Dance with the Devil Read online

  Her laugh was genuine, incredulous. "You think I ate anything in that place, after what you had me do?"

  "I thought you had an iron stomach." The devil reached for the remote and clicked on the small flat screen mounted under her kitchen cabinets. He turned the station to a local news channel running a story about the restaurant she'd been in two nights before. It had been closed for health code violations.

  No surprise.

  "What do you want?" Kathleen asked, ignoring the news program. She didn't care about the restaurant, and she didn't want to care about the employees now out of a job, or the people who'd gotten food poisoning and had to be hospitalized. She didn't want to know if someone had died. She didn't want to know what the devil had made her a part of.

  "You make it sound as though I always have to want something from you, Kathleen, when perhaps it's simply the comfort of your company that I require." He gave her a steady, sincere look.

  Kathleen ground the cigarette, mostly unsmoked, into the ceramic ashtray. "My company isn't much of a comfort to anyone."

  She bent to retrieve her phone and plugged it into the charger, but left it on the counter as she went upstairs without waiting for the devil to speak again. It wasn't as easy as that, of course. The Lord of Darkness went wherever he wanted, whenever and however. He was waiting for her in the bathroom, where he sat on the sink and watched her pee without so much as a blink from either one of them.

  "Jesus," she snapped when he didn't say a word as she wiped and flushed and nudged him aside to wash her hands. "What? What do you want?"

  And still, the devil said nothing but weighted her with his gaze, eyes like embers, while she brushed her teeth and smoothed on nighttime lotion. Kathleen flossed, deliberately taking her time. She brushed and rinsed and spat.

  "Do you want to fuck me?" She stared at her reflection, meeting her own gaze, without looking at him in the mirror beside her.

  He wasn't blond and fit any longer, not from the corner of her eye, which was the only way she dared looked at him when he was in his true form. She gripped the edges of the sink and leaned forward as she bared her teeth to see the blood outlining them from how deliberately fiercely she'd handled her oral hygiene. Her mouth hurt and would sting worse with the rush of mouthwash; she rinsed with it and hissed, but did it again although nothing would ever wash away the taste on her tongue.

  "Is that what you want me to ask you to do, so you can deny me?" Lucifer laughed, low and rumbling, and blew a charnel breath across her bare skin.

  Kathleen closed her eyes. "You really think that's the hill on which I want to die, so to speak?"

  "I think," the devil said, "you want to tell me no so you can be done with all of this. No matter the price."

  It had become a thought as common to her as suicide. Refusing to do the devil's bidding. Losing her soul. It seemed barely possible there could be anything for her other than Hell no matter what choices she made, but at least she'd have the choice.

  "You do have the choice," he reminded her, although she hadn't spoken aloud. "You've always had it. And no, I don't want to fuck you. I know, I know, sex is supposed to be my game, and I surely won't tell you I've never had the pleasure of playing it."

  She opened her eyes and turned to look at him, or at least the manifestation he'd chosen, because staring at that shifting shadow form in the mirror's reflection was going to drive her mad. "Well, you do want something, so just tell me and get it over with. I have a book to write."

  "Tomorrow, you can write. Tonight, I want you to do something else for me."

  She pressed her lips together and crossed her arms over her chest, thinking for a moment she would refuse this time. No matter what it was. He could ask her to turn that light off at the switch, and she would say no. Just say no and end all of this misery.

  Be finished.

  But in the end, she did not deny the devil what he wanted, because she never did.

  3

  After, when she worked hard to put away the thoughts of what she’d done to please the devil, the words came. Kathleen wrote. She layered plots and characters and made a world, typing until her fingers were sore, because at least when she was writing, she didn't have to think about what she'd done. And after the writing, she took a pill and drank a little, trying to find a way to sink into that solace, but she still woke in the morning with a clear head and no sign of the sins she'd committed.

  4

  "Go out. Have a good time," the devil said. It had been three weeks and two days since the last time he’d appeared. Not long enough to make her think he was gone forever; absolutely long enough to have started her expecting him at every turn.

  Kathleen was far from fooled. "That's it? Have a good time? First of all, I can't force myself to have a good time, and you know it, so how is such a thing fair to ask?"

  Lucifer looked wounded, though the sly sideways grin made it clear he was anything but. "Go out. Do what people do who want to have a good time, Kathleen. Be seduced."

  That stopped her for a moment as she scrambled eggs and made toast. She'd already set the table with two plates -- Satan had impeccable table manners, although she was sure the devil had no need to eat. She turned from the stove with her spatula raised.

  "Be seduced?"

  "Yasss," the devil hissed. Gleeful. Midnight eyes, entirely pupil, no iris, sparkled. He waggled arched dark brows. Today he looked like a sixteen-year-old club kid, complete with black fishnet arm sleeves and ebony eyeliner.

  She should've been grateful he'd asked such a simple thing of her. Nothing illegal. It wasn't even necessarily disgusting. If she woke in the morning with regrets, it would be no different than any of the times she'd hooked up with a stranger of her own accord.

  "I've asked worse of you, Kathleen."

  She turned back to the stove and scooped the eggs onto a platter, turned off the burner and set the food on the table. "Yes. I know you have. Which makes me suspicious as to why you're asking me such a thing, now. I mean, I can't imagine what on earth me letting a guy fuck me has to do with anything else."

  "I didn't say it had to be a guy."

  She'd never been with a woman. That idea had a certain charm, though she dismissed it after a moment or so as not impossible, but simply unlikely and probably more complicated, in the end. "No matter who it is, what does it matter? What possible difference could it make in the world?"

  "All things have their place," the devil said.

  She put the spatula in the dishwasher, thinking this over. The devil had shown up as she was finishing her word count for the day, a consideration she had noticed, if you could ever think of Satan as being considerate. It was close to eight o'clock at night, and she'd been planning to spend the night fucking around on social media and watching television.

  "Everything in the circle, I know. You've told me that before."

  A burned out bulb makes someone trip in the dark, a broken ankle prevents them from running in a marathon so someone else can win, the winner spends the prize money on drugs and overdoses, leaving behind a daughter who grows up to initiate anti-drug legislation...the circle turned and everything fit inside it. Every piece necessary.

  "Of course, it's still your choice. It always is."

  That almost never made it better, knowing she could refuse. Knowing there would never come a point when what the devil asked of her would be so awful that she could give up her soul instead of doing it. She would always choose her own salvation, even if it meant committing an atrocity.

  "Tell me again," Kathleen said quietly, her eyes closed, as she stood with her back to him.

  The devil's appearance might change, but his voice rarely did. It rolled over her, a curtain of velvet. She bent her head, listening.

  "Death is not the end. There is more."

  There is more.

  Kathleen had long ago become uncertain of the existence of a God, though she supposed if she believed in the devil she ought to have more faith in a supreme being.