Once You Go Demon (Pure Souls) (17 page)

“Contracted until one of us kisses dirt, I’m afraid.” She sighed. “I’m leaving next week.”

“Ramiel know about that?”

She feigned confusion, but he was so over letting those around him sport a second face at will.

“You love him?”

Persephone crossed her arms over her chest and stared at the bar. “Like it matters. I’m nephilim, and he’s angelus. We’re not ever going to be together. Not to mention, you know, the fact that I’m married to the prince of pity and self-indulgence.”

“You never know what’s going to happen in this world or the next, Lady.”

She startled when his hand ghosted over hers. When they found themselves exchanging sympathy via goofy smiles, she shook herself from her stupor.

“I’ll do what I can, Gaius. I can’t leave the mountain if he agrees, though, and that ass won’t come down for all the tea in Costco. You’ll need a sponsor. I … think you know what I’m hinting at. You going to be able to swing that?”

“I’ll find a way,” Jerry assured, pulling back his hand. “And if Dee doesn’t do it for me, he’ll do it for Riona. Speaking of which, I’d like to send you a Christmas present.”

“You know I don’t exactly celebrate JC’s b-day, right?”

Jerry could break bread with her on that one. “Solstice then. I don’t want Riona here when Marc shows up. I need to deal with it alone. Would you sponsor her on the Mountain?”

Her fingers looped her cup. “You sure you want to subject someone who looks like her to my family? I can’t make any vows for her safety there. Hades in particular has a thing for redheads.”

“I know, Milady. But sometimes you just have to go with the devil you know.”

Chapter 20

What Riona did not place on the counter, as Dee and Jerry looked on, was a severed kraken’s head or a box of tourist flyers filled with glossy pictures of the Canadian Tundra, and a complete set of the greatest hits of Neil Diamond, alphabetized. Yet, for all their comprehension of why she was covering their kitchen counter in what she in fact was, those might have resulted in fewer cocked heads and vacant expressions.

She weighed herself on her hands as she leaned across the kitchen island, glaring at Dee in his boxers and Jerry in his briefs. “What? Can’t a girl unpack groceries without getting the third degree?”

Dee’s hand went to his eyes, trying to rub away the sleep. “Sure you can, but if you do it at 4 A.M. on a Saturday, we’re bound to come running. Come on, Ree. I wouldn’t be surprised if you woke up all the dead in the North Church Cemetery with the racket you were making.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t sleep. I went grocery shopping. Hope you don’t mind, I used your car.”

Jerry nosed about in a few of the sacks. In the third, his hand shot in to the unknown and removed—in a manner akin to a magician with a rabbit—a twelve-pound, plastic-wrapped, frozen turkey.

“Are you going American domestic on us, Keystone?” he queried as the incriminating poultry twirled in a slow rotation from his hand.

“I’ve asked you not to call me that. Marc used to …” The words died on her tongue. Rounding the island, she cradled the beheaded beast in her arms. “I’ve never made a Thanksgiving dinner. I realized that as I was tossing and turning last night.”

“Thanksgiving was three weeks ago.”

She shrugged. “I wasn’t exactly in the mood then.”

Dee pulled himself to the other side of the kitchen, yanking down the canister of coffee from the cupboard. “Never knew you were the cooking type. I think the most I’ve ever seen you whip up is a takeout menu and microwave popcorn.”

Riona shoved the bird into the refrigerator before she turned and started to unload other goods; various assortments of vegetables, both of the fresh and canned variety, jars of gelatinous goo that was hopefully turkey gravy, rolls boasting a Hawaiian heritage, and six bottles of wine.

Six bottles. For three people.

Riona huffed as she slammed the refrigerator door closed. “It’s just a big, fat bird and a few side dishes. How hard can it be?”

“I’m what?”

“Picking up my mother,” Riona repeated.

She stood just outside his bedroom door at the tender hour of eight A.M., her arms crossed over her chest and her fingers tapping on her biceps. He’d gone back to sleep after assuring that their kitchen wasn’t being ransacked by thieves, but he’d really hoped to achieve double digits in to the morning before getting up again.

“Use Dee’s car. I already asked him, he says it’s cool. You do know how to drive, don’t you?”

“I was a gnosis demon, if you’ll recall.” His fingers labored to rid his human eyes of the sleep crusted in the corner. “Molly know I’m coming?”

“Do you think I’d warn her in advance so we could all be victims of pre-meditated ridicule? No, she doesn’t. I called the home, though, and told them you’d be picking her up around ten or eleven. They were not entirely opposed to the idea of her staying here the whole weekend. Funny, since I didn’t even ask.”

That gave him ten times the jolt any cup of coffee could. “Thank the gods. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”

“Not unless a national disaster strikes rendering all forms of public and private transit dead, no. Even then, we’d do our best to find a horse and buggy.”

Groaning, he turned back into his room to shimmy into a pair of jeans and an overly-worn, long-sleeve plaid shirt.

Molly Dade’s tongue was unnaturally still as he loaded her extra oxygen tank in to the trunk. Riona’s mother tended toward the petite and shrunken down side. It looked like someone had left an albino raisin on the front seat. So different from his own mother. Though his personal human memories were fuzzy, Jerry vaguely recalled Julia Gallicus back in Ancient Alexandria being called on to weigh down their ships in port while anchors were repaired.

The lack of venom didn’t fool him for a second, however. Jerry had watched enough of the Discovery Channel while on demon downtime to know real predators bided their time before ripping into the hapless antelope.

He maneuvered the car out of the parking lot and on to the road. “Happy to be getting out for the day, Molly? Excited to see Riona’s new house?”

“New house?” The tone suggested both surprise and dismissiveness. “Shacking up with some new guy, is she?”

He was wise enough to remain still and hope the spider’s eyes didn’t see him.

“My daughter sent you?” she asked when Jerry let her opportunity pass.

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You sleeping with her?”

“Not anymore.”

“You used to,” Molly concluded. “Of course, Riona’s always been loose. Lost her innocence with some hockey player when she was seventeen, you know. I walked in on them in her room, just as his puck was passing into her net.”

Not only was Jerry unsure of what he should say, he also knew the truth. In fact, Riona had lost her ‘innocence,’ as Molly so delicately put it, when she was sixteen to a cheerleader named Tiffany Roo. Of course, Riona didn’t know he was privileged to that information either, and it was exactly the type of thing you’d expect an old wretched battle ax like Molly Dade to bring up as you passed her rolls over dinner.

“You love my daughter, Marc?”

The name stung, but when she’d called him that after he’d shown up, he didn’t have the heart to correct her. Of course, the memory charm he’d worked at their last meeting meant she didn’t recall him introducing himself. He didn’t know where the Marc association came from, however. As far as Jerry knew, Molly Dade had never met Marc Angeletti. So, he’d play the part of the priest with Molly, though the act felt forced. He didn’t mind fooling the rest of the world, but no matter how much of a raving banshee she was, you shouldn’t lie to the mother of the woman you were hoping to marry someday.

He coughed and shifted in his seat. “Um, yeah. Yes, I do.”

Molly leaned in a little, angling her body over the gear shift. “But she don’t love you back.”

“No, ma’am. I don’t think she does.”

“Of course, she doesn’t.” The old woman sparked as she laughed and hit Jerry on the leg with surprising strength. “Know how I know? She’s got the hots for some guy named Jerry. Completely gaga over him from the looks of it.”

Ice and fire competed for control in Jerry’s squishy interior. True, facts in Molly’s brain might not be linear, but they didn’t come from nowhere. Back when they’d been “dating” the first time, Riona must have said something. But
love
? Even if she’d told Molly as much back then, she’d never given him the privilege of hearing those three little words.  

But at the moment, he was playing at being Marc, and Marc had to answer her now.

“What a lucky guy,” Jerry breathed out, noting to himself how choked up his voice came across.  “I hope he knows how lucky he is.”

“Well, if there was one thing Riona’s never had problems with, it’s making men feel ‘lucky,’ if you know what I mean.” She let out a cackle that Shakespeare’s witches would have pissed themselves to pull off. “Don’t know where I went wrong with that girl that she turned out that way.”

Jerry couldn’t exactly defend Riona, at least not from Molly’s perspective. His research on the younger Dade’s physical history was encyclopedic in its thoroughness, leading up to his assignment to corrupt her. Riona had indeed gone through a bumpy time in her late teen and college years. Since, no one would award her any prizes for chastity, but she only ever pursued the physical within the confines of the emotional. And even at the worst of times, she’d never been the hooking-up-with-a-different-guy-every-night type o’ girl. Every other month, maybe.

Luckily, embracing psychobabble gave him an option. “Probably nothing you did, Molly. Girls who grow up without a father often turn out that way, trying to find someone to fill that void.” His tongue held back the capper, literally.

“Without a father, yes. Her father, of course….”

Jerry glanced from the corner of his eye as best he could and caught Molly’s confused, distant expression. He wasn’t sure if her sudden lack of clarity was because of her erased memory, or her Alzheimer’s butting into their conversation. In any case, the silence that filled the car brought him to one, undeniable conclusion.

Molly Dade would be canonized after her death, for she had just performed a miracle. She made him feel sympathy … for her.

The mortal fallacy, oh he’d forgotten it. And now he was due to experience it all over again, wasn’t he? While he was lucky to get a body that was relatively well taken care of and on the sunny side of the age spectrum, he, too, would end up like Molly someday. Old, confused, alone, unwanted, decrepit. Most of those things didn’t bother him so much. If he pulled off this second chance at living, a shot at Heaven might still be in his cards. But alone … Humans didn’t get many years, but they were blessed with a perspective that told them their years passed slowly. Jerry didn’t want to pass through this mortal life again and end up alone. He wanted it to be complete.

Damn him, but he wanted Riona.

“Don’t worry, Molly. I have a feeling Riona and Jerry are going to end up okay.”

Molly’s eyes became saucers at the sight of Dee’s hulking frame filling the doorway. She had to stand still and lean back slightly to take a proper survey of the demigod.

“Please tell me you’re not the one my daughter’s schlepping.”

Dee gave a spot on impersonation of a candied apple as he helped Molly cross into the house and began to guide her toward the living room. “Um, no. We’re just friends.”

A grin plastered over her face. “Good, I still got a shot then.”

“Jer?” Dee’s low voice gave him a shiver.

“Yeah, chief?”

Molly shuffled toward the sofa as Dee leaned in closely. “You’re needed in the kitchen. But be careful. She’s likely to blow again.”

“Why, what happened?”

“Not what she’d hoped. That’s the problem.”

At first, Jerry thought the kitchen was empty. It wasn’t until a steady
knock, knock, knock
from the other side of the island drew his attention that he knew otherwise.

Riona, bum down to the linoleum, rocked herself in allegro time. Both her hands grasped at the side of her head, her bloodshot eyes and a quivering lips suggested trouble.

“What’s up?”

She jolted and turned a momentary mask of shock toward Jerry before her features melted back in to woe. She dismissively motioned in the direction of the sink.

“I was supposed to defrost it.”

“The sink?”

“Not the sink, the turkey!” she shrieked. “I put it in the fridge. I thought it would thaw out overnight, but it didn’t. Just the skin did. The rest of it is still a popsicle. And I burned the pumpkin pie. And I didn’t know I had to get extra chicken stock to make the stuffing. And apparently there’s a difference between yams and sweet potatoes. How was I supposed to know they’re different things? I fucked up everything. And you know my mom won’t let this go if she’s here. She’ll be all, ‘see, Riona, one more thing you suck at,’ or ‘who did you think you were, Betty Crocker?’.”

Her lips stilled the moment his fingers pressed against them.

“Slow down, sunshine, or I’m going to have to ask to see your Kenyan birth certificate. Can the ‘Oh, Ricky!’ routine. Next you’ll be crying about going to the club and playing the bongos.” He pulled back his hand and surveyed the countertops as best he could from his crouched down place next to her. “Where’s the bird now?”

“In the sink. I looked it up on the Internet and it said that’s the quickest way to defrost it. But it will still be another 2-3 hours before it’s ready to go in the oven.” She paused, then looked up perplexed. “Did you get my mom?”

“Yeah.”

“Damn it, no hope of salvation then. How is she today?”

“Well, just suffice to say that I didn’t wrap Dee’s car around a telephone pole, but I was tempted.” His voice softened as he continued, “She thinks my name is Marc. I hope her calling me that isn’t going to tick you off. I thought it best to keep up appearances.”

“No. I mean, yeah. I understand.” Her hands filed back her auburn locks. “Oh God, what am I going to do about dinner?”

“That’s easy.” Reaching out, he took Riona’s hand and brought her to her feet. “You’re going to do exactly what I say, and don’t panic. Luckily for you, I’ve picked up some excellent cooking lessons over the years.”

For once in her blessed life, Riona Dade did not argue. She did not bitch. She did not retort. When he said boil water, it boiled. When Jerry told her to add milk, lactation deployment ensued. Before long, they’d become a team, working the burners and basting a bird that may have defrosted just a bit faster than humanly possible.