Kiss & Hell (40 page)

“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.

But did he listen?

No. Because God forbid she should be right.

Frustration made her jump up and down.

For the love of valiant nobility, what the hell did Clyde think he was doing? Didn’t he get dead?

After all that, he had the audacity to
live
?

Irony—she was all about making it.

How could he be anything but dead after she’d torn his breathing tube out? He was brain-dead, for Christ’s sake. No one who was brain-dead got up out of bed.

No one but Clyde.

In the midst of the scattered equipment, torn curtains, locust carcasses, and machine parts scattered to infinity and beyond, a tortured grunt came from the bed.

Where Clyde better keep his ass if he knew what was good for him.

Leave it to a man to ruin a perfectly good plan.

Clyde’s once battered form stirred, his chest blowing life in rapid, choppy breaths. With agonizing determination she could almost feel, he gripped the rails on either side of the bed in his hands, dragging his upper body to a sitting position. Each movement he made, each small victory his body was granted made Delaney scream, “No!” A no clearly only she could hear.

Raw grit was what led Clyde to the end of the bed, his determined eyes never leaving Satan’s reed-thin back. Soundlessly, he slid to the floor, wobbling, then righting himself. The bandages on his right arm and foot were soaked and trailing in shredded chunks from his body. Every vein in his strained body stood out against skin that was pale and breaking out into a sweat.

The big picture she was getting blew chunks.

Clyde launched himself at her body. Kneeling beside Delaney, he pinched her nose shut, prying her mouth open with two fingers.

Wow. He was just determined to ruin everything, now wasn’t he?

The Neanderthal knew CPR. That meant he was going to revive her and make a fantastic mess of a perfectly good budding afterlife romance for them.

Jesus!

“Clyde!” she yelled to deaf ears. “Nooo! What is it with you and the Superman deal? I’m dead, dipshit! You’re supposed to be, too. Stop screwing everything up already, or I swear, the next time we meet, I’m going to force tofu down your throat and make you listen to Michael Bublé for an eternity!”

He slapped his stiff hands on her chest with clumsiness and began compressions. His eyes were filled with a look that could only be labeled hell-bent.

Lucifer squealed his fury, bellowing his outrage that Clyde lived. He threw himself at Clyde, landing on his back with the slap of Clyde’s flesh against the tile leaving an echo in the room.

Clyde reared up, trying to shrug him off, but he was weak, his body slow and clunky from being sedentary for three months. The muscles in Clyde’s chest strained when he lunged for her body again. He howled a cry of pure determination, dragging her to him and pinching her nose to begin the process once more.

Her eyes widened in horror, her throat became raw from screaming at Clyde to stop. Invisible hands dragged her, lurching her forward in unsteady, stilted tugs. Crap! Clyde’s effort to save her must be working. In increments, her limbs melted, dragging, yanking, pulling her back away from the light.

Yet she could still see Satan and Clyde’s struggle. They’d become one blurred ball, a slow-motion horror flick come to life.

When Clyde reared up for the last time, he managed to thrust Lucifer from his back.

But the devil didn’t crash to the ground. Instead, he hovered helplessly in midair, his thin legs dangling, his white-blond ponytail streaming down his back.

Delaney felt the light pressure of a hand, strong and sure, stroke the top of her head, erasing the agonizing throb of her head. Then her chest heaved, filling with air. Without warning, she was no longer looking down at Clyde and Lucifer, but up toward the disembodied voice of a being who apparently held Lucifer effortlessly in his grip.