Dance with the Devil Read online

  26

  So.

  There was love. She had fallen into it a second time with the same man, and for the second time had felt it end. Everything part of the circle, everyone playing their parts.

  Yet one lesson Kathleen had learned from doing the devil's work would not leave her. Choices made ripples, and ripples made waves, and you could ride them or you could let them tumble you over and under and drag you along the rocky bottom until you were tossed up onto the shore battered and bloody.

  She chose to ride.

  She knew just where to find him. On the sand, facing the water. Night had almost fallen and the pale pink and gold of sunset spread across the sea, though the sun was no longer visible. A breeze fluttered the hem of her dress. She dragged her bare toes through the sand still warm from the sun.

  "I wrote Ride with the Devil because of you," she said without preamble, without looking at him. They both stared out over the water. "I didn’t remember it at the time, but it would never have been the book it was if I hadn't met you. If I had not fallen in love with you. And it would not have been the book it became if you had not broken my heart."

  He half-turned, but she shook her head and held up a hand so he would stay quiet.

  "Loving you broke me, but I built something from the pieces. And look what it turned into. The career I'd dreamed of. More books. Success. Fame."

  "And a lot of grief," Jake said at last.

  She smiled a little. "You can't harvest the honey if you don't risk the stings."

  "I was wrong. I thought I was doing the right thing. I was a coward."

  "It doesn't matter now." She looked out again to the water, both of them silent for another few minutes before she held out her hand for him to take.

  Their fingers linked. She moved to stand beside him, hip to hip, still without speaking. They stayed that way for some time, watching the water.

  "If I could take it back from you, Kathleen, I would. I would do whatever he asked of me, if it meant you didn't have to."

  She kissed him then, soft and sweet and slow. They danced there on the sand, moving in a slow circle. She ran her fingers through his hair and tipped his face so she could kiss him again and again until both of them had to stop and take a breath.

  Then, without rushing, she explained the truth about the devil's tasks. What that meant for both of them. How neither of them were bound anymore.

  "All that time," Jake said, brow furrowed, expression grim. "Everything we did, and it was all for nothing?"

  "Everything a piece of the circle," she told him. "All of us playing a part. None of it was for nothing, Jake. After all, it brought us together, didn't it?"

  “Do you think it’s over?”

  “I don’t know. The devil says he doesn’t lie, but…” she shrugged. “That’s probably a lie. He might come back around. I guess we’ll have to wait and see.”

  Jake nodded, eyes narrowed. “Yeah. But you know, Kathleen, if he asks us to do something for him again, this time we can say no.”

  “We can,” she agreed. “But what if we don’t want to?”

  That was a truth she had to throw out there. Both of them had done the devil’s bidding, and not all of the things they’d done had been bad. Jake nodded again. He looked out to the water for a second before looking back at her.

  “Someone else will, if we don’t.”

  She let her fingers link at the back of his neck. She pushed onto her toes to kiss his mouth. She whispered into his ear.

  “Yes. Someone else always will.”

  So.

  There was love.

  Neither of them said it aloud. She saw it in his eyes, when he looked at her as though she were a treasure, and she gave it to him in her kiss and the way she cupped his face to stroke her thumbs along the crinkles at the corners of his eyes. They looked at each other and they needed to say nothing, because both of them already knew.

  Ride with the Devil

  If you enjoyed Dance with the Devil, check out the original story, Ride With the Devil, available now!

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  Ride With the Devil Excerpt

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  If you take enough rides with the devil, pretty soon he’ll drive.

  The devil had been grabbing for the wheel since before Jake Harron had been born, but he wasn’t quite ready to give it up to the bastard. Not yet. The time was coming, he knew that much. When Old Scratch would demand too much, ask him for more than he could give. And even when that time came, Jake thought as he fingered the set of lock picks in his pocket, he’d do his best to go down shouting out “fuck you.”

  This time, what the devil had asked him to do didn’t seem so bad. Breaking and entering might rank higher on the police list of crimes than drowning a basket of kittens, but Jake still sometimes woke in a cold sweat, his sheets a tangled horror around him, from dreams of the way the kittens had cried.

  “Break in. Find the jewelry and money. Will you take it?” The devil always asked. Never demanded. The deal was, Jake was free to decline any request, at any time. The trick was that if he did, the devil got to keep his soul.

  “Yes.” Jake had said this time. It was what he always said. “Do I have to keep it?”

  “No. Dump it in the river. Unless,” the devil had said with a grin showing what seemed to be every single picket in the whitewashed fence of his teeth, “you want to profit from your ill-gotten gains.”

  That would be one more brick on the already well-paved road to Hell Jake couldn’t stop walking. He’d shaken his head. “No.”

  The devil, who hardly ever looked the same way twice, had that day been favoring a three-piece suit and an Al Pacino mien. “You sure? The lady’s filthy with dough. Think about it, Jacob. You could live like a king.”

  “I’ll live like I’m not about to rob an old lady’s wedding rings,” Jake had said. “And, by the way, fuck you.”

  “Any time,” the devil answered with a grin and a slide of his tongue over those white, white teeth. “Any time, kiddo.”

  Now Jake stood on the front porch of a modest bungalow that needed some fresh paint and someone to mow the grass. Flowers drooped in the beds around the front steps. Roses, mostly. He thought they were red, though it was hard to tell in the dark. Plus, they were long dead. An overgrown hydrangea bush pressed against the porch. Blooms the size of his head, almost. His mom had always liked hydrangeas. She’d scattered the ground beneath them with iron spikes to keep the color deep and dark and blue.

  Jake hated hydrangeas.

  He’d picked up the lock picks from an estate sale. They’d been laid out on a table along with a bunch of miscellaneous metal junk. Old keys. Mismatched forks and knives. He hadn’t known what they were — at the time the devil hadn’t yet started asking him to steal things that required the use of lock picks. Yet the moment he saw them, a frisson of delight had trickled up and down his spine. All the way to fingers and toes. That tingle often gave him a semi, which under most circumstances would be kind of pleasant, if occasionally awkward, but Jake fucking hated the fact that doing what the devil wanted him to do ever felt good. He wanted everything he did for Old Mr. Splitfoot to feel terrible, and it hardly ever did.

  Most of the time, it felt fantastic, even when he was hating himself for it.

  He’d stolen the picks, of course. Paying for them would’ve been the right thing to do, and though the devil hadn’t outright asked Jake to steal them he figured the theft might count toward his debt in some way. It didn’t work that way, of course. It wasn’t a checklist. Just like the good he did never counteracted the bad; his soul’s worth couldn’t be weighed on any scale. The only way to keep himself from losing it was to do what the devil asked. Everything he asked. At least until Jake couldn’t do it any longer, and then the devil would own his soul forever.

  Now Jake pulled out the picks and sorted through them. It was an art, this business of opening locked doors without a key. He didn’t want to take pride in the skill, which had co