Jenna Black: The Devil's Due

“The idea has crossed my mind,” Dominic admitted as he sampled his lasagna and frowned. “Too much oregano,” he muttered under his breath.

That prompted both Adam and me to take a bite, and we both assured Dom it was perfect. He blushed with the praise, but it was well deserved. I wondered how come neither he nor Adam weighed three hundred pounds if they ate like this every night. I kept eating long after I was full, unable to stop myself because it was so delicious.

Unfortunately, pigging out on the lasagna forced me to turn down the homemade cannoli for dessert. I accepted a cup of strong Italian-roast coffee as a consolation prize, then finally got around to telling Adam why I’d contacted him.

He and Dom both listened carefully to my summary of Claudia Brewster’s story, but they were eerily silent afterward. I looked back and forth between the two of them. Adam was giving me a look that said I was pond scum. Dominic was staring at his coffee cup as if it held the secrets of the universe.

Belatedly, I remembered that Dominic—actually, Saul—had been attacked and savagely beaten by God’s Wrath. I supposed it was naive of me to expect Adam and Dominic to have any desire to help one of its members.

The silence grew increasingly painful as the seconds ticked away, and I tried to think how to extricate my foot from my mouth.

“Look, I don’t have any sympathy for this kid,” I said, though strictly speaking that wasn’t true. Considering my own aversions, I did feel sorry for Tommy Brewster being forced to host a demon in his body, no matter how many ideological problems I had with God’s Wrath. “I do have sympathy for his parents, though. Claudia Brewster was so desperate, she tried to hire me to commit what the law thinks of as murder. She had to know she’d be arrested herself, but she was willing to do it anyway to free her son. She didn’t approve of his involvement with God’s Wrath, but sometimes you love your family even if you don’t approve of them.”

Despite rivers of bad blood between myself and my mother, I was pretty sure we still loved each other, at least a little bit. My general state of happiness increased in direct proportion to the distance between us, but I’d have been miserable if something terrible happened to her. That thought immediately led me to thoughts of the terrible thing that had happened to my father, and I shut that line of reasoning down in a hurry.

“You have one hell of a nerve,” Adam snarled at me, shifting his chair closer to Dominic and slinging his arm protectively around his lover’s shoulders.

“Don’t, Adam,” Dom said softly, though he leaned into Adam’s embrace. “There’s poetic justice in what happened to this guy, but if this really is a case of unwilling possession, how do we know it’s the only one? Maybe it’s happening more often than we think, and this kid is just the only case weird enough to cause raised eyebrows.”

I hadn’t thought of that myself, but it was a good point. I decided to keep my mouth shut, though. I figured anything I said would just dig the hole deeper, but Dominic might be able to persuade Adam to look into the Brewster case.

Adam scowled. “It’s bullshit anyway. There are too many safeguards in place to believe the guy was unwilling. There’s a reason the police have told the mother they can’t help.”

“And maybe Brewster had some kind of sudden religious conversion and decided it was time to host a demon,” Dom agreed, “but it sounds damned unlikely. No matter what the evidence says, I find it hard to believe he could go from being in God’s Wrath to being a willing host in ten days.”

Adam removed the protective arm from Dom’s shoulders and, after giving me another glare, turned his chair to face his lover. “I find it hard to believe anyone would bother going through this elaborate scheme to possess some low-level God’s Wrath flunky. What would anyone have to gain by it?”

“Well that’s a good question, isn’t it? What would it hurt to do a little unofficial investigation? Maybe look at his registration video, see if you see something that ordinary human beings wouldn’t see. Look into Tommy Brewster’s background, see if there’s some reason the Spirit Society would consider him a threat. After all, it’s beginning to look like most of the Spirit Society are Dougal’s puppets. You never know—this could turn out to be something important.”

Adam gave him a sour look. “That’s a bit of a stretch.” He made a sound between a sigh and a growl. “You really want me to investigate this?”

Dominic thought about that for a minute, then nodded. “Yeah, I do. Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe it’s none of our business. But I’d feel more comfortable if I knew for sure.”

Adam turned his sour look on me, but I knew he wouldn’t turn Dominic down, so I met his gaze steadily.

“You’ll owe me one for this,” he said, and his tone of voice sent a shiver down my spine.

I tried to think of something to say, some clever retort, but nothing came to mind. Dominic ended the staring contest by grabbing another cannoli and plunking it on Adam’s plate.

“Here,” Dominic said with a little smile. “Eat this and see if it sweetens your mood. I’ll walk Morgan to the door.” The smile turned impish. “We have unfinished business, remember?”

I forced myself not to glance toward the paddle that still lay on the counter in plain sight. And I tried my best not to visualize what the two of them would do as soon as I was out the door. It didn’t help when Adam picked up the cannoli with his fingers and scooped out some of the creamy filling with his tongue. Dominic and I both blushed, and I hastened out of the kitchen without a parting shot.

I went home after dinner, planning a quiet evening of vegging out in front of the TV. I didn’t have many quiet evenings these days, and the prospect held a surprisingly strong appeal.

Because of my uncomfortably eventful life, I never just strolled into my apartment as if it were a safe haven. Before I unlocked the door, I activated and armed my Taser. Once inside, I did a thorough room-to-room check before allowing myself to relax.

For a while, I’d tried the old trick of putting a length of string between the door and the frame when I went out. Supposedly, if that string was still in place when I returned, it meant no one had opened the door. The problem was I didn’t always remember to put it there, and any time I returned home and didn’t see the string my heart would go into overdrive and I’d conjure the image of hordes of demons invading my apartment. Even when the string was still right where I left it, I found I didn’t feel comfortable until I verified with my own two eyes that I was alone. I always felt vaguely silly when I’d finished my search, but that didn’t stop me from doing it.

Satisfied that there were no bogeymen waiting to kill me, I plopped down on the sofa, grabbed the remote, and tried to turn on the TV. Nothing happened. I’d forgotten the batteries were dead—I’d meant to stop by the store and buy some on my way home.

I was just mustering the enthusiasm to stand up and turn the TV on by hand when a sudden pain stabbed through my eye.

“Ow! Shit!” I pressed at the space between my eye and my nose, where the pain was most intense, but it was gone before I even got my hand to my face.

Lately, this was the only communication I had with Lugh while I was conscious. For a while, during a period of intense stress, I’d been able to hear his voice in my head, but my subconscious had learned how to block him out. I actually preferred the pain in my eye to hearing his voice in my head, which made me feel like a Looney Tune.