Page 6

Do You Know How Demon D eals Work?

T aking a deep shuddering breath, Helena steeled herself and marched toward the kitchen. The dishes had already been cleared from the table and all that remained was the cloth and variou s crumbs.

Just before she pushed her kitchen door open, bile came up at the back of her throat and she paused for a moment to swallow it back. On the other side of the door, she heard the clinking of glass bumping glass. He was definitely still in there. Gently, she pushed the door so it opened a slig ht crack.

There he stood, still wearing the catering outfit, his back to the door. His hands were dunked into her kitchen sink, washing pans, while her dishwasher next to him hummed away on what she presumed were all the plates and glasses they had j ust used.

He looked s o normal.

From this angle, she could see more of his hair from under the blue kerchief he wore, which was dark. No horns, no tail. Just a guy, who then turned around holding the baking sheet she had tried to use for her fis h filets.

He moved to set the clean version on top of her stove when he paused. Lifting his head, his burning eyes stared at the doorway.

He caught her spyin g on him.

Deciding to face the inevitable, she pushed the door the rest of th e way in.

He jumped, dropping the baking sheet. It bounced off the edge of the stove and would have hit the ground except he caught it with his tail, which manifested into view. “Hell in a handbasket!” he shouted, which startled her back in return. “You s cared me!”

“I… I scared you ?” she challenged, trying to process that s tatement.

“Where the hell did you come from?” he said, turning away, then he snapped his fingers multiple times in the air while he blew out a shaking breath. It was a surprisingly human gesture for him. “Why are you sneaking around l ike that?”

“I… but you saw me?” Helena pursed her eyebrows as she gestured at the doorway where she had been peeking.

He blew another breath and turned another circle, calming himself down, then set the baking sheet on the stove top with his tail.

“Is everyone else gone?” he asked, throwing a towel over his shoulder.

“Uh, yeah,” she said, still standing there p erplexed.

The demon caterer reached into the sink and pulled the plug, the water making a glub-glug sound as he did it. He ran the water and rinsed it out while she stood there watching him. “For the record, I didn’t see you. I just had that creepy feeling like I was being watched and was trying to figure it out when you opened the door,” h e argued.

“But we made eye contact?” sh e pushed.

“Okay, we made eye contact,” he said, irritated. “I’m not going to argue.”

Now she felt bad. “Do you… do you need any help in here?” s he asked.

“No, just go sit down at your table and drink your wine. I’ll have this finished in a minute,” he said as he ran the water again, this time dipping wine glasses into the stream to wash. Once more, his tail manifested, appearing after a brief shimmer in the air, like a heat mirage, before wrapping itself around one of the used glasses. It carried the fragile thing over to her as far as it could reach. “Here. This one w as yours.”

Helena had to take a step in to grasp the glass. “Uh, thank you.” But she didn’t leave. Instead, she screwed up her courage and brought the glass back, stepping up beside the creature in her kitchen.

Heat, or some sort of wrong energy, seemed to radiate off of him but that also could have been her imagination. She couldn’t say. “I’m actually all good with the wine drinking,” she said and set the wineglass into the water to disappear under the fr esh suds.

He grunted, then retrieved it back out of the water. His hands had changed, reverting back to the dead-grayish skin and long black nails he had before. She gasped again, realizing she stood next to the demon in all his glory once more, no longer glamouring himself as the caterer. His black nails clicked against the glass as he turned it over to go at the inside with her rose pink bott le brush.

Fascinated, she watched him rinse the glass out under a fresh stream of water and then set it upside down on one of her dishtowels on the counter over the dishwasher. The juxtaposition of the supernatural creature doing a perfectly mundane thing seemed to keep her mind from cracking into a millio n pieces.

“Are you going to watch me the whole time?” he asked, his voice rumbling next to her. She looked up his bare arms to his head with the elegant black horns arching like ra m’s horns.

Swallowing, she backed away and went into her towel drawer to get a dry one. Turning back, she took in his full body, now no longer covered with anything resembling clothing. Just his full moon and the string of the front leather apron. The crack down the middle was covered by his tail, which maintained that strange grayness of skin until about a foot down it when it morphed into blackness. The tip of his tail had the typical triangle devil tail …thingy, and it swung back and forth in a little contented arc near the ground, like a cat. His wings were tucked tight against his back so he could move easily. Otherwise, the other disturbing aspect to him was his too thin frame, highlighted by what she could see of his ribs with their deep grooves.

She commented on none of this but came up on the other side of him this time to grab one of her wine glasses and start drying it. He didn’t comment on her helping him or do anything to stop her.

“Thank you,” she said, three dry glasses later, “for such a g ood meal.”

“It tasted good?” he asked, a longing in h is voice.

“It tasted amazing,” she confirmed.

He nodded, not looking at her, a complicated expression on his face, like a mix of satisfaction an d regret.

“So… you do this a lot?” she asked.

“I’m not going to take your soul,” he said instead of a nswering.

That made her flinch, like she had been caught sneaking a cookie. “Oh, well that’s good,” she said.

“I mean, not unless you want me to,” he added. “I don’t know how much you know about demon summoning, but there are other ways to deal with the cost.”

Her mind jumped to a million things that she had either heard or imagined. “Honestly, I don’t even know how I did it this time. Don’t suppose I can just return you without paying since I didn’t mean to?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I performed the service, and it’s not me that gets paid, but the cosmic debt. I used as little of it as possible, though. Tried to make what you already had work. So it won’t be too bad.”

“Cos mic debt?”

He sighed. “You can think of it like magic, I guess. Demon magic. I used as little as possible.”

“But you did have to u se some?”

Now he looked down at her with narrowed eyes into slits of starlight. “I made a three course dinner with dessert on no notice. For nine. Believe me, I performed miracles tonight.”

She giggled at that, which surprised her. But it also made him less scary, so she leaned into it. “I guess I did leave you with a disaster.”

He’s just anormal caterer who helped me out of a jam. This is fine. This is fine. This is fine. Some part of her started to b elieve it.

For a moment at least.

Beside her, he drained the water, rinsing away the suds again, having finished the last wineglass. He then plucked up the one she had finished drying, reaching around her with his long arms. He picked up all but the one still in her hand, spacing each between his equally too-long fingers.

A tremble rolled down her spine, the same wrongness she got from licking a battery. Then he was gone, moving to her cupboard where she kept her liquor and the various glasses required for proper liquor drinking. When he opened it with his tail, she saw that the inside had been o rganized.

Shocked, she opened another cupboard where she kept her pantry items. Instead of the different series of cans and glass bottle thrown in haphazardly, they were stacked neatly with the labels facing out. She opened the cupboard below it, and the boxes where she kept her cereal along with one sad box of oatmeal and her various sides that she never made were lined up as well and ordered.

“How did you… when did you have time to do this?” she asked, opening her dishes cupboard to find the same thing, bowls and plates sorted and rearranged so that everything actually fit properly.

“Don’t worry. I’m not charging you for it either. I just couldn’t stand it,” he said, grabbing up the dishcloth to rub at a spot on the last glass before putting it away.

“So you used … demon magic as well?” she asked, looking around at the deeply spotless counters and the floor devoid of the standard pile of dirt in the corners that she could never q uite get.

“Like I said, I couldn’t stand it,” he said, an edge of growl in h is voice.

It wasn’t directed at her, but she pursed her lips at it. “Thank you,” she said.

“Yeah,” he answered, sighing as he flipped the towel back over his gray shoulder and folded his arms across his chest, surveying the domain he had been master of until that moment. “Okay, I guess it’s time. How do you want to do this?”

A small, worried half-whimper escaped he r throat.

He turned to her, his imposing form bearing down on her even from across the room.

Then he sighed. “You don’t know how any of this works at al l do you?”

Her throat had closed up, so she shook her head while tears burned at the bottom of her eyes.

He sighed a second time and gestured a hand. Immediately his form changed, reverting back to a normal man’s with burning ethereal eyes. “Is that better?” he asked, obviously annoyed.

She nodded, swallowing her tears. It was better, even if only marginally because she still knew what he was underneath. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know how I did this, I don’t know what it all means, and I don’t know what I would have done if you hadn’t h elped me—”

“Okay, okay. Calm down,” he said and gestured toward her dining room. “Let’s go sit down, and I’ll give you the full rundown on how th is works.”