Kiss & Hell (11 page)

“Pat Benatar, 1980, off the
Crimes of Passion
album.” Clyde’s lean fingers began to massage his temples in absent circles.

And now we had the crazy. Maybe he was more confused about how he’d landed here than he was letting on. “Uh, you just crossed the threshold from creepy and annoying to crazy. Repeat?”

His head popped up, and he gave a push with two fingers to settle his glasses back on the bridge of his nose. “Forget it. It’s just a habit. I have a lot of useless trivia in my head. Sometimes words—songs trigger it. It just flies out of my mouth before I can stop it. Especially when I’m stressed, and getting you to give me your ear for more than the time it takes you to make my eyeballs feel like they’re being grilled on hot coals is damned stressful, lady.”

Delaney forced away the smile she almost let happen from hitting her face. “Okay, so how about we leave the era of leg warmers and Madonna, and you tell me what information you have about me from, of all places, Hell.”

Clyde scowled. “Madonna didn’t happen until more like ’82.”

“Right. Like a—a—”

“Virgin. From her
Like a Virgin
album, circa 1984, if I remember correctly.”

“I’ll be sure to make a mental note. Now spew, demon.”

Now he frowned, the vein in his temple pulsing. “I hesitate to say this, but I’m guessing you won’t believe me.”

“And that’s stopped you from yakking my ear off before? You set my chair on fire to get me to pay attention to you. Whatever it is, it must be serious—so tell me what the frig you want from me, and let me decide if I believe you.” Which she probably wouldn’t, but who didn’t want to hear the gossip they’d evoked straight from Hell? If she was all the rage down there, she wanted every juicy detail.

“All right. So it’s just like I told you. I don’t know how I ended up in Hell. I’d swear that on the Bibles that crazy woman offered me. A stack of them. I’ve been there for three months—in the file room.”

A snicker escaped her throat. “Hell has files?”

Clyde’s face grew strained, almost as if what he claimed to have seen in these files really did trouble him. “A shitload of them,” he said with a gruff note to his tone. “On
everyone
—the incoming, the due to be incoming, potential visitors, the easily corrupted, the want to corrupt but haven’t decided what road to take to the land of corruption—plus, mission assignments for all the demons in Hell, et cetera.”

Mayhem, madness, and chaos—all in one neat little filing system. Very clean. “So what does that have to do with me? I can’t be corrupted, believe me. I know.” And know she did. She’d been offered wealth and power once before by the very definition of evil. It’d been ugly, ugly. That warning shiver ran along her arms again with just the hint of the long-ago memory.

Clyde’s jaw shifted. “You weren’t in those files, Delaney. You were in the files for ‘vengeance—long overdue.’ ”

Her bravado slipped from her hands like sand in an hourglass. Her breath wheezed out of her lungs, leaving a heavy pressure in its wake. “Meaning?”

The pained expression left his eyes and they took on a solemn, direct stare. “Meaning, someone was assigned to come here and taunt you, to torment you in whatever way they had to, to get you to give in and follow Satan. From what little I read, your file was flagged. It’s the kind of file that’s in the equivalent of the urgent basket, which means a demon given the assignment is supposed to do whatever it takes to bend you to his will—make a contract with you—because, as Marcella said, demons can’t literally kill anyone. They can only coerce you into doing something that will land your soul in Hell upon your death—make you see your worst fears by creating illusions. I gather they were going to try and make you so crazy that you might end your . . . commit . . . suicide,” he said with graveness so gravelly deep, she couldn’t ignore it.

Huh. Surely the devil, after his run-in with her fifteen years ago, knew that just wasn’t gonna happen. Hadn’t he already tried, indirectly anyway, to corrupt her and found out he was SOL? But
suicide
. . . that was playing some serious hardball. Fighting to find her calm, Delaney popped her lips. “Well, if you were sent here to make me want to end it all, you’re doing a phenomenally shitty job, my friend. Though, if you hang around much longer, temptation might not be as mighty an effort to resist.”

For the first time, Clyde laughed, but it wasn’t the kind that dripped with sarcasm. It was hearty, rich, deep. It left something warm in her belly, right in the deepest depth of it, stealing another gasp of air from her she had to hide. “But that’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I don’t belong in Hell and I’m damned sure not going to participate in helping you take . . . well, you know. When I realized no one was doing anything but laughing at me behind my back, and sometimes boldly to my face when I told them I’d been gypped, I decided to figure out a way to get out of Dodge without doing anything too heinous to anyone. Especially after I found out what those beginners’ demon classes were. When I refused to participate in learning how to create mayhem, or study ‘Possession—Your Guide to Rebirth,’ I was sent to the file room, and for someone like me, all that paperwork really is Hell—a punishment I can’t quite describe, and my level boss knew it. I was eventually labeled difficult, but not untrainable. So I lay low, learned a thing or two. Learned newbie demons are granted day-, week-, even month-long passes all the time. But, some of the things I’ve learned—seen—I’d like to forget. So there it is.”

Her lips pursed. “Still doesn’t explain why Lucifer sent you to do this particular deed. You’re a noob. Unless he thought you had some innate ability. Like driving mediums crazy with a demon’s constant yapping.”

His sigh expelled from his chest, making it expand and push at the throw she’d given him. “You’re right, I am a noob, painfully so. But Lucifer doesn’t do much more than leave the assignments up to his level bosses—most times. Though your file had his handwriting all over it. But here’s the clincher on this whole mess. I wasn’t really assigned to you.”

Now that made her pause. “So who was?”

Clyde’s eyes held guilt in the way they flitted from her face and focused on something behind her. “Some guy named
Clyve
Atwell. It was easy enough to change the letters in the name on the file from a
v
to a
d
. Like I said, I wasn’t totally above using these demonic powers, mediocre as they might be, to get me the frig out of there. I can’t think of much that would be worse than the punishment I was due for my refusal to attend classes. I’m also not proud of what I did—but this Clyve was a total waste of skin in life. He deserved what he got when I pulled that off.”

“Well, now I’m really dying here,
Clyde
. What kind of assignment did poor Clyve get that you were supposed to get?”

His next sigh represented a man truly torn—or really good at faking it. “Keep in mind, my original assignment was meant to debase me, humiliate me for not joining the freak show down there,” he hedged.

“And?”

“He’s Paris Hilton’s newest Chihuahua . . . well, he’s possessing it, anyway—for a year. I have a feeling he’ll be wearing diamond-encrusted collars and having his renal glands milked on a regular basis until the punishment is up.”

Laughter bubbled in her throat and spilled out in a burst of snorting giggles. “I can see how that’d be a sentence worse than death. But this also begs the question: did this Clyve with a
v
deserve what he got? The word according to you, of course.”

Disgust was written all over his sleekly chiseled face. “He was a pig, one of the worst humans to roam planet Earth,” he spat with a flex of his big fist. “A bastard. A vile bastard. Clyve with a
v
deserved to rot in the pit for eternity. He had a laundry list of criminal activity. A rap sheet so long I’d still be reading it if I wasn’t worried I’d get caught. But the worst of it is, he was responsible for a hit-and-run that killed a kid. A
seven-year-old
kid.”

Clyde shook his dark head, clearly because of the senselessness of something so tragic. “Never even looked back, the drunk ass. He knew he did it, too, and to this day, no one knows who killed Katie Martin. Except Clyve. He knew he’d snuffed a kid. He made a comment about it that I can’t repeat without the threat of losing my lunch.” Clyde’s last words were riddled with such repulsion even she paused.

A somber moment lingered between them. Delaney reached for her grandmother’s chair behind her, sitting down and gripping the arm that wasn’t charred beyond recognition. If Clyde wasn’t telling the truth, he was damned good at spinning some smack, because a tale like that was . . . vile, unimaginable. “Jesus Christ Superstar,” she muttered. A sharp pain clutched at her heart for little Katie Martin and a family that would never have justice.

“Tim Rice and Andrew Lloyd Webber, 1970, I believe.”

She raised a bewildered stare at him.

“You said Jesus Christ Superstar,” he offered reasonably, the sudden directional change in conversation appearing completely normal to him. “It was an album, then a musical—”

This demon . . . “Yeah, yeah. Broadway. I got it. Okay, how about we move on? Because if I linger over what you just told me, I’ll never sleep again.”

Clyde cupped his jaw, then ran his hand up and over the planes of his face to scratch his dark head. “Right. Anyway, I switched the files because I knew it meant coming back to this plane or whatever you call it if I did. I need to find out what happened the day I died, Delaney. I was a chemical consultant doing freelance research, for God’s sake. I was about as tame as the Dalai Lama. I wouldn’t hurt someone physically or otherwise.
Ever.
”

Said the wolf in sheep’s clothing. Maybe. “And how did you die again?”

Everything about his demeanor changed with one sheepish grin. “I wasn’t the most coordinated man . . . I had an accident . . .”

“Clearly. But there’s more . . .” she coaxed. Because there always was with Clyde.

“Uh, I blew myself up.” He held up a hand to stop her from what he must have known was coming next. “I know, I know. The particulars of what I was researching are probably far more detailed than you’d care to hear and about as evil as a newborn kitten. Just know I did something unbelievably stupid, and I should have known better. I was always careful, if not about my paperwork, that’s what Tia was for, anyway, then definitely about my surroundings and my chemicals. But I sure didn’t intend to end up dead—so forget the suicide theory I just know is milling around in that pretty head of yours, and nothing about what I was doing for research was diabolical or important to anyone of importance, if that’s where you’re headed next. So I took this mission because it put me back here on Earth, first and foremost, but I also took it because there’s no way I’m living out an eternity down
there
. I don’t know that in life I was much of a believer in Heaven and Hell and everything they teach you in catechism because it just isn’t logical to me, but in death, I believe.”

Yeah. Death had a way of conforming nonconformists.

And the demon had called her pretty. Christ, was she so hard up for male attention she’d preen over it when it was served up by a demon? “And again, who says you couldn’t have made this all up? I hate to keep bringing up the treacherous deceit your kind are known for, but wellllll, I have to look out for my ass, too. Ya feel me? For all I know, this biz about me and Clyve and Chihuahuas is all just so much crap.” No doubt she wished the bit about little Katie was just that. Crap.

“And again, I’d have to agree. But if that wasn’t enough, there’s more.”

“Wow. How much better does it get than when a demon says he’s here to convince you Hell is the new Paris?”

Clyde snickered a deep chuckle. “You know, sometimes, you’re pretty damned funny.”

Delaney slapped her hands on her thighs and nodded. “Yeaaaah. I’m a fucking riot. All the demons say so. I have to have a sense of humor or I’ll go batshit in my line of work. Now get on with it before I lose my patience again.”

Again, Clyde looked around with caution as if someone might hear what he was going to relay.

Delaney’s reaction was to reassure, stemming from years of guiding spirits, a reaction she couldn’t seem to help. “It’s okay. I can feel an entity for the most part—good or bad. It’s just you and the entity you are, for the moment. No worries we’ll be overheard.”

The intake of breath Clyde sucked in was long-winded, the stiff set of his shoulders relaxing but a hair. “They talk about you in Hell—that’s how I recognized your name on the file, too. I’ve only heard short snippets of conversations, but what I heard is something you need to know. Something I couldn’t live without telling you, or not live, or whatever it is that I’m doing.”

Delaney rolled a hand in front of her. “So get jiggy wit it. And before you say anything else, I know. Will Smith—”

“Nineteen ninety-eight, from his
Big Willie Style
album. I’m a fan.”

Jesus. He was a veritable font of useless crap. “Fab. Now out with it.”

Clyde’s face said he was uncomfortable, but he never let his eyes stray from hers. “I was at the water cooler one day—”

“Because Hell is Africa hot and naturally they’re obligated to provide refreshment.” She let the sarcasm drip from her words with a snicker.

The joke clearly escaped Clyde. He was all business now that he had free rein. “Right. Whatever. I was at the water cooler and your name came up. The other demons said you were a real ball-buster. That they were glad Satan was finally paying the kind of attention to you that you deserved—sending in the big guns like he was. A couple of them mentioned how they’d tried to interfere in that crossing thing you do and that you’d made one too many pairs of eyes bleed. So it served you right that your head was on the block.”

Amusing shit, indeed. That she’d pissed ole Lucifer off was cause for celebration in her book. It meant breaking out her best party dress and high heels—maybe some confetti. It didn’t upset her even a little that those fuckwads were kvetching over her past expulsions when they’d interfered with a perfectly good crossing. Though she didn’t chase demons purposely. So they didn’t worry her—much.