Devil May Care

by Patricia Eimer

  “But what if they don’t? What if those things have already done something horrible to him?” Her eyes were wide and filled with tears. Even devastated the girl was drop dead gorgeous. If I didn’t love her so much I’d hate her guts.

  “He’s going to be fine,” I insisted.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because we know.” Mom stood up. “Now, if you girls will excuse me. Even if your father won’t let us search, my coven and I can still start laying protective spells over Tolliver to keep him from harm until your father arrives.”

  “Faith?” Lisa looked at me. “Are you sure he’ll be okay?”

  I wasn’t. That was the problem. I’d never heard of imps attacking someone unprovoked before now, and if imps didn’t do it then I doubted that sprites would, either. I couldn’t imagine my brother somehow pissing off a sprite and not mentioning it to anyone. So that meant someone had sent these particular creatures to target him. That made this whole mess a lot more complicated than it should have been.

  Sprites wouldn’t be able to kill Tolliver but if they were clever they’d be able to hide him somewhere and hand him over to another, more powerful creature to use in a whole host of unholy ways. Possibly leaving him trapped outside the mortal realms, and in the thrall of another being, for the rest of time.

  My phone buzzed. Matt had texted me. Have you seen your dad today?

  Yes, I texted back. Why?

  My dad is sending Mom and Brenda to the Grey Lands and Mom’s sure your dad put him up to it.

  Doubt it, I typed. Dad would never have suggested banishment as punishment for anything but an unpardonable act. Exposing the Celestial realms to mortals. Stealing the souls of children. Blowing up his car and trying to take over the mortal realms. Really jaw-droppingly bad shit that even demons didn’t consider to be a good way to kill time on a Thursday night.

  But what if Valerie thought he had? What if she thought Dad was responsible for her banishment? How desperate would she be to bargain her way out of the situation?

  I took Lisa’s hand. “Why don’t you stay out here and help Hope keep Mom reigned in on the ‘protective spells’ while I get your apartment cleaned up?” I didn’t like the direction my thoughts were taking and cleaning would take my mind off a certain duo of women who would have access to sprites and a motive for taking hostages.

  “But what if all that malicious power sucks you dry?” she asked. “It isn’t safe. You could get zapped and then you’ll be helpless if the sprites come back.”

  “That’s why you’re going to stay out here and watch my back.” I wiggled my fingers at her. “Besides, you shouldn’t be in there working with this stuff. One, with the way your emotions are right now it could backfire and make things worse. Two, it’s just better if you don’t have to see it all again.”

  I remembered going back into mine and Dan’s townhouse one last time to clean up after the EMTs had taken him away. Filtering through the wreckage had made the situation so much more painful. It wasn’t going to be like that for Lisa, though. Dad was going to find Tolliver, and they’d get their happily ever after.

  I nudged Lisa toward Hope.

  “Hey.” My sister bumped Lisa’s shoulder with her own and then pulled out her cell phone. “I’ve been stockpiling pictures of the ugly people who come into the library. Want to point and laugh with me? It’ll take your mind off things.”

  “Why not?” Lisa sighed. “Someone else’s ugly shoes always have a way of making you feel better about things.”

  Leaving them to snark about the rampant abuses of fashion that tended to crop up in Pittsburgh I stalked into Lisa’s apartment and closed the door. Or tried to close their door, since someone—or several tiny someones working together—had ripped it off its hinges. Somewhere in that apartment dead sprites were starting to decay and the smell was horrible—rotting meat and vanilla cookies rolled into one thick, all-encompassing stench that had saturated the room, seeping into the tiny nooks and crannies. I fled back into the hallway, leaning over and bracing my hands on my knees, taking in deep, cleansing breaths.

  “You okay?” Hope looked up from her phone.

  “It’s fine,” I wheezed. “The mess is just bigger than I’d first expected. I needed a second to regroup and strategize.”

  “I can help clean up.” Lisa tried to stand and Hope grabbed her arm again, keeping Lisa in place.

  “No, no.” I closed my eyes, and a crackle of power crawled along my skin. I pushed it outward, forming a protective bubble around myself. “I’m fine. You sit out here and try not to worry. Find something really cringe worthy to show me. Like people who dressed to match their dogs or something.”

  With my force field in place, I crossed over the threshold and took a deep breath. Nothing but clean, deliciously fresh air. Not the slightest stench of burnt cookies and death penetrated my exterior. Good. Now I could get to work.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  I’d found forty sprites underneath various bits of furniture in the living room and one wet towel shoved under the couch. My guess was that the sprites had ambushed Tolliver when he was getting out of the shower and he’d never had a chance. A naked demon is almost as vulnerable as a naked human. Maybe even more. Humans don’t have wings for an attacker to tear at or a tail to grab onto for leverage. Plus, male demons have all the same sensitive areas to protect that a regular man does, and a sprite would play dirty by going for those first.

  The upside was, if he’d managed to take out forty of the little nuisances, they’d be wary about trying anything else until they replenished their numbers. The downside was that he’d managed to take down forty sprites and they still had enough members in their pack to kidnap him. I’d finished setting the living room to rights when the vestibule door opened and I waved my fingers, letting the furniture drop back onto the floor with a thud. The last thing I needed was the neighbors to see a levitating living room set.

  “What happened?” Matt asked, peeking his head inside the open door. “Why are Lisa and Hope sitting on the steps? And why are you cleaning Lisa’s apartment…inside a bubble?”

  “The bubble cuts down on the stench.” I’d gotten rid of the sprites and cleaned up the hellfire residue so I let it dissipate. In fact, the only thing I had left to do was draw out all the energy swirling about the room. It was like a seething mass of pink cotton candy left too long in the machine, reduced to a giant nest of ick. Yeah, that was going to be fun.

  “The stench of what?” Matt twitched and rubbed his hands up and down his arms. He scratched behind one ear and then ran one foot up the back of his opposite leg. “What the Hell happened? And why does it feel like we’re in the middle of one of those giant static electricity balls?”

  I motioned around me. “A pack of sprites attacked Tolliver.”

  “Not possible.” Matt shook his head and scratched at his arms, this time harder. “Sprites would never attack unprovoked.”

  “Well, these ones did.”

  “No way,” he said. “It couldn’t have been sprites. We had them as pets when I was a kid. I’m telling you, it wasn’t sprites.”

  “Are you sure? So what are those? Butterflies?” I motioned to the garbage bag I’d used as a makeshift body bag for them. Not that I wanted to keep the nasty things, but I wasn’t sure of how to dispose of them. They were too big to flush, and the garbage disposal just seemed sort of sadistic. Well, more sadistic than I was comfortable with anyway.

  Matt pulled the bag open and peeked inside, recoiling in horror. “What did Tolliver do to them? They’re just simple creatures.”

  “It looks to me like he defended himself. Besides, those simple creatures ambushed him, Matt. Now he’s missing and we’ve got half a dozen demons scouring the Grey Lands for him right now.”

  “I can’t believe a pack of sprites would do this.” He turned to me, eyes wide and face a faint green. “The sprites we kept at home would have never behaved this way. Not unless they were specifically ordered
to attack in order to defend the community.”

  “If they only attack at someone else’s command then maybe you should worry less about the poor, simple creatures, and more about who decided to sic them on my brother.”

  I knew that seeing dead sprites bothered him on an elemental level, and I understood where he was coming from. He was part angel and he believed desperately in the sanctity of all life. But right now I needed him to focus on the fact that my brother was missing and that was bad. Sure it sucked that a bunch of sprites had to die, but I could only have so much sympathy for the little buggers. Especially since all the evidence seemed to point to the fact that the sprites had started it.

  “You’re not suggesting the Biloxi pack was involved?” His eyes were instantly wary.

  “That’s precisely what I’m suggesting. Your mother is desperate and she wanted some trump card to keep your father from banishing her to Purgatory. She’d see hurting my brother as a logical solution that had the added bonus of giving her a chance to screw with the Devil.”

  “Why Tolliver?” He blew out a long breath and crossed his arms over his chest. “What possible advantage is there for my mother to kidnap the Archdemon of Gluttony? Of everyone she could have attacked, why Tolliver?”

  “I’m sure she was hoping to get me instead, but hey, one demon is as good as another to the Angale, isn’t it? We’re all just interchangeable little bits of evil for those people to attack, unprovoked.”

  “Faith.” Matt took a step toward me and then stopped. “I know you’re upset but you have to know that not all of the Angale are like that. There are those of us who realize that the world needs both sides of the Celestial Order to keep the world in balance.”

  “Name five besides you.”

  “Well there’s…” Matt stopped. “That doesn’t mean these sprites are from Biloxi. Just because my mother and Brenda were here…”

  “And they left in a huff,” I pointed out.

  “They were upset when they left. But that—”

  “Then your father threatened to banish your mother into Purgatory.”

  “Leaving that aside.” He pinched the bridge of his nose. “We have no definitive proof that these sprites are from Biloxi. They could be—”

  “The minions of some other apocalyptic cult full of militant nephilims?”

  “It sounds really bad when you put it that way,” he huffed.

  I bit my lower lip and looked at my shoes, scuffing them together. I knew this had to be hard for him to accept and I couldn’t imagine what it felt like to realize that your mother wasn’t just harmlessly crazy, she truly was a beyond the pale level of evil. Which was sort of surprising actually since I didn’t know that angels, or their offspring, could go quite this level of bad. Impulsive, sure. Dangerous, even I could get behind. But she had sent innocent creatures to attack someone for no reason other than her desire to cause pain. That was a pure, premeditated evil that even my soul, dark as it was, shied away from.

  “Do you recognize any of them?” I opened the mouth of the bag so that he could look inside.

  “Sprites are just like imps—carbon copies of each other. The only difference is sprites are green and imps are blue.” He turned his head away from the bag and closed his eyes. “I couldn’t identify them even if I wanted to. Which I don’t. If they are part of the Biloxi pack at one point and time these creatures were my friends.”

  “I’m sorry.” I closed the bag and stepped toward him but stopped. What was I supposed to say? His pets had attacked my brother and he’d protected himself. I couldn’t blame Tolliver; I would have done the same thing in his place. All I could really be sorry for was the fact that someone had put all of us in this situation. “But, you said yourself, your mother has a pack of sprites that she could have ordered to attack my brother. Doesn’t she?”

  “Yes but we have no proof this is the Biloxi pack,” Matt said, snapping into attorney mode. “That’s the thing you seem to have forgotten. You have no proof that your brother’s victims are from my mother’s pack of sprites. You don’t have anything more than suspicions and an act of mass murder on your brother’s part.”

  “This isn’t a court of law and it’s not mass murder if you’re defending yourself.” I shook my head and turned away from him. I knew the magic swirling around the room had us both on edge but I wasn’t going to let it give me an excuse to act irrationally and say something I’d probably regret later. “Besides, you really think the demons who are looking for Tolliver are going to care about proof? My father is currently out of his mind with worry and surrounded by a pack of demonlords who each command their own legion. Including Malachi. And if you haven’t figured it out, that three foot grim reaper disguise of his hides a whole lot of scary underneath it. They’ll do whatever it takes to get Tolliver back.”

  “The Alpha isn’t going to allow your father to just—”

  “There’s no allow to it.” Black power surged along the length of my spine and I tried my best to shake it off and focus on Matt instead of my sudden, irrational desire to zap something—or someone. “We don’t take orders from Him. We’re demons. Like my patients would say, the Alpha is not the boss of us.”

  “So you’re saying that they can just do whatever they want and no one is going to stop them?” He crowded me backward, against the island, and loomed over me. His wings unfolded and golden light sparked across his skin. Obviously the malignant magic that had filled Tolliver’s apartment was affecting his emotions just like it was mine. It was time to make him see reason and then we could figure out how to deal with this.

  He came closer and the green of his eyes disappeared behind the gold filling them. Energy crackled along his skin and I had to move away from him as it arced between his hands.

  Oh, hell no. Just because this place was filled with bad juju didn’t mean I was going to let him turn himself into the Celestial version of Chernobyl. I moved toward him so that we were nose to nose. My wings spread and my horns shot upward, tearing through my scalp. My tail dropped loose and curled around my ankle, the end flicking back and forth. “Look, I know this sucks and I’m guessing that you really don’t feel like yourself right now because the Matt I know wouldn’t be this stupid.”

  “So now I’m stupid?”

  “You have to help me figure out where your mother stashed Tolliver because if we don’t come up with something soon they are going to pull it out of her by force. Trust me, I don’t like your mother, but I’ve heard stories of some of the things these demon lords can do and none of them are something I’d wish on anyone. Not even her.”

  “They wouldn’t dare.” His wings beat in an angry staccato and a bright golden glow enveloped him, the edges rough and spiked with anger. The air was perfumed with a mixture of cookies and the sulphuric tang of brimstone.

  “You want to test that theory?” I made my eyes flash black. “If she doesn’t tell them what they want to know, they could come after you and I may not be able to keep you safe. So please, whatever you’re feeling right now, push it aside and help me.”

  “So my mother was right. You’re all just a bunch of mindless killing machines. All of you.” He pulled away from me, stalked toward the door, and threw it open.

  “It’s better than the alternative,” I whispered as he stormed out, slamming the door behind him. I picked up the glass candy dish sitting on the island and hurled it at the door, shattering it into dozens of tiny pieces.

  Damn it. Why did relationships have to be so damn complicated?

  I looked around the rest of the room and made sure it was back to the way it had been before. The only thing left to deal with was the sticky residue of malevolent magic that had turned my normally rational boyfriend into a testosterone-fueled pair of well-muscled wings. Then I could go upstairs with Lisa and a pint of chocolate ice cream to wait for news of Tolliver.I stretched my powers, probing the magical goo saturating the room. It shrank away when I pressed against it. Good. That should be easy enough t
o clean up. I could just draw it up into a big ball-o-gunk and give it a blast of dark magic. I opened my body up to its full power, focusing on the room. I tried to draw all of the magic toward me, and watched it seep across the floor and pool around my feet.

  Yuck. Why couldn’t my brother get kidnapped by somebody normal? Like a drug cartel. They’d have just chopped off a few of his fingers and he could have healed himself with no problems. Instead, he got nabbed by someone who liked to leave behind a magical version of toxic sludge.

  I shivered when the gunk latched onto my tail and absorbed into my skin. The magic inside of me tried to contract into a tiny ball, fleeing the thread of Celestial power seeping into me. The lights flickered and the sides of my vision darkened.

  This was so not good.

  “Faith?” I heard Lisa from a distance, calling for me and pounding on the door, as the world went black.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The phone rang and I rolled over to answer it. Whatever was in the magical energy that I’d absorbed, it packed one hell of a punch. “Hello?”

  “Faith?” Dan asked, sounding concerned.

  “Dan?” I hurt too much to care that he had crossed over into stalker territory with his phone calls.

  “Are you okay? You sound like you’re hungover.”

  “What? No, just tired.” I snuggled closer to my pillow. “What time is it?”

  “Ten in the morning.”

  Okay, what was the big deal? Ten wasn’t all that late for me to sleep, honestly. Hello? I worked the midnight shift.

  “On Monday,” he added.

  “Monday?” That wasn’t good. Tolliver had been taken on a Thursday. My parents’ wedding was scheduled for Saturday. There was no way today was Monday. Because even if I was on my deathbed my mother would have dressed me up in that ugly bridesmaid’s dress so she could have the wedding of her dreams.

  Unless they’d canceled the wedding, and there was only one reason I could think of that Mom would allow that to happen. Tolliver must still be missing. But that didn’t explain why they’d let me pull a Rip Van Dyke, or Winkle, or whatever his name was. The door flew open and Lisa rushed into the room, flinging herself onto the bed beside me. She hugged me so tight that I was thankful that I didn’t actually need to breathe. “Faith! I’ve been so worried about you.”