Chapter 4 #4
“Kinda, yeah.” Morgan confiscated the ice cream scoop.
Ice cream couldn’t make it worse, at least, and it might help.
Her stomach suddenly reminded her that she’d only had wilted salad and a couple of hundred-calorie packs of almonds since breakfast. She grabbed the Tupperware full of the snickerdoodle cookies she’d made a few days before and started building herself a honeycomb-flavor ice cream sandwich.
“Well, shit. Huh.” Gisele tapped her spoon thoughtfully. “Do you eat? Sleep? Shower with water? Any allergies we should know about?”
Lucareoth looked overwhelmed. “I do eat: a lot of the same stuff you do. And sleep. I think our days are almost twice as long as yours, but I guess I can nap? I don’t know if I have allergies, I’ve never been here before, and the water thing is deeply weird but I’m guessing you don’t have hot sand baths so I’ll try to figure it out? ”
Morgan tried to contribute. “Do you want honeycomb or chocolate caramel cheesecake ice cream?”
Lucareoth’s eyes flicked back and forth between the two as if he feared choosing the wrong one would summon Fiona. “I… I…”
“You can sense what everyone else wants but you can’t pick which ice cream you like?” Morgan already felt bad for not having thought about any of the logistics. The ice cream hadn’t been supposed to be a trick question. Wasn’t he supposed to be all about desire?
“It’s OK, I’ll give you some of both,” Gisele soothed. She turned back to Morgan. “How are you going to get him home?”
“I have no idea,” Morgan confessed.
Lucareoth stabbed at the ice cream with his spoon, getting a little of it to stay on. He looked at it suspiciously before very slowly putting it in his mouth. His eyebrows shot up. “This is amazing.”
He licked the spoon slowly, sensuously. A bolt of heat shot through her body. Down, girl, she reminded herself. He was made for this: he might not even realize the effect he had. The poor man—demon—was just trying to eat a snack. She tried to distract herself by fishing out more cookies.
“Here, try it in a sandwich.” Morgan handed him one. “I made the cookies a few days ago, so they’re getting a little stale, but still pretty good.”
He took a bite cautiously, and then looked back up at her through absurdly lush lashes. “You made these?”
“I stress-bake.” If she could hit her quota, she could manage her student loan payment and the rent, and continue to afford the occasional luxury ice cream.
She wasn’t going to hit her quota, not at this rate.
That wasn’t important right now. “If I remember correctly, and I probably don’t, the walls between planes should still be thinner for a little while where the original ritual was conducted. ”
“What you’re saying is that we should have stayed there after the other people left,” Lucareoth said. “And before your mother, the demon hunter, saw me.”
“I panicked, OK? I didn’t want the EMTs seeing us hanging around like we were hiding something.”
“Wait, EMTs?” Gisele asked.
Morgan swallowed. “Tim was the one who pulled Luke over. Then he had a heart attack.”
“What?” Gisele set her bowl down hard on the counter. “Is he OK?”
“He’s dead,” Lucareoth said and took another bite of ice cream.
Gisele looked back at Morgan accusingly. “Talk about burying the lede, Morgan!”
“Do you mean ‘a demon is stuck in our dimension and we’re all screwed if the Shadow Council finds out’ isn’t lede-y enough for you?”
“There can be two ledes!”
“He’s dead, which means we can’t sell him anything so he’s not a lead anymore,” Lucareoth raised a hand. “So who’s the second lead?”
“L-e-d-e, not l-e-a-d—you know what, never mind,” Morgan said.
If they got too derailed by the number of human things Lucareoth didn’t know, they’d never get anywhere.
“The point is, we need to do some research tonight, figure out what ritual we need to send you back, and then get back into the building.”
“Are you OK?” Gisele asked her.
“Pretty obviously not.”
“Do you want a hug?”
“Oh god, yes please.”
Gisele folded her into her arms and for a moment Morgan let a little tension drain. Then she realized they were being stared at. She opened her eyes to see Lucareoth watching, wide-eyed.
“Is she sucking out your energy?” he asked hesitantly.
“What? No.”
“Then what are you doing?” He looked slightly grossed out.
Another reason to never visit the Infernal Plane. “It’s a hug. Humans do it to comfort each other. It feels nice.”
“Uh… huh.” He gave her a look like she had suggested licking the dust from under the refrigerator. Which was probably a lot of dust: she’d never moved it to clean and she was willing to bet their rental company hadn’t either. “What can I offer you to go back tonight?”
She shook her head. “My badge won’t work this late. It’ll have to be in the morning.”
“Who are you going to say he is to get him in the building? Vendor? Prospect? Pizza delivery guy?” Gisele gave her shoulder a pat and stepped back.
“You told the other one I was the new sales intern,” Lucareoth pointed out.
“Vijay was stoned out of his gourd and would have accepted it if I said you were Santa Claus. Never mind who Santa Claus is,” she said as Lucareoth opened his mouth.
“The point is, Hayley is going to want to know how she never processed your intake paperwork if we try that in the cold light of day.”
“I might be able to do something about that,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “At what cost?”
“No cost,” he said hastily. “I have a limited amount of… influence on this plane. Like the illusion thing.”
“Illusion thing?” Gisele asked, interested.
“Oh, right,” he waved a hand, and his human-image disappeared.
“Oh, my,” said Gisele. Her eyes rounded for a moment and then she controlled her reaction.
The second time around, Morgan found the horns less alarming.
The tail was kind of fun. Now that he was less agitated, it curled up behind him like a question mark.
And the scales… She wanted to run a finger along them and see what they felt like.
And then remembered that he could probably tell and shoved that thought straight into a mental trash can.
“Anyway, I have a certain dispensation to use small amounts of power over here to—” he cut himself off at Morgan’s glare. “To protect myself. I can convince people of things, if they’re already inclined to believe them.”
“Convince them you’re on payroll?” Morgan asked.
“Maybe he’s not on payroll,” Gisele said.
“Pretty sure unpaid interns are illegal these days.”
“So maybe someone else is paying him,” Gisele argued.
“Like a work-study thing. He’s a college senior, he’s got a scholarship that pays so he gets real-world experience.
Then all you have to do is convince Hayley is that she signed the paperwork for the internship, without needing budget and stuff. ”
Morgan pursed her lips. “Is that something you can do?”
“If you tell her, I can make her believe it,” he said with confidence, ruined slightly by the ice cream on his chin.
That she wanted to lick off. She caught Gisele staring at her staring at his chin.
Her roommate raised her eyebrows just enough that Morgan could tell that, as soon as they were in private, she was in for a thorough grilling about the insanely hot demon she’d dragged home and exactly what Morgan might be thinking about doing with him, and possibly if he had additional broodmates at home who were not already claimed.
She resolved to simply never be in private again.
“All right. Just until we get access to the phone room and get you home,” she warned. The faster he was gone, the better.
“I want to get home as fast as I can, too,” he pointed out. “Before your mother notices I’m here or my boss notices I’m gone. Because if they do—”
“There’ll be Hell to pay,” Morgan said. They all contemplated that for a moment.
“So,” Gisele said brightly. “Who wants to watch implausible explanations for Stonehenge?”