramble to her feet, slipping on the rain-slick floor, Satan but a mere infuriated step behind her and far more confident on his sneakered feet. “Get out!” she screamed to Delaney, her head snapping backward when Satan grabbed a long, dark handful of hair, wrenching it viciously. Marcella bit out angry words in her native language. “Descarado sin espina, hijo de puta! Si tocas un pelo en su cabello, sea a verte en el hoyo!”
Hissing infiltrated her ears, clawing at her eardrums, the screeching ssssss pounding painfully against them. A shiver she had no control over skittered from her sodden head to her toes. What was it with the flippin’ reptilian family, already? For the love of squirmy, slithering things—snakes, what seemed like thousands, shimmied across the floor, up her legs, wrapping around her ankles and edging their way to her waist. She screamed, shaking them off and shuddering, her chest heaving, her brain racing for a solution.
And then there were locusts, emerging from the dim light of the room in swarms, clacking to the ground and bashing themselves against her face.
Marcella clawed at the hands that dragged her, twisting and turning her lithe body like some captured wild animal. “Get ooooout, Deeee!” Her hoarse cry mingled with the deep, crazed laughter of her captor.
Fury clamped down on Delaney like a vise, forcing her to take action. The hell she’d leave Marcella.
Her eyes scanned the room with wild desperation, pushing her to think. Delaney hurled herself at a lone chair in the corner of the room just as fire exploded in a starburst of blue and orange flames. They writhed at her feet, dancing their demonic rhythm to block her path. Terror made her legs pump like she’d run the minute and a half all her life.
She latched on to the chair’s back, lifting it high over her head, bellowing in a wet warble, “Duuuuck!” before she sent it sailing across the room at Satan, only to have it fruitlessly slam against the far wall and splinter to the ground.
And that was when she heard it—the incessant rapid-fire bong of Clyde’s heart monitor.
Oh, and then there was her friend’s lithe figure, beautiful, fiery, hot-tempered, and the closest thing she’d had to a BFF, dead or otherwise, in all of her life, hurtling toward her. Marcella’s glossy black hair billowing in soaking wet streams was the last thing Delaney saw before she was body-slammed with such force she crumpled, her head hitting the sink with a crack so sharp and ominous she knew it meant bad shit.
Slinking to the floor, helpless to save herself or her friend, Delaney had one last moment of consciousness.
In that moment, she heard the sweet, sweet sound of Clyde’s heart monitor.
Flatlining.
Two thumbs up.
twenty-three
Victory just wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
For sure she didn’t feel like going to Disney World.
Warm heat bathed her back, calling for her to turn around and lift her face to it.
But that was damned hard to do when you couldn’t tear your eyes away from a train wreck.
Her jacked-up body being the train wreck and all.
Really, there was nothing like identifying with your work, Delaney thought while peering down at her broken, soaking wet, just a little too bloody for her taste, body.
Lucifer toed her using the tip of his foot, nudging her ribs with a look of disgust when Delaney’s body gave him no reaction while he clung to Vincent’s soul. He held up the struggling black wisp of light in his hand and examined it. “Oh, Vinny. Come to Papa. Did you miss me? And look at this mess, would you? Now I’ll have to send in the cleanup crew. They need far more direction
than I have time for tonight,” he cackled.
Realization was slow and thick like pea soup.
When it finally came—it was much like that defining moment she’d heard so much about. She totally got it. Just like that.
Holy fucksticks, Batman.
She was dead.
Epically so.
She looked down again at her battered, broken body.
Yep, there was no recovering from that. Not even bionics and Oscar Goldman could save her.
Bummer.
Her eyes scanned the room for her friend. Oh, God, where was Marcella? Had she disappeared? She could only pray she’d escaped Lucifer . . .
Okay, okay, so she was dead. Delaney fought to compartmentalize. Pros and cons, pros and cons . . .
There were pros and cons to this whole dead thing.
Con—who’d take care of her babies? Kellen. He’d do it. He’d better.
Pro—up in here, no one would call her crazy for talking to ghosts. Nice.
Con—she’d never see Kellen again. Major suckage.
Pro—no more bills to pay. Her deflated bank account cheered.
Con—no more Friday nights and Ghost Whisperer. Boo, hiss.
Pro—dead meant Clyde was somewhere ’round here. So who’d powned who?
That brought a smile to her face and the desire to find the man she planned to make hers.
Delaney looked down at the bed where Clyde lay. Her warm fuzzies were quick to turn to dismay. Christ on a cracker, didn’t he have his listening ears on when she’d told him to cross? Hadn’t she said go—into—the—light? Clear as day. Not even a hint of an accent when she’d told him either.
Kiss & Hell Page 30