Kiss & Hell (6 page)

She let go of the pillow and grabbed a dog. While Clyde hadn’t been terribly frightening, she had a bad feeling in her gut this was just the beginning of things to come. No demon could just whack you and drag you back to Hell. They had to win you with a contract. It was simple, really. Minions from Hell preyed on the weak. Mostly those who had no sense of self-worth or those whose moral barometers were so skewed that even if a demon didn’t come along and strike a bargain with them, most likely they’d end up in Hell all on their own anyway.

Then a contract was drawn up, and typically that contract benefited the contracted for a time, and then—wham—the fine print in that binding contract came along and doused you with a bucket of cold water. Demons were masters of deceit—if you told one you had a headache, he’d offer to fix it, and while you’re all thinking aspirin and soothing gel eye packs, he whacks your head off.

“That’s the strange part. How I got rid of him, I mean. All it took was me waving a prism that had been blessed under his nose and he was writhing in pain. Which means he’s a weak demon—or a new one. So why the fuck would Lucifer send a noob? I’m no lightweight in the spirit world. I know spirits who can protect me—at least for a little while, anyway.”

Kellen rose from his place on the floor, heaving her overweight pooch over his shoulder like a toddler, stroking his back. “So you think this has to do with Vincent?”

Delaney hauled her three-legged fur baby up into her lap and held him to her chest, burrowing her face in his neck, gulping to fight back her fears. “Well, when was the last time someone threatened to see me in Hell?”

Kellen’s nod was curt as he put the dog back on the floor and scooped up another. “When the shit went down with Vincent.” His tone was solemn, much the way it always was when they even vaguely touched upon what had happened just a month shy of fifteen years ago. The day she’d been handed this gift to yammer with people no one else could see but her.

A day so horrible, neither she nor Kellen had been able to take it out of its Pandora’s box and discuss it at length. Not in nearly fifteen years.

Her eyes instantly began to water, but she brushed at the corners of them impatiently. “Right. So would you do me a favor tonight?” Under normal circumstances, she wouldn’t have been much bothered by the expulsion of a demon. But those were random demons, few and far between. Clyde had been sent for
her
. Of all the demons she’d encountered in fifteen years, no one had ever come with a specific intent like that. So having another presence in the house, for all the good it’d do her, brought reassurance. False, but a modicum of security, anyway.

Kellen pointed to where she sat and grinned that disarming, charming grin that made women want to mother him. “Couch?”

Delaney nodded with a distant smile, pulling the sweater she’d thrown on closer to her chest to thwart the chills racing along her arms. “Hope you packed fresh man-panties. Do you mind?”

He returned her smile and winked. “Only if you promise to let me sleep with the one-eyed monster. There’s nothing like waking up to his googly-eyed, vacant stare while he breathes his stench on me.”

Delaney held out her hand, and Kellen took it, giving it a supportive squeeze. “Just tonight or at least until I can get in touch with Marcella. I’m not overly worried, because this Clyde was as lame as they get, but just for safety’s sake.”

Kellen’s eyes narrowed, glittering with his dislike for her friend Marcella Acosta. “Was she too busy fighting the bowels of Hell to bother to answer her demon hotline tonight?”

Delaney clucked her tongue in his direction, setting her three-legged wonder aside with a loving pat to the head and rising with a stretch of her arms. “I wouldn’t go knocking the only connection I have to all things demonic, were I you, big brother. Marcella’s helped me more times than I can count. Do you have any idea the kind of help she can be when a demon possesses a lost spirit and is preventing me from crossing them? Not only that, but she’s kept hundreds of those very spirits from making a very bad eternal decision. And you know what I always say—one less freaky-deaky demon in the world is one less future possession in the making. Now get off her ass and lighten up. And no, I couldn’t get in touch with her. So lay off already.” With a finger, she pointed down at her blind dog, snapping her fingers so he’d know to follow her. “Punkin, come with Mommy—it’s time for your insulin.”

She trotted off to the kitchen, breathing a sigh of relief that Kellen had agreed to stay. His beef with Marcella was valid on some levels. She
was
a demon. But she was a demon who’d made a very bad decision based on foolish emotion versus practicality.

Shit happened.

Marcella had spent a butt-assed long time trying to make it right on this plane. Not that it would ever do her any good. She’d turned her nose up at the Big Kahuna. Major bad juju. That wasn’t something you could ever take back, but take it back she tried each time she helped Delaney convince someone that the demon who had showed up at a crossing—as some occasionally did—and was offering them riches beyond compare and a sea of tanned, toned, naked twenty-year-olds as far as the eye could see, was all just bullshit. You might see tanned, toned twenty-year-olds, but they’d have scales, or snakes writhing on their heads.

No one knew that better than Marcella, and Delaney was grateful for her—even if Kellen thought she was a turbo bitch with an agenda that still remained unapparent to Delaney after ten years of friendship.

She’d be bitchy, too, if what Marcella said about what her demon form really looked like was true. Scales and horns and the like were so far from Marcella’s gorgeous human form. That alone was a good reason to be pissed off.

In Delaney’s opinion, Marcella’d been ripped off, and now she had no hope of redemption. Choosing sides when you left this Earth, and having no guidance from someone like Delaney—especially if you waffled at the wrong moment—was a scary prop.

Yanking open her fridge once more, she dug out the insulin, reaching into the drawer beside it to find the packaged needles she kept there for dog number one. She filled the syringe as Kellen’s chestnut-colored head peeked around the door frame of her kitchen and her pack tore around the corner, screeching to a halt at her feet. Positioning her diabetic pooch in her arms, Delaney injected his meds with a swift, practiced hand.

“Mind if I shower—or is the water still only hot from nine in the morning until ten forty-five?” he joked. His jaw was unshaven, his hazel eyes bleary. Probably from the long hours he put in at his after-school program for gifted children. He was a good teacher. He’d be an even better father, and that made her smile. She just might have offspring by proxy if Kellen ever settled down.

Delaney chuckled, then looked at her microwave clock. “You’ve got, like, eight minutes.”

Her brood stared after Kellen’s broad back, while he hurried off to catch the last of the hot water she’d see until tomorrow. And that reminded her . . . her hands went to her hips, her eyes zeroed in on her “pack.” Hah! Pack, schmack. “Hey, philistines,” she called to them. Five and a half pairs of eyes sought hers. Well, four and a half if you counted out her sightless angel.

Six bodies lined up dutifully as though a treat were in order. “Oh, no, no, no. You guys are in deep doody with me. Wanna tell me what all that cozying up to Clyde was all about? Haven’t I taught you, Grasshoppers? Demons are bad, bad, bad, and there you all were, climbing all over him like he was a mountain of T-bones. You’ve got some splainin’ to do.
All
of you. Now let’s get some sleep. Off to bed.” She gave them a stern look before flipping the lights off in the kitchen and heading to her bedroom.

The pitter-patter of paws followed closely behind, each of them jumping up on the bed and sniffing the place where Clyde had sat not an hour before with looks of longing on their wee puppy mugs.

Delaney’s lips pursed. What the hell was going on? Her dogs were as sensitive as she was to a bad spirit. How could they mourn his loss?

She grabbed the muzzle on her anxiety-laden pooch, turning the dog to face her. “Sweetums? What about horns and scales don’t you get? He’s a bad spirit. Now knock it off and all of you settle down.” Dog number three turned her wet, brown nose up at Delaney, returning to the task at hand, which was apparently to dig to China through the blanket until they all found out where Clyde had gone.

That should be reason enough to give her pause as she climbed into bed, soothed by the sound of Kellen’s presence in her bathroom.

But she just wasn’t ready to go there.

For now he was gone.

Gone was good.

As her eyes drifted closed, from the end of her bed a shimmer of multicolored light interrupted her fall into oblivion.

Was it asking too much that a medium get some shut-eye? If this kept up, she wouldn’t be able to help people cross the street, let alone cross over into their own eternal utopia.

Hunkering down under the covers, she muttered, “Not now, Charlie. Everything’s fine. Promise. Go find some movie grip to toy with because this medium is ass fried.”

His smile lifted his mustache—a smile that was less like a comfort and more like a lethal promise of mayhem to come. The craggy lines of his face revealed a much harder man than was the reality of the total softy he really was. In death, he was as raw biker sexy as he’d been in his prime in the seventies. “
Death Wish
,” he said, his lips moving out of sync with his voice. Sometimes, when a spirit like Charlie came along, it was like watching an old Japanese movie translated to English—their lips moved long before the words came out.

She knew this was his way of offering his supernatural, albeit sometimes destructive, help, and it left her touched. Delaney yawned and flashed him a sleepy smile. “Nuh-uh, Mr. Bronson. I know you’d like to whip out an AK-47 and trash all moving matter, but I don’t need that kind of help. No
Death Wish
tactics tonight. It’ll all be fine. The bad guy’s gone now, and that means I don’t need Rambo-like help.” She was prepared for that smile to turn to disapproval at the mere mention of another infamous movie and an even more popular actor. “And don’t frown at me. You didn’t corner the market on vigilante-like revenge. Think of it as passing the movie star action-adventure torch to Sylvester, and get over yourself. But thanks for thinking of me. You’re a real peach.” Her smile was warm when she winked.

His nod was short, his hand rising in a succinct wave before he vanished, leaving her feeling all warm and smooshy.

How many people could say Charles Bronson had just dropped by to offer up his own brand of justice in her defense?

Sometimes, there was small compensation for the fact that she’d probably never have real live sex again unless it was via a battery-operated love tool.

Really small.

three

“Darlink?”

Delaney wiped the back of her hand over the corner of her mouth, searching for stray drool. Her hair clung to her eyelashes and her right arm was sore from being pressed beneath her chest. Waking up to her friend’s light Spanish accent, and the scent of her sophisticated perfume, might have made her smile if the night before hadn’t been so craptacular. “Marcella?”

A husky chuckle drifted to her ears. Husky and sensual and totally Marcella. “Not so in the flesh,” she confirmed.

Delaney struggled to open her eyes, reaching for whatever dog was in her immediate vicinity so they could snuggle. She came up dogless. Kellen must have taken them out for her. “Where are the dogs and what time is it?”

“Your cranky brother has the creatures and it’s time to get up.”

She felt Marcella’s weight shift on the end of the bed. She could picture her striking demon friend from behind her closed eyelids. Darkly voluptuous, olive skinned, green eyed, probably dressed in a curve-hugging black dress with a pair of matching heels, draped casually at the foot of her bed. Yet she kept her eyes closed. “I had a spectacularly shitty night last night, and you’d know all about that if you’d answered my nine hundred voice-mail messages. But my forecast is much brighter this morning. I’m all out of immediate danger right now—so be a good girlfriend and go catch up on your reality TV or something.
Wife Swap
was on this week. You don’t want to miss that. Hook up with me in a couple of hours, ’kay?”

“No can do,
chica
.”

Delaney groaned with a pathetic whine, rolling to her side. “Why is it that you can’t do? I’m not getting any younger here. You, on the other hand, are forever young. I don’t want to cast stones, but I lost my directions to the Fountain of Youth. I need some sleep here.”

Marcella snorted. Delaney could visualize the delicate flare of her nostrils. “Don’t you all go waving my misfortune in my face there, girlie. It has very few perks—one of them being eternal youth—but if you could get a gander at my demon form, you’d grow a mustache. It’s unsightly. Heinous even. Now, get up, my pretty ghost magnet. We have business to attend to.” Marcella grabbed her by the forearm, pulling her to an unwilling, upright position and propping a pillow behind her back.