Chapter 4 #3
Restful was more of a compliment than what her parents would have said. What did it say about her relationships that a literal damn demon had nicer things to say about her?
“You gave the one guy a small amount of money when you didn’t want to, and then after he got hurt you gave him a larger amount of money than you wanted to, and then you wished you didn’t give him any money at all,” he said, coming back to the earlier question.
“I could have helped him, and then as a result he would have been punished when he dies for the lying and the groping, and I would have met my quota and we all would have been happier.”
“You can’t buy souls!”
“I mean, I can. It’s pretty easy, they just have to sign the contract.”
“I mean that I’m not going to let you just damn someone in front of me.”
“But why not?”
“What could you possibly give him that would be a reasonable trade for his immortal soul?”
Lucareoth’s eyebrows furrowed as he thought back. “He didn’t want to sleep in the shelter tonight because last night someone got beat up.”
She sucked in a breath. She had figured he’d wanted booze. Which meant that she had been making terrible assumptions about someone. Maybe she was wrong. But trading your soul to get off the street was still surely a bad move? Did she have the right to make that decision? She wished she knew.
He patted her elbow as if he were trying to make her feel better. “He was happy with the money you gave him. Was it worth a lot?”
Not enough for a hotel room. Maybe she should have given him more, except she didn’t have more on her. She tried to stick to her principles. “Not as much as protecting his soul.”
“He wanted to use it for booze,” the demon said casually. “Also, he wanted to grab your butt.”
People were complicated and she hated them all.
They approached the hulking brick tower she called home and entered its tiny courtyard.
He watched, trying to not look obvious but clearly fascinated, as she yanked open the first door—there was a trick to it or it got stuck—and then unlocked the inner door in the vestibule.
The lobby echoed her footsteps, the tiny checked tiles bouncing the sound off all the hard surfaces that, despite being easy to clean, didn’t get cleaned quite as often as would be optimal.
A choice. She sighed. He was a guest, after all.
“Which sounds less unappealing: seven flights of stairs or the world’s sketchiest elevator?”
“… elevator?”
“Stinkovater it is.” She punched the button, and the doors creaked open, the inner door noticeably trailing the outer.
The elevator had an olfactory punch that wasn’t simply urine, although urine was an element.
There was an optimistic amount of knock-off Pine Sol, and a funk that was probably some exotic species of mold, overlaid by a sweet smell not unlike floral conditioner.
She usually opted for stairs, and congratulated herself on the cardio.
Sometimes she made it all the way to the top without having to pause at one of the mid-way landings.
He sniffed appreciably. “This reminds me of my grandsire’s!”
She made a mental note to continue in her policy of not including visiting the Infernal Plane on her bucket list. “Wait, I thought your parents wanted to eat you.”
He looked offended. “Where I’m from, if a parent declines to eat their spawn, they back them after that. It’s the job of the elder to support the spawn they keep, otherwise it is a waste of resources to raise them.”
Morgan wished her mother saw things that way.
She watched his face fall, though, as he thought.
She debated letting it go for a moment. She didn’t want to know.
He was going to be gone in the morning, and good riddance.
But, as his shoulders collapsed in on themselves, she found herself asking gently, “Are you worried they’re going to regret that now? ”
He shook it off. “Maybe they would have. But neither one made it through the last reorg, and they left me with enough debts I didn’t have a lot of choice about taking the sales job.”
“I’m… I’m so sorry,” she stammered. Given all the talk of eating people, she guessed that the demon world didn’t have much need for unemployment benefits.
He twitched his shoulders, shaking off any grief like he was shaking off a fly as the elevator doors creaked open. “At least they were together. And they won’t have to deal with this mess.”
When she opened the apartment door, Gisele called out from the kitchen to them. “Ice cream time!”
Anxiety suddenly clawed at her stomach again. She hadn’t thought this part through at all. But Gisele was already coming out of the kitchen, dusting off a perfectly manicured hand on her jeans and extending it to shake.
Lucareoth took it with a dazzling smile. Gisele took a tiny breath.
“Gisele, this is Luke,” Morgan said hurriedly. Already, that little crease was appearing between his eyebrows as he took a second look and opened his mouth. “I need to show him something, we’ll be right back.”
Gisele’s assessing face quickly turned to cynical amusement as she shot her roommate the Look. The You’re trying to keep this new person from saying something because you forgot to get ahead of this, didn’t you Look.
Lucareoth only looked confused as she bustled him into her bedroom and shut the door behind them. She didn’t have time to be embarrassed that she’d dragged a demon into her bedroom.
“Her name is Gisele,” she said with great emphasis. “You will use the correct pronouns for her and you will never say another word to the contrary.”
“Yes?” He looked even more confused. “Her desires for how she wants to be addressed are extremely clear.”
“Oh.” She supposed that would be an easy desire to pick up on.
Still, she hadn’t expected a demon to follow Gisele’s lead more willingly than a lot of humans.
She felt a flash of shame for her entire species, but pushed on to her second point.
“She is my very best friend, you will treat her with more respect than you treat me with, you will never ever try to even touch her soul for any reason, or you are out on your ass and I’ll call the Shadow Council myself. You understand?”
“You realize that if you ban me from making a Deal with anyone at all, you’re stuck with me.”
“We’ll get you back without anyone’s souls being involved.”
“You don’t even like your coworkers,” he pointed out, sounding uncomfortably reasonable. “I’m sure some of them would be happy to stab you in the back for some whatever-Q-L things.”
“We’re not talking about this.” The embarrassment had fallen behind but was starting to catch up.
She had a demon. A very attractive demon.
In her bedroom. And she’d forgotten to make her bed, which had dark red sheets she knew her skin would look good against and had bought in a fit of optimism and was now deeply regretting.
Her ears flared hot. “Let’s go eat some ice cream. ”
Gisele, who had seen far too much and responded to things with far more grace than Morgan thought she herself would have been able to summon, greeted their reappearance with only the tiniest eyeroll for Morgan.
“So what brings you to our corner of the island?” Gisele asked, digging into a pint of Van Leeuwen chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream and pushing a second pint—honeycomb—at Morgan.
Luke had the sense to glance at Morgan.
She sighed. She could try to keep this all from Gisele, but her roommate was like a terrier with a secret. And it was going to be too hard to explain why Luke was crashing on their couch. She needed to give her the truth. “You know the stuff I told you about my family?”
In college, Gisele had often dragged Morgan uptown to be fed by Gisele’s extended family, at least half of whom regularly seemed to turn out enormous plates of mofongo and pernil.
Gisele’s family had handled her coming out with only moderate drama, so it had taken months for it to occur to Gisele that the reason the invitations weren’t reciprocated weren’t only because Morgan’s family lived further upstate.
It wasn’t until the stray mailing from a chupacabra conservation charity ended up at Morgan’s address by mistake that Gisele started asking questions.
It took understanding that the mailing was not some kind of mean joke about Gisele’s Puerto Rican heritage for her roommate to start realizing that Morgan really did come from a different culture.
Which was good, because Gisele was the one who ended up procuring all the sushi after the Penguin Incident in sophomore year. It had never even occurred to Fiona.
Gisele paused and gave Morgan her full attention. Which took a lot, when the competition was chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream. “You mean the… you-know stuff?”
“Yeah, so…” No way for this not to be a bomb. “Luke’s not exactly human.”
Gisele looked far too excited about this information. “Wait, really? Are you a werewolf? I’ve always wanted to meet a werewolf.”
“No, I am not a werewolf.” He looked more amused than anything else, fortunately.
How to put this? She gave up. “He’s a demon.”
“Really?” Gisele raised her eyebrows, impressed. “Like, from Hell and everything?”
“If by Hell, you mean a place all bad human souls go so they may be tormented into eternity, which is ruled by fallen angels from a prissy God, no. We are not.” It would have been more forbidding if Lucareoth hadn’t looked so prissy himself.
“He’s from the Infernal Plane,” Morgan said before this could turn into a lecture on metaphysics. “It’s not the same thing. He’s stuck here by accident, until we can figure out how to get him back.”
“Huh.” Gisele grabbed a spoonful of ice cream as she thought. “I’m guessing there’s a good reason why you’re not asking your parents for help?”
Lucareoth jerked back. “Her dam wants to kill me.”
Gisele paused and looked to Morgan for confirmation.