Luck of the Devil (7 page)

“Yes.”

“Faith Anne, what have I told you about lying?”

“It’ll get you further in life than anything else as long as you can keep the story going?”

Tolliver snickered.

“Tolliver.” My father shifted focus to my brother. “Would you like to explain to Lisa why she’s having so many problems as a succubus?”

“That’s my fault,” Lisa protested. “I’ll get better with a bit of practice. I haven’t blown anyone up in weeks.”

“That’s very good, dear.” He drummed his fingertips against his legs, his glare fixed on my brother. “Tolliver?”

“I’m sort of not allowed to make succubi,” Tolliver said, keeping his head down and his eyes on the carpet. “I don’t know how to train them.”

“And? What else do you think you need to get off your chest?”

“I’m not allowed to take the soul of someone who’s intoxicated. They must be capable of freely giving it to me.”

“We will be discussing this later, son. In private.”

“Sucks to be you, Tolly,” Hope said.

“I wouldn’t get comfortable, Hopewell.” My father turned to her and my mother, his expression stern. “Isn’t there something you need to tell me?”

“I saw your new car from the window and I think it’s totally hot?” She batted her eyelashes and smiled her
Daddy Loves Me
smile.

“No.” My father paced the length of my living room, the sliver of black from his tail flicking anxiously against his right ankle. That couldn’t be good. Pacing was one of the Devil’s more ominous coping mechanisms. “Try again.”

“I’ve decided I’m really not cut out for all that nature and the whole rustic lifestyle so, instead, Boris and I thought we’d give urban living here in beautiful Pittsburgh a try.” Hope batted her eyelashes at him again but her smile slipped slightly.

“Try again. Why are you here and not doing your duty in Idaho?”

“Oh, for the love of Pete,” I said. “Boris has fallen up and they’ve been ousted. She’s been living with Mom in Provo for the past month, and now she’s here, living in the apartment you had me keep for you.”

I sucked air into my lungs and hoped I could get through the rest of the explanation without my dad blowing up the apartment. “Tolliver’s acting creepier than normal. Lisa keeps blowing people up when she tries to use her unholy powers of seduction. Last night’s kill, Harold, was probably your paperwork issue this morning, but he’s gone now, so thanks for that. Oh, and the neighbor next door is way too perceptive for anyone’s good, so do you think we could maybe keep it down? I’ve gotten rather fond of living here and the combined Bettincourt-Morningstar craziness is threatening to ruin that right about now.”

Why did they have to bring their messes here? All I wanted for this week was to spend it on the couch watching reality television. That wasn’t too much to ask, was it?

“Boris has fallen up?” His eyes flashed red and his horns curled upward. “And you didn’t tell me immediately?”

“I thought it would be better to tell you in person?” Hope squeaked.

“And when did you intend to do that?”

“Um, now?”

“Where is my son-in-law?” He glowered and the lights flickered ominously. “Where have you hidden him?”

“Upstairs. 6A. Sitting on the couch eating Oreos and watching Cartoon Network,” Hope said quickly. “His stuff is all packed for you to just send him right to Purgatory. No problem at all. Just snap your fingers and
poof
! No more Boris.”

“I can’t do that, Hopewell.”

“Yes, you can. Just put your thumb and your middle finger together and move them quickly. Make the little sound, and off he goes.”

“It doesn’t work that way. You allowed him to fall up. Boris is no longer my subject. That means I no longer have any control over him.”

“You’re the Devil. You control all sorts of things. Snap your fingers, send him back to Hell, and get me back my cult. I’ll harvest the souls and we’ll be fine. No one has to know. Just a minor blip on the radar.”

“You lost control of your assignment. Now the souls belong to your uncle.”

“But Boris… ”

“Is an immortal being with immense power.” He’d grown larger, looming over the rest of us with his head brushing the ceiling. The lights flickered and died. “And you’ve allowed him to slip out of his bonds. He’s under no one’s control right now. Until I’ve managed to contact your uncle and arrange a transfer, he is masterless. Beholden to no one. Accountable to no one. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

“I really screwed up,” Hope said, cringing back into the sofa against Mom. “Instead of giving Mom a month to soften you up, I should have told you immediately?”

“Yes, you should have.” He began to shrink back to his normal size, and light returned to the room. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to go deal with Borisephan. If I were you, I’d find somewhere else to go for a while.”

“Dad?” I pointed at the front door. “Mortal neighbors? Remember?”

“I’ll be discreet, but your sister still needs to stay out of her apartment for the next several hours while her husband and I”—he narrowed his eyes, his horns curling ominously—“talk.”

“Right,” I agreed. “We’ll just take Mom and get the two of you settled into a hotel. No worries. You can just phase in and meet her later.”

“Two rooms.”

“What do you mean two rooms?” my mother said.

“Two rooms,” he repeated, and disappeared with a quiet
pop
.

“He doesn’t mean that,” Mom said with shaky confidence.

“I’d do what he says,” Tolliver said. “If Dad said two rooms, get two rooms.”

“But we’ve been working things out.”

“Obviously, keeping something this big from him has changed that situation,” Tolliver said, and disappeared.

Lightning streaked across the sky, and the building shook from the force of thunder.

“I’ll just get your bags loaded in my car,” I said to my mom, and shooed her and my sister toward the front door.

“This is nothing,” she said. Ping-Pong-sized hail beat down outside my window. “He’s just a bit cranky right now from all the traveling he had to do.”

Chapter Seven

“Well, that could have gone better,” Hope said later that night. She sat down with a large bowl of chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream and handed me a bowl of spumoni.

“You can say that again.” I took a big bite of ice cream. “Where’s Boris?”

“Upstairs.” She motioned at my ceiling with her spoon. “Apparently, he can’t be pulled back into Hell because he’s fallen up and Dad doesn’t trust him unsupervised in Purgatory. There are too many souls still waiting to be processed and he’s concerned he could do something rash.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I’m supposed to keep an eye on him until Dad can arrange for a transfer. But he said it shouldn’t be too much trouble. He’s cut off Boris’s access to any real power,” she said.

“Real power?” I said.

“He’s not capable of using his powers for evil. No powers of persuasion, no stealing souls, no unfairly manipulating the outcomes of events.”

“But he’ll still keep his immortal visage,” Tolliver added. “Dad can’t strip things from him that are inherent in all immortals.”

“So he’s still got wings and a tail, but he can’t do anything?”

“He can phase,” Hope said. “But that’s about it. Otherwise he’s just a big, formerly demonic battery.”

Wow. I tried not to act surprised at her comment. If Dad had called in the Alpha, things had gotten serious. I couldn’t help but wonder what that meant for Hope. Until this was sorted out, she was essentially going to bed each night with a member of the opposite team.

“What happens now?” I bit into my ice cream.

“We sit and wait while they work out an arrangement for him.” Hope stirred hers into a pile of slush instead of eating it.

“How long does that take?”

“Who knows? It’s only happened twice before that I can remember.” Tolliver flopped onto the love seat with a bowl of strawberry ice cream. He shoveled a heaping spoonful into his mouth.

“And what happened?” I asked, taking another bite.

“Dad arranged a transfer,” Tolliver said, spraying ice cream everywhere. “It took about a week from start to finish. It was a no-muss, no-fuss affair.”

“And do you think that’s what he’ll do with Boris?” Hope asked, her eyes sad. A transfer to the other side would keep them from any sort of reconciliation. Most likely, she would never get the chance to see him again.

“Who knows? The others didn’t destroy a major operation when they fell up, and they weren’t Satan’s son-in-law,” he said.

“The real question is, what are
you
going to do?” I asked pointedly.

Hope scraped her spoon across the bottom of her bowl. “What do you mean?”

“Well, are you going to separate?” I asked. “Are you already separated?”

“Yes… no… I don’t know what we are.”

“Okay, so what do you want to be?” I asked, scooting closer.

“Come on, dish.” Tolliver pushed himself to the edge of his seat.

Hope’s shoulders stiffened and she huffed loudly. “Aren’t you supposed to be trying to find a way to train your new succubus? Where is she, by the way?”

“Family dinner with her parents,” Tolliver and I said in unison.

“She goes every Thursday night and they have dinner together. She claims she has to work at the hospital on Sunday now and can’t go to church with them. So they’ve moved family dinner to the middle of the week to accommodate her work schedule,” he said.

“Clever. Simple. Believable. And they have no real negotiation room. So who came up with that idea?”

“That would be me,” I said.

“I knew it wasn’t her.” Hope laughed, and I couldn’t help giggling along.

“Anyway,” Tolliver said. “Spill about you and Boris. What’s up with the ‘sort of, maybe together’?”

“Well, we’re sort of together. It’s complicated.”

“Yeah, since one of you is a demon and the other one has reformed,” he said.

I focused on my ice cream. If she decided to flip and kill Tolliver, I wanted to appear as non-threatening as possible.

“Fine.” She set her empty bowl on my coffee table. “We’re obviously still living together because, well, he’s in the apartment with me. But we’re not actually, you know, living as man and wife.”

“You mean you’re not sleeping together?” Tolliver asked.

My ice cream lodged in my throat. They weren’t sleeping together? Hope was living in the same apartment as a male being and not doing the horizontal monkey dance with him? That was something I never thought would happen.

“Or speaking civilly.”

“O-kay.” I tried to force down the bite of ice cream, coughing at my burning airway. “So you’re separated?”

“I don’t want to be. I mean, we had a good thing going. We were working a con, causing mischief, spreading evil, and the sex… well, he’s an incubus, so I won’t even go into the sex.”

“Please don’t,” I said, still in shock.

“And suddenly,
boom.
It’s over.” She sniffled, and I handed her a tissue from the box on my side table. This was serious. “One minute I thought we were perfect and the next he’s announcing he’s fallen up, and, by the way, he’s blown our entire con right out of the water. You know when I was running those cons in college with the cheating husbands?”

“The ones where you would get them to cheat on their wives and file for divorce before you cleaned out their bank accounts and left them?” I asked.

“It was like that moment.”

“What moment?” Tolliver asked.

“When those wives heard that their perfect worlds were a lie. They never had any clue their marriages were failing, and one day their husbands would come home and tell them it was over and their worlds would completely shatter.”

“I’m sure it isn’t that bad,” I said weakly, and handed her another tissue.

“It was just like that. One minute our lives were perfect and the next it was over. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”

“Divorce him, let Dad transfer him out of the organization, and score a couple of easy wins,” Tolliver said, and stood to get more ice cream.

“I don’t know. What would people say if we got divorced? It would look like I couldn’t keep a husband.” She dabbed at her eyes.

“You love him, don’t you?” I wished she’d quit crying. Storm clouds already amassed outside, and I wasn’t sure what would happen if she really went into hysterics.

She balled up her fist and growled. Lightning flashed next to the window and thunder rumbled in the distance. “I thought I did, but now I’m just so angry and I want to beat him to a pulp.”

“You want to stay here tonight?” It was the last thing I wanted, but if merely talking about her breakup with Boris was causing the weather outside to go wonky, I couldn’t imagine what would happen if she had to go upstairs and face him. “Sleep on the couch?”

“No, I’ve got the bed up there and Boris sleeps on the couch, mumbling and praying all night for the protection and salvation of Brother Ev.”

“That’s got to be restful.” Tolliver carried a bowl loaded to the brim with chocolate ice cream when he rejoined us.

“You sure?” The last thing anyone needed was another major meteorological incident. We’d already had hail hit nowhere else in Pittsburgh but my street, and in the middle of July, which had brought its own local news coverage. And with Dad here, we’d have at least one more freak storm in the next few days. The more cranky immortals, the worse it would get and the more people would notice. The more people who noticed, the less likely it would be for us to blend quietly into the background of everyday life.

“No, but that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to go upstairs and go to bed like nothing’s wrong. And tomorrow, I’m going to get up and think of a way to make this up to Dad. He’s pissed, and now I’ve got to come up with some way to get on his good side. Who would have thought one little cult in Idaho would be such a big deal? From the way he’s acting you’d think I was the one who fell up.”

“It was a cult set up by a demon and their entire Bible was written at the dictation of Bael,” Tolliver said. “Their first four prophets were archdemons, and there’d been a demon running the whole thing behind the scenes, harvesting their souls for over one hundred years. With the spin-off groups spreading the message, the missionary groups, and the tithing, the cult was a major source of food and income. You had to expect he was going to be pissed at the loss. It’s not like you dinged his car, Hope. You lost an apocalyptic, Satan-worshipping cult.”

“I know.” Her eyes shone red, and a tear hung ominously from her lower eyelashes. Thunder rumbled louder outside, slightly closer than before, and I wrapped my arm around her, pulling her close. When she didn’t snap at me, I knew she wasn’t trying to con anyone by acting like she felt guilty. She knew she’d screwed up her assignment, her life had fallen into ruin, and there was nothing she could do about it.

“I just don’t know how to fix it.”

“You better quit whining and figure something out.” Tolliver’s red eyes flickered. “And figure it out quick, because the Hellbound won’t be as forgiving as Dad when the food runs short.”

“So what should I do?”

Tolliver and I looked at each other, stumped, trying to come up with an idea that would reap big rewards in a short amount of time. His eyes returned to their normal black, and his shoulders slumped. “I got nothing.”

“We’ve got to find you some low-hanging fruit,” I said. “Cheating husbands, maybe? You were always good at that.”

“Takes too long,” Tolliver said.

“Defense attorneys?” Hope suggested.

“Same issue,” I said.

“I’ve got it!” Tolliver clapped his hands together. The front door opened and Lisa stepped inside, her arms full of various boxes and grocery bags. “Bad priests!”

Lisa kicked the door closed behind her and made her way to the kitchen, struggling with the pans of leftovers her mother had sent home for us. “What about bad priests?”

“We’ll find some for Hope so she can steal their souls,” Tolliver said.

I tried to think about any bad priests I may have heard about in the neighborhood.

“Are there a lot of those hanging around?” Lisa asked.

“Not really,” Hope said. “And they take a bit to harvest. But once you do, they’re a big catch.”

“We’re trying to find a quick and easy way for her to harvest a lot of souls to get back on Dad’s, and the rest of Hell’s, good side,” I said.

“Why don’t you go to the prison?” Lisa said.

I froze, amazed at the genius of what she was suggesting.

She put the leftovers in the fridge and then grabbed the chocolate ice cream out of the freezer. She opened the carton and peered into it with a pout. Instead of grabbing a bowl, she snagged a spoon out of the dish strainer and dug in. “Aren’t those guys basically doomed to begin with?”

“Not necessarily,” I said. It was simple. Basically foolproof. “Some of them are murderers, rapists, that sort of thing—but the petty guys aren’t necessarily on the express train to Hell.”

“But they’re already halfway over the line, for the most part,” Tolliver said. It was a brilliantly simple plan. She’d just need a way in.

“Hold up.” Hope held her hands in front of her. “Back the crazy train right up. I’m not going to prison. I look horrible in orange, and Dad will flip if I get arrested.”

“Why would you get arrested?” Lisa asked. “They’d put you in a women’s prison and there isn’t one of those nearby.”

“So how am I going to get into a men’s prison?”

Lisa took another spoonful, shrugged, and said, “The State Prison System puts up flyers at the community clinic. They’re looking for volunteers to go in and teach classes for GED programs and life skills, things like that.”

I smiled. She could pull it off. It was so simple a newborn imp could do it. “You have a communications degree, and good communication is a life skill.”

Tolliver’s eyes were the size of silver dollars and glistening with excitement. “And they wouldn’t let the violent offenders in the class. It would be low- and medium-security prisoners. And those are the guys you’re targeting.”

“They aren’t necessarily ours, but they are easy to corrupt,” Hope said.

“And you could use your ability to inspire unholy lust as the final tipping point to secure them,” I said, knowing how much she enjoyed using that particular skill. It was her signature move.

“Yes!” She stood and marched toward the door, her platinum hair crackling with static as the entire apartment grew bright. Outside, the black clouds dissipated, making way for the sunshine.

“Wait! What are you doing?”

“Taking control of my life.” She raised her fist in the air. “I’m going upstairs to tell Boris exactly what I think of him and his stupid ideas. Then I’m going to bed so that bright and early I can volunteer to teach a class in communication and public relations at the prison to help those poor, unfortunate suckers get their lives on track. And once that’s done, I’m going to plan how I’m going to harvest their souls in an unholy orgy of wickedness to feed Hell for a month and make everyone forget about that stupid cult!”

“All right,” Tolliver said, clapping his hands in delight. “We have a plan.”

“We have a plan,” Hope said, and stalked regally out the door.

“Apparently, we have a plan,” I said. A surprisingly good one. As long as she could pull it off. “And with that, I’m going to bed.”

My door popped back open and my sister stuck her head in the room. “Hey, Faith?”

“Yeah?”

“Our car is a rental, and it’s in Boris’s name, so I can’t really keep driving it with the whole separated thing.”

No, she wasn’t even suggesting what I thought she was suggesting. “And?”

“I’ll just take your Civic tomorrow, okay? Since you’re on vacation, you won’t need it or anything.” Hope snagged the keys off the table next to the door, twirling them around her index finger. Apparently, she was suggesting what I thought.

“But how am I supposed to get around?”

“Well, take the bus, silly. Or just don’t go anywhere until I get back. Duh.” She closed the door, taking my car keys with her.

“Why can’t she take the bus?”

Tolliver chuckled and patted me on the back. “Because she’s Hope and Hope is evil? It’s late so I’m going to bed myself. ’Night all.”