Chapter 4
“ Y OU WANT HANNAH to be with you? Respect you? Love you?” Daphne asked. “Hell, why stop there? I could make the whole world love you. Millions, billions of adoring fans. Simpering, swooning over you. I can make it happen. All you have to do is say—”
“I don’t want the whole world to love me. Just Hannah.”
“ Boring ,” Daphne singsonged. “But whatever, it’s your life. You want your snooty little girlfriend to be head-overheels in love with you? I can make it happen.”
Another unfair assessment. If Daphne knew Hannah, she’d know Hannah had been raised by a single mom who cleaned houses in a wealthy suburb just west of Newport, working herself to the bone and still struggling to make ends meet.
She’d know that Hannah knew what it was like to go to school with the girls whose houses her mom cleaned and to be looked down on because of it, teenage cruelty at its finest. She would know that Hannah knew better than most what it felt like to be on the outside looking in, to feel like no matter how hard she tried, she’d always be on the outside looking in.
That a part of Hannah worried, would always worry, that she didn’t actually belong in the crowds she ran in now that she had money, and that everyone knew it, too.
If Daphne knew Hannah, she’d know that even before Hannah struck gold on TikTok, when she was working as a makeup artist and living in a two-bedroom apartment with three roommates, barely covering rent and groceries, she still scraped together a few extra dollars to send home to her mom each month.
And two years ago, when she had struck gold, earning her first big brand sponsorship, the first thing Hannah had done was pay off her mom’s mortgage.
Sam’s student loans had been next, Hannah telling Sam to consider it my investment in your future when Sam had balked.
In a way, Sam owed it to Hannah to keep trying.
“How?” she demanded, too suspicious to be anything close to hopeful.
Daphne sighed explosively. “This again? Really? I’m a demon. Demon. An agent of evil, one that—”
“No. You’re a demon. Trust me, I get that.” The horns and tail were damning evidence. Pun totally intended. “But why should I trust that you have the power to do what you say you can? Hell, you’re a demon . Why should I trust you at all?”
Daphne’s bottom lip jutted out in an exaggerated pout. “That’s awfully prejudiced of you, casting aspersions and making judgments because of what I am. I’ve got to say, I’m a little disappointed in you, Samantha.”
“Oh, save it.” She pressed a palm to her forehead; she was clammy, nervous sweat cooling on her skin, leaving her chilled. She hugged her coat around her body a little tighter. “Demons are … they do …”
“We do …?” Daphne prompted, eyes wide, eager.
“I don’t know! Bad things. You said it yourself, you’re an agent of evil.”
“Don’t tell me your sensibilities are so delicate that you’re going to let one itty-bitty word frighten you away from seizing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to have anything and everything you’ve ever wanted.”
“I’m discerning,” she argued. “There’s a difference. Excuse me if I have a few concerns about the existence of demons.”
“No, difficult is what you are.” Daphne’s tongue pressed against the inside of her cheek, her nostrils flaring delicately when she sighed. “Go on, ask whatever it is you’re clearly dying to.”
Jesus, okay. Where to start …? “Were you forged in the flames of Hell? Were you created from, I don’t know, fire and brimstone?”
“Biblical much?” Daphne snorted. “No, I wasn’t forged . I was born. Human. I became a demon later.”
“How?”
“A very lonely man in a white lab coat decided to experiment with sugar, spice, and everything nice but unfortunately a little something extra got tossed into the mix.” She rolled her eyes. “I am what I am, Sam. It’s a boring story. Ask me something else.”
The purse of her lips and hard set of her jaw told Sam that pushing would get her nowhere.
Not on this. At the end of the day, Daphne was right: She was a demon, and as curious as Sam was about how someone became that way, it didn’t really matter.
Not when she was standing here offering Sam a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, exactly what she wanted on the night when she needed it most.
“Okay, fine. You say you have all this power?” Sam swallowed thickly, heart hammering, guts braided in an intricate knot. Heaven help her, she could not believe she was actually about to say this … “Show me what you can do.”
Daphne deliberated, a calculating gleam in her eyes. “I suppose the proof is in the pudding.” She nodded once, a quick upward jerk of her chin. “All right. Wish for something.”
Easy. “I wish that Hannah—”
“Uh-uh,” she stopped her, finger wagging. “ Not that.”
“But you said—”
“I said that for a nominal, nonmonetary fee, I’d offer you the opportunity to win your girlfriend back, and now you’re asking me to prove to you that I’m capable of making good on my word.
I’m happy to do that. But what I’m not about to do is give the milk away for free.
I wasn’t born yesterday; I’ve been doing this for over a millennium.
Nice try, though. Wish for something else. ”
Sam’s brain fritzed, blue-screening. “Did you just say a millennium ? As in over a thousand years?”
“Two millennia, if we’re getting technical.” She studied her nails. “Which, again, is neither here nor there. Make a different wish.”
She faltered, brain blank, still coming online after learning that Daphne was literally ancient, that she had memories going back to a time Sam was only familiar with from history books and Starz series when Sam could barely remember what she ate for breakfast yesterday. “For what?”
“It’s your wish, silly. What do you want?”
Plenty of things. For one, she wanted out of this godforsaken elevator.
Out of this suit, too. She really did want to be promoted to executive pastry chef, if for no reason other than she’d earned it.
She knew it, and Coco, pigheaded and vindictive as she was, could deny it until she turned blue, but deep down she knew it, too. The job was Sam’s .
The wish was on the tip of her tongue—
“And don’t go getting any bright ideas about wishing for anything you think might win you your ex back. I’m offering you a sample, Sam, not a damn sourdough starter.”
Sam’s stomach rumbled.
It was silly. Dumb, honestly. But after a day as hellish as this? All Sam wanted was to eat her weight in bread pudding.
“Antoine’s,” she said, decided. This whole day was bizarre; why not ask for something ridiculous?
“Oldest operating family-owned restaurant in New Orleans. They have this bread pudding that’s to die for.
They make it with Leidenheimer French bread and it’s chock-full of golden raisins and spice and they slather it with this thick hot buttered rum sauce.
” Her mouth watered and her stomach rumbled, her appetite back with a sudden vengeance. “I want that.”
“I guess the proof really is in the pudding.” Daphne chuckled, amused by her own joke. “All right. One bread pudding from Antoine’s, coming right up. All you’ve got to say is, ‘I wish …’”
“Fine. I wish I had the pecan bread pudding from Antoine’s.” She paused. “Make that two servings.” Sue her, she was hungry. “With extra rum sauce.”
Like flint striking steel, sparks erupted from Daphne’s fingertips when she snapped them. “Done.”
Sam held her breath, waiting for a bowl full of bread pudding to land in her lap.
Nothing happened.
She looked around the elevator, still empty save for the two of them. “Well?”
Daphne arched a brow. “I’m a demon, not a short-order cook. Hold your horses.”
Five minutes became ten, spunky Muzak emanating from the elevator’s suddenly functioning speakers.
After an indeterminate amount of time that left Sam wondering whether she’d somehow landed herself in Purgatory, the elevator doors opened, metal grinding shrilly against metal, hot sparks flying in every direction.
She drew her scarf up over her face and peered cautiously through her splayed fingers.
A guy sporting a backward baseball cap poked his head between the doors, staring down at them from half a floor above, eyes flitting curiously around the confined space they were trapped in. “Uh, I’ve got a special delivery for a Daphne?”
She stood, dusting off her skirt primly. “That would be me. Thank you very much.” She reached into the bodice of her dress and withdrew a crisply folded fifty-dollar bill that she promptly handed over.
The courier passed her a grease-stained paper bag. “Enjoy.”
He left, whistling a jaunty tune as he turned the corner in the direction of the service elevator, as if this were normal, delivering food to two women trapped in a defunct elevator. All in a day’s work.
The doors groaned, sliding shut.
“Shouldn’t we have tried to …” Sam trailed off with a sinking realization. She’d been played like a fiddle. “We’re not really trapped in here, are we?”
Daphne seesawed her head from side to side. “ Technically —”
“Screw technically,” she said. “Did you or did you not cause the elevator to malfunction?”
“You say malfunction, I say temporarily out of order.” Daphne smirked. “Don’t sound so scandalized. So what if I engineered the perfect scenario to get you alone? I’m evil, remember?”
“You’re a pain in my ass, is what you are,” Sam muttered.
“If it makes you feel better, we aren’t even in the elevator. Not anymore. Technically we aren’t even in your building. Think of this as our own personal little liminal space, a cozy little pocket between space and time just for us.”
“An elevator is a liminal space.” She held out a hand for the bag Daphne was holding. “Gimme.”
Daphne swung the paper bag in front of her face tauntingly. “Say please.”
“Go to hell,” Sam snapped, snatching the bag.
Daphne laughed. “Been there, done that, but it’s so balmy this time of year, you know?”